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| House Intel Comittee reopening issue of Iraq's WMDs |
| 2006-02-04 |
| Nearly a year and a half after a final report from American weapons inspectors concluded they could not uncover evidence of stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence has reopened the question, launching an inquiry and asking the director of national intelligence to re-examine the issue. Chairman Peter Hoekstra, a Republican from Michigan, is said by his staff to believe that it is too soon to conclude that Saddam Hussein either destroyed or never had the stockpiles and programs to produce biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons that Western intelligence agencies insisted he had before the war. President Bush and two inspectors he appointed to find the weapons have all said the evidence of the weapons has not turned up, and the president announced shortly after he won the 2004 elections that the search for Saddam's WMD was over. But at the same time, Mr. Hoekstra is not alone in his concerns about the whereabouts of Saddam's arsenal. Prime Minister Sharon and his Israel Defense Force chief of staff during the Iraq war, Moshe Yaalon, have said weapons were transferred from Iraq to Syria before the war, a view also promoted by a former Iraqi air force general, Georges Sada. Senator Clinton last week acknowledged that the possibility is still a live one, saying, "there were no weapons, or if there were, they certainly weren't used or they were in some way disposed of or taken out of the country." In the weeks before and following the launch of Operation Iraqi Freedom, at least 10 facilities believed by American, European, and Israeli intelligence to be for the production and research of chemical and biological weapons were systematically looted by members of Iraq's Republican Guard, ordered by the regime's leadership to destroy and hide evidence of the programs, according to current and former intelligence officials from America, Britain and Israel. In interviews with the New York Sun, these officials reflect the position of Defense Secretary Rumsfeld in the months after the war: "The absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence." The chairman of the House intelligence committee apparently has a similar view. "The chairman very much believes the issue of weapons of mass destruction is not settled yet and there are sufficient questions of organized looting, transfer to another country or party or things that may have been missed by the survey group. There are enough questions that need to be answered before anyone can say definitively what happened," a spokesman for Mr. Hoekstra, Jamal Ware, said yesterday. Mr. Ware yesterday said Mr. Hoekstra is worried that equipment or stocks of biological and chemical weapons could have been transferred to a third country or landed in the hands of terrorists. The former undersecretary of defense for policy, Douglas Feith, said the question of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction is still open. "People talk about the former Soviet loose nukes problem. The question is whether this is a loose WMD problem," Mr. Feith said. Mr. Feith, who has been vilified for overseeing a tiny group special office in the Pentagon before the war that assembled intelligence on Iraq, said, "We have not found evidence of stockpiles. But there remains lots of open questions because we have not found evidence to confirm what he did with all the stockpiles he had." Mr. Feith's view that questions remain about Iraq's weapons program is also held by the State Department's chief of Iraq intelligence between 2003 and 2005, Wayne White. In an interview this week, Mr. White, said, "Just as the pre-war WMD intelligence was largely wrong, the conclusion after the war that absolutely nothing was in Iraq could also be wrong." If Mr. Hoekstra and Mr. Feith are correct that the weapons programs could have been disassembled and may be in enemy hands, the political and diplomatic implications for the Bush administration are complicated. In a sense, it validates one of Mr. Bush's key reasons for going to war. But if the weapons existed and were hidden or sent elsewhere, then the war partially justified to disarm a tyrant who may slip germs, chemicals or even nuclear materials to terrorists may have set off a chain of events that led to the very scenario Mr. Bush was trying to preempt. This was one line of attack the president's critics took shortly after the war. Writing on May 21, 2003, in Canada's Globe and Mail, Susan Rice, a former assistant secretary of state under President Clinton who would go on to become a foreign policy adviser to Howard Dean during the 2004 election season, raised the prospect of Saddam's missing weapons in terms similar to Mr. Feith. "The richest treasure trove of dangerous WMD material since the collapse of the Soviet Union is on the loose and perhaps far easier for al-Qaeda and other terrorists to acquire than it was under the control of their ideological adversary, Saddam Hussein," she wrote. Mr. White, who counts himself as a critic of the president's decision to go to war, is confident that organized looting from the regime occurred in the first weeks after the invasion. "Efforts were taken by remnants of the Iraqi intelligence services and Republican Guard to destroy portions of sites known to be associated with WMD," he said. "What does that tell you? If there was nothing to hide, why were these sites destroyed? Obviously there was something there. There is evidence to suggest there were files and perhaps even equipment that was destroyed aggressively in the months following the fall of Baghdad." Mr. White says that in those months after the launch of the war he would often sit in weekly meetings to go over the Iraq intelligence, hear repeated reports of sites systematically looted or destroyed, and shake his head. "I was not making much of this at the time and it was pointless. In most cases I was turning to a person sitting next to me, thinking it was over. Game over. The main problem we had at the time was insurgency," he said. While the view that in many cases Iraqis had gotten to the WMD facilities before the Americans may be surprising to many war critics, the final report from the last chief weapons inspector, Charles Duelfer concedes as much. In the preamble of his September 30, 2004 report, Mr. Duelfer writes that his Iraq Survey Group's "ability to gather information was in most ways more limited than was that of United Nations inspectors. First, many sites had been reduced to rubble either by the war or subsequent looting. The coalition did not have the manpower to secure the various sites thought to be associated with WMD. Hence, as a military unit moved through an area, possible WMD sites might have been examined, but they were left soon after. Looters often destroyed the sites once they were abandoned." Mr. Duelfer writes that looting along with the "chaos of the war" contributed to "the loss of a great amount of potentially very valuable information and material for constructing a full picture of Iraqi WMD capabilities." Mr. Duelfer's predecessor, in his October 2, 2003 testimony to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, David Kay said, "Deliberate dispersal and destruction of material and documentation related to weapons programs began pre-conflict and ran trans-to-post conflict." A former colonel for Israeli military intelligence who worked on Iraqi issues, Miri Eisin, says of a transfer of weapons to Syria, "I don't know all of it, but some things went in that route. At the end of the day, it would be the type of things they could hide. This would strike out the biological type things, but they could get chemical weapons, possibly residual missile parts." Other Israeli and American officials say they doubt the weapons were moved to Syria and that intelligence did not confirm the initial reports that the weapons were moved. |
| Posted by:Dan Darling |
| #7 What's Khaddam saying? He's been awful quiet as of late from his perch in France. Surely he's got to know something... |
| Posted by: Danking70 2006-02-04 18:28 |
| #6 There are only so many places to hide them now that they are in Syria. Jordan? Not a chance. Turkey? Ditto. Iraq again? Nope, too many 'merkans. Israel? Oh, that would be fun. Lebanon? Maybe before but I doubt it now. So Pencilneck has a real problem with hiding the stuff (if he has it, of course). He might try destroying it, but that requires some technology and expertise. Are the Syrians up to that? Maybe. Maybe not. |
| Posted by: Steve White 2006-02-04 18:06 |
| #5 IF there were WMD and they were moved to Syria, I'm not entirely optimistic they are still there to be found. We'll see .... |
| Posted by: lotp 2006-02-04 17:18 |
| #4 Nice to see that we're finally translating and reading the millions of documents collected from Iraq. |
| Posted by: Danking70 2006-02-04 17:04 |
| #3 part of Baby Assad's exile negotiations, perhaps? |
| Posted by: Frank G 2006-02-04 14:40 |
| #2 Debka called this first and I still think they will be proved right. |
| Posted by: phil_b 2006-02-04 08:06 |
| #1 "This was one line of attack the president's critics took shortly after the war. Writing on May 21, 2003, in Canada's Globe and Mail, Susan Rice, a former assistant secretary of state under President Clinton who would go on to become a foreign policy adviser to Howard Dean during the 2004 election season, raised the prospect of Saddam's missing weapons in terms similar to Mr. Feith. "The richest treasure trove of dangerous WMD material since the collapse of the Soviet Union is on the loose and perhaps far easier for al-Qaeda and other terrorists to acquire than it was under the control of their ideological adversary, Saddam Hussein," she wrote." Same old damned if you do, damned if you don't situation with the left. They were the ones clammoring for Bush to go to the UN, a process that took months and gave Saddam the time needed to sprit his WMD stocks to Syria. So, gee, what a surprise that we didn't find much of anything (and of course what we did find was dismissed out of hand). But I do think that the argument is specious and will be seen that way if this invesitigation, hopefully based on some of the thousands of documents we've uncovered since the invasion, determines that the WMD's existed and were moved. Busha was right about WMD's, he was delayed by the left and the Euro's (yeah, yeah, same thing) and they are sitting Syria. |
| Posted by: remoteman 2006-02-04 05:40 |