PNAC-Kristol: Bush Made Misstatements on Iraq WMDs

Kristol: Bush Made Misstatements on Iraq WMDs

NewsMax

Sunday June 8, 2003

Update: Condoleeza Rice grilled on "Meet the Press" -Transcript up

"...In comments sure to be seized upon by Bush administration critics at home and abroad, one of the leading proponents of the war in Iraq said Sunday that President Bush may have misstated the case that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction before the U.S. attacked.

"We shouldn't deny, those of us who were hawks, that there could have been misstatements made, I think in good faith," Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol told "Fox News Sunday."

Asked, by whom, the leading Iraq war backer explained, "By the president and the secretary of state, that will turn out to be erroneous." ---

But the leading neoconservative writer and former chief of staff to Vice President Dan Quayle added, "I hope .. are found but I'm very skeptical.

"We have interrogated a lot of people and we haven't found a single person who said he participated in disposing, destroying the stock of weapons of mass destruction. Or in hiding them."

Condolleza Rice grilled on Meet the Press (MSNBC)

Tim Russert (Meet the Press, MSNBC) grilled Condoleeza Rice this morning on "hyped" evidence on Iraq, quoted older Bush and Cheney's statements and compared them with quotes of latest articles on forgeries on the Iraq-Niger link, the DIA report from September 2002, Greg Thielman's statements, Dick Cheney's "multiple visits" at the CIA and many other articles, which all had been mirrored by Global Free Press.

Rice accused the mentioned critics and "unknown names" as "revisionism".

Asked by Russert several times, if she and President Bush would support an investigation, Rice answered after a while, she would support an "investigation" but is convinced, WMD will be found. A transcript of the interviews is available at "Meet the Press".

In another interview with Sen. Carl Levin, D-MI, on U.S. intelligence concerns, Levin told Russert about the "inquiry" on Bush and Intelligence. Levin mentioned the empty "mobile labs" and said that President Bush and the United States' "credibility is on the line", when Bush argued in Poland last week, that WMD already have been found.

From the Transcript:

       MR. RUSSERT: Weapons of mass destruction: The president and people throughout the administration said that Saddam Hussein posed an imminent threat because he possessed weapons of mass destruction. Here’s what the president said.
       “Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised.” And the vice president: “Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction.”

       Was there truly an imminent threat and where are the weapons of mass destruction?
       DR. RICE: There are two separable issues here. What did we have in terms of intelligence estimates before going in and what have we found? In terms of intelligence estimates going in, the October 2002 intelligence estimate, national intelligence estimate, which is the definitive estimate by the intelligence community, said in its key judgments, Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction, for instance, on chemical weapons, 100 to 500 metric tons of chemical agent in the country; a biological weapons        program that was being rapidly reconstituted; evidence of efforts to reconstitute a nuclear program. And it was not just American intelligence. There was supporting intelligence from all over the world. There was, of course, the United Nations weapons inspectors talking about unaccounted for stockpiles of VX and anthrax and sarin gas.

       MR. RUSSERT: As you know, others are saying that the intelligence was—Senator Joe Biden used the word “hyped” by the administration to provide a rationale for the war. And this is what has been accumulated over the following weeks.

This from US News & World Report: “For months, the vice president’s office and the Pentagon had been more aggressive than either State or the CIA when it came to making the case against Iraq. Veteran intelligence officers were dismayed. ‘The policy decisions weren’t matching the reports we were reading every day,’ says an intelligence official.

In September 2002, US News has learned, the Defense Intelligence Agency issued a classified assessment of Iraq’s chemical weapons. It concluded: ‘There is no reliable information on whether Iraq is producing and stockpiling chemical weapons.’”

       And let me show you some comments of some other people and then give you a chance to respond. “‘The American people were manipulated,’ bluntly declares one person from the Defense Intelligence Agency who says he was privy to all the intelligence there on Iraq.”

And then this. “‘The al-Qaeda connection and nuclear weapons issue were the only ways that you could link Iraq to an imminent security threat to the U.S.,’ notes Greg Thielmann, who retired in September after 25 years in the State Department, the last four in the Bureau of Intelligence and Research. ‘And the administration was grossly distorting the intelligence on both things.’”

       And then this. “Ray McGovern, a retired C.I.A. analyst who briefed President Bush’s father in the White House in the 1980s, said that people in the agency were now ‘totally demoralized.’ He says, and others back him up, that the Pentagon took dubious accounts from emigres close to Ahmad Chalabi and gave these tales credibility they did not deserve.”

       And last night in Iowa, Bob Graham, the former chairman of the Intelligence Committee, now running for president, said, “Information was essentially politicized, manipulated. Those parts that the president liked became placed in the president’s speeches, and those that they didn’t like got put in the trash can.”

       DR. RICE: I just don’t understand this argument. As I said, revisionist history all over the place. This has gone on with Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction for the better part of 12 years. Successive CIA directors, successive administrations have known that we had every reason to judge that he had weapons of mass destruction.
       MR. RUSSERT: Where are they?
       DR. RICE: Well, Tim, the question of where and how we’re going to find his weapons of mass destruction is a separable question from what we knew going in. The fact is this was a program that was built for concealment. We’ve always known that. We’ve always known that it would take some time to put together a full picture of his weapon of mass destruction programs. We’ve always known that interviews with scientists and with those who were involved in the program would be the most credible evidence as to how this program was put together.

       MR. RUSSERT: The Washington Post reported that Vice President Cheney made numerous trips to the CIA and that some people at the CIA felt pressured because of his presence to provide information to the president and vice president that they wanted to see.

       DR. RICE: Simply not true. The vice president did make trips to the CIA, although no one talks about exactly how he’s briefed or even how the president is briefed. But I can tell you this: This administration has experienced foreign policy people who are consumers of intelligence and who do ask difficult and tough questions of intelligence officials. But the director of Central Intelligence has said and has assured all of us that he has no evidence or any belief that anybody was pressured at any time to change estimates or to change their assessments.

       MR. RUSSERT: Let me show you a specific comment the president made in his State of the Union message on January 28, 2003, when he talked about uranium from Africa. Let’s watch:

       (Videotape, January 28):
       PRES. BUSH: The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.
       (End videotape)

       MR. RUSSERT: Now, five weeks later, this is what appeared in The Washington Post: “A key piece of evidence linking Iraq to a nuclear weapons program appears to have been fabricated, the United Nations’ chief nuclear inspector said in a report that called into question U.S. and British claims about Iraq’s secret nuclear ambitions. Documents that purportedly showed Iraqi officials shopping for uranium in Africa two years ago were deemed ‘not authentic’ after careful scrutiny by U.N. and independent experts... ‘We fell for it,’ said one U.S. official who reviewed the documents.”

       In light of that, should the president retract those comments? And should there be a full, open government investigation into our intelligence agencies?
       DR. RICE: The president quoted a British paper. We did not know at the time—no one knew at the time, in our circles—maybe someone knew down in the bowels of the agency, but no one in our circles knew that there were doubts and suspicions that this might be a forgery. Of course, it was information that was mistaken.

       MR. RUSSERT: ...shouldn’t there be an investigation? Shouldn’t the president welcome an investigation?
       DR. RICE: The president is overseeing, at this point, an intelligence community that is quite busy looking for weapons of mass destruction and putting together a picture of what precisely we know happened in Iraq. The DCI has put together a group to look at what they know and what they knew before and what they find now. I’m quite sure the congressional committees that have oversight for intelligence are going to look into what was known before.
       MR. RUSSERT: Do you welcome that?
       DR. RICE: Of course.
       MR. RUSSERT: And will cooperate fully?
       DR. RICE: Of course. But, the key here is that those who want somehow to say that this intelligence was politicized, using selective quotations from a DIA paper, the bulk of which—the selective quotation doesn’t even stand up within the context of the DIA paper, let alone within the context of the intelligence estimates on which the president was relying.

       MR. RUSSERT: You are confident you will find weapons of mass destruction.
       DR. RICE: We are confident that we—I believe that we will find them.

Interview with Levin

       MR. RUSSERT: And we are back.
       Senator Carl Levin, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, will there be a full- blown official congressional investigation into our intelligence agencies regarding the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq?

       SEN. CARL LEVIN, (D-MI): We hope so. A number of us, both Democrats and Republicans, have called for this investigation. Just a week ago, Senator John Warner, who’s the Republican chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, called for a thorough investigation. Senator Rockefeller, who’s the senior Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, and I as the senior Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, have urged Senator Roberts, who’s the Republican Chairman of the Intelligence Committee, to join with the Armed Services Committee in a joint investigation, because this is such a critical issue.

If our intelligence is either manipulated or if it’s shaded or if, in some way, it is exaggerated, it is very, very dangerous for us, particularly as we go down the road and look at other threats.

       MR. RUSSERT: Has the president welcomed such an investigation?
       SEN. LEVIN: We just heard on your program that the security adviser said that they would welcome a congressional—I don’t know if she used the word investigation. That seems to be the whole issue here. The Republicans—at least some of them in the leadership—are resisting the word “investigation” so we’d be happy just to call it an inquiry.

       MR. RUSSERT: Senator, do you believe that President Bush’s credibility is on the line?
       SEN. LEVIN: I think that the nation’s credibility is on the line, as well as his.

       MR. RUSSERT: What happens if we do not find significant amounts of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq?

       SEN. LEVIN: I think our credibility will be weakened. Even the president has said that our credibility is significantly going to be determined by whether we find weapons of mass destruction or not. I was kind of stunned the other day when the president said that we have found weapons of mass destruction.
       He said this twice, I believe, in Poland, that we actually have found them. I think that raises credibility issues. But if we do not find weapons of mass destruction, I think that the credibility and reliability of our intelligence is going to be challenged in the future, and it’s going to be much more difficult for us to lead the world..."

Meanwhile, Former Federal Prosecutor John Loftus said on FOX TV, the government will make an announcement in 24 to 48 hours that will provide proof of WMD. "They were put on trucks and moved into Syria".

The british media continued to push "Iraq-Gate":

Daily Mirror

Sunday 8 June 2003 03:34pm

PENTAGON: NO CHEMICAL WEAPONS

Jun 7 2003

By Paul Gilfeather

"...GEORGE Bush was told by Pentagon chiefs there was NO evidence Iraq was building weapons of mass destruction, it emerged yesterday.

A previously top secret report said it did not have enough "reliable information" chemical and biological weapons were being amassed.

Yet the Defence Intelligence Agency report dates from September 2002 - when US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was publicly claiming Saddam Hussein had vast stockpiles of the arms.

President Bush and Premier Tony Blair are fighting accusations they "sexed up" Saddam's arsenal to win public support for war. America's National Security Council denied intelligence was spun..."

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