Failure to find banned weapons is becoming an increasing embarrassment for the Bush administration, with several influential lawmakers saying on Friday that they believe the White House had hyped the Iraq threat

The Bush administration should have heeded Mark Twain’s advice: “When in doubt, speak the truth.” But it didn’t, and thought it could fool people into believing that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, had links to Al Qaeda and was even involved in the 9/11 attacks on the US. This, of course, was rubbish, tripe of the highest order, as many of us had been saying for months. The truth, however, will out sooner or later. And the expletive deleted has finally hit the fan.

On Friday the ranking Democrat on the US House of Representatives Intelligence Committee warned that President Bush’s contention that America went to war with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq to rid the country of hidden biological and chemical weapons “could be the greatest intelligence hoax” of all time. And it’s not only Democrats that are saying this. So are Intelligence Committee members from Bush’s own Republican Party.

Representative Jane Harman, Democrat-Ranco Palos Verdes (Los Angeles County), has sent a letter, along with Representative Porter Goss, Republican-Florida, the Intelligence Committee chairman, to CIA Director George Tenet asking him to explain what “intelligence” led spy agencies to believe Iraq had stocks of the banned weapons or that Al Qaeda operated on Iraqi territory.

“US credibility is at stake,” Harman told reporters on Friday. “Especially if there is an interest in another military adventure, we need the facts.”

The congresswoman said intelligence briefings about weapons of mass destruction she received in the committee were a major reason why she had voted for last October’s war resolution in the House of Representatives.

The underlying implication was that had it not been for such briefings, Harman might well have voted against the resolution. The same could probably be said of other US lawmakers, many of whom must now be thinking they were conned into voting for the war resolution.

To add to the Bush administration’s embarrassment, the top US Marine commander in Iraq said on Friday that US intelligence was “simply wrong” in its assessment that Saddam Hussein intended to unleash biological or chemical weapons against America forces during the war.

“It was a surprise to me then, it remains a surprise to me now, that we have not uncovered weapons,” Lt. General James Conway, commander of the First Marine Expeditionary Force, said from Baghdad in a teleconference with reporters in Washington.

“It’s not for want of trying,” he continued. “We’ve been to virtually every ammunition supply point between the Kuwaiti border and Baghdad, but they’re simply not there.”

Conway said, “What the regime was intending to do in terms of its use of the weapons, we thought we understood, or we certainly had our best guess, our most dangerous, our most likely courses of action that the intelligence folks were giving us. We were simply wrong.”

His comments are likely to further fuel concern in Washington that the prewar intelligence in Iraq was flawed at best and an outright lie at worst.

Amid the mounting criticism, CIA Director George Tenet took the unusual step of issuing a statement on Friday denying that the agency’s assessments on Iraq were politicised.

“Our role is to call it like we see it — to tell policymakers what we know, what we don’t know, what we think, and what we base it on,” Tenet said.

His remarks were intriguingly reminiscent of Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld’s comments at a Pentagon press briefing during the height of the war, when he observed, “There are things we know. There are things we don’t know. Then there are things we know we don’t know and things we don’t know we don’t know.”

Even this example of Rumsfeldian doublespeak pales into insignificance, however, compared to the spin that Major General Keith Dayton, the director of the Pentagon’s Defence Intelligence Agency’s human intelligence service, tried to put on the US’ failure to find any weapons of mass destruction.

Dayton, who will head a new team of more than 1,400 experts to search for proscribed weapons, said in a press briefing on Friday that it was possible that Iraq “deliberately misled” US intelligence agencies, making them think that weapons were being produced and deployed even as they were secretly being destroyed.

So now we are being asked to believe that Iraq wasn’t secretly producing weapons of mass destruction but secretly destroying them, though why on earth it should have wanted to resort to such subterfuge Dayton was unable to say.

In fact, the US’ failure to find even a shred of evidence that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction only confirms what the Saddam Hussein regime had been saying all along in the months before the war — that it didn’t have any.

Failure to find banned weapons is becoming an increasing embarrassment for the Bush administration, with several influential lawmakers saying on Friday that they believe the White House had hyped the Iraq threat or was misled by the intelligence community.

No such doubts seemed to assail White House spokesman Ari Fleischer at a press briefing on May 29, when a reporter asked, “Is the President satisfied with the intelligence he got before the war? Because now one Cabinet officer is saying that they (the Iraqis) buried the weapons; another said they destroyed them; and another said they — what’s the President’s view on all this?”

Fleischer replied, “The President is indeed satisfied with the intelligence that he received. And I think that is borne out by the fact that just as Secretary Powell described at the United Nations, we have found the two trucks that can be used only for the purpose of producing biological weapons. That’s proof perfect that the intelligence in that regard was right on target.”

Reporter: “We go to war for two trucks?” Fleischer: “I’m sorry?” Reporter: “You would go to war from the finding of two trucks?” Fleischer: “Well, I don’t think it’s anything to dismiss. Iraq had, contrary to their protestations to the United Nations, trucks for the purpose of producing biological weapons. They said they didn’t have them, they got caught — proof-perfect that they had them.”

This whole exchange sounds like a scene from the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party.

But if there is already “proof-perfect” evidence that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, would Fleischer, aka Ari, the evasive, care to explain why the Bush administration has now decided to send in a new team of more than 1,400 experts to search for evidence of such weapons?

http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=story_2-6-2003_pg3_8