In my June 22 post, I reported the fact that Senator Rick Santorum, chairman of the Senate Republican Conference Committee, and Representative Pete Hoekstra, chairman of the US House Intelligence Committee, had announced the finding of over 500 munitions or weapons of mass destruction, specifically ‘sarin- and mustard-filled projectiles,’ in Iraq since 2003. This astounding revelation, to my knowledge, has not been reported by a single news outlet in the UK. In the US, it has barely been reported either, despite the fact that, as Powerline reported, Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld confirmed the find:
What has been announced is accurate, that there have been hundreds of canisters or weapons of various types found that either currently have sarin in them or had sarin in them, and sarin is dangerous. And it’s dangerous to our forces, and it’s a concern. So obviously, to the extent we can locate these and destroy them, it is important that we do so. And they are dangerous. Anyone — I’m sure General Casey or anyone else in that country would be concerned if they got in the wrong hands. They are weapons of mass destruction . They are harmful to human beings. And they have been found. And that had not been by Saddam Hussein, as he inaccurately alleged that he had reported all of his weapons. And they are still being found and discovered.
Where this was reported, the WMD were described as ‘old’ and therefore of no consequence. This despite the fact that the casus belli for the invasion of Iraq was the fact that Saddam had failed to meet the UN’s requirement that he prove he had destroyed all his stocks of WMD along with his WMD programmes, and that when no stocks were found after he fell it was said that this proved there had never been any WMD, there were no ‘stockpiles’, there was no WMD programme, Saddam was a floppy bunny rabbit and we had been taken to war on a lie — the mantra that is now presented as an unchallengeable fact and which has paralysed both a US President and a British Prime Minister.
The issue of whether old WMD still existed in Saddam’s Iraq therefore was and is critical. Now we know it did exist after all. But the Big Lie that it did not is now so vast, and so many people’s credibility depends upon it, not to mention their entire world view based on the irredeemable evil that is George W Bush and the unmatched moral virtue of themselves in targeting this menace to civilisation who happens to be ensconced in the White House, that this belated discovery of part of Saddam’s WMD has to be rubbished. Powerline has relayed the hysterical reaction of the one broadcast evening news show even to have reported the findings:
MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann ridiculed the finding of ‘WMD: weapons of minor discomfort,’ snidely suggesting ‘you might get a burn if you rub these weapons directly onto your skin.’ Olbermann condescendingly marveled: ‘Independent experts and the level-headed staggering in amazement tonight that deteriorated mustard gas cannisters, at least 15 years old and as much as 18 years old, could be pawned off by desperate politicians as some kind of rationale for the deaths of 2,500 American servicemen and women in Iraq.’ Soon enough, Olbermann raised Joe McCarthy, asking Newsweek’s Jonathan Alter: ‘Have Senator Santorum and Congressman Hoekstra moved directly into the league of Joe McCarthy waving the blank page that’s supposed to contain the list of communists in the ’50s?’
So the dogged attempt to drag the truth about the discovery of Saddam’s WMD out of a secret world determined to cover up its own compromised record is McCarthyism? Extraordinary. It would surely be nearer the mark to say that it is Hoekstra and Santorum who are being demonised for their desire to get at the truth. In the Wall Street Journal yesterday, they raised the profile of this scandal by blowing the whistle on the US intelligence world that has tried to prevent that truth from emerging and is even now trying to rubbish it through its patsies in the media. The WSJ is subscription only, so since this is so important — and so under-reported — here is their article in full:
On Wednesday, at our request, the director of national intelligence declassified six ‘key points’ from a National Ground Intelligence Center (NGIC) report on the recovery of chemical munitions in Iraq. The summary was only a small snapshot of the entire report, but even so, it brings new information to the American people. ‘Since 2003,’ the summary states, ‘Coalition forces have recovered approximately 500 weapons munitions which contain degraded mustard or sarin nerve agent,’ which remains ‘hazardous and potentially lethal.’ So there are WMDs in Iraq, and they could kill Americans there or all over the world.
This latest information should not be new. It should have been brought to public attention by officials in the intelligence community. Instead, it had to be pried out of them. Mr. Santorum wrote to John DeFreitas, commanding general, U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command, on April 12, asking to see the report. He wrote, ‘I am informed that there may well be many more stores of WMDs throughout Iraq,’ and added, ‘the people of Pennsylvania and Members of Congress would benefit from reviewing this report.’ He asked that the ‘NGIC work with the appropriate entities’ to declassify as much of the information as possible.
The senator received no response. On June 5, he wrote again, this time to John Negroponte, director of national intelligence, ‘concerning captured Iraqi documents, data, media and maps from the regime of Saddam Hussein.’ He mentioned his disappointment that many captured Iraqi documents had been classified, and that he still had received no response from Gen. DeFreitas. Some 10 days later, still with no response, he shared his dismay with one of us, Pete Hoekstra, chairman of the House Permanent Committee on Intelligence, who on June 15 wrote to Mr. Negroponte, urging him to declassify the NGIC analytic piece. Mr. Hoekstra was also dismayed because he had not been informed through normal intelligence channels of the existence of this report.
To compound matters, during a call-in briefing with journalists held at noon on June 21, intelligence officials misleadingly said that ‘on June 19, we received a second request; this time asking that we, in short order — 48 hours — declassify the key points, which are sort of the equivalent to key judgments from something like a National Intelligence Estimate, from the assessment.’ The fault was their own; we had been requesting this information for nine weeks and they had not acted.
On Thursday, Mr. Negroponte’s office arranged a press briefing by unnamed intelligence officials to downplay the significance of the report, calling it ‘not new news’ even as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was reiterating the obvious importance of the information: ‘What has been announced is accurate, that there have been hundreds of canisters or weapons of various types found that either currently have sarin in them or had sarin in them, and sarin is dangerous. And it’s dangerous to our forces… They are weapons of mass destruction. They are harmful to human beings. And they have been found… And they are still being found and discovered.’
In fact, the public knows relatively little about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Indeed, we do not even know what is known or unknown. Charles Duelfer, former head of the Iraq Survey Group, stated that the ISG had fully evaluated less than 0.25% of the more than 10,000 weapons caches known to exist throughout Iraq. It follows that the American people should be brought up to date frequently on our state of knowledge of this important matter. That is why we asked that the entire document be declassified, minus the exact sources, methods and locations. It is also, in part, why we have fought for the declassification of hundreds of thousands of Saddam-era documents.
The president is the ultimate classifier and declassifier of information, but the entire matter has now been so politicized that, in practice, he is often paralyzed. If he were to order the declassification of a document pointing to the existence of WMDs in Iraq, he would be instantly accused of ‘cherry picking’ and ‘politicizing intelligence.’ He may therefore not be inclined to act.
In practice, then, the intelligence community decides what the American public and its elected officials can know and when they will learn it. Sometimes those decisions are made by top officials, while on other occasions they are made by unnamed bureaucrats with friends in the media. People who leak the existence of sensitive intelligence programs like the terrorist surveillance program or financial tracking programs to either damage the administration or help al Qaeda, or perhaps both, are using the release or withholding of documents to advance their political desires, even as they accuse others of manipulating intelligence. We believe that the decisions of when and what Americans can know about issues of national security should not be made by unelected, unnamed and unaccountable people.
Some officials in the intelligence community withheld the document we requested on WMDs, and somebody is resisting our request to declassify the entire document while briefing journalists in a tendentious manner. We will continue to ask for declassification of this document and the hundreds of thousands of other Saddam-produced documents, and we will also insist on periodic updates on discoveries in Iraq.
This is no small matter. It is not — as a few self-proclaimed experts have declared — a spat over ancient history. It involves life and death for American soldiers on the battlefield, and it involves the ability of the American people to evaluate the actions of their government, and thus to render an objective judgment. The people must have the whole picture, not just a shard of reality dished up by politicized intelligence officers.
Information is a potent weapon in the current war. Al Qaeda uses the Internet very effectively and uses the media as a terrorist tool. If the American public can be deceived by people who withhold basic information, we risk losing the war at home, even if we win it on the battlefield. The debate should focus on the basic question — what, exactly, we need to do to succeed both here and in Iraq. We are dismayed to have learned how many people in our own government are trying to distort that debate.
This is fast becoming an enormous scandal. Clearly, the intelligence world is desperately trying to cover up its serial incompetence throughout the whole Saddam/WMD saga. In saner times, there would now be a media feeding frenzy over the Hoekstra /Santorum revelations, and the fact that they are having to drag this information out of a secret intelligence world which is refusing to declassify a document that could shed light on one of the most pressing issues of the day — and in addition feeding black propaganda about it to the media. Yet because journalists are so compromised in creating the Big Lie over Iraq, they are cravenly acting as the spooks’ propaganda mouthpiece as these shrouded briefers from the intelligence underworld continue with their obfuscatory, treacherous and anti-democratic activities, while Hoekstra and Santorum’s explosive revelations are being trashed, ridiculed and ignored.
Astonishing.
