[Rhodes22-list] Politics - WMD

[Hank]

Bill,

I kind of agree with you and I kind of don't.

I do not believe that the claims that Iraq had WMD and was building Nukes
was false.  I believe it was inaccurate.  To me, false signifies a
deliberate attempt to mislead, and I don't believe that happened.  My
opinion.

A good part of the blame for these inaccuracies has to lie with Saddam.  He
did everything he could to hinder the UN inspections teams and to create the
belief that he had WMD.

Look at it this way, if someone comes up to my family and says "I have a gun
and I am going to kill you", I'm certainly not going to wait until he proves
it to take action.  I'm going to get him first.  I know this analogy is very
simplistic and the issues with Iraq before the 2003 invasion were much more
complicated, but essentially, this is what happened.  The intelligence we
had at the time (and this is across the western countries, US, UK, Germany,
France, etc.) showed that he had WMD.  Now it looks like he may not have had
it.  Unfortunately, decisions are made with the information you have at the
time, not with information you receive later.  This is called Monday Morning
Quarterback  and it is real easy to say we should have done this or that
based upon new information.  We've all made some sort of decision that
later, in hindsight, we realize was not the best decision we could have
made.  Once we realized it, we couldn't go back and change the decision, we
have to determine where to go from this point further.

Nobody around the world, except the Islamic extremists, wants the U.S. to
unilaterally pull out of Iraq.  Everyone knows that this would be
devastating to the region.

In the end, it doesn't really matter how we got here or whose fault it is.
It is what it is.  The only thing that matters is where do we go from here.

Hank

On 11/3/06, Bill Effros <bill at effros.com> wrote:
>
> Brad,
>
> Getting desperate, are we?
>
> The Bush administration got the United States into this war by claiming
> Iraq had actually built nuclear weapons:
>
> "We do know, with absolute certainty,
> that he is using his procurement system
> to acquire the equipment he needs
> in order to enrich uranium to
> build a nuclear weapon."
>
> Dick Cheney
> Vice President
> September 8, 2002
>
> and
>
> "We believe he has, in fact, reconstituted
> nuclear weapons."
>
> Dick Cheney
> Vice President
> March 16, 2003
>
> The documents referenced in the New York Times were posted on the web by
> the Bush Administration in an effort by Republicans to flush out more
> documents to support administration claims.
>
> The documents posted were all captured during the 1991 Gulf war.  No one
> said Iraq wasn't trying to build WMD prior to the first gulf war.  It
> was the current administration that claimed Iraq had actually built
> nuclear weapons after the first Gulf war, and that the United States had
> to invade Iraq in order to find them.
>
> There has not been one shred of evidence to support administration
> claims that Iraq tried to build nuclear weapons between 1991 and 2003.
>
> The point of the Times story was that this administration, which is now
> running on a "we can protect America better" platform, is posting plans
> for building nuclear weapons on the Internet in a last ditch effort to
> try to justify false claims that Iraq was building nuclear weapons just
> prior to our invasion.
>
> Now Republicans are trying to claim that documents they posted, which
> detail how to build atomic bombs, refer to Iraqi attempts to build
> weapons after 1991.
>
> You guys must think everyone else is really stupid.
>
> Bill Effros
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Brad Haslett wrote:
> > You gotta love the intelligentsia at the New York Times.  No doubt,
> > this was
> > supposed to be a hit piece on the Bush Administration.  Perhaps they
> > outwitted themselves?  An analysis and the original article from today's
> > newspaper is attached.
> >
> > Brad
> >
> > ---------------------
> >
> > *Shocker: New York Times Confirms Iraqi Nuclear Weapons Program
> > *11/02 10:39
> > PM<
> http://tks.nationalreview.com/post/?q=ZTJjYzYzYmMwNjY3N2YwNWE5NDQ3ZTQzZDczZWU5N2Y=
> >
> >
> > When
> > I saw the headline on Drudge earlier tonight, that the New York Times
> > had a
> > big story coming out tomorrow that had something to do with Iraq and
> > WMDs, I
> > was ready for an October November Surprise.
> >
> > Well, Drudge <http://www.drudgereport.com/> is giving us the scoop.
> > And if
> > it's meant to be a slam-Bush story, I think the Times team may have
> > overthunk this:
> >
> > *U.S. POSTING OF IRAQ NUKE DOCS ON WEB COULD HAVE HELPED IRAN...
> >
> > NYT REPORTING FRIDAY, SOURCES SAY: Federal government set up Web site
> > — **Operation
> > Iraqi Freedom Document
> > Portal*<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Iraqi_Freedom_documents>
> > * — to make public a vast archive of Iraqi documents captured during the
> > war; detailed accounts of Iraq's secret nuclear research; a 'basic
> > guide to
> > building an atom bomb'... Officials of the International Atomic Energy
> > Agency fear the information could help Iran develop nuclear arms...
> > contain
> > charts, diagrams, equations and lengthy narratives about bomb building
> > that
> > the nuclear experts say go beyond what is available elsewhere on the
> > Internet and in other public forums...
> >
> > Website now shut... Developing... *
> >
> > I'm sorry, did the New York Times just put on the front page that
> > *IRAQ HAD
> > A NUCLEAR WEAPONS PROGRAM AND WAS PLOTTING TO BUILD AN ATOMIC BOMB*?
> >
> > What? Wait a minute. The entire mantra of the war critics has been  "no
> > WMDs, no WMDs, no threat, no threat", for the past three years solid.
> Now
> > we're being told that the Bush administration erred by making public
> > information that could help any nation build an atomic bomb.
> >
> > Let's go back and clarify: IRAQ HAD NUCLEAR WEAPONS PLANS SO ADVANCED
> AND
> > DETAILED THAT ANY COUNTRY COULD HAVE USED THEM.
> >
> > I think the Times editors are counting on this being spun as a "Boy, did
> > Bush screw up" meme; the problem is, to do it, they have to knock down
> > the
> > "there was no threat in Iraq" meme, once and for all. Because obviously,
> > Saddam could have sold this information to anybody, any other state,
> > or any
> > well-funded terrorist group that had publicly pledged to kill millions
> of
> > Americans and had expressed interest in nuclear arms. You know, like,
> > oh...
> > *al-Qaeda.*
> >
> > The New York Times just tore the heart out of the antiwar argument,
> > and they
> > are apparently completely oblivous to it.
> >
> > The antiwar crowd is going to have to argue that the information somehow
> > wasn't dangerous in the hands of Saddam Hussein, but was dangerous
> > posted on
> > the Internet. It doesn't work. It can't be both no threat to America
> > and yet
> > also somehow a threat to America once it's in the hands of Iran. Game,
> > set,
> > and match.
> >
> > UPDATE: The article is up
> > here<
> http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/03/world/middleeast/03documents.html?ei=5094&en=1511d6b3da302d4f&hp=&ex=1162530000&partner=homepage&pagewanted=print
> >
> >
> > .
> >
> > Having now read it, I can see that every stop has been pulled out to
> > ensure
> > that a reader will believe that posting these documents was a strategic
> > blunder of the first order.
> >
> > But the story retains its own inherent contradiction: The information in
> > these documents is so dangerous, that every step must be taken to
> > ensure it
> > doesn't end up in the wrong hands... except for topping the regime that
> > actually has the documents.
> >
> > (By the way, is it just me, or is the article entirely devoid of any
> > indication that Iran actually accessed the documents? This threat
> > that, "You
> > idiot! Iran could access all the documents!" is entirely speculative.
> > If the
> > government servers hosting the web site have signs that Iranian web
> > browsers
> > accessed those pages, it's a different story; my guess is somebody
> > already
> > knows the answer to that question.)
> >
> > I'm still kinda blown away by this paragraph:
> >
> > Among the dozens of documents in English were Iraqi reports written in
> > the
> > 1990's and in 2002 for United Nations inspectors in charge of making
> sure
> > Iraq abandoned its unconventional arms programs after the Persian Gulf
> > war.
> > *Experts say that at the time, Mr. Hussein's scientists were on the
> > verge of
> > building an atom bomb, as little as a year away.*
> >
> > Is this sentence referring to 1990, before the Persian Gulf War? Or
> 2002,
> > months before the invasion of Iraq? Because "Iraq is a year away from
> > building a nuclear bomb" was supposed to be a myth, a lie that Bush
> > used to
> > trick us into war.
> >
> > And yet here is the New York Times, saying that Iraq had a "how to
> > manual"
> > on how to build a nuclear bomb, and could have had a nuke in a year.
> >
> > In other news, it's good to see that the New York Times is firmly
> against
> > publicizing sensitive and classified information. Unless, of course,
> > they're
> > the ones doing it.
> >
> > ONE LAST THOUGHT: So Iraq had all the know-how, all the plans, all the
> > designs, "charts, diagrams, equations and lengthy narratives about bomb
> > building." Unless they were keeping these documents around as future
> > material for paper airplanes, all this stuff constituted a plan of
> action
> > for some point in the future; but to complete creating these weapons,
> > they
> > would have needed stuff. I don't know an exact list of what they would
> > have
> > needed, but articles like this
> > one<
> http://www.foreignpolicy.com/users/login.php?story_id=3597&URL=http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=3597
> >give
> >
> > a good idea. Sounds like you need a firing mechanism (the right kind
> > of
> > firearm would suffice), some fairly common industrial equipment like a
> > lathe, material for the bomb casing, some fairly common conventional
> > explosives, all of which would have been easy to get in Iraq. Oh, and,
> of
> > course, the nuclear material itself.
> >
> > They would have needed something like... um... you know... what's that
> > stuff
> > called? Oh, that's right.
> >
> > *Yellowcake.*
> >
> > But we know Iraq would never make an effort to get yellowcake. Joe
> Wilson
> > had tea with officials in Niger who said so.
> >
> > ---------
> > November 3, 2006
> > U.S. Web Archive Is Said to Reveal a Nuclear Primer
> >
> > By WILLIAM J.
> > BROAD<
> http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/b/william_j_broad/index.html?inline=nyt-per
> >
> >
> >
> > Last March, the federal government set up a Web site to make public a
> > vast
> > archive of Iraqi documents captured during the war. The Bush
> > administration
> > did so under pressure from Congressional
> > Republicans<
> http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/r/republican_party/index.html?inline=nyt-org
> >who
> >
> > had said they hoped to "leverage the Internet" to find new evidence of
> > the prewar dangers posed by Saddam
> > Hussein<
> http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/h/saddam_hussein/index.html?inline=nyt-per
> >.
> >
> >
> >
> > But in recent weeks, the site has posted some documents that weapons
> > experts
> > say are a danger themselves: detailed accounts of
> > Iraq<
> http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/international/countriesandterritories/iraq/index.html?inline=nyt-geo
> >'s
> >
> > secret nuclear research before the 1991 Persian Gulf war. The
> > documents, the
> > experts say, constitute a basic guide to building an atom bomb.
> >
> > Last night, the government shut down the Web site after The New York
> > Times
> > asked about complaints from weapons experts and arms-control officials.
> A
> > spokesman for the director of national intelligence said access to the
> > site
> > had been suspended "pending a review to ensure its content is
> appropriate
> > for public viewing."
> >
> > Officials of the International Atomic Energy
> > Agency<
> http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/i/international_atomic_energy_agency/index.html?inline=nyt-org
> >,
> >
> > fearing that the information could help states like Iran develop nuclear
> > arms, had privately protested last week to the American ambassador to
> the
> > agency, according to European diplomats who spoke on condition of
> > anonymity
> > because of the issue's sensitivity. One diplomat said the agency's
> > technical
> > experts "were shocked" at the public disclosures.
> >
> > Early this morning, a spokesman for Gregory L. Schulte, the American
> > ambassador, denied that anyone from the agency had approached Mr.
> Schulte
> > about the Web site.
> >
> > The documents, roughly a dozen in number, contain charts, diagrams,
> > equations and lengthy narratives about bomb building that nuclear
> experts
> > who have viewed them say go beyond what is available elsewhere on the
> > Internet and in other public forums. For instance, the papers give
> > detailed
> > information on how to build nuclear firing circuits and triggering
> > explosives, as well as the radioactive cores of atom bombs.
> >
> > "For the U.S. to toss a match into this flammable area is very
> > irresponsible," said A. Bryan Siebert, a former director of
> > classification
> > at the federal Department of Energy, which runs the nation's nuclear
> arms
> > program. "There's a lot of things about nuclear weapons that are
> > secret and
> > should remain so."
> >
> > The government had received earlier warnings about the contents of the
> > Web
> > site. Last spring, after the site began posting old Iraqi documents
> about
> > chemical weapons, United
> > Nations<
> http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/u/united_nations/index.html?inline=nyt-org
> >arms-control
> >
> > officials in New York won the withdrawal of a report that gave
> > information on how to make tabun and sarin, nerve agents that kill by
> > causing respiratory failure.
> >
> > The campaign for the online archive was mounted by conservative
> > publications
> > and politicians, who said that the nation's spy agencies had failed
> > adequately to analyze the 48,000 boxes of documents seized since the
> > March
> > 2003 invasion. With the public increasingly skeptical about the
> rationale
> > and conduct of the war, the chairmen of the House and Senate
> intelligence
> > committees argued that wide analysis and translation of the documents
> > — most
> > of them in Arabic — would reinvigorate the search for clues that Mr.
> > Hussein
> > had resumed his unconventional arms programs in the years before the
> > invasion. American search teams never found such evidence.
> >
> > The director of national intelligence, John D.
> > Negroponte<
> http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/n/john_d_negroponte/index.html?inline=nyt-per
> >,
> >
> > had resisted setting up the Web site, which some intelligence
> > officials felt
> > implicitly raised questions about the competence and judgment of
> > government
> > analysts. But President Bush approved the site's creation after
> > Congressional Republicans proposed legislation to force the documents'
> > release.
> >
> > In his statement last night, Mr. Negroponte's spokesman, Chad Kolton,
> > said,
> > "While strict criteria had already been established to govern posted
> > documents, the material currently on the Web site, as well as the
> > procedures
> > used to post new documents, will be carefully reviewed before the site
> > becomes available again."
> >
> > A spokesman for the National Security
> > Council<
> http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/n/national_security_council/index.html?inline=nyt-org
> >,
> >
> > Gordon D. Johndroe, said, "We're confident the D.N.I. is taking the
> > appropriate steps to maintain the balance between public information and
> > national security."
> >
> > The Web site, "Operation Iraqi Freedom Document Portal," was a
> constantly
> > expanding portrait of prewar Iraq. Its many thousands of documents
> > included
> > everything from a collection of religious and nationalistic poetry to
> > instructions for the repair of parachutes to handwritten notes from Mr.
> > Hussein's intelligence service. It became a popular quarry for a
> > legion of
> > bloggers, translators and amateur historians.
> >
> > Among the dozens of documents in English were Iraqi reports written in
> > the
> > 1990s and in 2002 for United Nations inspectors in charge of making sure
> > Iraq had abandoned its unconventional arms programs after the Persian
> > Gulf
> > war. Experts say that at the time, Mr. Hussein's scientists were on the
> > verge of building an atom bomb, as little as a year away.
> >
> > European diplomats said this week that some of those nuclear documents
> on
> > the Web site were identical to the ones presented to the United Nations
> > Security
> > Council<
> http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/s/security_council/index.html?inline=nyt-org
> >in
> >
> > late 2002, as America got ready to invade Iraq. But unlike those on
> > the
> > Web site, the papers given to the Security Council had been extensively
> > edited, to remove sensitive information on unconventional arms.
> >
> > The deletions, the diplomats said, had been done in consultation with
> the
> > United States and other nuclear-weapons nations. Mohamed
> > ElBaradei<
> http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/e/mohamed_elbaradei/index.html?inline=nyt-per
> >,
> >
> > the director of the International Atomic Energy Agency, which ran the
> > nuclear part of the inspections, told the Security Council in late
> > 2002 that
> > the deletions were "consistent with the principle that
> > proliferation-sensitive information should not be released."
> >
> > In Europe, a senior diplomat said atomic experts there had studied the
> > nuclear documents on the Web site and judged their public release as
> > potentially dangerous. "It's a cookbook," said the diplomat, who spoke
> on
> > condition of anonymity because of his agency's rules. "If you had
> > this, it
> > would short-circuit a lot of things."
> >
> > The New York Times had examined dozens of the documents and asked a half
> > dozen nuclear experts to evaluate some of them.
> >
> > Peter D. Zimmerman, a physicist and former United States government arms
> > scientist now at the war studies department of King's College, London,
> > called the posted material "very sensitive, much of it undoubtedly
> secret
> > restricted data."
> >
> > Ray E. Kidder, a senior nuclear physicist at the Lawrence Livermore
> > National
> > Laboratory<
> http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/l/lawrence_livermore_national_laboratory/index.html?inline=nyt-org
> >in
> >
> > California, an arms design center, said "some things in these
> > documents
> > would be helpful" to nations aspiring to develop nuclear weapons and
> > should
> > have remained secret.
> >
> > A senior American intelligence official who deals routinely with atomic
> > issues said the documents showed "where the Iraqis failed and how to get
> > around the failures." The documents, he added, could perhaps help Iran
> or
> > other nations making a serious effort to develop nuclear arms, but
> > probably
> > not terrorists or poorly equipped states. The official, who requested
> > anonymity because of his agency's rules against public comment, called
> > the
> > papers "a road map that helps you get from point A to point B, but
> > only if
> > you already have a car."
> >
> > Thomas S. Blanton, director of the National Security Archive, a private
> > group at George Washington
> > University<
> http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/g/george_washington_university/index.html?inline=nyt-org
> >that
> >
> > tracks federal secrecy decisions, said the impetus for the Web site's
> > creation came from an array of sources — private conservative groups,
> > Congressional Republicans and some figures in the Bush administration
> > — who
> > clung to the belief that close examination of the captured documents
> > would
> > show that Mr. Hussein's government had clandestinely reconstituted an
> > unconventional arms programs.
> >
> > "There were hundreds of people who said, 'There's got to be gold in them
> > thar hills,' " Mr. Blanton said.
> >
> > The campaign for the Web site was led by the chairman of the House
> > Intelligence Committee, Representative Peter Hoekstra of Michigan. Last
> > November, he and his Senate counterpart, Pat Roberts of Kansas, wrote
> > to Mr.
> > Negroponte, asking him to post the Iraqi material. The sheer volume of
> > the
> > documents, they argued, had overwhelmed the intelligence community.
> >
> > Some intelligence officials feared that individual documents,
> > translated and
> > interpreted by amateurs, would be used out of context to second-guess
> the
> > intelligence agencies' view that Mr. Hussein did not have unconventional
> > weapons or substantive ties to Al
> > Qaeda<
> http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/a/al_qaeda/index.html?inline=nyt-org
> >.
> >
> > Reviewing the documents for release would add an unnecessary burden on
> > busy
> > intelligence analysts, they argued.
> >
> > On March 16, after the documents' release was approved, Mr. Negroponte's
> > office issued a terse public announcement including a disclaimer that
> > remained on the Web site: "The U.S. government has made no determination
> > regarding the authenticity of the documents, validity or factual
> > accuracy of
> > the information contained therein, or the quality of any translations,
> > when
> > available."
> >
> > On April 18, about a month after the first documents were made public,
> > Mr.
> > Hoekstra issued a news release acknowledging "minimal risks," but
> > saying the
> > site "will enable us to better understand information such as Saddam's
> > links
> > to terrorism, weapons of mass destruction and violence against the Iraqi
> > people." He added: "It will allow us to leverage the Internet to enable
> a
> > mass examination as opposed to limiting it to a few exclusive elites."
> >
> > Yesterday, before the site was shut down, Jamal Ware, a spokesman for
> Mr.
> > Hoekstra, said the government had "developed a sound process to review
> > the
> > documents to ensure sensitive or dangerous information is not posted."
> > Later, he said the complaints about the site "didn't sound like a big
> > deal,"
> > adding, "We were a little surprised when they pulled the plug."
> >
> > The precise review process that led to the posting of the nuclear and
> > chemical-weapons documents is unclear. But in testimony before
> > Congress last
> > spring, a senior official from Mr. Negroponte's office, Daniel Butler,
> > described a "triage" system used to sort out material that should remain
> > classified. Even so, he said, the policy was to "be biased towards
> > release
> > if at all possible." Government officials say all the documents in
> Arabic
> > have received at least a quick review by Arabic linguists.
> >
> > Some of the first posted documents dealt with Iraq's program to make
> germ
> > weapons, followed by a wave of papers on chemical arms.
> >
> > At the United Nations in New York, the chemical papers raised alarms
> > at the
> > Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, which had been in
> > charge
> > of searching Iraq for all unconventional arms, save the nuclear ones.
> >
> > In April, diplomats said, the commission's acting chief weapons
> > inspector,
> > Demetrius Perricos, lodged an objection with the United States mission
> to
> > the United Nations over the document that dealt with the nerve agents
> > tabun
> > and sarin.
> >
> > Soon, the document vanished from the Web site. On June 8, diplomats
> said,
> > Mr. Perricos told the Security Council of how risky arms information had
> > shown up on a public Web site and how his agency appreciated the
> American
> > cooperation in resolving the matter.
> >
> > In September, the Web site began posting the nuclear documents, and some
> > soon raised concerns. On Sept. 12, it posted a document it called
> > "Progress
> > of Iraqi nuclear program circa 1995." That description is potentially
> > misleading since the research occurred years earlier.
> >
> > The Iraqi document is marked "Draft FFCD Version 3 (20.12.95),"
> > meaning it
> > was preparatory for the "Full, Final, Complete Disclosure" that Iraq
> > made to
> > United Nations inspectors in March 1996. The document carries three
> > diagrams
> > showing cross sections of bomb cores, and their diameters.
> >
> > On Sept. 20, the site posted a much larger document, "Summary of
> > technical
> > achievements of Iraq's former nuclear program." It runs to 51 pages, 18
> > focusing on the development of Iraq's bomb design. Topics included
> > physical
> > theory, the atomic core and high-explosive experiments. By early
> October,
> > diplomats and officials said, United Nations arms inspectors in New
> > York and
> > their counterparts in Vienna were alarmed and discussing what to do.
> >
> > Last week in Vienna, Olli J. Heinonen, head of safeguards at the
> > international atomic agency, expressed concern about the documents to
> Mr.
> > Schulte, diplomats said.
> >
> > Scott Shane contributed reporting.
> > __________________________________________________
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