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Sunday, Nov 22, 2009
Still, Smith hammered the matter home, declaring that "nobody believes a word now that the prime minister is saying."
As for the specific intelligence charge, Blair stood firm, characterizing the BBC report as "completely and utterly untrue." While the leader of the Commons, John Reid, blamed the BBC leak on "rogue elements" within the intelligence agencies, Blair said that he had "spoken and conferred with the chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee," and was confident that "there was no attempt at any time by any official or minister or member of [my] staff to override the intelligence judgments of the Joint Intelligence Committee, and their judgments -- including the judgment about the so-called 45 minutes -- was a judgment made by the intelligence committee and by them alone." He also disputed that it came from one source.
But on Thursday, the Financial Times reported that the information came from one "senior Iraqi officer on active service within the country's military." Additionally, on Thursday, Lord Healey, former chancellor and deputy leader of the Labor Party, called on Blair to resign if WMD are not found.
To watch President Bush, you would hardly know his chief global ally was teetering on the brink. Sleeves rolled up casually, a beaming Bush thanked 2,500 cheering American, British and Australian troops at the Army base at As-Sayliyah, Qatar, Thursday for ensuring that "no terrorist network will gain weapons of mass destruction from the Iraqi regime." As if there were no worldwide clamor demanding to know where, exactly, these WMD are, Bush expressed confidence that the WMD would turn up soon enough. "He's got a big country in which to hide 'em," Bush said. "Well, we'll look. We'll reveal the truth."
It was notable, however, when Bush added that U.S. forces had already located "two mobile biological weapons facilities which are capable of producing biological agents."
This was an accurate detail -- but it was one that diverged wildly from his description the week before of those labs as "the weapons of mass destruction" themselves. The labs "probably" were designed to produce biological weapons, according to the Central Intelligence Agency, though no evidence yet exists that they were.
But that didn't stop the president from telling Polish TV last Thursday that "We found the weapons of mass destruction ... For those who say we haven't found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons, we found them."
The fact that the president backed off this claim so significantly is no small matter -- and it fits in with the pattern of behavior that has emerged in the last few days as the administration and its allies begin to deal with these accusations. On Wednesday morning, two senior Pentagon officials took the step of holding a press conference for the express purpose of denying that their organization had told intelligence officials to lie; in message the press conference recalled nothing so much as President Nixon's assertion that he was not a crook.
Stories that Pentagon officials were told to drum up evidence to support WMD claims, as well as provide proof of a link between Iraq and al-Qaida, "are beginning to achieve the status of urban legends," said Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Doug Feith, who was joined by Bill Luti, deputy undersecretary for special plans and Near East and South Asian affairs. Feith and Luti were responding to various media reports about a number of matters. Feith, who rarely speaks to the press, confirmed reports that he had fashioned a small intelligence team -- one that critics said was a far more bellicose alternative to assessments coming in from the CIA and DIA -- but disputed that it was there to accomplish anything other than "review this intelligence to help digest it for me and other policymakers."
At the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo on Tuesday, Wolfowitz, too, felt compelled to respond to some of these charges. It has only been 11 weeks since U.S. troops first crossed the Kuwaiti border, he said, and "11 weeks is a very short time." There are still Iraqi soldiers killing Americans, "it is not yet a secure situation and I believe that probably influences to some extent the willingness of Iraqis to speak freely to us."
Many in the GOP seemed to see the calls for an investigation as purely sour grapes by Bush-hating pacifistic Democrats. "They just can't accept the fact that the president, through his moral leadership, is right in the war on terror, and he was right going into Iraq," House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas, told reporters at a press briefing. "They pick at every little thing they can to try to undermine this president and where he is taking us on this war on terror ... They do it for their own political gain."
DeLay is not without his point. A careful reading of many of the stories gaining traction out there makes it clear that in some cases the Bush administration is facing dubious -- even ludicrous -- charges. The left-wing Guardian charged on Wednesday that Wolfowitz had declared oil to be "the main reason for military action against Iraq" thus, the paper said, "confirming the worst fears of those opposed to the U.S.-led war." But the transcript indicates that this story was based on a misquote. Wolfowitz had been asked why he felt economic sanctions would work against North Korea but not Iraq, and he answered that Iraq quite simply was too independently wealthy for sanctions to achieve their results. "Let's look at it simply," he said. "The most important difference between North Korea and Iraq is that economically, we just had no choice in Iraq. The country swims on a sea of oil." North Korea, on the other hand, "is teetering on the edge of economic collapse," providing "a major point of leverage." The Guardian took the brash "sea of oil" quote out of context and made it seem as though that was the reason Wolfowitz supported going to war in Iraq as opposed to North Korea.
