Read David Corn About Bush's Failures to Secure Weapons in May!!!

[DrFunkenstein]

Note: I had often felt that these articles were some of the most politically lethal weapons in the Kerry arsenal. I ultimately chose to push for mention of Tora Bora (got it) and the Rumsfeld/Powell divide (didn't), I always felt that this was one of the most politically useful findings of Bush incompetence/mendacity.

I highly recommend reading both articles in their entirety.

During an April 17 press briefing, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said, "I don't think we'll discover anything, myself. I think what will happen is we'll discover people who will tell us where to go find it. It is not like a treasure hunt, where you just run around looking everywhere, hoping you find something.... The inspectors didn't find anything, and I doubt that we will." Imagine if Rumsfeld had said that before the war: We're invading another country to eliminate its weapons of mass destruction, but we won't find them unless people there tell us where they are.

Bush had maintained that Saddam Hussein was a danger partly because he was close to possessing nuclear weapons. The US military, though, did not bother to visit Iraq's number-one nuclear site. A Washington Post story noted that before the war the vast Tuwaitha Nuclear Research Center held about 4,000 pounds of partially enriched uranium and more than ninety-four tons of natural uranium, as well as radioactive cesium, cobalt and strontium. This is stuff that would be valuable to people seeking to enrich uranium into weapons-grade material or merely interested in constructing a dirty bomb. Yet, the paper reported, "Defense officials acknowledge that the US government has no idea whether any of Tuwaitha's potentially deadly contents have been stolen, because it has not dispatched investigations to appraise the site. What it does know, according to officials at the Pentagon and US Central Command, is that the sprawling campus, 11 miles south of Baghdad, lay unguarded for days and that looters made their way inside."

Most of the facilities suspected of being used to manufacture or store chemical and biological weapons have also gone unexamined. On April 28 British Prime Minister Tony Blair said, "We started off, I think, with around about almost 150 sites to search and we were beginning to look at seven of them. Actually, the sites that we have got as the result of information now is closer to 1,000.... We have looked at many of those, but nothing like a majority of them." Days earlier, Judith Miller, a New York Times reporter embedded with one of four specialized military teams looking for WMD, noted (low in the story) that "two of the four mobile teams originally assigned to search for unconventional weapons have since been reassigned to investigate war crimes or sites unrelated to weapons." Sure, war crimes are important. But more so than finding weapons that can kill thousands and that happened to be the basis for the invasion and occupation?

Why is Richard Perle not screaming about this from the roof of his French vacation house? Blair, for one, practically sounds bored with the topic of WMD. "Our first priority," he recently said, "has got to be to stabilize the country, the second is the humanitarian situation, and the third--and we can take our time about this and so we should--is to make sure that we investigate the weapons of mass destruction." Take our time? Wasn't the point that the United States and Britain could not wait one week longer before invading because it was necessary to neutralize the threat from these weapons?

So now they tell us. The Pentagon was not ready to go with an extensive WMD search-and-secure mission, and, after the war, there is no need to rush. And by the way, there might not be any WMD to show for all the effort.

http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20030519&s=corn

A list of sites that still required investigation weeks after most of the fighting was finished was an indication that Bush had not moved quickly to counter the threat he had claimed existed. On May 7, Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence Stephen Cambone noted that before the war the Pentagon drew up a list of about 600 sites possibly related to weapons of mass destruction. Only seventy had been examined by the military's WMD-hunters, along with another forty sites added to the roster during the war. No unconventional weapons were found. The President didn't mention that on the carrier. Nor did he mention that his Administration had not mounted an all-out WMD search-and-secure mission. And as a series of Washington Post stories show, looters ransacked key nuclear facilities before US units looking for WMDs arrived. Partially enriched uranium and other radioactive material--as well as documents covering nuclear weapons design matters--are presumed missing. Were the plunderers petty thieves or the terrorists Bush claimed were in Iraq in search of WMDs? In any event, the war has been a boon to would-be dirty-bomb makers.

The leisurely pace and less than comprehensive nature of the WMD hunt borders on the criminal. The Pentagon's new, 2,000-person Iraq Survey Team--which will look for WMDs as one of several missions--is not scheduled to hit Iraq until the end of May. (The Bush Administration has not invited the UN to participate in the inspections.) Why was such a force of specialists not assembled before the war and ready to roll when the invasion was launched? At this point, a WMD search may unearth evidence to shore up Bush's claim that Saddam Hussein had WMDs, but it is unlikely to prevent unconventional weaponry and related material from falling into the wrong hands. The time for that sort of mission is long gone.

Bush was fooling the sailors of the Lincoln--and the rest of the nation--when he suggested that the WMD search was only beginning. The Johnny-come-lately Iraq Survey Team is a follow-up to a smaller effort that's mostly a bust. At the war's end, the 75th Exploitation Task Force started looking for WMDs. By mid-May, it was shutting down. Col. Robert Smith, one of its key officers, told the Post the unit's leaders no longer thought that "we're going to find chemical rounds sitting next to a gun.... That's what we came here for, but we're past that." The 75th focused on a short list of nineteen high-priority sites and sixty-eight non-WMD sites that might hold useful clues; it managed to examine seventeen of the former and forty-five of the latter. Its members were disappointed and frustrated. They had expected to find what Secretary of State Colin Powell described during his UN presentation: evidence of a nuclear weapons program, hundreds of tons of chemical and biological agents along with missiles to carry them. They uncovered nothing. Col. Richard McPhee, who commanded the 75th, said, "Do I know where are? I wish I did...but we will find them. Or not. I don't know. I'm being honest here." More honest than his Commander in Chief.

http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20030602&s=corn