WMDs

[lederhosen]

Interesting stories here and here:


The Defence Minister, Robert Hill, has conceded that flawed intelligence about Saddam Hussein's weapons capability may have influenced Australia's decision to join the war against Iraq and has backed a thorough and open review of the information.

But in an interview with the Herald, Senator Hill said it was too early to say that false conclusions were drawn about Iraq's chemical and biological weapons capability and he believed Australia was justified in joining the invasion.

The British Government - under intense public pressure to justify its reasons for going to war - yesterday denied a report that the Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, and his United States counterpart, Colin Powell, had privately expressed serious doubts about the quality of intelligence on Iraq's banned weapons program.

...

An unnamed intelligence official told the BBC that the main claim in last September's dossier - that Iraq could launch a chemical or biological attack within 45 minutes of an order - had been inserted on the instructions of officials in Downing Street...

Also here, and a shorter article here:

A growing number of US national security professionals are accusing the Bush Administration of slanting the facts and hijacking the intelligence apparatus to justify its rush to war in Iraq.

A key target is a four-person Pentagon team that reviewed material gathered by other intelligence outfits for any missed bits that might have tied Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein to banned weapons or terror groups.

This team, self-mockingly called the cabal, "cherry-picked the intelligence stream" in a bid to portray Iraq as an imminent threat, said Patrick Lang, a former head of worldwide human intelligence gathering for the Defence Intelligence Agency, which coordinates military intelligence.

The DIA was "exploited and abused and bypassed in the process of making the case for war based on the presence of weapons of mass destruction", he said, claiming the CIA had "no guts at all" to resist the alleged skewing of intelligence by the Pentagon.

Former chief of CIA counter-terrorist operations Vince Cannistraro said he knew of serving intelligence officers who blame the Pentagon for playing up "fraudulent" intelligence, "a lot of it sourced from the Iraqi National Congress of Ahmad Chalabi".

The INC, which brought together groups opposed to Saddam, worked closely with the Pentagon to build a case against Iraq. "There are current intelligence officials who believe it is a scandal," Mr Cannistraro said.

Meanwhile, despite numerous false alarms, trumpeted on the front page and then retracted in the fine print - if at all - we have, so far, found exactly zero Weapons of Mass Destruction. We have discovered what any first-year organic chemist already knew, that pesticides are close enough in structure to nerve gases that testing weapons found near a pesticides factory can give you false positives.

Lots of "dual-use technologies". Any country with a pesticide factory and the ability to mass-produce yoghurt has "dual-use" chemical and biological facilities. Look out, Ben and Jerry...

We've found a couple of trailers that might have been mobile labs, although last I heard no traces of any specific agents had been found. Now I'll admit, I don't know enough biology to think of any legitimate reason for having a biological lab installed on a trailer, but one thing smells fishy: if you look at the photos of these 'mobile labs' (sorry, I don't have a link handy), they look just like the cutaway diagrams we saw before the war began. Just look at them through a pair of binoculars, or a spy plane's camera, and you can see all the tanks and pipes and doohickeys we've been told a mobile lab would have. And that's the problem...

Given that Saddam *knew* Iraq was under close scrutiny, and presumably the best surveillance the USA was able to produce, why on EARTH wouldn't they cover these things up? Just put a metal shell over it, and it would look just like every other boxy trailer out there. Since the whole *point* of these supposed 'mobile labs' is to provide a concealable WMD capability, why would they not take such a simple and useful precaution?

Meanwhile, to show just how serious we are about the threat of radioactive material falling into the wrong hands... two months after US forces captured the Iraqi Nuclear Energy Agency, looters are still at work, although the US task force is at least starting to try to recover some of the radioactives taken from the compound. So unless it took al-Qaeda less than two months to get the idea of walking in and helping themselves to as much nuclear waste as they could carry, we should be safe on that front.

BTW, if it's democracy you're concerned about, Aung San Suu Kyi has been arrested again, along with what looks like most of the leadership of Burma's opposition, and Zimbabwe's High Court has banned the opposition there from protesting against Mugabe's regime.

Maybe we'll get around to bringing democracy to those countries too.

Right after we find the WMDs, I guess.


In other news, a white Anglo-Saxon churchgoing ex-computer tech tried to hijack a Qantas plane last weekend, apparently while babbling about God and the Apocalypse. It's not just the Muslims/Arabs we have to worry about, it would seem.

Hands up who feels safer now than they did in January?