Burdened by Proof

[RainDog]

this piece is from June, but worth re-reading...or reading for the first time.

I think you have to get to the article via the goggle cache..maybe this link will work-

www.boston.com/globe/sunday/print_archives/ 062903_index.shtml

Burdened by proof

In claiming detailed knowledge of Iraq's illegal weapons, US officials may have jeopardized the credibility of American intelligence and policy-making for years to come.

By Thomas Powers, 6/15/2003

IN THE COMING MONTHS, the Pentagon's newly organized Iraq Survey Group will scour the country top to bottom in search of evidence of weapons of mass destruction...() But in the eight weeks since the shooting stopped, American military and intelligence officials in Iraq have failed to confirm () Saddam's deadly germs, his chemical weapons, and his secret program to build nuclear weapons seem to have vanished with the dictator himself-with the possible, hotly disputed exception of the two tractor-trailer beds, discovered by America's Kurdish allies in northern Iraq, which may have been outfitted for the production of biological weapons. ...a factory for making poisons and explosives near the northern town of Khurmal; four chemical munitions bunkers at Taji; ''rocket launchers and warheads containing biological warfare agents... hidden in large groves of palm trees''; a suspicious caravan of trucks photographed last Nov. 25 at the Amiriyah Serum and Vaccine Institute, a center for testing biological and chemical weapons; ''1,600 death-row prisoners transferred in 1995 to a special unit'' where an Iraqi source saw ''blood oozing from the victims' mouths.'' In his State of the Union address, President Bush cited even bigger things: 30,000 Iraqi warheads, 500 tons of chemical weapons, 25,000 liters of anthrax, 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin. None of this has been found.

The missing weapons are no minor embarrassment. Some administration officials have recently suggested that there were many reasons for going to war against Saddam Hussein, and that WMD were put at the top of the list for ''bureaucratic'' reasons-because that was the only reason the UN in the near term was likely to accept.


The difficulty with this argument is the fact that international law accepts only a very narrow range of justifications for war, and chief among them is the threat posed by weapons and armies. An admission that the United States went to war for reasons having nothing to do with Saddam Hussein's weapons, or the threat he might use them, would be close to a confession that the invasion of Iraq was illegal under international law-something bound to cause President Bush personally, and the United States generally, real trouble for years to come.

The failure to find Saddam's weapons, or the large laboratories and factories necessary to develop and make them, therefore raises two awkward questions: How could America's $30 billion-a-year intelligence industry get things so wrong? And why did the White House persuade itself to go to war on the basis of evidence so flimsy?

...But the second question-why the United States went to war on evidence so flimsy-is the one that will cause the most trouble. It is essentially political in nature, and the absence of a reassuring answer will threaten the trust traditionally granted to presidents by the American people and Congress alike. The White House defended its policy of preemptive war in the National Security Strategy released last September, but it was Secretary Powell who made the factual case that Iraq was a rogue state that must be stopped before it gave WMD to Al Qaeda terrorists. ''I went out to the CIA and I spent four days and four nights going over everything they had,'' Powell told the New York Times at the end of May. ''I knew that the credibility of the United States was going to be on the line.''