What Eating
Cindy Sheehan?
By Jason Leopold
02 September, 2005
Countercurrents.org
Cindy
Sheehan has been subjected to an unwarranted backlash by right-wing
pundits because of her antiwar protests and some explosive statements
she made about President Bush. Perhaps Sheehan, while mourning the death
of her son, Casey, a U.S. soldier who died in the Iraq war, lashed out
at the president, and decided to take her antiwar message to Crawford,
Texas, after doing some fact checking on her emotional state. If so,
these are likely some of the circumstances that drove her:
While searching
the 600 or so sites identified by United States intelligence and Iraqi
officials as places where the country's biological weapons may have
been hidden, which was President Bushs rationale for starting
the war, to rid Iraq of weapons of mass destruction, not a single speck
of anthrax or other WMD has been uncovered since the war started more
than two years ago.
Two skeletal trailers that may have been used to develop anthrax or
botulism, scrubbed from top to bottom when it was found, leaving no
biological weapons traces behind, according to the Department of Defense,
is the only evidence the U.S. has found so far to justify its preemptive
strike against Iraq. But this is far from a "smoking gun"
and the prospects for finding any WMD in the months ahead are becoming
grim.
The media who covered the war on the ground asked U.S. military officials
in Iraq why WMD haven't been found. The responses were short and to
the point.
"I honestly
don't know," said Stephen Cambone, undersecretary of defense for
U.S. intelligence, during a briefing May 30, 2003.
Prior to the war,
nearly every major media outlet warned, based on reports from the Pentagon,
that Iraq's cache of chemical and biological weapons could be used on
U.S. and British troops sent into Iraq to destroy Saddam Hussein's regime.
To back up these
claims, President Bush and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said
Saddam's history of using WMD on his own people and in the war the country
fought against Iran was evidence of the viciousness of the dictatorship.
So are we to believe that Saddam suddenly got a dose of humanity, opting
instead to let his regime be torn apart rather than go out in a blaze
of glory? Or could it be that Iraq either destroyed its WMD or never
had anything substantial to begin with?
Looking back at
the events that led up to the war, it's likely the latter. The Bush
administration never presented the proof to the United Nations that
its intelligence suggesting Iraq was developing chemical and biological
weapons was superior to that of the U.N. weapons inspectors who actually
combed through the country looking for stockpiles of anthrax, botulism
or VX. Now the military, which has taken over inspections, are finding
exactly what U.N. weapons inspectors found nothing. Even Al Capone's
safe had a couple of empty bottles of liquor in it when Geraldo Rivera
opened it up twenty years ago.
In October 2002,
President Bush gave a speech in Cincinnati and spoke about the imminent
threat Iraq posed to the U.S. because of the country's alleged ties
with al-Qaeda and its endless supply of chemical and biological weapons:
"Surveillance
photos reveal that the (Iraqi) regime is rebuilding facilities that
it had used to produce chemical and biological weapons," Bush said.
"Iraq possesses ballistic missiles with a likely range of hundreds
of miles far enough to strike Saudi Arabia, Israel, Turkey, and
other nations in a region where more than 135,000 American civilians
and service members live and work. We've also discovered through intelligence
that Iraq has a growing fleet of manned and unmanned aerial vehicles
that could be used to disperse chemical or biological weapons across
broad areas. We're concerned that Iraq is exploring ways of using these
UAVs for missions targeting the United States. And, of course, sophisticated
delivery systems aren't required for a chemical or biological attack;
all that might be required are a small container and one terrorist or
Iraqi intelligence operative to deliver it."
None of this intelligence
information has ever panned out. Most notably, according to the International
Atomic Energy Agency, Vice President Dick Cheney erred when he said
in 2002 that Iraq was six months away from developing a nuclear weapon.
Furthermore, the
president's claims that thousands of high-strength aluminum tubes sought
by Iraq were intended for a secret nuclear weapons program were also
incorrect.
Bush said in a September
2002 speech that attempts by Iraq to acquire the tubes point to a clandestine
program to make enriched uranium for nuclear bombs. But experts contradicted
Bush, saying that the evidence is ambiguous.
The report, from
the Institute for Science and International Security, a copy of which
was acquired by the Washington Post, "also contends that the Bush
administration is trying to quiet dissent among its own analysts over
how to interpret the evidence."
David Albright,
a physicist who investigated Iraq's nuclear weapons program following
the 1991 Persian Gulf War as a member of the International Atomic Energy
Agency's inspection team, the Post reported, authored the report.
The Institute, headquartered
in Washington, is an independent group that studies nuclear and other
security issues."
"By themselves,
these attempted procurements are not evidence that Iraq is in possession
of, or close to possessing, nuclear weapons," the report said,
according to the Post story. "They do not provide evidence that
Iraq has an operating centrifuge plant or when such a plant could be
operational."
The lack of evidence
and public blunders by other high-ranking officials in the Bush administration
are endless.
Secretary of State
Colin Powell made it clear in an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal
on February 3, 2003, a day before his infamous meeting at the U.N. where
he presented "evidence" of an Iraqi weapons program, which
turned out to be the empty trailers the U.S. military found shortly
after the start of the war, that there was no "smoking gun":
"While there
will be no 'smoking gun,' we will provide evidence concerning the weapons
programs that Iraq is working so hard to hide," Powell said in
his op-ed. "We will, in sum, offer a straightforward, sober and
compelling demonstration that Saddam is concealing the evidence of his
weapons of mass destruction, while preserving the weapons themselves."
However, Powell
did no such thing. Instead, Powell held up a small vial of anthrax at
the U.N. meeting to illustrate how deadly just a small vial can be and
then used that to couch his claims that Iraq's alleged stockpile of
anthrax would be much deadlier.
The same day, February
3, 2003 White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer dodged a dozen or
so questions about the intelligence information from sources in Iraq
and from the CIA that showed, without any doubt, that Iraq possessed
WMD.
"I think the
reason that we know Saddam Hussein possesses chemical and biological
weapons is from a wide variety of means. That's how we know," Fleischer
said.
In virtually every
press briefing (archived on the White House's web site), and every speech
by President Bush between January 2003 and the days leading up to the
war in March, hundreds of questions were directed at Bush during stakeouts
and at Fleischer at his press briefings about what intelligence information
the U.S. had that could be declassified to support its allegations that
Iraq was either developing WMD or was hiding them. However, not a single
shred of proof was offered up by the White House to back up its claims.
Moreover, when the
White House finally seized on something tangible prior to the war, such
as the existence of long-range missiles, Iraq started destroying the
weapons in the presence of U.N. inspectors. But at that point war with
Iraq was inevitable.
In an interview
with "Meet the Press" on February 9, 2003, Tim Russert, the
program's host, asked Powell about one of the alleged WMD sites Powell
spoke about at a U.N. meeting the week before. Russert asked Powell
if the U.S. knew where certain weapons in Iraq were being stored why
not just send the U.N. inspectors in or destroy the facility rather
than go to war.
Powell's response
is poignant:
"Well, the
inspectors eventually did go there, and by the time they got there,
they were no longer active chemical bunkers."
Still trying to
figure out whats eating Cindy Sheehan?
(Reporters note: I wrote a portion of this article in 2003, shortly
after the start of the war. I have changed some elements of it in hopes
of explaining why some people, such as Cindy Sheehan, demand an end
to the war).
Jason Leopold is the author of the explosive memoir, News Junkie,
to be released in the spring of 2006 by Process/Feral House Books. Visit
Leopold's website at www.jasonleopold.com
for updates.
© 2005 Jason
Leopold