Centerfield

That's an interesting possibility-- but I don't think we could figure out the answer without access to the appropriate documents, all of which are certainly going to remain classified in perpetuity...

And we seem to have had bad information long before we made it over to Afghanistan and Iraq, or stocked the Gitmo kennel. Like, for a decade or so. Come to think of it, pretty much everybody had bad info about Iraqi WMD for quite a while--including France, Russia, Germany, Israel, and so on.

I blame it on those cheapie Made-In-China Popeil Pocket Cattle Prods. We should never have outsourced.

This is just another lame attempt to link two unrelated phenomena. We’ve seen a lot of that around here lately.

The Bush administration thought that Iraq had WMDs for a number of reasons none of which has anything to do with torture. Pretty much the same reasons that the Clinton administration thought that Iraq had WMDs.

While were are on this subject, has anyone bothered to disprove the theory that Saddam sent his WMDs to Syria? Have there been any inspections in Syria since the war? Just wondering.

This fiction that everyone thought Iraq had WMD's needs to be purged a bit. There were considereable doubts i n Germany, Russia and England about Iraq's WMD capabilities.

In the fall of 2002, the Germans found the intelligence on Iraq mobile weapons labs, as provided by "Curveball", unreliable. The Germans told CIA officials that Curveball was drunk, insane and had suffered a nervous breakdown.

In the Downing street memos British intelligence had doubts about Iraq WMDs.
From the David Corn at The Nation
A March 8, 2002, options paper prepared by Blair's national security aides noted that Iraq's nuclear weapons program was "effectively frozen," its missile program "severely restricted," and its chemical and biological weapons programs "hindered."
Saddam Hussein, it reported, "has not succeeded in seriously threatening his neighbors." This paper also said the intelligence on Iraq's supposed WMD program was "poor." It noted that there was no "recent evidence" of Iraqi ties to al Qaeda.

Russia
On October 11, 2002, Putin said that Russia did not have any reliable evidence that Iraq had WMD, and that it had not received any such evidence from the United States.[29] On November 11, 2002, Deputy Foreign Minister Fedotov said that the issues Russia was concerned about included the elimination of rocket fuel and clarification of information on the elimination of Scud missiles.[30] As recently as January 28, 2003, Foreign Minister Ivanov ruled out the possibility that Iraq was capable of quickly producing nuclear weapons.[31] That view was shared by the Ministry of Atomic Energy, according to which Iraq did not have the technological and scientific capabilities to create nuclear weapons.[32] The head of the Russian Munitions Agency Zinoviy Pak said on February 7, 2002, that Iraq did not have modern chemical weapons and lacked the necessary infrastructure. Pak also said that the Chemical Weapons Convention permits some research in this area in order to devise defensive measures.[33] At the same time, the ultimate goal of Iraqi disarmament was never challenged by any Russian
officials. (the numbers refer to references in the original article)

correction, second sentence should read
There were considereable doubts in Germany, Russia and England about Iraq's WMD capabilities BEFORE the US invaded Iraq.

The US estimates of Saddam's WMD's precede our having anyone in custody to torture.

Not that I'm advocating torture, but torturers aren't so stupid to believe everything that is told to them. Information given in any interrogation, by any means, have to be verified. For instance, if prisoners who have been isolated from each other tell the same story, that suggests it is not made up, but real. The best verification is when a prisoner refers to a location which can be inspected, and you then go to the location to see if there is physical evidence which corraborates the prisoner's account.

What the Iraqi WMD intelligence debacle revealed was that the Administration only heard the "intelligence" that it wanted to hear, and disregarded anything contrary to its preconceived notions. This kind of mindset is particularly dangerous when dealing with coerced information from a prisoner who is highly motivated to tell an interrogator what he wants to hear.

OK Marcus, going solely from my memory it seemed the UN was pretty hot to get its inspectors back on the ground in Iraq and was repeatedly frustrated that Saddam was not being forthright with them and concealing something, if only info about what he did with the WMD. That doesn't sound like an international community highly skeptical of any WMD.

I'd say to for both "sides" of this argument: the "Bush lied"(or "believed its own lies") side and the "it didn't matter because he was a tyrant/ democracy in the Middle East" side, we should "lay low" and let time and the historians straighten it out. All we accomplish at this point is scoring political points. (And there are so many other ways to score points.)

Think of it as a new version of "Who's Deep Throat?"

Could it have been that the U.N. had some idea of what Bush was trying to do?
However aside from that (just how the war got started), maybe the Democratic senators should offer a deal to the administration- they will OK the Bolton nomination if Bush et al will allow UN inspectors in to Gitmo. The Red Cross has been there but their findings are not made public the UN's are.

There's an important difference between Clinton-era knowledge of Iraqi WMDs and post-911 knowledge. There was an inspection regime on during most of the Clinton Administration, except for the bit where we bombed him and contained him for awhile. There was no doubt that he'd had gas weapons and research labs, that were probably mostly gotten by the inspectors or the missiles in 1998. There was no doubt that he was researching bio and nuclear weapons, and had high hopes of eventually getting The Bomb; these hopes were delayed by the inspection regime and '98 bombings.

In 2002, that knowledge was stale, but one had to think that Saddam's hopes of eventually escaping sanctions and getting nuclear weapons were high; he was still violating the cease-fire at every opportunity, including firing at coalition aircraft. One had to fear the real possiblility that Saddam might think that he could deliver a nuclear weapon via his terrorist buddies without being held to account by ballistic radar.

Now, Bush did mention the future nuclear development threat as a reason for action, but it came after current WMDs in all the speeches. I don't believe that this was by any means have been necessary to get public approval for war. For whatever reason, he must have thought they were there.

Well, I, for one, don't think the Administration went to war on account of WMDs, but that they believed the WMDs would nonetheless be found and would therefore present very convenient ex post facto evidence.

That being said, then, I think the Administration truly believed they would find WMDs for many of the reasons that have been discussed above, not to mention one that seems to be rarely mentioned-- and that's that much of the weapons program material simply could not be accounted for by the inspectors or Saddam's regime. In this absence, the Administration simply assumed that it was because that material was being hidden. The fact that it has never turned up obviously leads one to other conclusions today, but then hindsight is 20/20.

Another reminder for everyone, that the main thrust of the Bush Administration's argument to go to Iraq was "imminent threat". This despite the armies of reporters and inspectors in Iraq. One wonders ifthe administrati9on approved of torture, rendition, intdeterminate jailing, etc. because all other avenues to justify the war have evaporated away.

I think the Administration believed that Saddam had WMD but I think it was based on two premises: (1) Saddam wouldn't have given up his WMD program voluntarily; and (2) the intelligence agencies are liberal wimps who we can't trust. Marcus is correct that there were doubts, but according to Ken Pollack, who was in Clinton's NSC and who wrote a book advocating the war, the general consensus among the various intelligence agencies throughout the world was that he did have WMD. But this was partly because no one believe he would voluntarily get rid of the stuff he was building. As Marcus said, all the agencies, including the CIA, had doubts about how solid the intelligence was. It wasn't unreasonable to think that he had WMD--the question is whether the intelligence was definitive enough to go to war over. That's not necessarily an easy question to answer because intelligence is not usually going to provide smoking guns. Still, it's pretty clear that the Administration ignored considerable doubts about the reliability of the intelligence. Moreover, as Marcus notes, the issue is whether Saddam was an "imminent" threat so that there was no time to do anything but go to war. If the US had intelligence on Dec. 6 that the Japanese fleet was preparing to attack Pearl Harbor, no one would say, wait until you have more definitive intelligence because you act because the threat was so dangerous. In Saddam's case, it's hard to argue that the threat was so imminent that we had no time to wait.

I have not read anything about getting the WMD intelligence from tortured prisoners. What prisoners were there to torture?

I'm going to go ahead and pretty much agree with Marcus on his 1st point. Here's the thing guys...everyone once knew or had a very good idea what sorts of weapons Iraq had. Then time passed without inspectors, not to mention a war, and oops, we didn't know anymore. No one outside Iraq had much of a clue.The reason for the inspectors was because we didn't know.

France, Germany and others felt the proper response to not really knowing was to wait and keep inspecting even in the face of incomplete cooperation. We were unwilling to wait in the face of incomplete cooperation, primarily due to our post-9/11 sense of urgency. Not judging the merits of either view, just characterizing my understanding of the positions.

I'm going to quarrel with Marcus's 2nd point. Bush, in his address on the topic to the nation, is on record as having said that we could not afford to wait until the threat was imminent. This is essentially a declaration that the threat was NOT imminent. Right from the horse's mouth. The idea expressed by Bush (regardless of some statements by other admin officals that reflected incomplete understanding) was that the potential negative outcome was too grave to allow delay. His argument was not temporally based. It was based on scale, and on the bellicosity of the enemy.

Regardless of its merits then, Bush's doctrine of preemption is based on an assessment of how potentially dangerous a situation could become, and not upon how soon this danger could be visited upon us. Again, not judging, just characterizing. If we want to discuss the merits of the Bush pre-emption doctrine, let's at least understand its nature.

My experience is that the mischaracterization that the pre-emption doctrine is based upon temporal urgency is closely followed by evidence that Iraq did not represent a situation of temporal urgency. Clearly, if you understand the pre-emption doctrine as described by the President, you can see that this argument is a straw man.

So nobody has an answer on the WMD going to Syria theory?

The current terrorist trial in Jordan indicates that at least some of the twenty tons of materials they were planning to use came from Syria, and that the terrorists brought them into Jordan from in three trucks. The Jordanian government has said that the captured trucks entered from Syria and were captured 75 miles inside the border, heading for Amman, and had been trked from the border. Syria denies this--what a shock. I'm still waiting for the testimony on the exact "materials" involved, but initial reports were of 71 or 72 chemical agents, including amounts of sarin and VX. Syria is not known to have ever manufactured or possessed sarin or VX. Iraq did.

In other words, nothing solid yet. Some "credible" intel reports. Some satellite-confirmed major convoys from Iraq to Syria. Some possible trans-shipment of chemical agents by al-Qaeda operators via Syria. But short of catching stuff leaving Syria (which might or might not come out in the current trial) or going into Syria and finding stuff, no way to answer with assurance. Possible, yes. Proven, nope.

Thanks, Tully. It sounds like a possible answer to the WMD question. I have yet to hear a definite answer either way but given the porous nature of the Iraq/Syria border it is at least plausible that the WMDs could have been sent there.