CNN.com - New Canberra probe into WMD intel

The Australian government has ordered an independent inquiry into the intelligence advice provided on the threat posed by Iraq to world security.

...Monday's report largely absolves the government from any blame in the situation saying there was "no evidence that political pressure was applied to the (intelligence) agencies" and that is presentation of evidence had been "consistent, moderate and measured".

The report's findings matched those of the Hutton inquiry in Britain, which cleared Prime Minister Tony Blair's government of "sexing up" intelligence to justify the war.

"The government stands by its presentation of the case for disarming Iraq of its WMD capabilities," Foreign Minister Alexander Downer said in a statement Monday.

Evidence collected since the conflict began showed Saddam "was pursuing WMD programs and that his regime was concealing these activities from U.N. inspectors," Downer said.

Or, as Hans Blix once put it, "Iraq appears not to have come to a genuine acceptance – not even today – of the disarmament, which was demanded of it and which it needs to carry out to win the confidence of the world and to live in peace. As we know, the twin operation ‘declare and verify’, which was prescribed in resolution 687, too often turned into a game of ‘hide and seek’." - Jan 27, 2003.

FOXNews.com - Kay: Bush May Have Selected Iraq WMD Facts

Former U.S. weapons inspector David Kay said Wednesday that President Bush may have been selective about the facts he used to make the case for going to war with Iraq.

That's not necessarily to say, though, that intelligence about Iraqi weapons was misused by the Bush White House, Kay told an audience at Trinity University.

"Politicians don't go around picking their weakest arguments," Kay said. "The real charge that deserves careful scrutiny is not whether you picked the best argument out, but whether you actually manipulated and were dishonest about the data."

He added that he's seen no evidence that the Bush administration mischaracterized intelligence from Iraq, "but it is such a serious charge that it deserves investigation."

The Nation: The Propaganda of William Safire

Safire did not mention that when CIA chief George Tenet testified before the Senate intelligence committee in February 2003, Tenet said that while the CIA believed Ansar al-Islam had received funding from Al Qaeda, Zarqawi considered himself and his network "quite independent" of Al Qaeda. Receiving money from Al Qaeda might qualify Ansar al-Islam as an "affiliate," but according to Tenet's testimony Zarqawi was no "Al Qaeda leader."

...he pointed to a remark that Secretary of State Colin Powell made during his February 5, 2003, presentation to the U.N. Security Council: "Iraq today harbors a deadly terrorist network headed by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, an associate and collaborator of Osama bin Laden." But Powell and the Bush administration has not been able to show that Hussein was firmly linked to Ansar al-Islam. After all, the group operated in the northern territory, where Baghdad had limited control. Moreover, in January, when Powell was asked whether there was evidence linking Hussein and Al Qaeda, he replied, "There is not--you know, I have not seen smoking-gun concrete evidence about the connection, but I think the possibility of such connections did exist and it was prudent to consider them at the time that we did."

AP - Hans Blix Says Iraq War Was Unfounded

"The justification for the war - the existence of weapons of mass destruction - was without foundation," Blix said. "The military operation was successful, but the diagnosis was wrong.

Blix, whose teams did not make significant weapons finds during months of searching Iraq before the war, has repeatedly criticized U.S. and British handling of information before the war.

Again on Tuesday he criticized the United States and Britain for trusting their own intelligence more than that of the weapons inspectors, who had not found "a smoking gun."

Blix, 75, who headed the U.N. inspectors from 2000 to mid-2003 said in a speech Feb. 15 that no hidden weapons had been found in Iraq since 1991, but he did not rule out that a minor cache of weapons might be exposed.

Ok, but was Hussein in violation of the UN resolutions and the agreement that ended the war in 1991? Mr. Blix cannot deny his own testimony to that effect. There may be no large stockpiles in Iraq, but there certainly were ongoing weapons programs, in violoation of the war-ending resolutions. There were also ties to Al Qaida and international terrorism, also in violation of those resolutions. The security council may wish to remain toothless, but the US cannot afford to wait for the rest of the world to wake up.

Reuters - Democrat Says CIA Didn't Give UN All Iraq WMD Data, by Tabassum Zakaria

A Democratic senator accused CIA Director George Tenet on Monday of making false statements when he said during public hearings that his agency gave the United Nations information about all the top suspected weapons of mass destruction sites in Iraq before the war. "All such sites were not shared, and Mr. Tenet's repeated statements were false," Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan said in a speech on the Senate floor.

Reuters - Rumsfeld says al-Qaeda 'clearly involved' in Iraq

"They clearly are involved and active," he responded when pressed on whether al-Qaeda were involved in Iraq. Pentagon officials said on Friday they had no proof any of the several hundred foreigners held in Iraq were al-Qaeda members.

FOXNews.com - Zarqawi Bomb-Maker Killed in Iraq

The bomb-making lieutenant, whose name wasn’t released, died in a gun battle at a terrorist safe house late last week, military sources told Fox. The military officer's death is significant because Al-Zarqawi is the man believed to have masterminded a number of recent attacks against the coalition in Iraq. Inside the terrorist safe house, sources said the military found a passport belonging to Zarqawi, fake identification and other information.

Meanwhile, defense officials say that a copy of a letter believed to have been penned by Zarqawi has turned up in Saudi Arabia. The copy was discovered with Saudi financiers whom Defense officials believe were being solicited to fund terrorist operations inside Iraq, sources told Fox. The U.S. military recently intercepted the original from Al Qaeda member Hassan Ghul. The letter is significant because of its message to the terrorist network's command structure in the mountains along the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan calling for help in Iraq. Defense officials told Fox they are convinced that there is a communications link — a sharing of tactics — among Al Qaeda-tied groups in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In another find that could prove the Afghanistan-Iraq connection, three Afghans were arrested over the weekend as they entered Iraq from Turkey carrying tens of thousands in U.S. dollars and large quantities of Iranian currency, military sources told Fox. American soldiers have recovered millions of U.S. dollars in recent weeks inside Iraq — crisp, new bills that officials believe came directly from an unidentified bank.

Australia's Daily Telegraph - Secure in conviction war's aims were true

Mr Varghese said if it turned out that there were no stockpiles of WMD in Iraq, and in his view, that's still an "if", it's genuinely puzzling as to what happened.

A theory posited by former Clinton adviser and CIA analyst Kenneth Pollack in The Atlantic Monthly magazine is that Saddam Hussein may have scaled back his program sometime after 1994-1995 when defectors and discoveries had revealed the extent of Iraq's continued efforts to obtain WMD.

At that point, Mr Pollack argued, Saddam may have cut back his programs and even destroyed some weapons, retaining only a very limited research and development capacity while ensuring scientists were ready to resume work if sanctions were ever lifted.

Asked why Saddam didn't claim credit for destroying the weapons, he said it may have suited Saddam's purposes for his internal opponents, the Kurds and the Shias, to think he still had them, and externally it supported his image among Arab nations to be seen to thumb his nose at the US.

...As to whether he had any evidence that analysts had been pressured to present findings on Iraq in keeping with Government expectations, he said he had raised the issue with staff and had not received any sense that they felt under pressure to provide a particular line.

MoveOn.org petitions senators to censure Bush for WMD claims - billingsgazette.com

'nuff said

Common Dreams - 'NY Times' Fails to Acknowledge Its Role in WMD Hype

The Paper of Record Blames Intelligence and Administration, but any Indictment of the National Press is Missing, by William E. Jackson Jr.

baltimoresun.com - The paper chase, by Seth Ackerman

Ackerman's article on Hussein Kamel (below) is reloaded, this time for the Baltimore Sun, in a slightly different format.

Seth Ackerman, a freelance journalist, has extensively researched the history of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. He is a contributor to Harper's and was a staff member of FAIR, the media watchdog group.

MotherJones - A Legacy of Lies, by Seth Ackerman

there is compelling evidence to suggest that the Clinton administration's false alarms on Iraqi weapons, like Bush's, were much more than just honest mistakes. One astonishing series of events in particular illustrates the ways in which the Clinton White House cleared the path for Bush's war.

...In February 2003, as the worldwide debate over war was just reaching a crescendo, Newsweek reporter John Barry obtained a classified copy of the original U.N. transcript of Hussein Kamel's 1995 debriefing by Rolf Ekeus and his UNSCOM colleagues. Barry, a veteran of the Iraqi WMD beat, wrote up his scoop in a little item, a mere six paragraphs long, that appeared in the magazine's "Periscope" section. Although it received virtually no notice at the time, what Barry wrote seemed to turn the whole Iraq story on its head:

"Hussein Kamel, the highest-ranking Iraqi official ever to defect from Saddam Hussein's inner circle, told CIA and British intelligence officers and U.N. inspectors in the summer of 1995 that [in 1991] after the Gulf War, Iraq destroyed all its chemical and biological weapons stocks and the missiles to deliver them.

The stocks had been destroyed to hide the programs from the U.N. inspectors, but Iraq had retained the design and engineering details of these weapons. Kamel talked of hidden blueprints, computer disks, microfiches and even missile-warhead molds.

Still, the defector's tale raises questions about whether the WMD stockpiles attributed to Iraq still exist."

...Iraq had eliminated all its weapons of mass destruction by the summer of 1991, and the U.S. had been told of it in 1995.

FOXNews.com - Rumsfeld: U.S. Won't Back Down in Iraq

Rumsfeld said he believes a recently intercepted letter, purportedly from a terrorist organizer connected to the Al Qaeda terror network, is authentic. The letter writer, believed to have been Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, wrote of efforts to cause a civil war between the two major Muslim sects, the long-dominant Sunnis and the majority Shiites.

NRO - Stalinist Mullahs, by Michael Ledeen

Oddly, just as the foreign minister was announcing Iran's intention to sell enriched uranium to interested parties — thereby spitting in the eye of the French, German, and English diplomats who sang love songs to themselves just a few short months ago, proclaiming they had negotiated an end to the Iranian nuclear program — two smugglers were arrested in Iraq, near Mosul, with what an Iraqi general described as a barrel of uranium. Here is what General Hikmat Mahmoud Mohammed had to say about the event: "This material is in the category of weapons of mass destruction, which is why the investigation is secret. The two suspects were transferred to American forces, who are in charge of the inquiry."

Compulsive readers of these little essays may remember that, late last summer, I told CIA that I had been informed of a supply of enriched uranium in Iraq, some of which had been carried to Iran a few years ago. I had offered to put CIA in touch with the original couriers, who said they would take American inspectors to the site, but CIA could not be bothered to go look.

I am told that the uranium in the barrel near Mosul came from the same secret laboratory. Perhaps now the CIA will think better of my sources, and work harder to find these materials.

Faster, please.

The American Conservative - No End to War, By Patrick J. Buchanan

The Frum-Perle prescription would ensnare America in endless conflict

Iraq had no hand in 9/11, no ties to al-Qaeda, no weapons of mass destruction, no nuclear program, and no plans to attack us.

FOXNews.com - U.S. Troops Nab Al Qaeda Suspects in Iraq

The United States arrested seven guerrillas believed linked to Al Qaeda in an early morning raid to the north.

U.S. troops arrested seven militants believed linked to Al Qaeda in the turbulent city of Baqouba, north of the capital, the military said. It gave no details on the nationalities of the militants.

Troops from the 4th Infantry Division carried out the raid early Wednesday targeting an "anti-coalition cell" that may have ties to Usama bin Laden's terror group, a statement from the U.S. command said.

Homicide attacks have killed 300 people, mostly Iraqis, since the beginning of the year. They have fueled speculation that Islamic extremists, possibly linked to Al Qaeda, were playing a greater role in the anti-coalition insurgency. U.S. military officials had believed the attacks were spearheaded by Saddam Hussein loyalists.

VOANews.com - US Soldiers Capture Militants with Possible al-Qaeda Links North of Baghdad

The US military said Wednesday soldiers have arrested seven militants with suspected ties to al-Qaida.

A U.S. military spokesman in Baghdad said the seven militants were captured in the town of Baquba, 60 kilometers north of the capital. They were arrested by the U.S. Fourth Infantry Division along with 15 others in a raid on what they describe as an anti-coalition cell.

Baquba is in the heart of the so-called Sunni Triangle, where attacks against U.S. soldiers have become an almost daily occurrence. Iraqi police said the group was suspected of involvement in a number of recent attacks in the area. They did not say what the nationalities of the suspects were, but the coalition has repeatedly blamed attacks on foreign elements with links to terrorist groups.

TheStar.com - `Heads should roll' over Iraq

Adviser wants U.S. intelligence chiefs to quit
Cites faulty conclusions on Saddam's weapons

Richard Perle, a chief proponent of last year's U.S. invasion of Iraq, yesterday called for the chiefs of the Central Intelligence Agency and the U.S. Defence Intelligence Agency to step down because of their faulty conclusions that Saddam Hussein possessed mass-killing weapons.

Perle, a close adviser to U.S. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, said top officials made no attempt to skew the intelligence about Saddam Hussein's alleged weapons of mass destruction. Instead, he implied, top policymakers relied in good faith on the conclusions of the intelligence agencies.

"George Tenet has been at the CIA long enough to assume responsibility for its performance," Perle told reporters, referring to the director of the agency. "There's a record of failure and it should be addressed in some serious way."

While Kay dismissed the prospect that stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction would ever be found in Iraq, Perle disputed him on two relatively minor claims: that Iraq wasn't seeking to enrich uranium or develop mobile weapons laboratories to manufacture chemical or biological weapons.

"The jury is still out" on those points, Perle said.

Paul Greenberg: An imminent threat - to his own credibility

The Big Lie in this rapidly over-heating presidential campaign is that George W. Bush claimed Saddam Hussein was an imminent threat.

Actually, what George W. Bush said in his State of the Union address last year was just the opposite - that this country dare not wait until a threat is imminent before responding to it, not after what happened September 11, 2001.

Or to put it another way: "Why is Saddam Hussein attempting to develop nuclear weapons when most nations don't even try? According to intelligence, Iraq has chemical and biological weapons . . . ."

That was John F. Kerry on Oct. 9, 2002, speaking from his vantage point on the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Is Senator Kerry now going to accuse himself of hyping the intelligence reports, misleading the American people and generally taking this country into war under false pretenses?

Pop quiz: Who said, "I believe that a deadly arsenal of weapons of mass destruction in his hands is a real and grave threat to our security."? Surprise, it was John F. Kerry.

CNN.com - Iraq report 'will clear Canberra'

If you actually saw this article, you're a gumshoe. CNN buried it.

An Australian parliamentary inquiry has concluded the government did not doctor intelligence on Iraqi weapons in the run-up to the war, a newspaper report says.

Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer said Tuesday there was "no evidence" Canberra had "sexed-up" the threat of Iraq's WMDs.

"I don't think any of these inquiries in America, Britain or here are going to reveal anything terribly exciting or surprising. There's been no evidence to suggest that the British, the American and the Australian governments were lying," Reuters reports him as saying.

Downer on Monday evening defended the Australian government's decision to join the war saying there was "no doubt" that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein had WMD programs.

"What we clearly weren't wrong about was that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction programs and that's been reinforced by what [chief U.S. weapons inspector] David Kay has said and what the Iraq Survey Group has shown," Downer told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's Lateline program.