Neocons Considered Planting WMD Evidence in Iraq?

[Clara T]

Neocons Considered Planting WMD Evidence in Iraq?
by Gary Leupp
www.dissidentvoice.org
January 9, 2006

<snip>

Citing “hree U.S. intelligence sources and a source close to the United Nations Security Council,” Alexandrovna indicates that the OSP planned “off book” missions that were dispatched by Stephen Cambone, Defense Department intelligence chief, from March 2003. (Cambone now occupies the # 3 post in the Defense Department.) Teams sent to Iraq included “CIA, FBI, Green Berets, Delta Force operators, and commandos from the Navy’s Special Warfare Development Group.” Their first priority was to investigate an allegation made by disinformation master Ahmad Chalabi that a USN pilot shot down in 1991 and proclaimed KIA soon afterwards was being held as a POW in Iraq. (That was bogus.) The second was to deal with the WMD issue. The third was to get Saddam.

During the summer and fall of 2004, one unnamed team, according to the UN source, interviewed many Iraqi intelligence officers, telling them, “Our President is in trouble. He went to war saying there are WMD and there are no WMD. What can we do? Can you help us?” The Iraqis understood they were being asked to cooperate with a deception. “But,” the UN source continues, “ the guys were thinking this is absurd because anything put down would not pass the smell test and could be shown to be not of Iraqi origin and not using Iraqi methodology.”

The Senate Select Intelligence Committee, which is supposed to at some point investigate the OSP, has asked the Pentagon’s Inspector-General to probe the office and Douglas Feith’s role in it. Feith and the other neocons have shown themselves shameless purveyors of disinformation again and again. Somebody among or close to them must have fabricated the Niger uranium documents. Jacques Chirac, as I recall, once opined that if the U.S. didn’t find WMD in Iraq it would probably stage a discovery. But the report that they actually considered doing just that to justify their war, to further hoodwink the American people and the world, beats everything I’ve heard so far. Talk about chutzpah.

There’s no end to it. Before the Iraq attack, the disinformationists had succeeded in convincing the majority of Americans that Iraq had WMD threatening the world. Before the Iran attack, they have probably succeeded in convincing most Americans that Iran has become a nuclear threat. They’ve gotten the media to routinely refer to “Iran’s nuclear weapons program” even though IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei has repeatedly said he finds no evidence of one. Despite ElBaradei, the Bush administration has been able to organize its allies in the IAEA to find Iran in violation of the Non-Proliferation Treaty on the grounds that it kept aspects of its nuclear program secret up to 2003, despite the fact that it’s opened itself to an unprecedented level of IAEA inspection since. Washington has successfully conflated Iran’s non-binding agreement with the UK, Germany and France with the NPT itself. Thus when Iran ends its voluntary suspension of uranium enriching activities, the administration pretends it’s doing something illegal, even though the Treaty itself specifically allows it to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes.

http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Jan06/Leupp09.htm

[CrazyOrangeCat]

1. Inspector Cleusau (sp?)

looks like a genius compared to these jerks.

[Demeter]

3. Clouseau

[Demeter]

2. I Always Wondered Why They Hadn't Faked The WMDs

Could it be because we were expecting them to do so, and said so, publicly?

Or perhaps there were enough credible witnesses who could attest to the fakeness of any such planting?

Or maybe they were just too arrogant and lazy (and let's face it, incompetent) to try. They figured that the bought and paid for media would make any actual work on their part unnecessary.

[yurbud]

4. I think Joe Wilson showed the danger of even a less high stakes fake

[yurbud]

5. they probably thought they could ahead of time then realized difficulty

too late.

[yellowcanine]

6. I doubt that they trusted anyone to pull it off after the faked yellowcake

documents turned out to be so easy to expose. Planting WMDs would have presented at least two problems that are probably not solvable-

1) Creating WMDs that were "authentic" enough to fool weapons experts as being Saddam era Iraqi.

2) Even if one had authentic WMDs, getting them planted without anyone involved tipping off the operation later. There would be too many people involved for someone not to spill the beans once they realized the stakes involved.