....LMB: "Buckets of Whitewash"....

February 04, 2004

Last year, back in the fall I think it was, there was talk of a new sheriff in town. David Kay was taking over as head US weapons inspector in Iraq, and the White House told us confidently that he would come back with results. This worried me, as it made it sound like he would find tiny scraps and spin it into evidence of an arsenal of terror, or that maybe he'd go ahead and plant evidence and come back with "proof" that the US invasion was justified and holy.

Imagine my surprise when Kay came back and announced that he'd found nothing, and that he didn't think that Iraq had any stockpiles of WMD (or WOS) since 1998, when weapons inspectors had destroyed much of Iraq's weapons supplies.

That surprise faded quickly after I heard Kay began attacking US intelligence.

Then it fell into place. Kay couldn't find anything, yet was still able to help out Bush and his pals by diverting the blame. Before anyone could point the finger at the White House for lying their way into war, Kay talked about a massive failure of America's network of spies and analysts. Therefore Bush & co. weren't liars and con men, they were responsible public defenders who'd done the best they could with faulty data. The problem wasn't dishonest leaders, it was incompetent spooks.

I'm sure the Bush administration would've like to have just let Kay's "no weapons here" testimony fade from memory along with his helpful diversionary tactic, but this issue was too hot. Politicians and media stupidly bought into Kay's line and called for an investigation into the intelligence agencies. And Bush agreed.

While Bush is announcing the this investigative team will be "independent" and "bipartisan", he conveniently gets to choose all of its members. And he's already managed to start blurring lines by announcing that it's not just about finding out what happened to Iraq intelligence, but about American intelligence about the global proliferation of WMD/WOS.

All of this can potentially be useful, of course. US intelligence did fuck up some, thinking that Iraq had some amount of chemical and biological weapons. They seem to have been wrong. And finding out how intelligence messed up, and coming up with ways for it to work better to protect us is not a bad idea.

But at the bottom of it all, I think people want this to be an investigation into "why the hell did we invade Iraq if it had none of these weapons?", and that's not the sort of investigation we're likely to get. Instead we'll get some half-assed thing about lack of communication between government branches and over-reliance on technology, tricksy Iraqi defectors, out-dated thinking, and ideological bias.

When we all know that Bush and his pals distorted, twisted, and manufactured the truth about Iraq as much as they deemed necessary to convince the American people and world (less success for the world) to support an overthrow of Saddam Hussein's regime. This has been pretty well documented, although not very well publicized.

Long story short, intelligence didn't think Iraq was much of a threat, and said so, until the White House leaned on them and leaned hard. And when that pressure wasn't enough for the warhawks, they opened up their own little intelligence office (the Office of Special Programs) dedicated to finding evidence of an Iraqi threat, no matter how fishy or trivial. So in the end, Bush & co. didn't have to lie so much as to take all the ambiguous claims and questionable data that could be interpretted as evidence that Iraq was a threat, and presented it to the public as though it was a life-sized photograph of Saddam Hussein manually aiming a nuclear missile at Denver.

Some good articles on all this, past and present follow. If you want the quick version, I'd say go read this list of Key Findings from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace's report on the situation. Very simple, very unambiguous.

WMD-gate: Bush Wants to Scapegoat CIA
Losing the Plot
The Stovepipe
If You Can't Beat 'Em, Join 'Em
WMD in Iraq: Evidence and Implications