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

To: cnyndwllr who wrote (528677)	1/24/2004 12:34:22 PM
From: PartyTime	Respond to of 769670

New WMD blow for Blair Survey chief resigns saying Iraq never had stockpiles Duncan Campbell and Patrick Wintour Saturday January 24, 2004 The Guardian Tony Blair last night suffered a blow on the eve of the most testing week of his premiership when the US official at the helm of the hunt for Saddam's weapons of mass destruction asserted Iraq did not have large stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons. Resigning from his post after nine fruitless months in charge of the Iraq Survey Group he said he did not think there had been a large-scale weapons programme inside Iraq since 1991. David Kay, a hardline CIA of ficial close to the Republicans also criticised President George Bush for failing to give him adequate support. His remarks will add to the pressure on Mr Blair as he battles to win backbench support ahead of Tuesday's vote on top-up tuition fees and tries to avert criticisms in the Hutton report into the death of the government weapons scientist David Kelly. Lord Hutton is due to rule on whether the government exaggerated the September 2002 intelligence dossier on the threat of Saddam's arsenal. Opposition parties are demanding an independent inquiry into whether there was a massive intelligence failure - an inquiry that would probe much wider than the narrower terms of reference handed to Lord Hutton. Mr Blair has already shifted ground from saying he was absolutely confident that Saddam's weapons arsenal would be located to saying instead that evidence of weapons programmes would be found. More recently on the BBC Frost programme he said he did not know if any weapons would be found. Downing Street had already been discussing the possibility of a confidence vote next week if Mr Blair failed to win Commons backing for tuition top-up fees. Backbench rebels claimed the government needed to win over as many 30 rebels ahead of Tuesday's vote, findings confirmed by a Guardian survey today. The news from Washington over the resignation of Mr Kay will reduce Mr Blair's authority ahead of Tuesday's vote and also raise fundamental questions about his judgment that urgent military action in Iraq was necessary. Mr Kay said of Iraqi weapons "I don't think they existed. "What everyone was talking about is stockpiles produced after the end of the Gulf War and I don't think there was a large-scale production programme in the 90s." His suggestion that Saddam had no illegal weapons means Saddam was involved in a gigantic bluff to shore up his international prestige Mr Kay added that the hunt would become even more difficult once the US has handed over power to Iraqis in June. His departure had been anticipated, but will be seen as indication that the search for WMD may turn out to be futile. The US wants to hand back power to Iraqis through a carefully crafted process of selecting appointees to a transitional government, but vociferous opposition from Shia clerics, who want direct elections, is forcing a rethink. A leading member of the Iraqi governing council close to the Bush administration said yesterday that elections were possible, and urged Washington to change its mind. "Elections are possible," Mr Chalabi told a thinktank conference in Washington. "Seek to make them possible and they will be possible." His replacement, former UN weapons inspector Charles Duelfer, has also spoken sceptically about prospects for locating the menace that was used as the casus belli. I think the reason that they haven't found them is they're probably not there," he said recently. Downing Street responded by calling for patience, saying: "There is still more work to be done, and we await that." But the Liberal Democrats seized on the resignation with the party's foreign affairs spokesman Menzies Campbell claiming "David Kay's admission that he does not believe that Iraq possessed stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons casts severe doubt on the government's case for war. Donald Anderson, the Labour MP who chairs the Commons foreign affairs committee, acknowledged that it now appeared "likely" that Saddam did not have the weapons attributed to him. Mr Anderson told Newsnight: "It looks increasingly forlorn that there are any chances now of finding those stockpiles." The Bush administration has tried to shift the emphasis from the hunt for WMD on to efforts to improve security and pave the way for a handover of power to Iraqis. The White House said last night it was hoping to learn soon whether the UN would agree to send a team back to Iraq to examine how best to elect a new Iraqi government. Two UN security experts arrived in Baghdad last night to explore whether security is good enough to allow a full UN team back in. The UN secretary general, Kofi Annan, has said the UN should play a part but not at the expense of the safety of its staff. The US says security is improving, but incidents continue to kill and maim, the latest bombing on Thursday killing two men at an Iraqi Communist Party office. Two US pilots meanwhile died last night when their helicopter came down in northern Iraq. It was unclear what caused the crash. · The US military indicated yesterday that they may fill the "spider hole where Saddam Hussein was eventually captured so that it does not turn into an attraction for tourists. A spokeswoman for the 4th Infantry Division, said yesterday: "To get rid of the hole would reduce the amount of traffic to the area, which only complicates our military mission." guardian.co.uk

To: cnyndwllr who wrote (528677)	1/24/2004 12:38:10 PM
From: PartyTime	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

>>>Lord Hutton is due to rule on whether the government exaggerated the September 2002 intelligence dossier on the threat of Saddam's arsenal.<<< guardian.co.uk Somehow I don't think Bush is going to have the overseas military vote in his corner for this year's Floridian presidential election. In fact, I bet many soldiers are now sitting in the Iraqi desert wishing the Democrats already had their candidate named ... so that they can support that candidate!

To: cnyndwllr who wrote (528677)	1/24/2004 12:50:52 PM
From: PartyTime	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

Ex-CIA Officers Questioning Iraq Data By John J. Lumpkin Associated Press Friday 14 March 2003 A small group composed mostly of retired CIA officers is appealing to colleagues still inside to go public with any evidence the Bush administration is slanting intelligence to support its case for war with Iraq. Members of the group contend the Bush administration has released information on Iraq that meets only its ends -- while ignoring or withholding contrary reporting. They also say the administration's public evidence about the immediacy of Iraq's threat to the United States and its alleged ties to al-Qaida is unconvincing, and accuse policy-makers of pushing out some information that does not meet an intelligence professional's standards of proof. "It's been cooked to a recipe, and the recipe is high policy," said Ray McGovern, a 27-year CIA veteran who briefed top Reagan administration security officials before retiring in 1990. "That's why a lot of my former colleagues are holding their noses these days." A CIA spokesman suggested McGovern and his supporters were unqualified to describe the quality of intelligence provided to policy-makers. "He left the agency over a decade ago," said spokesman Mark Mansfield. "He's hardly in a position to comment knowledgeably on that subject." McGovern's group, calling itself Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, includes about 25 retired officers, mostly from the CIA's analytical branch but with a smattering from its operational side and other agencies, he said. Carrying an anti-war bent, they invoke the names of whistle-blowers like Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers, a top secret study on U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Leaking classified national defense information is illegal, and CIA officers take a secrecy oath when they join. Prosecutions of violations are rare, but government personnel caught leaking nondefense information may lose their security clearances, or their jobs. Federal law also offers protections to whistle-blowers in some cases. McGovern and his supporters acknowledge their appeal to their colleagues inside the CIA and other agencies is unusual. The CIA's culture tends to keep disputes inside the family, and many intelligence officers shun discussions of American policy -- such as whether war on Iraq is justified -- saying it is their job to provide information, not to decide how to act on it. McGovern, who now works in an inner-city outreach ministry in Washington, said of his group's request, "It goes against the whole ethic of secrecy and going through channels, and going to the (Inspector General). It takes a courageous person to get by all that, and say, 'I've got a higher duty.'" Agency spokesman Mansfield said, "Our role is to call it like we see it, to provide objective, unvarnished assessments. That's the code we live by, and that's what policy-makers expect from us." The administration says its information is sound. During Secretary of State Colin Powell's address to the United Nations Security Council last month, he said, "These are not assertions. What we are giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence." But other countries have challenged the accuracy of several of Powell's statements. And it is no secret that in the past some people with access to intelligence information -- such as members of Congress or a presidential administration -- have leaked selected pieces that lend support to a given policy. This can provide the public with a less-than-complete picture of what the CIA and other agencies have learned. Another member of McGovern's group, Patrick Eddington, resigned from the CIA in 1996 to protest what he describes as the agency's refusal to investigate some of the possible causes of Gulf War veterans' medical problems. Eddington said would-be whistle-blowers can privately contact members of Congress to get their message out. "They have to basically put conscience before career," he said. Vince Cannistraro, a former CIA counterterrorism chief, said he saw little chance of CIA analysts going public to contradict the Bush administration. "Sure, there's a lot of disagreement among analysts in the intelligence community on how things are going to be used (by policy-makers)," he said. "But you are not going to see people making public resignations. That would mean giving up your career."