[casi] Lying game continues: Bush: 'We Found' Banned Weapons

["AS-ILAS" <AS-ILAS@DELETETHISgmx.de>]

Dear all,

The lying game continues.

Best

Andreas
--------------


1) Bush: 'We Found' Banned Weapons
2) But aren't those mobile trailers evidence of an Iraqi bioweapons
program? - No !

---------------------
1)

Bush: 'We Found' Banned Weapons

President Cites Trailers in Iraq as Proof

By Mike Allen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, May 31, 2003; Page A01

KRAKOW, Poland, May 30 -- President Bush, citing two trailers that U.S.
intelligence agencies have said were probably used as mobile biological
weapons labs, said U.S. forces in Iraq have "found the weapons of mass
destruction" that were the United States' primary justification for going to
war.
In remarks to Polish television at a time of mounting criticism at home and
abroad that the more than two-month-old weapons hunt is turning up nothing,
Bush said that claims of failure were "wrong." The remarks were released
today.

"You remember when [Secretary of State] Colin Powell stood up in front of
the world, and he said, 'Iraq has got laboratories, mobile labs to build
biological weapons,' " Bush said in an interview shortly before leaving on a
seven-day trip to Europe and the Middle East. "They're illegal. They're
against the United Nations resolutions, and we've so far discovered two.

"And we'll find more weapons as time goes on," Bush said. "But for those who
say we haven't found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons,
they're wrong. We found them."

Bush arrived today in Poland, a U.S. ally in the Iraq war and the first stop
on his trip. Later he will meet with fellow heads of government in St.
Petersburg, and Evian, a resort city in the French Alps, before presiding
over a meeting between Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Palestinian
Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas in Jordan.

Bush administration officials have recently been stressing a hunt for
"weapons programs" instead of weapons themselves. Among the officials who
have hedged their claims in recent public statements is Defense Secretary
Donald H. Rumsfeld, who said this week that deposed president Saddam Hussein
may have destroyed all the weapons before the war.

U.S. authorities have to date made no claim of a confirmed finding of an
actual nuclear, biological or chemical weapon. In the interview, Bush said
weapons had been found, but in elaborating, he mentioned only the trailers,
which the CIA has said were intended for production of biological weapons.

The agency reported that no pathogens were found in the two trailers and
added that civilian use for the heavy transports, such as water purification
or pharmaceutical production, was "unlikely" because of the effort and
expense required to make the equipment mobile. Production of biological
warfare agents "is the only consistent, logical purpose for these vehicles,"
the CIA report concluded.

Preparing for Bush's visit to the Middle East, administration officials said
they were assembling a team of 24-hour-a-day monitors to mediate between the
parties and measure performance in implementing the "road map" peace plan
that aims to create a Palestinian state and permanent peace in the region.

Powell said the move stopped short of naming a "major envoy, with constant
negotiations." But it would deepen U.S. responsibility in the peace-making
process. Powell, joining Bush aboard Air Force One today, said the head of
the U.S.-led team would be chosen soon.

Recounting his February speech to the U.N. Security Council, which included
the display of satellite images and the playing of communications
intercepts, Powell said that he "went out to the CIA, and I spent four days
and four nights going over everything that they had as holdings." Powell
said he had access to "a room full of analysts, the raw documents, the
papers."

"Where I put up the cartoons of those biological vans, we didn't just make
them up one night," he said. "Those were eyewitness accounts of people who
had worked in the program and knew it was going on, multiple accounts."

"I have been through many crises in my career in government and there are
always people who come after the fact to say, 'This wasn't presented to
you,' or 'This was politicized or this wasn't,' " Powell continued.
British Prime Minister Tony Blair said during a brief visit to Warsaw today
that he was confident that illegal weapons would be found and urged people
to "have a little patience," the Reuters news agency reported.
"The idea that we authorized or made our intelligence agencies invent some
piece of evidence is completely absurd," Blair said, referring to news media
reports in London that British intelligence officials feel that Blair's
office overstated the case in a dossier issued before the war. "Saddam's
history of weapons of mass destruction is not some invention of the British
security services."

Bush plans to use a speech in Krakow on Saturday to argue anew that the
liberation of the people of Iraq was a legitimate cause for war, according
to an administration official. He will speak after a solemn visit to the
firing squad's "Death Wall" at the site of the Auschwitz concentration camp,
and will draw a line from that to modern evil, including to Hussein and
terrorists. Bush told Polish television that the visit's purpose is "to
remind people that we must confront evil when we find it."

Bush began his sprint through six countries by offering conciliatory words
to such traditional allies as France that tried to thwart the war in Iraq.
But his aides said he planned to use the trip to continue projecting
American might to try to change the world on his terms.

"I understand the attitudes of some, but I refuse to be stopped in my desire
to rally the world toward achieving positive results for each individual,"
Bush told foreign reporters before leaving Washington.
A senior administration official said the theme underpinning the diplomatic
tour was "what does President Bush do with his military victory?" Bush will
lay out his answers beginning with the speech in Krakow, where he will call
for greater transatlantic cooperation on controlling AIDS, poverty and
weapons of mass destruction.
"Together, we can achieve the big objective," he said Thursday in remarks to
foreign reporters that the White House released today. "And that is peace
and freedom."

>From here, Bush heads Saturday afternoon to St. Petersburg for celebrations
and a gathering of world leaders on the occasion of that city's 300th
anniversary. Then he flies to Evian for the annual meeting of the heads of
the Group of Eight industrial powers. There, supporters and opponents of the
war in Iraq will try to work out continuing resentments.

© 2003 The Washington Post Company

-----------------

2)

http://www.demog.berkeley.edu/~gabriel/weblog/blogger.html

But aren't those mobile trailers evidence of an Iraqi bioweapons program?

Short answer: NO.

The CIA report on the trailers is here.
http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/iraqi_mobile_plants/index.html


Slate's Fred Kaplan analyzes the report
http://slate.msn.com/id/2083760/ in great detail.


He finds that the report itself acknowledges that the trailers had at least
two other potential uses, and he deems the claim that they were weapons labs
to be "less than compelling."

Read closely, though, the CIA report reveals considerable ambiguity about
the nature of these vehicles. For example, it notes that Iraqi
officials—presumably those currently being interrogated—say the trailers
were used to produce hydrogen for artillery weather-balloons. (Many Army
units float balloons to monitor the accuracy of artillery fire.) In response
to this claim, the report states:

Some of the features of the trailer—a gas-collection system and the presence
of caustic—are consistent with both bioproduction and hydrogen production.
The plant's design possibly could be used to produce hydrogen using a
chemical reaction, but it would be inefficient. The capacity of this trailer
is larger than the typical units for hydrogen production for weather
balloons.

One could ask: Since when was Saddam's Iraq considered a model of
efficiency?
You might be wondering who broke the U.S. Aides Say Iraqi Truck Could Be a
Germ-War Lab

http://college3.nytimes.com/guests/articles/2003/05/08/1087610.xml

story. Why, what a coincidence, it's someone we know! Judy Miller!

http://www.demog.berkeley.edu/~gabriel/weblog/2003_05_01_archive.html#105417
462720326960

Fancy seeing you here!

And who's the main source for the article? Hey, someone else we know! It's
Steve Cambone!

http://www.demog.berkeley.edu/~gabriel/weblog/2003_05_01_archive.html#105433
997455428558

Such a small world. Steve must be on his way to Baghdad right now to head up
the Iraqi Survey Group

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/30/international/worldspecial/30CND-WEAP.html
?ex=1054958400&en=7f14c82b25e79d27&ei=5062&partner=GOOGLE

and find those pesky weapons, and I would bet Judy's tagging along, too. In
the article, Steve said
"While some of the equipment on the trailer could have been used for
purposes other than biological weapons agent production, U.S. and U.K.
technical experts have concluded that the unit does not appear to perform
any function beyond what the defector said it was for, which was the
production of biological agents."

I guess the U.S. and U.K. experts he was talking about must not be the
people who wrote the report, because the report makes no such claim. The
very strongest statement in the entire report is "Analysis of the trailers
reveals that they probably are second- or possibly third-generation designs
of the plants described by the source," while the language throughout the
rest of the report is substantially more cautious. I have a feeling the
experts he's talking about are his imaginary friends.

I'm sure we can expect more from the Steve and Judy show soon.

------------

Is the Pentagon preparing to falsify evidence of Iraqi weapons?

Short answer: it looks like it.

What makes me think so? According to the NY Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/30/international/worldspecial/30CND-WEAP.html
?ex=1054958400&en=7f14c82b25e79d27&ei=5062&partner=GOOGLE

(in a story not written by Judith Miller, so it's probably not ALL
propaganda):

"The Pentagon announced today a 'significant expansion' of the hunt for
weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Stephen A. Cambone, the first under
secretary of defense for intelligence, said Maj. Gen. Keith Dayton of the
Army has been appointed to head a new team, the Iraq Survey Group, that will
look for chemical and biological weapons."

Who is this Stephen Cambone? Washington Times reporters Bill Gertz and Rowan
Scarborough

http://216.239.57.100/search?q=cache:4BMxMBTw6f8J:www.washtimes.com/national
/20030523-123023-9221r.htm+stephen+cambone+gertz&hl=en&ie=UTF-8

recently wrote the following (strangely the original page with this article
has disappeared; I recovered this from the Google cache):


Stephen Cambone has assumed sweeping power over the Pentagon's intelligence
bureaucracy as the new undersecretary of defense for intelligence.

We obtained a copy of a May 8 memorandum from Deputy Defense Secretary Paul
Wolfowitz setting up the new office. It states that the office takes over
all 286 persons and policies attached to the intelligence,
counterintelligence and security, and other intelligence-related issues that
were in the portfolio of the assistant defense secretary for command,
control, communications and intelligence, once the Pentagon's top
intelligence official.

Mr. Wolfowitz said the new office is in charge of "all intelligence and
intelligence-related oversight and policy guidance functions" in the office
of the secretary of defense.

Mr. Cambone, a protege of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld who has
little intelligence experience, will have several deputies, including three
charged with intelligence warning, war fighting and operations, and
counterintelligence and security.

The key phrase of the implementing guidance memorandum relates to the
office's power over other Pentagon intelligence agencies that in the past
have resisted control by Pentagon policy-makers.

It states that the new undersecretary will "exercise authority, direction,
and control over the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the National Imagery
and Mapping Agency (NIMA), the National Reconnaissance Organization (NRO),
the National Security Agency (NSA), the Defense Security Service (DSS) and
the DoD Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA)."

The undersecretary will be responsible to see that "these organizations ...
have adequate acquisition-management structures and processes in place to
deliver intelligence programs on time and within budget."

The job of whipping the Pentagon intelligence bureaucracy into shape is
formidable. Pentagon intelligence agencies consume the lion's share of the
amount spent on intelligence overall, estimated to be about $35 billion
annually.

Additionally, the memorandum states that the Pentagon's chief information
officer has been given a new title — assistant defense secretary for
networks and information integration — and will report directly to the
secretary of defense, an unusual arrangement because most assistants report
to an undersecretary.

The post also comes with new authority over Pentagon space activities.


What else do we know about Dr. Cambone? He is a 1982 political science Ph.D.
from Claremont Graduate School. He was the staff director

http://www.newamericancentury.org/defjul1698.htm

of the Commission to Assess the Ballistic Missile Threat to the United
States, also known as the "Rumsfeld Commission."

Here's the kicker: besides being "a protege of Donald Rumsfeld," he also was
one of the authors of the Project for the New American Century's Rebuilding
America's Defenses,

http://www.newamericancentury.org/RebuildingAmericasDefenses.pdf

the radical, Strangelovian document that formed the basis for the Bush
administration's National Security Strategy.

http://usinfo.state.gov/topical/pol/terror/secstrat.htm


So, having failed, despite Judith Miller's best efforts, to find any
evidence of chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons in Iraq, the Pentagon
is sending a new team of 1400 people, headed by one of Rumsfeld's closest
buddies, a civilian political science Ph.D. with little intelligence
experience, who also happens to be a neoconservative PNAC guy (a
"Straussian," too, for those who think that matters). What are the odds that
he will not claim to find something?

Here's my question for Cambone: who wrote the following sentence in the PNAC
report?

On page 60, in the section "Transforming U.S. Conventional Forces," which
discusses long-term plans for the U.S. military:

"And advanced forms of biological warfare that can 'target' specific
genotypes may transform biological warfare from the realm of terror to a
politically useful tool."

Could it get any creepier? I'm not sure even science fiction writers have
thought up something so scary. Did they contract out the writing of this
section to the Josef Mengele Fan Club? This is not some parody of PNAC
thinking. This is what they say in their own report!

UPDATE: More on Cambone from the Agonist.
http://agonist.got.net/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB.cgi?board=News;action=display;num=1
054367840



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