State Dept. refutes CIA on Mobile Labs

[Conclamo Ludus]

From The New York Times

In a classified June 2 memorandum, the officials said, the department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research said it was premature to conclude that the trailers were evidence of an Iraqi biological weapons program, as President Bush has done. The disclosure of the memorandum is the clearest sign yet of disagreement between intelligence agencies over the assertion, which was produced jointly by the C.I.A. and the Defense Intelligence Agency and made public on May 28 on the C.I.A. Web site. Officials said the C.I.A. and D.I.A. did not consult with other intelligence agencies before issuing the report.

The report on the trailers was initially prepared for the White House, and Mr. Bush has cited it as proof that Iraq indeed had a biological weapons program, as the United States has repeatedly alleged, although it has yet to produce any other conclusive evidence.

In an interview with Polish television on May 30, Mr. Bush cited the trailers as evidence that the United States had "found the weapons of mass destruction" it was looking for. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell echoed that assessment in a public statement the next day, saying that the accuracy of prewar assessments linking Iraqi trailers to a biological weapons program had been borne out by the discovery.

Some intelligence analysts had previously disputed the C.I.A. report, but it had not been known that the C.I.A. report did not reflect an interagency consensus or that any intelligence agency had later objected to its finding.

The State Department bureau raised its objections in a memorandum to Mr. Powell, according to Congressional officials. They said the memorandum was cast as a dissent to the C.I.A. report, and that it said that the evidence found to date did not justify the conclusion that the trailers could have had no other purpose than for use as mobile weapons laboratories.

The State Department spokesman, Richard A. Boucher, said tonight: "I'm not in a position to comment on reports of classified memorandum from our intelligence folks." But a State Department official who spoke on condition of anonymity said: "We do rely on I&R for their best judgment on things, but when you weigh in all the factors, the C.I.A. and D.I.A. folks are the ones who have been out there, and their conclusion was that these trailers were mobile labs."
An administration official sympathetic to Mr. Powell said the memo put him in an uncomfortable position, but would not characterize Mr. Powell's view of its findings.

The reasons cited in the State Department memorandum to justify its dissent could not be learned. But in interviews earlier this month in Washington and the Middle East, American and British analysts with direct access to the evidence also disputed the C.I.A.'s claims, saying that the mobile units were more likely intended for other purposes and that the evaluation process had been damaged by a rush to judgment.

Administration officials said one argument made in the State Department report was that each of the two trailers and one laboratory discovered by the United States in Iraq could constitute only part of what the C.I.A. report said it believed had been two- or three-trailer systems necessary for the manufacture of chemical weapons. The missing trailers have not been found.

Among the alternative purposes for the trailers that the State Department report described as plausible were that they had been intended for the refueling of Iraqi missiles, one administration official said.

The State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research is a small but important agency in the intelligence community. Its principal purpose is to provide the Secretary of State and his top advisers with intelligence analysis independent of other agencies, but it also has a voice in the drafting of national intelligence estimates and other documents that are supposed to reflect the consensus of the intelligence community.

The fact that the C.I.A. and the D.I.A. did not consult with other agencies in producing the so-called white paper reflects a rare but not unknown approach, officials from the intelligence agencies and Congress said. The government's intelligence apparatus spans more than a dozen agencies, and officials usually try to reach consensus before making their findings public.

The exclusion of the State Department's intelligence bureau and other agencies seemed unusual, several government officials said, because of the high-profile subject.

Administration officials said the State Department agency was given no warning that the C.I.A. report was being produced, or made public.

A C.I.A. official defended the process by which the agency reached its conclusion, saying that the C.I.A. and the D.I.A. were most intimately familiar with the physical evidence and human intelligence related to the trailers, and were thus most qualified to issue public findings. But a Defense Department official acknowledged today that some analysts in the D.I.A. in Iraq had also objected to the conclusions.

The C.I.A. has said that its initial information about the use of mobile trailers as biological weapons laboratories came from a former Iraqi scientist, and that the discovery of the trailers appeared to have confirmed intelligence that he provided.

"We didn't shop that paper around because we were the ones who were most knowledgeable about it," the C.I.A. official said. "We were the ones who knew from a former Iraqi scientist what to expect, and we didn't have to ask a handful of people in small agencies."

But administration officials sympathetic to the State Department said that the department's intelligence bureau felt it had been deliberately shut out of the process. The intelligence bureau has been more skeptical than the C.I.A. and D.I.A. on matters related to Iraq's suspected illicit weapons program and its ties to terrorism.

An intelligence official sympathetic to the C.I.A. view said the State Department intelligence bureau's skepticism had been well known and that seeking its input on the report would have served no useful purpose.

The C.I.A. official said the State Department document was an internal memorandum and that it had not been read by George Tenet, the director of central intelligence, or other officials at the agency.

Interesting. More confusion over these mobile weapons labs. Are we ever going to get a consensus? CIA says that they believe they could be used to make weapons if they have another trailer. Whether you are on the left or the right, we've got to find these damn WMD's. These labs weren't used to sell ice cream. Where are they?!

[pickledaddy]

I find it disturbing that we haven't found any evidence of WMD when we seemed to know the locations of all of these hidden bunkers and other sites where they were kept. Remember Colin Powell's speech to the UN?

[seretogis]

Intelligence agencies will never agree 100% of the time on anything, it's just a fact of life. Even if the mobile labs were used for biological weapons, even if it's proved beyond a doubt, there will still be at attitude of "well.. uh.. where's the OTHER stuff?" amongst the liberal media. It's not about finding WMDs anymore, it's about smearing Dubya, and by proxy anyone who isn't a flaming liberal nut-job.

[Sparhawk]

Originally posted by seretogis
Intelligence agencies will never agree 100% of the time on anything, it's just a fact of life. Even if the mobile labs were used for biological weapons, even if it's proved beyond a doubt, there will still be at attitude of "well.. uh.. where's the OTHER stuff?" amongst the liberal media. It's not about finding WMDs anymore, it's about smearing Dubya, and by proxy anyone who isn't a flaming liberal nut-job.

By "where's the OTHER stuff", I suppose you're talking about actual weapons of mass destruction?

I'm not terribly inclined to give the CIA and DIA the benefit of the doubt, seeing as it was their intelligence that said iraq's WMD constituted a 'clear and present danger' to the US.

[chavos]

The Bush Doctrine At Risk
George F. Will

An antidote for grand imperial ambitions is a taste of imperial success. Swift victory in Iraq may have whetted the appetite of some Americans for further military exercises in regime change, but more than seven weeks after the president said, "Major combat operations in Iraq have ended," combat operations, minor but lethal, continue.

And overshadowing the military achievement is the failure -- so far -- to find, or explain the absence of, weapons of mass destruction that were the necessary and sufficient justification for preemptive war. The doctrine of preemption -- the core of the president's foreign policy -- is in jeopardy.

To govern is to choose, almost always on the basis of very imperfect information. But preemption presupposes the ability to know things -- to know about threats with a degree of certainty not requisite for decisions less momentous than those for waging war.

Some say the war was justified even if WMD are not found nor their destruction explained, because the world is "better off" without Saddam Hussein. Of course it is better off. But unless one is prepared to postulate a U.S. right, perhaps even a duty, to militarily dismantle any tyranny -- on to Burma? -- it is unacceptable to argue that Hussein's mass graves and torture chambers suffice as retrospective justifications for preemptive war. Americans seem sanguine about the failure -- so far -- to validate the war's premise about the threat posed by Hussein's WMD, but a long-term failure would unravel much of this president's policy and rhetoric.

Hussein, forced by the defection of his son-in-law, acknowledged in the mid-1990s his possession of chemical and biological weapons. President Clinton, British, French and German intelligence agencies, and even Hans Blix (who tells the British newspaper the Guardian, "We know for sure that they did exist") have expressed certainty about Iraq's having WMD at some point.

A vast multinational conspiracy of bad faith, using fictitious WMD as a pretext for war, is a wildly implausible explanation of the failure to find WMD. What is plausible? James Woolsey, Clinton's first CIA director, suggests the following:

As war approached, Hussein, a killer but not a fighter, was a parochial figure who had not left Iraq since 1979. He was surrounded by terrified sycophants and several Russian advisers who assured him that if Russia could not subdue Grozny in Chechnya, casualty-averse Americans would not conquer Baghdad.

Based on his experience in the 1991 Persian Gulf War, Hussein assumed there would be a ground offensive only after prolonged bombing. U.S. forces would conquer the desert, then stop. He could manufacture civilian casualties -- perhaps by blowing up some of his own hospitals -- to inflame world opinion and could count on his European friends to force a halt in the war, based on his promise to open Iraq to inspections, having destroyed his WMD on the eve of war.

Or shortly after the war began. Hussein, suggests Woolsey, was stunned when Gen. Tommy Franks began the air and ground offenses simultaneously and then "pulled a Patton," saying, in effect, never mind my flanks, I'll move so fast they can't find my flanks. Hussein, Woolsey suggests, may have moved fast to destroy the material that was the justification for a war he intended to survive, and may have survived.

Such destruction need not have been a huge task.

In Britain, where political discourse is far fiercer than in America, Prime Minister Tony Blair is being roasted about the missing WMD by, among many others, Robin Cook, formerly his foreign secretary. Cook says: "Such weapons require substantial industrial plant and a large workforce. It is inconceivable that both could have been kept concealed for the two months we have been in occupation of Iraq."

Rubbish, says Woolsey: Chemical or biological weapons could have been manufactured with minor modifications of a fertilizer plant, or in a plant as small as a microbrewery attached to a restaurant. The 8,500 liters of anthrax that Hussein once admitted to having would weigh about 8.5 tons and would fill about half of a tractor-trailer truck. The 25,000 liters that Colin Powell cited in his U.N. speech could be concealed in two trucks -- or in much less space if the anthrax were powdered.

For the president, the missing weapons are not a political problem. Frank Luntz, a Republican pollster, says Americans are happily focused on Iraqis liberated rather than WMD not found, so we "feel good about ourselves."

But unless America's foreign policy is New Age therapy to make the public feel mellow, feeling good about the consequences of an action does not obviate the need to assess the original rationale for the action.

Until WMD are found, or their absence accounted for, there is urgent explaining to be done.

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Yeah....liberal smear job, my a$$.

[The_Dude]

act of desperation

[seretogis]

Originally posted by The_Dude
act of desperation

I agree with you, Dude. The whimpering about WMDs is nothing but an act of desperation by the Dems and anti-Bush people who lack a substantial candidate. The only way that their presidential candidates will stand a chance is if they manage to knock Bush down a few notches, and according to polls (which are a load anyhow) it isn't working.

Quick, help fan the flames!

[smooth]

lol,

polls are inaccurate, but even so they clearly indicate our president is in the lead...

[Nad Adam]

WTF, isn't it time to let the UN inspectors in. What would have happend here if only the CIA would have had access to the evidence?

And also:

Among the alternative purposes for the trailers that the State Department report described as plausible were that they had been intended for the refueling of Iraqi missiles, one administration official said.

Damn, Iraq must have been a threat if they had missiles so advanced that they needed refueling.

[The_Dude]

nice one.

by that i meant that they cant find anything, so they're going after the minutest thing that they can remotely connect to 'imminent threat'.

maybe they were gonna drive those trucks over and blow up the entire middle east and europe?