Wednesday, June 04, 2003
Newsweek Article about the WMD's in IRAQ.
It blows away the smoke of any supposed "Smoking Gun" the Bush administration claimed to have.
Here is an intriguing section of the article about Chalabi and Iraqi defectors with WMD information. Chalabi had reasons to want a US invastion for his own political aspirations in a post Saddam Iraq. Bush had reason to want to beleive everything the defectors told him about a WMD program. It's a marriage made in heaven especially when the advice from the CIA is ignored.
Then came the defectors. Former Iraqi officials fleeing the regime told of underground bunkers and labs hiding vast stores of chemical and biological weapons and nuclear materials. The CIA, at first, was skeptical. Defectors in search of safe haven sometimes stretch or invent the facts. The true believers in the Bush administration, on the other hand, embraced the defectors and credited their stories. Many of the defectors were sent to the Americans by Ahmed Chalabi, the politically ambitious and controversial Iraqi exile. Chalabi’s chief patron is Richard Perle, the former Reagan Defense Department official and charter member of the so-called neocons, the hard-liners who occupy many top jobs in the Bush national-security establishment.
The CIA was especially wary of Chalabi, whom they regarded as a con man (Chalabi has been convicted of bank fraud in Jordan; he denies the charges). But rather than accept the CIA’s doubts, top officials in the Bush Defense Department set up their own team of intelligence analysts, a small but powerful shop now called the Office of Special Plans—and, half-jokingly, by its members, “the Cabal.”
It blows away the smoke of any supposed "Smoking Gun" the Bush administration claimed to have.
Here is an intriguing section of the article about Chalabi and Iraqi defectors with WMD information. Chalabi had reasons to want a US invastion for his own political aspirations in a post Saddam Iraq. Bush had reason to want to beleive everything the defectors told him about a WMD program. It's a marriage made in heaven especially when the advice from the CIA is ignored.
Then came the defectors. Former Iraqi officials fleeing the regime told of underground bunkers and labs hiding vast stores of chemical and biological weapons and nuclear materials. The CIA, at first, was skeptical. Defectors in search of safe haven sometimes stretch or invent the facts. The true believers in the Bush administration, on the other hand, embraced the defectors and credited their stories. Many of the defectors were sent to the Americans by Ahmed Chalabi, the politically ambitious and controversial Iraqi exile. Chalabi’s chief patron is Richard Perle, the former Reagan Defense Department official and charter member of the so-called neocons, the hard-liners who occupy many top jobs in the Bush national-security establishment.
The CIA was especially wary of Chalabi, whom they regarded as a con man (Chalabi has been convicted of bank fraud in Jordan; he denies the charges). But rather than accept the CIA’s doubts, top officials in the Bush Defense Department set up their own team of intelligence analysts, a small but powerful shop now called the Office of Special Plans—and, half-jokingly, by its members, “the Cabal.”
