inside the glass house

Weapons of mass deception return to haunt authors
NEW YORK -- Just days before Secretary of State Colin Powell made a dramatic presentation before the UN Security Council accusing Iraq of hiding weapons of mass destruction, he was being briefed by US intelligence officials on the evidence available to nail Saddam Hussein.

The briefing was part of a dress rehearsal before Powell's theatrical appearance at the United Nations, which was brought live by all the major American television networks. But according to a widely circulated story in 'US News and World Report' last week, there was an equally interesting political melodrama which was being played behind closed doors.

The usually unflappable Powell was so livid with the shoddy evidence he was being fed by intelligence officials that at one point he flung several pages into the air and shouted: "I'm not reading this. This is bullshit."

Still Powell went on to tell the Security Council that "every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources. These are not assertions. What we're giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid (?) intelligence"

The Americans have a word for it: horse manure, and loads and loads of it. Last February, even UN arms inspectors, who were being briefed by US intelligence officials on possible secret sites of Iraqi weapons, were sceptical of the claims.

One UN official, who was part of an army of inspectors who conducted the fruitless search inside Iraq, was quoted as saying that the Americans were providing them "with garbage after garbage after garbage".

So far, the US has failed not only to find that elusive "smoking gun" but any gun -- not even a half-smoking gun with which they could justify a war fought primarily to eliminate Iraq's nuclear, biological and chemical weapons.

Was the US claim an over-exaggeration, a half-truth or an outright lie concocted to manipulate the American public into justifying the war?. Not surprisingly, nearly 300,000 US and British troops have found no evidence of these weapons, since their search began after the fall of Baghdad in early April.

Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld, one of the primary architects of the war, told a meeting of the Council on Foreign Relations in New York that American forces had failed to locate such weapons because the Iraqis may have destroyed them. "We don't know what happened," he confessed.

The weapons the Iraqis were said to be hiding included 550 artillery shells with mustard, 30,000 empty munitions, and enough precursors to increase the stockpile to as much as 500 tons of chemical agents and 100-500 tons of chemical weapons agents.
And this was a stockpile of unaccounted weapons which could not have been spirited out of the country in a suitcase under cover of darkness.

Powell told the Security Council that even the low end of 100 tons of agent would enable Saddam Hussein to cause mass casualties across more than 100 square miles of territory, an area nearly five times the size of New York city.

The controversy over weapons of mass destruction has become so intense that even British Prime Minister Tony Blair took a severe beating in the House of Commons last week.

Blair’s intelligence
In September last year, Blair presented Parliament with a dossier titled "Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction -- the Assessment of the British Government." The report concluded that "intelligence (British?) has established beyond doubt .... that Saddam has continued to produce chemical and biological weapons."

The most dramatic claim was that these were weapons would be "ready within 45 minutes of an order to use them." But the claims have so far been proved to be hollow-- and publicly ridiculed.

The Blair government, a faithful ally of the US, has been accused of "doctoring" intelligence reports to build a phony case for the war. An indignant Blair denied the charges but expressed confidence that sooner or later the incriminating weapons will be found.

If not, well, the time is right to plant them, and pronounce to the world at large: "We told you so". But after all does it really matter whether or not Iraq had weapons of mass destruction to justify a war that helped oust a ruthless dictator?

Robin Cook, the former British Foreign Secretary who quit the Blair government in protest against the war, says: "It matters immensely." The basis on which the war was sold to the House of Commons and to the British people, he said, was that Saddam represented a serious threat.

Ian Duncan Smith, leader of the opposition Conservative Party in the House of Commons, was equally forthright when he said that the "truth is nobody believes a word" of what Blair was saying because he had duped the British public with false intelligence. Are the Brits ready for a "regime change" at 10 Downing Street, London?

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