Unfolding weapons of mass destruction questions

Apparently Bush told intrepid and fearless reporter Tim Russert that he really really thought the damn things would turn up. Perhaps it was his inability to see out of the glass case Cheney and his people kept him in. Turns out that we now know the guy who told us about the mobile biological labs was thoroughly discredited already. The Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) put out a "fabricator warning" on the Iraqi army deserter, which apparently wasn't heeded. NY Times, Feb 6.:

Agency Alert about Iraqi not Heeded, Officials Say: An Iraqi military defector identified as unreliable by the Defense Intelligence Agency provided some of the information that went into United States intelligence estimates that Iraq had stockpiles of biological weapons at the time of the American invasion last March, senior government officials said Friday.

A classified "fabrication notification" about the defector, a former Iraqi major, was issued by the D.I.A. to other American intelligence agencies in May 2002, but it was then repeatedly overlooked, three senior intelligence officials said. Intelligence agencies use such notifications to alert other agencies to information they consider unreliable because its source is suspected of making up or embellishing information.

Because the warning went unheeded, the officials said, the defector's claims that Iraq had built mobile research laboratories to produce biological weapons were mistakenly included in, among other findings, the National Intelligence Estimate of October 2002, which concluded that Iraq most likely had significant biological stockpiles.

Intelligence officers from the D.I.A. interviewed the defector [and ...] concluded he had no firsthand information and might have been coached by the Iraqi National Congress, the officials said. That group, headed by Ahmad Chalabi, who had close ties to the Pentagon and Vice President Dick Cheney, had introduced the defector to American intelligence, the officials said.

Nevertheless, because of what the officials described as a mistake, the defector was among four sources cited by Secretary of State Colin L. Powell in his presentation to the United Nations Security Council last February as having provided "eyewitness accounts" about mobile biological weapons facilities in Iraq, the officials said. The defector had described mobile biological research laboratories, as distinct from the mobile biological production factories mounted on trailers that were described by other sources.

In a related matter, the intelligence officials acknowledged that the United States still had not been able to interview two other people with access to senior Iraqi officials, and whose claims that Iraq possessed chemical and biological stockpiles were relayed to American officials in September 2002 by two foreign intelligence services.

So we have a direct connection between spoofery and suspected coaching by the INC. And we have evidence that parts of the government knew that this source shouldn't have been passing information into the National Intelligence Estimate, which is supposed to be America's key annual assessment of what's going on. This alone could be worth a grand jury. I am very curious now about the "foreign intelligence services" that have come up a lot in the news lately. It seems that countries like Germany who admitted that Saddam probably had WMD were also being misled.

Britain is faced with the imminent collapse of the famous "45 minutes" to weapons readiness claim which Blair put out before the war. It was compelling, and really undergirded whatever support the war could muster on the Isle. Yet it turns out that this too was provided by a shady exile, as well. The excellent UK source The Independent reports:

The "reliable source" who provided MI6 with the information that Iraq could deploy chemical and biological weapons within 45 minutes was an Iraqi exile who had left the country several years previously, The Independent on Sunday can reveal. That fact alone should have prevented the intelligence being used in the Government's September 2002 dossier on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.

The 45-minute claim, repeated four times in the dossier, is at the centre of the dispute over Britain's case for war in Iraq. An IoS investigation has established at the highest level that the "reliable source" obtained the information at second hand from a serving officer in the Iraqi army, with the rank either of full colonel or brigadier....

Said to have "military knowledge", the source maintained contacts with serving officers in Saddam Hussein's armed forces. But the fact that he was not in Iraq meant that the information he provided, especially on such an important point as whether Saddam had active plans to use chemical and biological weapons, did not meet normal standards for assessing intelligence, especially as it was unsupported by documentary evidence. There was no definite information on whether chemical or biological warheads were with front-line units, which would have made it feasible that they could be used within 45 minutes, or back in secure bases which would make it impossible.

The fact that the information was "single source", and was included in the dossier at a late stage, first emerged after the BBC reporter Andrew Gilligan reported what he had been told by the weapons scientist David Kelly...

Not until the inquiry did the public learn that the original information passed on by the Iraqi exile referred only to battlefield weapons. "It related to munitions, which we had interpreted to mean battlefield mortar shells or small calibre weaponry, quite different from missiles," John Scarlett, the chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee and author of the dossier, told Lord Hutton.

Evidence at the inquiry showed that Mr Scarlett never used the word "munitions" in drafts of the dossier, allowing the claim to become inflated to one of WMD... The fate of the officer who provided the information remains a mystery. There are rumours that he is dead or missing.

Record opium haul in Afghanistan; Wolfie thinks "War on terror is Dope!"

Scott McDonald of Reuters reports today:

Opium output hit a record high in Afghanistan in 2003, with another increase expected this year in the war-torn country that does not have any other real exports, a conference was told on Sunday.

Two years after the ruling Taliban were ousted from power by a U.S.-led coalition, opium production has skyrocketed as farmers in lawless provinces crank up output, threatening efforts to strengthen the government and establish a proper economy.

Karzai has banned opium cultivation and trafficking and set up the Counter-Narcotic Directorate, but with the country and international donors still scrambling to build an infrastructure after two decades of violence, opium output has climbed again.

UNODC estimates that Afghan opium production last year hit 3,600 tons, up six percent over the previous year, and said that surveys of farmers show a further increase is likely this year.

Afghan output accounts for two-thirds of world opium production, and officials have voiced concern because it is spreading to areas in the country where it has not been grown before. UNODC has estimated that the output could be worth $2.3 billion, compared to Afghanistan's official exports of $40 million to its neighbour Pakistan.

This brings up a few ideas. Firstly, our military strategy seems to be to provide opiates for the masses. Second, since our friendly warlord allies control most of the territory in question, by purchasing black tar opium and H can we back up the Good side of the war on terror? I propose an investigation into how the Pentagon tacitly allows MOST OF THE WORLD'S opium production within its very domain. There must be memos piled up somewhere in Rummy's office.

Last year's HongPong.com archives reinstated

The good news is that last night I finally set some time aside to extract all the postings from the old HongPong.com and drop them into this new system, MovableType.

For those interested in the technicalities of it, I had the whole Scoop database as a giant XML file, with all the headlines, dates and encoded HTML. I needed to figure out how to use a technology called XLST to convert the XML into HTML, and from there copy it into MovableType. That took a while, but it worked. I also added some plug-ins, including the much-needed photo album plugins.

The old junker computer still isn't working and I think I'll have to ditch it.

So now all the old postings from the HongPong.com of yore are available. Coming soon, the huge library of protest photos and other such images. Also, I may have to fish out the older Thwart.net archives and add those, too. Soon there will be category listings on the right hand side, and some richer images.

To look at the HongPong.com archives, use the links at right.