President Bush's top foreign policy advisers insisted on Sunday that all of the evidence available to them starting last October pointed to efforts by Saddam Hussein to revive his weapons programs. They dismissed as "revisionist history" charges that intelligence had been twisted to justify an attack on Iraq.
The comments on Sunday by Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs Condoleezza Rice, were part of a coordinated effort by the White House to quell questions about whether they had exaggerated the threat posed by Saddam.
But the arguments that they put forward varied somewhat from the explanations that senior administration officials offered to reporters a few weeks ago on a background basis and appeared to open the possibility that, in the end, US forces might find that Saddam had several development programs under way, but few or no weapons ready for use.
PHOTOS: REUTERS
Bush appeared to be edging toward that direction on Thursday, when he told troops at the US Central Command in Qatar that mobile biological laboratories found in Iraq showed that Saddam was "capable" of producing biological weapons. That is somewhat different from saying that he possessed chemical and biological weapons, the argument that Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney made repeatedly before the war.
On Sunday, Rice argued that the administration made the best judgment it could and that a succession of central intelligence directors had made the same judgments as far back as 1996.
"Successive CIA directors, successive administrations, have known that we had every reason to judge that he had weapons of mass destruction," Rice argued on the NBC News program Meet the Press. She said that if the CIA had come to a different conclusion, it would have constituted a failure to "connect the dots," a clear reference to the term used to question why the agency did not put together evidence that a terror attack was in the works before Sept. 11, 2001.
"The fact is this was a program that was built for concealment," Rice said. "We've always known that. We have always known that it would take some time to put together a full picture of his weapons of mass destruction programs."
Powell and Rice did not repeat the argument that many in the administration had made privately in recent weeks -- that Saddam had chemical "precursors" and biological agents but kept them in nonweaponized form so that they would not arouse the suspicions of UN inspectors. Those same officials went on to tell reporters, before and during Bush's Middle East trip, that Saddam did not have time between the withdrawal of the inspectors and the start of the war to put together the components into chemical and biological weapons.
Both officials disputed suggestions that the administration had exaggerated intelligence to build a larger coalition, or to win domestic support for a war. They both said it would take more time to uncover the evidence of Iraq's weapons efforts -- the time they were unwilling to extend to UN inspectors in March. Interviews with scientists and others are proceeding, they said, and another 1,300 US experts are now joining the search.
But it is unclear how much time Rice and Bush have before a number of congressional inquiries begin, and other nations begin to question US credibility on similar issues, including evidence about the Iranian and North Korean weapons programs, among others.
The crucial document Rice cited was the October 2002 "National Intelligence Estimate," which was the basis for administration statements that Saddam possessed proscribed weapons.
That intelligence estimate bore the stamp of George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence. On Sunday, White House officials appeared to be subtly shifting the issue from whether they twisted conclusions to what the CIA said as it prepared the estimate, a consensus document that is supposed to reflect the conclusions of competing intelligence services.
The document noted the extensive findings of UN inspectors, before their withdrawal from Iraq in 1998, of missing stores of chemical weapons, biological precursors and equipment.
Powell, appearing on Fox News, noted that the mobile biological laboratories found by US forces bore great resemblance to those he described to the United Nations in February. "I would put before you exhibit A, the mobile biological labs that we have found," he said. `Now, people are saying, well, are they truly mobile biological labs? Yes, they are."
So far, however, there has been no evidence that the labs were ever put into use in producing the critical materials for biological weapons.
Asian perspectives of the US have shifted from a country once perceived as a force of “moral legitimacy” to something akin to “a landlord seeking rent,” Singaporean Minister for Defence Ng Eng Hen (黃永宏) said on the sidelines of an international security meeting. Ng said in a round-table discussion at the Munich Security Conference in Germany that assumptions undertaken in the years after the end of World War II have fundamentally changed. One example is that from the time of former US president John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address more than 60 years ago, the image of the US was of a country
‘UNUSUAL EVENT’: The Australian defense minister said that the Chinese navy task group was entitled to be where it was, but Australia would be watching it closely The Australian and New Zealand militaries were monitoring three Chinese warships moving unusually far south along Australia’s east coast on an unknown mission, officials said yesterday. The Australian government a week ago said that the warships had traveled through Southeast Asia and the Coral Sea, and were approaching northeast Australia. Australian Minister for Defence Richard Marles yesterday said that the Chinese ships — the Hengyang naval frigate, the Zunyi cruiser and the Weishanhu replenishment vessel — were “off the east coast of Australia.” Defense officials did not respond to a request for comment on a Financial Times report that the task group from
BLIND COST CUTTING: A DOGE push to lay off 2,000 energy department workers resulted in hundreds of staff at a nuclear security agency being fired — then ‘unfired’ US President Donald Trump’s administration has halted the firings of hundreds of federal employees who were tasked with working on the nation’s nuclear weapons programs, in an about-face that has left workers confused and experts cautioning that the Department of Government Efficiency’s (DOGE’s) blind cost cutting would put communities at risk. Three US officials who spoke to The Associated Press said up to 350 employees at the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) were abruptly laid off late on Thursday, with some losing access to e-mail before they’d learned they were fired, only to try to enter their offices on Friday morning
CONFIDENT ON DEAL: ‘Ukraine wants a seat at the table, but wouldn’t the people of Ukraine have a say? It’s been a long time since an election, the US president said US President Donald Trump on Tuesday criticized Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and added that he was more confident of a deal to end the war after US-Russia talks. Trump increased pressure on Zelenskiy to hold elections and chided him for complaining about being frozen out of talks in Saudi Arabia. The US president also suggested that he could meet Russian President Vladimir Putin before the end of the month as Washington overhauls its stance toward Russia. “I’m very disappointed, I hear that they’re upset about not having a seat,” Trump told reporters at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida when asked about the Ukrainian
RSS