Thank God for the 24 hour news cycle. If it weren’t for CNNMSNBCCNBCFOX news we would not have known the intimate details of Brittany Spears’ wedding nor would we have been entertained by competing perspectives concerning the number of surgeries it took to destroy Michael Jackson’s face. Between beating to death the latest celebrity murders, weddings and deaths we have been told that there were no WMD in Iraq. Of course, the ramifications of this statement are lost on the consumers of mass media because the networks spend more time discussing why Michael Jackson was late to his first court appearance than the problems with David Kay’s testimony and interviews.
The media did report that Kay said there were no WMD and repeated his claim that the Administration based its decision on a massive intelligence failure. While many opponents of the Administration would insert a remark about Mr. Bush being a massive intelligence failure, I think such statements are seriously counterproductive and would like instead to focus on some serious problems with Kay’s deception concerning intelligence, his spintelligence.
Fox, has Kay claiming that after speaking with
CIA analysts he concluded that they were concernbed by “a lack of collection
capability than they were anything else.” This is an amazing statement
because in no public statement leading to the war did the Administration
say that their statements were based on extrapolation. Ari Fleischer, for
example, said, “We know for a fact that there are weapons there.” General
Franks said, “There is no doubt.” Secretary Powell said, “There can be
no doubt that Saddam Hussein has biological weapons and the capability
to rapidly produce more, many more.” Secretary Rumsfeld said, “He's amassed
large, clandestine stockpiles of biological weapons, including anthrax,
botulism toxin, possibly smallpox.” Mr. Bush said, “The evidence indicates
that Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program.” None of them
added, “And by the way, these statements are based on extrapolation from
documents and not on actual intelligence gathering.” It is clear from Dr.
Kay’s public statements that there was not an intelligence failure but
that the Administration made a decision to completely drop any equivocation
in the intelligence reports. Kay says as much responding to a statement
that the October 2002 NEI stated that the State Department could find no
evidence that Iraq had a nuclear weapons program. “Well, I think that's
true. There are caveats that clearly dropped out, dissenting opinions that
clearly dropped out, as you moved higher up and people read the headline
summaries.” This sounds eerily familiar, yet no one in the media has offered
the suggestion that the problem rests with a man who refuses to read reports
of more than five pages and has Dr. Rice and others give him the main points.
Interestingly, Kay directly calls into question
the State Department’s remarks on Iraq’s non-existent nuclear program by
saying that, “the State Department, after all, has no operatives in the
field. It's an analysis shop. That, in fact, the bulk, the CIA, DIA analyst,
who actually have direct contact with collection, thought, in fact, there
was a program there.” These, of course, were the very same analysts whom
he had just moments before claimed were concerned over their lack of collection
capability. It is quite clear that Kay’s statements beyond the factual
report that there are no WMD or related programs and that these have not
existed for quite some time were made to take pressure off the Administration.
Distracted by Janet Jackson’s nipple, the media have bought into the claim that the statements made by Administration officials were based on a “massive intelligence failure.” Buying into this framework makes it seems as if the media suffer from some sort of institutional amnesia. We do not have to wait for the investigation into whether or not Bush stuffed his crotch before he landed on the Lincoln to know who is responsible for the shaping of intelligence. When the transcript of Hussein Kamal’s interview with UNSCOM/IAEA was published in Newsweek. On August 26, 2002 “Big Time” Dick told a VFW gathering in Nashville that in 1995 Hussein Kamal had provided evidence that WMD and WMD programs were continuing in secret even as the UN was about to declare Iraq in compliance. Hussein Kamal’s statements were unequivocal. He said, “All chemical weapons were destroyed.” Concerning the activities of UNSCOM, he said, "You should not underestimate yourself. You are very effective in Iraq." Further he claimed, "I ordered destruction of all chemical weapons. All weapons - biological, chemical, missile, nuclear were destroyed.” He also said that the factories devoted to weapons programs were changed to produce pesticides and medicine.
This is vastly different from dropping equivocations out of reports. Both Cheney and Bush have made public statements concerning Kamal’s transcript that are directly contradicted by that document. Clearly, the fault lies not in intelligence gathering but in the political process of filtering intelligence to the public. It is obvious that the Administration not only contoured intelligence to fit its justification for war but completely fabricated evidence in cases where its claims about Iraq and WMD were directly contradicted. Their lies resulted in the deaths of more than 500 Americans, the wounding and maiming of 2,500 more and the deaths of more than 8,000 Iraqi civilians and 2,300 soldiers. Of course, with our attention riveted on the latest exploits of Bennifer we may never get to the bottom of this.