Last of the believers -- claiming an honest mistake will no longer wash

[radfringe]

Last of the believers
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1132811,00.html
Only Blair now insists there were Iraqi WMDs. But even claiming an honest mistake will no longer wash
Jonathan Freedland -- Wednesday January 28, 2004 -- The Guardian

It's getting embarrassing. Anybody who's anybody now admits that there are no, and were no, weapons of mass destruction worth the name in Iraq. The roll-call of converts to what used to be the exclusive position of the anti-war camp gets more impressive by the day.

David Kay, President Bush's handpicked arms inspector and the former chief weapons monitor of the CIA - hardly a limp-wristed European peacenik - quit his post at the head of the Iraq Survey Group last week, concluding that there are no Iraqi WMD to be found: "I don't think they existed," he said bluntly. Forty eight hours later, Colin Powell, the US secretary of state who a year ago was holding the UN security council rapt with his slide show on Saddam's weapons' concealment, complete with scary satellite shots of secret arms factories, admitted that such weapons may never be found. Even the president himself seems to have got the message. In his state of the union address last week, Bush knew better than to bang the tired drum of 2003. In a phrase so qualified as to be comic, he spoke only of "weapons of mass destruction-related programme activities".

---snip---

But there is a large flaw in the blame-the-spooks argument. For no one believes that the security services were quietly making their own inquiries into the situation in Iraq and then simply presented their best guess as to what was really going on. On the contrary, we now know that on both sides of the Atlantic the intelligence agencies were under two kinds of pressure. First, they were urged to find information that would cast the worst possible light on Baghdad and its intentions. Witness the joint intelligence committee's "last call" to all agencies to come up with some thing juicy to enliven the September 2002 dossier. Witness too the office of special plans set up in Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon. Former official Karen Kwiatowski told Channel 4 that that body was specifically tasked with "cherry-picking" from the raw intelligence data to find items that might harden the case for a pre-emptive war.

Second, the intelligence services were pressured to present their findings - themselves the result of pressure - in the strongest form possible. That much we know from Alastair Campbell's now-infamous memo to JIC chairman John Scarlett, "suggesting" no fewer than nine changes to the wording of the dossier, each one proposing a toughening of language.

[Nay]

1. And why can't we have such a reasoned dissection of the rush to war

in one of our own newspapers? Or on any TV news? Just get permission to read this article aloud over the air, for Chrissakes.

Where are the journalists in this country? Under a rock?

[T_i_B]

2. Another great article from Freedland!

:-)

[Tandalayo_Scheisskopf]

3. In the US...

A lot of media people are spending a lot of their valuable time ignoring the statements of Karen Kwiatowski.

At their own peril, I might add.

[Martin Eden]

4. The difference between the U.S. and the U.K. ...

... is that the total absence of WMD in Iraq puts Blair's ass on the line much more than Shrub's.

Shrubby and his handlers figure they can get through this without serious repercussions, and unfortunately they're probably right.