WMD Report:
More Proof
Iraq War Was Based On Lies
By Bill Vann
World Socialist
Web
06 October 2003
The
interim report delivered by Washingtons handpicked chief weapons
inspector has confirmed yet again that the Bush administrations
war against Iraq was an unprovoked act of aggression that was based
on lies.
The report was largely
anti-climactic, confirming what has already become all too obvious:
there exists no evidence that the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein possessed
weapons of mass destruction (WMD) or posed any threat whatsoever to
the US or the rest of the world.
We have not
found at this point actual weapons, David Kay said in his report
to Congress. It does not mean weve concluded there are no
actual weapons.
This conclusion
follows three months of work and $300 million in expenditures by Kays
1,200-member Iraq Survey Group (ISG), composed of military and civilian
experts. Their efforts came on top of those performed by military personnel
organized in the search teams of the 75th Exploitation Task Force that
roamed the country in the aftermath of the US invasion, not to mention
the intrusive inspections regime imposed under the mantle of the United
Nations before the war.
Hans Blix, the UNs
chief weapons inspector, dismissed Kays report. I dont
think there are any surprises, he said. The most important
point is that they confirm that they have not found any stocks of weapons
of mass destruction of any kind. They found minor proscribed items and
debris. Blix last month compared the US claims about Iraqi WMD
to the hunt for witches during the Middle Ages.
Kays report
served up a damning refutation of each specific point cited by the Bush
administration in the run-up to the war as justifications for invading
Iraq.
Related to the most
sensational charge, the incessant claim that the continued existence
of the Hussein regime threatened the US with a nuclear terrorist attack,
Kay reported: To date we have not uncovered evidence that Iraq
undertook significant post-1998 steps to actually build nuclear weapons
or produce fissile material.
In an Oct. 7, 2002,
speech delivered in Cincinnati, Bush had declared that the evidence
indicates that Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program...
Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof,
the smoking gun that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.
Similarly, Vice
President Cheney, in a March 16 appearance on NBCs Meet
the Press, had declared of Saddam Hussein, We know he has
been absolutely devoted to trying to acquire nuclear weapons. And we
believe he has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons.
The ISG report merely
confirms the assessment made by Mohamed ElBaradei, the head of the UN
nuclear inspection team, who said that the US had used forged and false
evidence to manufacture its nuclear weapons claims.
Chemical weapons abandoned in 1991
The ISG report also
concluded that whatever chemical weapons (CW) program Iraq maintained
was apparently abandoned long before the US invasion.
A National Intelligence
Estimate prepared last October warned that the Iraqi regime had renewed
production of mustard, sarin and VX agents, and probably has stocked
100 to 500 tons of chemical weaponry, much of it added in the
past year.
But Kay told the
congressional intelligence committee: Multiple sources with varied
access and reliability have told ISG that Iraq did not have a large,
ongoing, centrally controlled CW program after 1991.
He added: Information
found to date suggests that Iraqs large-scale capability to develop,
produce and fill new [chemical] munitions was reducedif not entirely
destroyedduring Operations Desert Storm and Desert Fox, 13 years
of UN sanctions and UN inspections, Kay said.
This assessment
stands as an indictment not only of the claims made by the Bush administration
in launching the war last March, but also of the trumped-up WMD charges
made by the Clinton White House in 1998 before launching cruise missile
attacks on Baghdad.
The sole physical
evidence of WMD material that the 1,200-person army of US inspectors
could claim to have found was a single vial of botulinum in the home
of an Iraqi scientist. In the run-up to the war, US officials claimed
ominously that Iraq had stockpiled 38,000 liters of the toxin. The report
also claimed that the ISG had discovered equipment and elements of laboratories
as well as the ashes of burned documents, the material that Blix referred
to as minor proscribed items and debris.
As to the tons of
anthrax, ricin, mustard gas, VX and other deadly substances that Washington
maintained were present in Iraq, the ISG has found not a trace.
The ISG report further
suggested that the only piece of WMD-related equipment that the Bush
administration claimed to have located in the aftermath of the war was
also bogus.
We have not
yet been able to corroborate the existence of a mobile BW [biological
weapons] production effort, Kay told a congressional hearing Thursday.
The administration had claimed that a pair of flatbed trucks equipped
with cooling equipment and fermenters that US forces recovered in May
were mobile weapons labs.
Iraqi scientists
countered that the trucks were used for making hydrogen for weather
balloons. US military officials quoted by the Associated Press indicated
that the Pentagon has accepted this explanation. No trace of biological
materials was found on either vehicle.
After the reports
release, Bush declared that it proved Saddam Hussein was a danger
to the world. British foreign secretary Jack Straw echoed this
claim, stating that the ISGs findings showed how dangerous
and deceitful the regime was and how the military action was indeed
both justified and essential to remove the dangers.
In reality, the
report only confirmed the claims of the Iraqi regime itself and the
assessment of most independent observers: Iraq had destroyed its WMD
stocks and was effectively disarmed well before the war was launched.
Military intelligence report discredits defectors leads
Kays report
to Congress came on the heels of findings by US military intelligence
that virtually all claims made by Iraqi exiles concerning supposed secret
weapons programs had proven fraudulent.
Officials within
the Pentagons Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) leaked the findings
of a secret report, which also said that leads from Iraqi defectors
had proven fruitless. The agency concluded that the Iraqi National Congress
(INC), the Iraqi exile group that arranged for most of the defectors
to speak to intelligence analysts, promoted the stories in a bid to
provoke a US invasion, while the defectors themselves were currying
Washingtons favor in hopes of being resettled in the US.
The US government
paid more than $1 million for the useless information. The New York
Times reported Sept. 29 that officials who leaked the DIA findings would
not speculate on whether the defectors had knowingly provided false
information and, if so, what their motivation might have been.
The Times report added: One Defense Department official said that
some of the people were not who they said they were and that the money
for the program could have been better spent.
The intelligence
provided by the INC-sponsored defectors was championed by the right-wing
ideologues in the civilian leadership of the Pentagon, and promoted
by the Times itself through the reports of its senior correspondent
Judith Miller. She acknowledged in an internal memo at the newspaper
that nearly all of her WMD exclusives were based on information
provided by the INCs chief, Ahmed Chalabi.
The leaking of the
DIA report is one more indication of the deep and bitter divisions within
the national security establishment that have emerged in response to
the growing debacle for the US military occupation in Iraq.
The substance of
the Kay report is itself testimony to these divisions. If there were
ever an individual who could be counted upon to manufacture the evidence
that the Bush administration desires, it is David Kay.
A right-wing Republican,
Kay was a political official at the Pentagon under the Reagan administration
in the 1980s. In 1991, in the wake of the Persian Gulf War, the first
Bush administration managed to have him installed as the head of the
International Atomic Energy Agency nuclear weapons inspection team in
Iraq.
He was removed from
this UN agency in 1992 after a series of provocations and because of
his unconcealed and intimate ties with the US Central Intelligence Agency
(CIA). Documents that he unearthed purporting to reveal the existence
of an ongoing Iraqi nuclear program later proved to be forgeries.
In the period leading
up to the invasion of Iraq, Kay was a ubiquitous presence on the cable
news networks promoting the Bush administrations program of regime
change.
Before rejoining
the CIA, Kay was senior vice president for San Diego-based Science Applications
International Corp. (SAIC), a major defense contractor that has won
lucrative contracts both for homeland security and Iraqi reconstruction.
Kay reportedly retains a major interest in the company in terms of stock
ownership.
If such an individual
was unable to produce the kind of report that would have bolstered the
Bush administrations WMD claims, it is undoubtedly because there
are elements within the US military and the intelligence establishment
who are refusing to collaborate in lying to the American public.
The Bush administration
has asked for a secret appropriation of another $620 million to fund
the continuation of the ISGs fruitless hunt for WMD. The obvious
question is whether this money will be used in another elaborate attempt
to fabricate evidence where none exists.
Kays report
promoted fresh charges that the administration deliberately promoted
phony intelligence to further its longstanding aim to conquer Iraq.
Sen. John D. Rockefeller
IV of West Virginia, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence
Committee, said that the report contradicted claims made before the
war that Iraq had posed an imminent danger.
Did we misread
it or did they mislead us, or did [we] simply get it wrong? he
asked. Whatever the answer is, its not a good answer.
There is only one
politically credible conclusion, but the Democrats are too cowardly
to publicly state it. The Bush administration deliberately manufactured
intelligence suggesting a threat from Iraq in order to overcome mass
opposition to launching a war of aggression.
The Iraqi people
have paid for this crime with the deaths and maiming of tens of thousands
of people, while American soldiers are being killed on a daily basis
as the result of growing resistance to an illegal colonial occupation.
The hundreds of billions of dollars that are going to fund the occupation
and the profiteering by politically connected firms like Halliburton
and Bechtel will be paid for by American working people through attacks
on living standards, social programs and jobs.
The report from
the ISGconfirming in unmistakable terms that the Bush administration
lied to the American people about the reasons for warposes the
urgent need for an independent investigation leading to the impeachment
and criminal prosecution of all those responsible for provoking this
war. The call for such a probe must be advanced together with the demand
for the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of all US troops from
Iraq.