MI6 and CIA were told before invasion that Iraq had no active WMD

Tony Blair's claims about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction are challenged again in Monday's Panorama

Πηγή: The Guardian
By Richard Norton-Taylor
March 18 2013

Fresh evidence has been revealed about how MI6 and the CIA were told through secret channels by Saddam Hussein's foreign minister and his head of intelligence that Iraq had no active weapons of mass destruction.

Tony Blair told parliament before the war that intelligence showed Iraq's nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons programme was "active", "growing" and "up and running".

A special BBC Panorama programme aired on Monday night details how British and US intelligence agencies were informed by top sources months before the invasion that Iraq had no active WMD programme, and that the information was not passed to subsequent inquiries.

It describes how Naji Sabri, Saddam's foreign minister, told the CIA's station chief in Paris at the time, Bill Murray, through an intermediary that Iraq had "virtually nothing" in terms of WMD.

Sabri said in a statement that the Panorama story was "totally fabricated".

However, Panorama confirms that three months before the war an MI6 officer met Iraq's head of intelligence, Tahir Habbush al-Tikriti, who also said that Saddam had no active WMD. The meeting in the Jordanian capital, Amman, took place days before the British government published its now widely discredited Iraqi weapons dossier in September 2002.

Lord Butler, the former cabinet secretary who led an inquiry into the use of intelligence in the runup to the invasion of Iraq, tells the programme that he was not told about Sabri's comments, and that he should have been.

Butler says of the use of intelligence: "There were ways in which people were misled or misled themselves at all stages."

When it was suggested to him that the body that probably felt most misled of all was the British public, Butler replied: "Yes, I think they're, they're, they got every reason think that."

The programme shows how the then chief of MI6, Sir Richard Dearlove, responded to information from Iraqi sources later acknowledged to be unreliable.

One unidentified MI6 officer has told the Chilcot inquiry that at one stage information was "being torn off the teleprinter and rushed across to Number 10".

Another said it was "wishful thinking… [that] promised the crock of gold at the end of the rainbow".

The programme says that MI6 stood by claims that Iraq was buying uranium from Niger, though these were dismissed by other intelligence agencies, including the French.

It also shows how claims by Iraqis were treated seriously by elements in MI6 and the CIA even after they were exposed as fabricated including claims, notably about alleged mobile biological warfare containers, made by Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi, a German source codenamed Curveball. He admitted to the Guardian in 2011 that all the information he gave to the west was fabricated.

Panorama says it asked for an interview with Blair but he said he was "too busy".

The Lies that Led to the Iraq War and the Persistent Myth of ‘Intelligence Failure’

Secretary of State Colin Powell presents the Bush administration’s case for war on Iraq at the U.N. Security Council on February 5, 2003

Πηγή: Jeremy R. Hammond
Sept 8 2012

The George Washington University National Security Archive recently published a newly released CIA document from January 2006 titled “Misreading Intentions: Iraq’s Reaction to Inspection Created Picture of Deception”. The document, the Archive notes, “blames ‘analyst liabilities’ such as neglecting to examine Iraq’s deceptive behavior ‘through an Iraqi prism,’ for the failure to correctly assess the country’s virtually non-existent WMD capabilities.” Foreign Policy magazine describes it as a “remarkable CIA mea culpa”. But nothing could be further from the truth. Far from acknowledging the CIA’s true role, the document does not present any kind of serious analysis, but only politicized statements rehashing well-worn official claims designed to further the myth that there was an “intelligence failure” leading up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in March of 2003.

There was no such “intelligence failure”. On the contrary, there was an extremely successfuldisinformation campaign coordinated by the CIA in furtherance of the government’s policy of seeking regime change in Iraq. The language of the document itself reveals a persistent dishonesty. It speaks of “deepened suspicions” that Iraq “had ongoing WMD programs” and “suspicions that Iraq continued to hide WMD.” Needless to say, however, the Iraq war was not sold to the public on the grounds that government officials and intelligence agencies had “suspicions” that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (WMD). It was sold to the public with declarations that it was a known fact that Iraq had ongoing programs and stockpiles of WMD. The tacit acknowledgment that the actual evidence only supported “suspicions” that this was so by itself is proof of that the narrative of an “intelligence failure” is a fiction.

The report relies heavily upon the 1995 defection of Saddam Hussein’s son-in-law, Hussein Kamal (respectively spelled “Saddam Husayn” and “Husayn Kamil” in the document), arguing that the information he revealed bolstered suspicions that Iraq was concealing ongoing WMD programs and continued to possess stockpiles of WMD. It argues further that the regime’s behavior indicated he was hiding such weapons. Kamal, who returned to Iraq and was killed there in 1996, was the same individual Vice President Dick Cheney referred to in selling the administration’s case for war on August 26, 2002, when he said that “we now know that Saddam has resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons. Among other sources, we’ve gotten this from the firsthand testimony of defectors—including Saddam’s own son-in-law, who was subsequently murdered at Saddam’s direction.” But the fact is that Cheney was lying, and the CIA’s persistent adherence to essentially the same false narrative renders ridiculous the suggestion that this document is some kind of “mea culpa”.

The document states, “Analysts interpreted Iraq’s intransigence and ongoing deceptive practices as indicators of continued WMD programs or an intent to preserve WMD capabilities, reinforcing intelligence we were receiving at the time that Saddam Husayn continued to pursue WMD.” Yet the examples it lists of Iraq’s “intransigence” and deception do not support the CIA’s earlier judgments that Iraq had ongoing programs and WMD stockpiles. “In April 1991, for example,” the document says, “Iraq declared that it had neither a nuclear weapons program nor an enrichment program. Inspections in June and September 1991 proved that Iraq had lied on both counts, had explored multiple enrichment paths, and had a well-developed nuclear weapons program.” This is true. However, the document makes no mention of the fact that it was public knowledge that Iraq’s nuclear program was subsequently completely dismantled. As former Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Mohammed ElBaradei, pointed out, the Agency had “destroyed, removed or rendered harmless all Iraqi facilities and equipment component of Iraq’s nuclear programme” by 1992. The IAEA reported in 1998 that it was “confident that we had not missed any significant component of Iraq’s nuclear programme”.

The document states that in “March 1992, Iraq decided to declare the unilateral destruction of certain prohibited items to the Security Council, while continuing to conceal its biological warfare (BW) program and important aspects of the nuclear, chemical, and missile programs”. As worded, this implies that Iraq in 1992 was continuing these programs. This is disingenuous, because in fact Iraq was at that time trying conceal past programs that it had ended following the 1991 Gulf War. Iraq did not continue these programs, but dismantled them and unilaterally destroyed its WMD in order to hide the fact that it had had such programs in the past. As the document acknowledges in its “Key Findings” section, “in 1991, Iraq secretly destroyed or dismantled most undeclared items and records”. Yet the very next paragraph contradictorily and disingenuously states, “We now judge that the 1995 defection of Saddam’s son-in-law Husayn Kamil—a critical figure in Iraq’s WMD and denial and deception (D&D) activities—promoted Iraq to change strategic direction and cease efforts to retain WMD programs.” This again implies that Iraq had ongoing WMD programs at least until 1995, which is false, as the CIA knew perfectly well at the time this report was written.

Even more importantly, that the programs had been dismantled and the weapons destroyed is in fact precisely what Hussein Kamal actually told U.N. inspectors when he defected in 1995. The newly released document in fact points out, “He said that Saddam destroyed all WMD in secret” in 1991. Yet apart from that single buried admission, the document is full of statements implying that weapons programs continued. For example, it states that “Iraqi officials did not admit to weaponized BW agent after the defection of Husayn Kamil”, but fails to clarify that this was an admission of past and not ongoing activity. The document acknowledges that Kamal’s defection was “the key turning point in Iraq’s decision to cooperate more with inspections”, but then adds that his debriefing with U.N. inspectors “strengthened the West’s perception of Iraq as a successful and efficient deceiver.” Following Kamal’s defection, the document states, “the West”, meaning the U.S., judged that Iraq “was determined to retain WMD capabilities.” In other words, the U.S. continued to claim that Iraq had ongoing WMD programs and stockpiles, and supposedly based that assessment on Kamal’s information, even though Kamal in fact had confirmed that Iraq’s WMD had been destroyed and its programs dismantled in 1991.

The document similarly states, “We now judge that the Iraqis feared that Kamil … would reveal additional undisclosed information. Iraq decided that further widespread deception and attempts to hold onto extensive WMD programs while under UN sanctions was untenable and changed strategic direction by adopting a policy of disclosure and improved cooperation.” The wording here that Iraq was attempting in 1995 “to hold onto” such programs does not merely imply a falsehood, but is an outright lie. Once again, the CIA was perfectly well aware that until 1995, Iraq was attempting to conceal the existence of its past WMD programs, which it was not attempting “to hold onto” but had dismantled in 1991. This kind of dishonest use of language to suggest Iraq continued to have ongoing WMD programs, even while contradictorily acknowledging elsewhere in the report that this was not true, is illustrative not of a willingness by the CIA to come clean, but to continue to obfuscate the truth and to persist in the false narrative of “intelligence failure”. The CIA in the document even tries to spin its acknowledgment that Iraq’s programs were dismantled and its WMD destroyed in 1991 by saying that this unilateral action left Iraq “unable to provide convincing proof when it later tried to demonstrate compliance”—thus shifting the burden onto Iraq to prove that it didn’t have WMD and attempting to obfuscate the fact that U.S. government officials repeatedly lied by claiming that the intelligence community had proof that Iraq did have WMD.

In October 1991, Iraq admitted to the U.N. Special Commission (UNSCOM) that its Al Atheer site had been built in order to conduct research into enriching uranium to build a nuclear weapon. On August 22, 1995, when Hussein Kamal was asked about the work that went on there, and whether it was continuing somewhere else, he replied, “yes, but not now, before the Gulf War.” That is to say, there were other sites involved in Iraq’s nuclear weapons program, but this program was ended by 1991. He also pointed out that the work done on enrichment “were only studies.” He noted that Iraq already “had highly enriched uranium from France but it was under the IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency] safeguards.” Iraq thus had worked on building its own centrifuges to enrich uranium, “but had never reached a point close to testing.”

The CIA document nevertheless states that Kamal’s defection “exposed the previously unknown 1991 crash program to develop nuclear weapons.” The program referred to would have entailed using enriched uranium from Iraq’s French-built reactor and enriching additional uranium obtained from Russia to weapons-grade in order to produce material for a bomb. The remarkable dishonesty of this statement is on full display when one compares it with the fact that, when this “crash program” was brought up in his UNSCOM debriefing, Kamal’s actual response was, “no, not true.” He acknowledged that “the decision was already there to use French uranium, but they were not ready with centrifuges.” In other words, the “crash program” was nothing more than a hypothetical contingency plan involving a scenario in which Iraq would make a final desperate effort to produce a nuclear weapon by kicking out U.N. and IAEA inspectors and enriching its own uranium to weapons-grade—a capability Iraq did not possess.

Gaddafi ‘regrets he stopped developing nuclear weapons’

 "If we had a nuclear bomb no one would have attacked us."

Πηγή: BLACK AND WHITE CAT

Thursday, March 31, 2011


When the United States and Britain invaded Iraq in 2003, a number of people pointed out what a terrible message this sent to the world about nuclear weapons. Iraq had dismantled its WMD programmes and it was invaded. North Korea had developed a rudimentary nuclear device and got negotiations. So, if you don’t want to be invaded, build a bomb.

The champions of Bush and Blair’s policy, however, claimed they were vindicated when Libya quickly offered to dismantle its WMD programmes. Gaddafi was welcomed with open arms, by western governments and by many of the same pundits who now want his blood.

So, once again, the message is: get hold of a nuclear weapon, or one day they’ll be coming for you too. According to an interview in the Russian magazine Arguments and Facts, that’s precisely what Gaddafi is saying now. I’ve translated the interview below, but we’ll come to that in a minute.

First, for anyone who still believes the United States and Britain didn’t know Iraq had no WMD, here’s what the British diplomat Carne Ross told John Pilger in the documentary The War You Don’t See:

I remember before I was sent to New York in late ‘97 I did the round of departments in London, saying to them, “OK, I’m going to New York, I’m going to be doing Iraq, what do I need to know?”

And I went to see non-proliferation department in the Foreign Office and I was expecting a briefing on the vast piles of weapons that we still thought Iraq possessed. And the desk officer sort of looked at me slightly sheepishly and said, “Well actually we don’t think there’s anything. We don’t think there’s anything in Iraq.”

I said, “That’s extraordinary. I mean, I thought we had sanctions because we thought Iraq had large amounts of weapons.”

He said, “No, no. The justification for sanctions is basically that we have unanswered questions about how those stocks were destroyed in the past.”

They knew in 1997 that Iraq had destroyed its WMD, but they kept the sanctions in place anyway. Then they invaded anyway. It was a convenient excuse. So could we stop now with the claims that Saddam “fooled us”?

Anyway, here’s a rough translation of the interview which Arguments and Facts (AIF) says it conducted by telephone with a man they say is close to Gaddafi and demanded anonymity. (The original Russian is here; and there’s a Chinese translation here if you prefer.)


AIF: - Does Gaddafi understand the position he’s in?

- Of course. We’re all realists here and no one is expecting a miracle. Our main goal right now is to hang on in Tripoli for a few months, despite the bombing. Another important thing is that Gaddafi should have everything he needs for long-term defence.

AIF: - Weapons?

- No. Money. Soldiers fight better when they’re paid.

AIF: - And then what?

- We’ll see.

AIF: - Is it true that Libya’s aircraft have all been destroyed?

- We can’t compete with NATO’s military power. That’s our fault - after the West lifted sanctions we should have immediately bought the latest Russian weapons. We signed the contract, but we delayed its execution for a long time. But it’s not a complete disaster. Every day CNN says Libya no longer has any air defences and then shows us firing at enemy aircraft. Where’s the logic in that?

AIF: - Yugoslavia resisted NATO for three months, but it had to surrender in the end.

- Gaddafi won’t give up. He saw that Milosevic died in prison and Saddam was hanged. He’s got nothing to lose - so Muammar will fight to the end.

AIF: - How long for? This week the rebels have occupied three cities.

- They haven’t taken the capital. Everyone who is now fighting for Gaddafi knows that if we lose we will be hanged from lamp posts. We have no choice but to fight back. Remember - when the riots started in February, they kept saying: “Gaddafi’s finished. He’s fled to Venezuela.” But Muammar crushed the rebels for two weeks. If it wasn’t for the Americans, we would have already taken Benghazi. Who knows how things will turn out? But Libya can’t hold out against a ground invasion.

AIF: - Do you think NATO has achieved success in the war against Libya?

- It’s funny - the best air forces of the most powerful countries in the world can’t deal with the army of a country with a population of six million in a week. This isn’t war. It’s a farce. Once again the West has shown its contempt for all decency. Protecting “freedom fighters”? Nonsense. In 2008, a small country started brutally killing insurgents. A big country stood up against that. Everyone condemned this country for its “aggression”. You don’t know what I’m talking about? I’m talking about the war between Russia and Georgia. But when a similar situation in appears in Libya, the Americans immediately take the side of the rebels. Why didn’t they bomb Tbilisi? It’s all lies. Gaddafi is accused of killing 8,000 people, but nobody has shown even twenty corpses on television, let alone mass graves. Not a single Libyan fled to Europe because of “Gaddafi’s atrocities” but now thousands are fleeing NATO’s bombing.

AIF: - Does Gaddafi regret anything now?

- Only that he stopped developing nuclear weapons. Everyone’s afraid to touch North Korea now. If we had a nuclear bomb no one would have attacked us.

Iraq: Forced Liberators on hire

Mr. Dana Rohrabacher

The Iraq war is the ugliest story of our era. From the beginning to the end and aftermath the whole is an exemplary case of deceit, fraud, democratic deficit and lack of transparency. These characteristics are reflected to the subsequent controversy stemming all the key - facts of the story. The "well - documented" Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) turned to be Weapons of Mass Deception for the justification of a war where the only real objective was oil and maybe the extermination of Saddam who like Qaddafi was up to quit using dollars in the oil trade. The famous "food for oil" programme turned to be the biggest scandal in the history of the UN involving bribes, kickbacks and black payments with the Iraqi money while the investigations were highly controversial as the person that formed the definitive report, Mr. Paul Volker was by that time the representative of the UN Association in the States. Furthermore, a magnetic bomb was attached on the car of the head of Iraq's independent Board of Supreme Audit Ehsan Karim taking his life. In England the expert of biological warfare employed by the British Ministry of Defense and formerly a UN weapon inspector in Iraq Mr. David Kelly was found dead after discussing with a BBC journalist about the British government's dossier on the WMD of Iraq. He allegedly committed suicide while taking his usual walk in the park using his own Knife to cut his veins albeit without leaving any fingerprints. The same foggy atmosphere surrounds the death toll of Iraqi children caused by the long standing embargo (100,000 - 1,700,000) and of the civilians following the final invasion, a number that had to be changed (increased) after the Wikileaks unsanctioned disclosure of the Iraq War Logs, consisting the biggest leak in the history of the USA.
On top of these events, last Sunday (12/6) while on a congressional delegation visiting in Baghdad, Rep. Dana Rohrabacher a defender of Bush administration's program of extraordinary rendition said that Iraq should repay USA for the war that President Bush have started in 2003 as a total of around $ 3 trillion have been spent already. In the same line he withdrew his support from the Libyan rebels for not accepting to repay the costs of the US air campaign there. The Iraqis denounced the idea of paying back their forced liberation and nation building which is yet in the stage of "bombing is like shopping" and the government asked him to leave the country. Obviously this story before its final spiraling into the memory hole will have the opportunity to turn even more ugly...