Iraq War: "They Knew"

That's the title of an article addressing the question of claims of WMDs in Iraq and "what did they know and when did they know it?"  It's They Knew by David Sirota and Christy Harvey In These Times 08/03/04.

The Web site for the story is packed with links.  I won't try to reproduce them all here.  But I will mention a few of the more notable ones.

The Lie Factory by Robert Dreyfuss and Jason Vest Mother Jones Jan/Feb 2004.  This is about the way in which the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans (OSP) bypassed the normal intelligence review process to hype the threat with phony evidence from the Iranian agent and professional con-man Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress.  Without taking account of the OSP, and of the rump national security advisory operation in the Office of the Vice President, it's impossible to get a real picture of just how deliberately the threat of Iraqi WMDs was pumped up beyond anything that reliable available evidence could justify.  It's also a warning: No matter what organizational structures are created to review intelligence, if an administration sets up an operation like the OSP to bypass them, the same thing can happen again.

Cheney Is Adamant on Iraqi 'Evidence' Los Angeles Times 01/23/03

Bush and C.I.A. Won't Release Paper on Prewar Intelligence New York Times 07/14/04

A separate white paper summarizing the National Intelligence Estimate was made public in October 2002. The Senate report criticized the white paper as having "misrepresented'' what the Senate committee described as a "more carefully worded assessment" in the classified intelligence estimate. For example, the white paper excluded information found in the National Intelligence Estimate, like the names of intelligence agencies that had dissented from some of the findings, most importantly on Iraq's nuclear weapons program. That approach, the Senate committee said, "provided readers withan incomplete picture of the nature and extent of the debate within the intelligence community regarding these issues."

Among the specific dissents excluded from the public white paper on Iraq's weapons was the view of the State Department's intelligence branch, spelled out in the classified version of the document, that Iraq's importation of aluminum tubes could not be conclusively tied to a continuing nuclear weapons program, as other intelligence agencies asserted. Also left out of the white paper was the view of Air Force intelligence that pilotless aerial vehicles being built by Iraq, seen by other intelligence agencies as designed to deliver chemical or biological weapons, were not suited for that purpose.

Under the unintentionally ironically-named "Iraq: Denial and Deception," the White House Web site provides the text of Bush's key Cincinnati speech of 10/07/02, entitled President Bush Outlines Iraqi Threat.