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June
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June
26, 2003
Undermining Blix
Wolfowitz Had
CIA Investigate Blix
By JASON LEOPOLD
Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defense,
was so eager to see the United States launch a preemptive strike
against Iraq in early 2002, that he ordered the CIA to investigate
the past work of Hans Blix, the chief United Nations weapons
inspector, who in February 2002, was asked to lead a team of
U.N. weapons inspectors into Iraq to search for weapons of mass
destruction, in an attempt to undermine the scientist.
The unusual move by Wolfowitz underscores
the steps the Bush administration was willing to take a year
before the U.S. invaded Iraq to manipulate and or exaggerate
intelligence information to support it's claims that Iraq posed
an immediate threat to the United States and that the only solution
to quell the problem was the use of military force.
U.S. military forces in Iraq have yet
to find any evidence of WMD. Some U.S. lawmakers have accused
the Bush administration of distorting intelligence information,
which claimed Iraq possessed tons of chemical and biological
agents, to justify the attack to overthrow Iraq's President Saddam
Hussein. Although the Bush administration continues to deny the
accusations, evidence, such as the secret report Wolfowitz asked
the CIA in January 2002 to produce on Blix, prove that the administration
had already decided that removing Saddam from power would require
military force and it would do so regardless of the U.N..
Earlier this month, Blix accused the
Bush administration of launching a smear campaign against him
because he could not find evidence of WMD in Iraq and, he said,
he refused to pump up his reports to the U.N. about Iraq's WMD
programs, which would have given the U.S. the evidence it needed
to get a majority of U.N. member countries to support a war against
Iraq. Instead, Blix said the U.N. inspectors should be allowed
more time to conduct searches in Iraq for WMD.
In a June 11 interview with the London
Guardian newspaper, Blix said "U.S. officials pressured
him to use more damning language when reporting on Iraq's alleged
weapons programs."
"By and large my relations with
the U.S. were good,'' Blix told the Guardian. "But toward
the end the (Bush) administration leaned on us.'"
Tensions between Blix and the hawks in
the Bush administration, such as Wolfowitz, Secretary of Defense
Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney, go back at least
two years, when President Bush, at the urging of Secretary of
State Colin Powell, said he wanted the U.N. to resurrect U.N.
arms inspections for Iraq.
The move angered some in the administration,
such as Wolfowitz, who, according to an April 15 report in the
Washington Post, wanted to see military action against Iraq sooner
rather than later.
When the U.N. said privately in January
2002 that Blix would lead an inspections team into Iraq, Wolfowitz
contacted the CIA to produce a report on why Blix, as chief of
the International Atomic Energy Agency during the 1980s and 1990s,
failed to detect Iraqi nuclear activity.
But, according to the Washington Post's
April 15, 2002 story, the CIA report said Blix "had conducted
inspections of Iraq's declared nuclear power plants fully within
the parameters he could operate as chief of the Vienna-based
agency between 1981 and 1997."
Wolfowitz, according to the Post, quoting
a former State Department official familiar with the report,
"hit the ceiling" because it failed to provide sufficient
ammunition to undermine Blix and, by association, the new U.N.
weapons inspection program."
"The request for a CIA investigation
underscored the degree of concern by Wolfowitz and his civilian
colleagues in the Pentagon that new inspections -- or protracted
negotiations over them -- could torpedo their plans for military
action to remove Hussein from power," the Post reported.
Soon after the CIA issued its report,
the administration began exaggerating intelligence information
of Iraq's weapons programs and, in some cases, forcing intelligence
officials to "cook" up information to support a war,
according to a Nov. 19, 2002 story in the London Guardian newspaper.
For example, last August, Cheney said
Iraq would have nuclear weapons "fairly soon" - in
direct contradiction of CIA reports that said it would take at
least five more years.
Rumsfeld, in public comments last year,
accused Saddam Hussein of providing sanctuary to al-Qaida operatives
fleeing Afghanistan - although they had actually traveled to
Iraqi Kurdistan, which is outside Saddam's control, the Guardian
reported.
On Feb. 12, 2002, a week or so after
the CIA issued its report to Wolfowitz on Blix, reporters questioned
Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld about the accuracy of the Bush
administration's claim that Iraq was harboring al-Qaida terrorists
and the countries alleged stockpile of WMD, which some news reports
said was not true.
Rumsfeld's response to the reporters'
questions about the accuracy of the information proves that the
Defense Secretary cares little about providing the public with
thoughtful, intelligent analysis.
"Reports that say that something
hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know,
there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We
also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there
are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns
-- the ones we don't know we don't know," Rumsfeld said.
But on Wednesday, Rumsfeld and Gen Richard
Myers, Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff, radically changed their
stance on the accuracy of such intelligence The officials said
at a news conference that intelligence information the U.S. gathered
leading up to the war in Iraq that concluded the country possessed
WMD may have been wrong.
"Intelligence doesn't necessarily
mean something is true," Myers said "It's just -- it's
intelligence. You know, it's your best estimate of the situation.
It doesn't mean it's a fact. I mean, that's not what intelligence
is. It's not -- they're -- and so you make judgments."
Jason Leopold
can be reached at: jasonleopold@hotmail.com
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