Senior Us Officials Knew In May There

Senior US Officials Knew in May there was no WMD in Iraq

The Observer reports that “US military survey teams sent to visit suspected sites of WMD, and intelligence interviews with Iraqi scientists and officials, had concluded” . . . as early as last May that there were no chemical or biological weapons stockpiles in Iraq, and nothing nuclear, either.

The Observer interviewed someone it identified as “a very senior US intelligence official” who served during the war against Iraq, and knew the WMD issue thoroughly. He said, “We had enough evidence at the beginning of May to start asking, ‘where did we go wrong?’ . . . We had already made the judgment that something very wrong had happened [in May] and our confidence was shaken to its foundations.” The source asserted that the intelligence community had “suppressed dissenting views and intelligence.”

This allegation directly contradicts the repeated assertions by the Bush administration and by the intelligence services themselves that no pressure was exerted on analysts.

The account was confirmed by former UN nuclear inspector David Albright: “It was known in May that no one was going to find large stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons. The only people who did not know that fact was the public.”

Actually, some of the “public” wasn’t unaware of at least some of these facts either. See the first entry for the Informed Comment column of June 11 and the March 18 email by moi cited there.

One obvious conclusion is that the Bush administration has known since May that its assertions that WMD may yet be found in Iraq were false or highly unlikely, and this is another area in which they have been willing to deliberately mislead the public. If you know that each time a coin is tossed there is a 50/50 chance it will come up heads, and you tell people the chance is 10/90, you are in effect lying to them.