25 Mar 2013 2:30 pm
Only Bush & company lied, even though almost everyone agreed with them.What about the many who disagreed?I guess they don't count.Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction - Did "Everyone" Agree? - June 12, 2008The claim that the entire world agreed Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction before the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq has been asserted countless times by the Bush administration and its supporters since we all learned it was the stuff of fiction. "Everybody agreed," former White House Press Secretary Tony Snow told Wolf Blitzer in May 2007. "We all thought that the intelligence case was strong," Condoleezza Rice said in April 2007, adding that even, "the U.N weapons inspectors (thought) Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. So theres no blame here of anyone." Etc., etc.The media almost always embrace this excuse, as well. Yet former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan"s revelatory new memoir, together with the quietly released report on intelligence manipulation by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, leave no doubt that the Bush administration took the nation into war on false pretenses of mushroom clouds and weapons trailers.Karl Rove, for example, told Bill O'Reilly on May 29 when talking about McClellan's book that, "everybody in the West, every major intelligence agency in the world, thought that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction."We hate to be the proverbial skunk at this garden party, but let's roll back the clock for a moment to see what "everyone" actually said and thought at the time.Let us begin with America's own intelligence agencies. Did they agree there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq?Well, no. The aforementioned Select Committee on Intelligence report, which was signed by all of the committee's Democrats, along with two Republicans, said that while the administration's statements on Iraq's nuclear capabilities were supported by some intelligence, the administration's statements, "did not convey the substantial disagreements that existed in the intelligence community."On the issue of weapons of mass destruction in general, the report found that administration officials exhibited a "higher level of certainty than the intelligence judgments themselves." The report also found that, "Statements by the President and Vice President prior to the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate regarding Iraq's chemical weapons production capability and activities did not reflect the intelligence communitys uncertainties as to whether such production was ongoing."We know also that the Bush administration encouraged the CIA to go as far as possible in supporting its case. The Washington Post reported in June 2003 that Cheney and his Chief of Staff, Scooter Libby, personally visited CIA analysts working on the National Intelligence Estimate of 2002 in order to inspire a re-examination of the case, something that no one could remember happening in any previous administration.Top administration officials, including President Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney, were also aware of some notable people in the intelligence community who disagreed about WMD claims. Tyler Drumheller, the former chief of the CIA's Europe division, revealed on "60 Minutes" that in the fall of 2002 President Bush, Vice President Cheney, then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and others were told by CIA Director George Tenet that Iraq's foreign minister-who agreed to act as a spy for the United States-had reported that Iraq had no active weapons of mass destruction program. Two former senior CIA officials later confirmed this account to Salon's Sidney Blumenthal.Secretary of State Colin Powell also disagreed at one time-although well before his much-publicized speech to the United Nations in February 2003. Speaking two years earlier in Cairo, Powell had this to say: "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 neighbors."Anthony Zinni, the Marine general who commanded the air assault in the first Gulf War, also had doubts. "Up until Desert Fox, I believed that (Saddam) had WMD," he told authors Derek Chollet and James Goldgeier. "Then Clinton said we would bomb the WMD sites. I asked the intelligence community for the targets, but they couldn't give me any. Nothing they gave me was definitively a WMD target. They were all dual-use. That's when my doubts began."Intelligence agencies and top administration officials aside, who else didn't agree that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction?..............You can read more about others who did not agree, including politicians, media outlets (both domestic and foreign) and international agencies tasked with carrying out inspections in Iraq, at the link in the title, but of course you won't.