On Thu, 29 Jan 2004 14:46:10 -0500 (EST), "Harry Krause"
wrote:

From The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 1/29/04:

Much snipped from this "highly respected" source.

Intelligence was corrupted for political purposes, not just in the
Case of the Two Trailers, but in almost every aspect of our
intelligence effort.

This last paragraph also refuted by Kay. Of course this isn't
mentioned in the article.

Wow, Harry, you can sure pick some good bull**** to post. Choices such
as this could reflect unfavorable on your unquestionable integrity.

John H

On the 'Poco Loco' out of Deale, MD
on the beautiful Chesapeake Bay!

The WMD's are on boats. I asssume your comment to this group is how do we
get WMD's out of boats (those pesky things are hard to fnd . . the bilge,
the galley, they are everywhaere including Kays head!)


"Harry Krause" wrote in message
news:c3dhc2g=.572e99c95b339ac83c53afd092345147@107 5405570.nulluser.com...
From The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 1/29/04:
http://www.ajc.com/opinion/content/o...man/index.html

No mystery to untangling WMD puzzler

By Jay Bookman


How could U.S. officials have been so wrong about something so
important -- the stockpiles of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction that
we now know never existed?

The Case of the Two Trailers may hold the answer.

You may recall that when two oddly equipped flatbed trailers were
found in northern Iraq last spring, U.S. officials jumped to claim
them as mobile labs used to make anthrax and other weapons.

"We found the weapons of mass destruction. We found biological
laboratories," President Bush boasted at the time.

"And we'll find more weapons as time goes on. But for those who say we
haven't found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons,
they're wrong, we found them."

In reality, it was the president who was wrong.

As retiring chief weapons inspector David Kay admitted last week, the
trailers that we flaunted before the world to justify our invasion
have turned out to be harmless facilities that produced hydrogen to
fill weather balloons.

How could we make such an embarrassing mistake?

Well, the initial claim that Iraq possessed mobile weapons labs came
from the same source as so much of our faulty intelligence:

Iraqi defectors, a group with a long history of telling us whoppers
about highly advanced nuclear programs, smallpox research -- anything
that might goad us into invading.

The CIA knew all too well that such sources were often tainted, yet it
went ahead and cited the mobile labs as fact, with no physical
evidence to corroborate the claim.

Why?

Without a thorough investigation, we have only conjecture.

But mobile labs did serve a convenient purpose for U.S. policy-makers,
who were scrambling to explain why U.N. inspectors weren't finding
anything in Iraq.

"We know that Iraq has at least seven of these mobile, biological
agent factories," Secretary of State Colin Powell told the United
Nations in February.

"The truck-mounted ones have at least two or three trucks each. That
means that the mobile production facilities are very few, perhaps 18
trucks that we know of. There may be more. . . . Just imagine trying
to find 18 trucks among the thousands and thousands of trucks that
travel the roads of Iraq every single day."

Now skip ahead a few months to the discovery of the two trailers.

Here another glaring weakness in U.S. intelligence comes into play.

We did not investigate to see what the trailers were; we investigated
to prove that they were weapons labs.

In other words, the conclusion was preordained.

Kay, who was a strong supporter of the war, offers a compelling
example of that blindness at work.

Last May, before his appointment to head the U.S. weapons search, he
was working as an expert analyst for NBC News and was given the chance
to inspect one of the trailers firsthand.

He immediately proclaimed them proof that Saddam Hussein had been
producing biological weapons.

"Literally, there's nothing else you would do this way on a mobile
facility," Kay told the world.

He also rejected the suggestion that the trailers might have been
simple hydrogen facilities, claiming that it "didn't pass the laugh
test."

Inevitably, a lack of trust and coordination among U.S. agencies also
plays a role, as it has throughout this episode.

In late May, the CIA released a "white paper" admitting that it had no
evidence that the trailers were used to create germ weapons.

"We nevertheless are confident that this trailer is a mobile BW
[bioweapons] production plant," the agency said.

The CIA reached that conclusion without consulting the State
Department's intelligence bureau, and a few days later, State
concluded that the CIA report had little basis in fact.

That leads to one more question:

Why did CIA professionals release a white paper on the trailers
prematurely, a paper that even to laymen seemed to ignore conflicting
evidence and distort the available data?

Well, they were responding to a request from the White House, which at
the time needed help in fending off doubts about our failure to find
WMD.

That gives us the final piece of the puzzle:

Intelligence was corrupted for political purposes, not just in the
Case of the Two Trailers, but in almost every aspect of our
intelligence effort.

only cowards hide behind fake email names!

Or people who don's like spam!
"Florida Keyz" wrote in message
...
only cowards hide behind fake email names!

On Thu, 29 Jan 2004 14:46:10 -0500 (EST), "Harry Krause"
wrote:

From The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 1/29/04:
http://www.ajc.com/opinion/content/o...man/index.html

No mystery to untangling WMD puzzler

Just for you Harry, from yesterday's Washington Post.

Mr. Kay's Truth-Telling

Thursday, January 29, 2004; Page A28


GIVE DAVID KAY credit for courage. The recently departed chief of the
Iraq Survey Group was one of those who confidently predicted that
stockpiles of biological and chemical weapons would be found in Iraq
after the U.S.-led invasion. Yesterday he straightforwardly told a
Senate committee hearing that "we were almost all wrong." There were,
he said, almost certainly no large stocks of illegal weapons in Iraq
and no evidence that any had been produced in recent years. Mr. Kay
has chosen to go public with this disturbing news not because he
wishes to embarrass the Bush administration or cast doubt on the
mission in Iraq but because he believes it vital that the faults in
intelligence gathering that led to the mistaken weapons estimates be
identified and corrected. There is indeed a critical need for such a
review: U.S. security in an age of proliferation and terrorism depends
on it. What a shame that, rather than accept Mr. Kay's conclusions,
both the president and his Democratic opponents prefer to play them
for political advantage.



President Bush and most of his aides have quietly backed away from
their once-unambiguous assertions that Iraq possessed weapons of mass
destruction. Mr. Bush now speaks of
"weapons-of-mass-destruction-related program activities" or, as he did
Tuesday, doggedly insists that Saddam Hussein was a "danger." Mr.
Kay's team has documented those activities, and the former inspector
agrees with the president's characterization of Saddam Hussein -- as
do we. The problem is that Mr. Bush has not taken the next step, which
is to admit that the intelligence that he was provided by U.S.
agencies and that he and his administration then relayed to the
country -- sometimes in exaggerated terms -- was substantially
mistaken. To do so might be politically perilous in an election year;
it's far easier to argue, as the administration has, that we must wait
many more months before drawing any conclusions. But the truth cannot
be put off forever, and it should not have to wait until after
November. The longer Mr. Bush delays, the longer it will be before
intelligence agencies can be held accountable and reforms undertaken.

Democratic members of Congress and presidential candidates are not
making a responsible reckoning any easier. Instead they have attempted
to twist Mr. Kay's conclusions to serve their arguments that Mr. Bush
fabricated a case for war against a country that posed no serious
threat. Mr. Kay punctured those theories yesterday. He bluntly told
Democratic senators that he had found no evidence that intelligence
analysts had come under administration pressure to alter their
findings; pointed out that the Clinton administration and several
European governments had drawn the same conclusions about Iraq's
weapons; and stated that his investigation showed that Saddam
Hussein's regime was in some ways more dangerous than was believed
before the war -- because its corruption and disintegration had made
it more likely that weapons or weapons technology would be sold to
"others [who] are seeking WMD." That didn't stop Howard Dean from
charging on the campaign trail that "the administration did cook the
books" -- an allegation that, so far as Mr. Kay's testimony is
concerned, is false.

The partisanship and demagoguery that have overtaken the discussion of
Iraq's missing weapons mean that investigations of the intelligence
failure by the Bush administration or Congress are unlikely to be
thorough or credible. The only proper approach to the problem,
suggested yesterday by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and quickly seconded
by Mr. Kay, is an independent inquiry. The president and Congress
should agree on the appointment of an expert, nonpartisan commission
with full secrecy clearance and subpoena power to examine why the
intelligence on Iraq proved wrong and to report on how such failures
can be prevented in the future. "It's not a political issue," Mr. Kay
told National Public Radio. "It's an issue of the capabilities of
one's intelligence service to collect valid, truthful information."
************************************************** *****

In case you missed it, I'll repeat it:

"Democratic members of Congress and presidential candidates are not
making a responsible reckoning any easier. Instead they have attempted
to twist Mr. Kay's conclusions to serve their arguments that Mr. Bush
fabricated a case for war against a country that posed no serious
threat. Mr. Kay punctured those theories yesterday. "

I don't know if the Post meets your respectability criteria.

John H

On the 'Poco Loco' out of Deale, MD
on the beautiful Chesapeake Bay!