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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: calgal who wrote (403382)	5/6/2003 5:36:45 PM
From: jackhach	Respond to of 769670

Nicholas Kristof: Why truth matters By Nicholas D. Kristof Op-Ed Columnist, New York Times Tuesday, May 6, 2003 Posted: 6:23 AM EDT (1023 GMT) When I raised the Mystery of the Missing W.M.D. recently, hawks fired barrages of reproachful e-mail at me. The gist was: "You &#! Who cares if we never find weapons of mass destruction, because we've liberated the Iraqi people from a murderous tyrant." But it does matter, enormously, for American credibility. After all, as Ari Fleischer said on April 10 about W.M.D.: "That is what this war was about." I rejoice in the newfound freedoms in Iraq. But there are indications that the U.S. government souped up intelligence, leaned on spooks to change their conclusions and concealed contrary information to deceive people at home and around the world. Let's fervently hope that tomorrow we find an Iraqi superdome filled with 500 tons of mustard gas and nerve gas, 25,000 liters of anthrax, 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin, 29,984 prohibited munitions capable of delivering chemical agents, several dozen Scud missiles, gas centrifuges to enrich uranium, 18 mobile biological warfare factories, long-range unmanned aerial vehicles to dispense anthrax, and proof of close ties with Al Qaeda. Those are the things that President Bush or his aides suggested Iraq might have, and I don't want to believe that top administration officials tried to win support for the war with a campaign of wholesale deceit. Consider the now-disproved claims by President Bush and Colin Powell that Iraq tried to buy uranium from Niger so it could build nuclear weapons. As Seymour Hersh noted in The New Yorker, the claims were based on documents that had been forged so amateurishly that they should never have been taken seriously. I'm told by a person involved in the Niger caper that more than a year ago the vice president's office asked for an investigation of the uranium deal, so a former U.S. ambassador to Africa was dispatched to Niger. In February 2002, according to someone present at the meetings, that envoy reported to the C.I.A. and State Department that the information was unequivocally wrong and that the documents had been forged. The envoy reported, for example, that a Niger minister whose signature was on one of the documents had in fact been out of office for more than a decade. In addition, the Niger mining program was structured so that the uranium diversion had been impossible. The envoy's debunking of the forgery was passed around the administration and seemed to be accepted — except that President Bush and the State Department kept citing it anyway. "It's disingenuous for the State Department people to say they were bamboozled because they knew about this for a year," one insider said. Another example is the abuse of intelligence from Hussein Kamel, a son-in-law of Saddam Hussein and head of Iraq's biological weapons program until his defection in 1995. Top British and American officials kept citing information from Mr. Kamel as evidence of a huge secret Iraqi program, even though Mr. Kamel had actually emphasized that Iraq had mostly given up its W.M.D. program in the early 1990's. Glen Rangwala, a British Iraq expert, says the transcript of Mr. Kamel's debriefing was leaked because insiders resented the way politicians were misleading the public. Patrick Lang, a former head of Middle Eastern affairs in the Defense Intelligence Agency, says that he hears from those still in the intelligence world that when experts wrote reports that were skeptical about Iraq's W.M.D., "they were encouraged to think it over again." "In this administration, the pressure to get product `right' is coming out of O.S.D. [the Office of the Secretary of Defense]," Mr. Lang said. He added that intelligence experts had cautioned that Iraqis would not necessarily line up to cheer U.S. troops and that the Shiite clergy could be a problem. "The guys who tried to tell them that came to understand that this advice was not welcome," he said. "The intelligence that our officials was given regarding W.M.D. was either defective or manipulated," Senator Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico noted. Another senator is even more blunt and, sadly, exactly right: "Intelligence was manipulated." The C.I.A. was terribly damaged when William Casey, its director in the Reagan era, manipulated intelligence to exaggerate the Soviet threat in Central America to whip up support for Ronald Reagan's policies. Now something is again rotten in the state of Spookdom. Nicholas D. Kristof is an op-ed columnist for the New York Times.

To: calgal who wrote (403382)	5/7/2003 4:30:22 PM
From: calgal	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

U.S.-French Dispute Lingers Past Iraq War URL:http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,86221,00.html Wednesday, May 07, 2003 WASHINGTON — President Bush continues his round of "thank yous" to heads of state who supported the U.S.-led war on Iraq, meeting Wednesday at the White House with Spanish President Jose Maria Aznar (search). The two will hold a brief news conference late in the afternoon and then discuss reconstruction efforts in Iraq and the maneuvering at the United Nations to get U.N. sanctions against Iraq lifted. France and Russia have objected to the immediate lifting of sanctions, demonstrating that the pre-war skirmishes that pocked U.S. relations with those countries have not yet healed. In an interview with four Spanish newspapers published Wednesday, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice criticized France and Germany for their tactics during the diplomatic disputes that preceded the war in Iraq. "Nobody should take NATO (search) hostage," Rice said, referring to threats issued from Paris to newly-allied Eastern European countries that backed the United States in the war. "It was very unsettling that Germany and France tried to prevent NATO from reinforcing the security of Turkey. There were many unsettling things in that process," Rice said. She also told reporters that the United States is not to blame for divisions in Europe that have lingered since the war. "It wasn't us that threatened smaller countries with reprisals nor tried to shut up the countries of Eastern Europe," Rice said. That last comment referred to French President Jacques Chirac's (search) remark that the countries of Eastern Europe had missed an opportunity to "shut up." White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said Wednesday that Rice made her remarks openly and was responding to provocative comments made prior to the war. Fleischer said the United States "should not sweep France's comments under the rug." The United States finds itself at odds again with France and Russia over ending U.N. sanctions against Iraq. The United States wants sanctions lifted completely before the June 3 deadline for the latest six-month oil-for-food program. If sanctions are lifted, that would allow the United States to use Iraqi oil money to rebuild Iraq. However, Russia and France, which lost millions in oil and goods contracts when the regime of Saddam Hussein was toppled, say they want U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan to administer the program until the United Nations confirms Iraq's weapons program has been destroyed. The United States has its own weapons inspectors in the country and top officials say it's not necessary for U.N. inspectors to return. Secretary of State Colin Powell is headed to the United Nations on Wednesday to discuss the status of the sanctions with Annan. Fox News' James Rosen and the Associated Press contributed to this report.