|
« How the UK government was doped
Main |
February 01, 2004
The selective reporting of Dr David Kay
Sunday Telegraph, 1 February 2004 Hardly had Lord Hutton finished summarising his report than the goalposts were promptly moved. Among those who were apoplectic that he had exonerated the government and eviscerated the BBC, the cry arose that he hadn’t addressed the ‘wider’ issue. This was that the Iraq war was based on false intelligence that Saddam posed a threat from his weapons of mass destruction. This myth has been reinforced by widespread media reports that Dr David Kay, who recently resigned as head of the Iraq Survey Group, has said no WMD actually existed in Iraq, thus proving that Saddam was no threat and we were led up the garden path to war. If you look, however, at what Dr Kay actually said this week to the Senate Armed Services committee and in media interviews, a very different picture emerges. Certainly, he claimed there had been a major failure of intelligence which had misrepresented the situation. But he was specifically referring to large weapons stockpiles which he now thought weren’t there after all, and to Iraq’s large-scale weapons programme which he said had been wound down after 1991. Intelligence agencies, he said, had failed to grasp that in the corruption and chaos of the Iraqi regime, Saddam himself was being told lies about his weapons programmes, whose large-scale production had stalled under the pressure of UN inspections. Such a serious intelligence failure is clearly a huge political embarrassment for both President Bush and Tony Blair, prompting the US National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice to acknowledge mistakes had been made and President Bush to say he wants to ‘know the facts’. But Dr Kay was not saying Saddam was therefore no threat on the WMD front. On the contrary, not only did he say it was possible that smaller WMD stockpiles remained hidden in Iraq, but that ‘right up to the end’ the Iraqis were trying to produce the deadly poison ricin. ‘They were mostly researching better methods for weaponisation’, he said. Not only that, Saddam had re-started a rudimentary nuclear programme. And he had also maintained an active ballistic missile programme that was receiving significant foreign assistance until the start of the war. Such revelations corresponded with Dr Kay’s interim report last autumn, which detailed ‘dozens of WMD-related programme activities’ which had been successfully concealed from Dr Hans Blix’s UN inspectors. These included a clandestine network of laboratories containing equipment suitable for chemical and biological weapons research, and new research on the biological agents Brucella and Congo Crimean Haemorrhagic Fever. And a scientist who had hidden a phial of live botulinum in his house had identified ‘a large cache of agents that he was asked but refused to conceal’ and for which the ISG was now searching. This all suggested, said Dr Kay, that after 1996 Saddam had focused on ‘smaller covert capabilities that could be activated quickly’ to produce biological weapons agents. And last week, he told this paper that he had discovered from interrogating Iraqi scientists that before the war Saddam had hidden WMD programme components in Syria. So according to Dr Kay, Saddam had posed a very live threat indeed from WMD. Yet this evidence has been almost totally disregarded, as an almost unanimous chorus of journalists has asserted that Dr Kay said Iraq had no WMD. His evidence has been brushed aside because of the assiduously promulgated myth that we only went to war because we were told Iraq had WMD that were ready to use. But this is not so. We went to war because Saddam was grossly in breach of UN resolutions instructing him to prove he had dismantled his WMD programme. True, messrs Bush and Blair asserted he had WMD stockpiles which would be found. But this wasn’t the reason for war. Such claims were only made to bolster the case to a public that seemed incapable of grasping that the reason for war was not the presence of WMD but the absence of evidence that it had been removed. Failure to make this case successfully led Bush and Blair to claim — according to Dr Kay, in good faith but on the basis of flawed intelligence — that since these stockpiles were unaccounted for they were probably still there. That claim has now spectacularly backfired, since the failure to discover any WMD has merely led people to conclude this proves the war was indeed ill-founded. But this is not so. For the fact that Saddam was actively engaged in WMD programmes, large-scale or not, shows he was indeed in breach of the UN resolutions, and was indeed the threat he had been assumed to be from his record, temperament, regional ambitions and links to terrorism. How much ricin, after all, do you need to kill thousands of people? To listen to anti-war critics, it would seem that modest amounts of biological agent somehow don’t count as WMD, or a re-started nuclear programme is no threat because it is only rudimentary. To Dr Kay, the war was absolutely necessary because Saddam had become ‘even more dangerous’ than had been realised, and ‘it was reasonable to reach the conclusion that Iraq posed an imminent threat.’ Yet virtually no-one has reported these remarks. Instead, Dr Kay is being quoted out of context to sustain the charge by the anti-war brigade of government duplicity. They have implied he resigned because he realised no WMD ever existed. But actually, he threw down his bat and stormed off the pitch in fury at the Bush administration for failing to give the ISG the money it needed to search for WMD, and for its incompetence in not preventing crucial evidence being destroyed by Iraqi looters. Those who know him well say he is so angry that he has been determined to embarrass the administration as much as possible. The result is that he has enabled the British media and anti-war politicians to take his finding that Saddam posed a different sort of threat even deadlier than had been thought, and turn it instead into the false claim that he said no threat had existed at all. History is constantly being rewritten over Iraq by people who were against the war from the start and have presented every development in the most malevolent light to prove that Bush and Blair took us to war on a lie. Logic, rationality and judgment have been suspended; and David Kay’s testimony is but the latest casualty. Posted by melanie at February 1, 2004
Comments
"Logic, rationality and judgment have been suspended" As someone who was exasperated that the UN did not enforce its resolutions on Iraq and who had a lot of symapthy with Bush and Blair's position it pains me that I now feel far less trust in their judgement now than I did a year ago. I have arrived at this position as a result of applying logic (where are the WMD? what about North Korea?) but also because of loss of trust in the integrity and capability of Blair and Bush. A combination of way in which the public dossiers were compiled and aired by the Government (and the Government's frequent propensity to spin) and an increasing belief that the mixed views of the intelligence of services over the capability of Iraq to attack the West have led me to this belief. In addition, the totally different treatment accorded by Bush and Blair to North Korea, a country which poses an even greater threat to its neighbours - as well as its own citizens who are being systematically starved and tortured - than Iraq posed in the last 5 years - further increases my mistrust that the case for war was based on i) good intelligence and ii)too much interference from 'spin merchants'. Trust is not based purely on logic but in belief in people. It is difficult to build and easy to destroy. Sadly, through their own actions and pronouncements on so many issues, Blair et al have made themselves less trustworthy than might otherwise have been the case. I will be far more sceptical in the future when a case is made for war because of my experiences during this one. Consequently, I will be far more sceptical when reasons are presented in support of a future war and will be far less likely to support it. Posted by: David at February 2, 2004 09:46 AMDavid, you are too purist. Blair and Campbell worked hard in the newsroom to get a good tabloid headline out. This was OTT and unnecessary, save that Blair was too afraid of his pacifist tendency in his party he needed to frighten the children.
THe UN has Cease-fire treaties with Korea and Iraq.....enforcement has taken place on one. There is no need to wonder about anything more than Blair's psychological need to have adoring votes from his party......this suggests weakness not strength. It is all to do with Labour Party Pacificism Posted by: Romulus at February 2, 2004 12:53 PMrom, you are at it again. rationilsing an illegal act of aggression by US/UK. as david in his post states the case for war as he sees it now is untenable. his skepticism is to be admired. your "reasoning" that Iraq "broke" a UN ceasfire whilst at the same time supporting the US/UK unilateral illegal attack on Iraq is truely grasping at straws. Logically, the absence of WMD presents at least three possibilities: 1 The intelligence services made a series of honest mistakes. 2 The Intelligence services lied to the Government. 3 The Intelligence services reported the situation accurately but were traduced/cherry picked/disregarded by the Government. already you are discounting option 3. ----------------------------- We know that Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice are on record as saying that Iraq posed no threat prior to February 24th 2001, when Colin Powell stated –on the record and on camera in Cairo- that ‘He (Saddam Hussein) has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbours’ (US Department of State website at http://www.state.gov/secretary/rm/2001/933.htm). We can also surmise that it is unlikely that the US seriously believed that Iraq had WMD -at least if their behaviour is a guide. In August 1998, The Washington Post reported that the ‘US has been blocking UNSCOM searches since last November’. In August 2000, the same paper reported that the US was urging UNMOVIC not to ‘force the issue’ regarding the return of inspectors and, in September, Madeleine Albright announced that the US would not use force to compel the return of the inspectors. The Daily Telegraph (17th June 2002) reported that ‘Senior German and French politicians argue that negotiations and a resumption of United Nations arms inspections are the way forward - a view that provokes exasperation in Washington.’ Seymour Hersh, writing in the New Yorker (24th December 2001) reported that the consensus in the Bush administration was that there would be no effort to revive the inspections process and the Washington Post reported on the 11th of January of 2002 that US was refusing to make any efforts to get the inspectors back in. Nor does it seem that WMD has ever been the US’s real concern. The Washington Post also reported on April 15th 2002 of the concerns of ‘Wolfowitz and his civilian colleagues in the Pentagon that new inspections -- or protracted negotiations over them -- could torpedo their plans for military action to remove Hussein from power.’ Colin Powell, the supposed dove, also affirmed that ‘US policy is that, regardless of what the inspectors do, the people of Iraq and the people of the region would be better off with a different regime in Baghdad. The United States reserves its option to do whatever it believes might be appropriate to see if there can be a regime change.’ (Quoted in the Guardian, May 6th 2002) Time magazine made it explicit on the 13th of May 2002, quoting a ‘top Senate foreign policy aide’ who said that ‘The White House’s biggest fear is that the UN weapons inspectors will be allowed to go in.’ Your thing on radio 4 was totally kick ass! I've never laughed at anyone so hard. Do you write this stuff yourself Mel? or do you just take it from script? You should do a show at the komedia in brighton. Me and all my mates would buy tickets for sure. Posted by: kraftycuts at February 3, 2004 05:43 PMWhy does Debka report this and noone follows it up ? Where is the investigative reporting BBC is so keen to undertake ?
Indeed the US administration and its intelligence agencies, as well as Dr Kay, were all provided with Syrian maps marked with the coordinates of the secret weapons storage sites. The largest one is located at Qaratshuk at the heart of a desolate and unfrequented region edged with marshes, south of the Syrian town of Al Qamishli near the place where the Iraqi, Syrian and Turkish frontiers converge; smaller quantities are hidden in the vast plain between Al Qamishli and Az Zawr, and a third is under the ground of the Lebanese Beqaa Valley on the Syrian border. These transfers were first revealed by DEBKAfile and DEBKA-Net-Weekly in February 2003 a month before the war. We also discovered that a Syrian engineering corps unit was detailed to dig their hiding places in northern Syria and the Lebanese Beqaa. A senior intelligence source confirmed this again to DEBKAfile, stressing: “Dr. Kay knows exactly what was contained in the tanker trucks crossing from Iraq into Syria in January 2003. His job gave him access to satellite photos of the convoys; the instruments used by spy planes would have identified dangerous substances and tracked them to their underground nests. There exists a precise record of the movement of chemical and biological substances from Iraq to Syria.” Armed with this knowledge, Kay was able to say firmly to The Telegraph’s Con Coughlin on January 25: “We are not talking about a large stockpile of weapons. But we know from some of the interrogations of former Iraqi officials that a lot of material went to Syria before the war, including some components of Saddam’s WMD program. Precisely what went to Syria and what has happened to it, is a major issue that needs to be resolved. " Posted by: Romulus at February 3, 2004 06:14 PMThe problem is you assume the "real reason" for going to war is but one. Posted by: Poosh at February 4, 2004 10:38 PMDavid: N. Korea was treated differently not because is represents a lesser threat thatn Iraq, but because military action risks tremendous destruction in S. Korea. That N. Koreans are starving is the fault of the regime. I dare say that the strategy against the regime is to starve them out hoping for a regime collapse. Not pretty but probably the least bad solution. Posted by: tallan at February 9, 2004 05:23 AM |
