Last night, CBS’ 60 Minutes aired a segment on Iraq pre-war intelligence — focusing on the Niger-Uranium controversy — that was so slanted I half suspect that Democratic Senator Carl Levin produced it. Here are just a few examples:
Where to begin? Regarding the Niger reference, Bradley failed to inform millions of viewers what the Senate’s 2004 Report on the U.S. Intelligence Community’s Prewar Intelligence Assessments on Iraq concluded on the issue: Conclusion 13 (page 73)
Conclusion 12 (page 72)
Conclusion 19 (page 77)
And on Sabri, I guess it wasn’t newsworthy to inform viewers of what else Sabri had to say. After all, are we supposed to believe Sabri on the nuclear program but discount his comments on biological and chemical weapons? According to the Washington Post, Sabri also told the CIA that Saddam was lying, that biological weapons research was underway, and that Saddam had dispersed chemical weapons to loyal tribes.
60 Minutes further reported:
Again, Bradley doesn’t mention that the “CIA continued to approve the use of similar [Niger-uranium] language in Administration publications and speeches, including the State of the Union.” He also devotes only one line to what British intelligence concluded on the issue. The July 2004 Butler report stated that the president’s uranium reference in his 2003 State of the Union address was “well-founded” and based on intelligence having nothing to do with the forged documents. Somehow I think many viewers would have found this information of interest. Here are the “relevant” bits from the report, on pages 123 and 125:
And,
Finally, the case against Saddam Hussein was far broader than 60 Minutes, the New York Times and many others would have you believe. To recap, on March 18, 2003, the day before ground forces entered Iraq, the president confronted a range of concerns regarding Saddam’s weapons programs, his connection to terrorism, his history of aggressive behavior, his use of poison gas, and his failure to comply with the 1991 Gulf War cease-fire agreement and subsequent U.N. resolutions. U.S. intelligence (as Powell Chief of Staff Lawrence Wilkerson has noted but the media has ignored) and other foreign governments concluded at the time that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction. On top of this were the findings contained in detailed U.N. reports. For example, on March 6, 2003, the United Nations issued a report on Iraq’s “Unresolved Disarmament Issues.” It stated that the “long list” of “unaccounted for” WMD-related material catalogued in December of 1998–the month inspections ended in Iraq–and beyond were still “unaccounted for.” The list included: up to 3.9 tons of VX nerve agent (though inspectors believed Iraq had enough VX precursors to produce 200 tons of the agent and suspected that VX had been “weaponized”); 6,526 aerial chemical bombs; 550 mustard gas shells; 2,062 tons of Mustard precursors; 15,000 chemical munitions; 8,445 liters of anthrax; growth media that could have produced “3,000 – 11,000 litres of botulinum toxin, 6,000 – 16,000 litres of anthrax, up to 5,600 litres of Clostridium perfringens, and a significant quantity of an unknown bacterial agent.” Moreover, Iraq was obligated to account for this material by providing “verifiable evidence” that it had, in fact, destroyed its proscribed materials (see more on Hans Blix and the “verifiable evidence” standard here). The same report noted “a surge of activity in the missile technology field in the past four years” and that while 817 of the 819 Scud missiles Iraq had imported had been accounted for, inspectors did not know the number of missiles Iraq had indigenously produced or still possessed. Similarly, while inspectors had accounted for 73 of Iraq’s 75 declared “special” warheads, doubts remained that Iraqi officials were truthful about how many had actually been manufactured. It acknowledged that inspectors had found a handful of 122mm chemical rocket warheads but noted that this discovery may only be the “tip of the iceberg” since several thousand, in the inspectors’ judgment, were still unaccounted for. It also stated that no underground chemical facilities had been found but added that such facilities may exist given the size of Iraq and that future inspections in this area would have to rely on “specific intelligence.” Finally, the report declared that there appears to be no “choke points” to prevent Iraq from producing anthrax at the same level it did before 1991, that large-scale Iraqi production of botulinum toxin “could be rapidly commenced,” and that given Iraq’s history of concealment, “it cannot be excluded that it has retained some capability with regard to VX.” And as we know today, Saddam’s Iraq never complied with its disarmament obligations. In September 2004 then-Iraq Survey Group head Charles Duelfer issued a report which cited many violations of the sanctions regime and concluded that “Saddam pursued a strategy to maintain a capability to return to WMD production after sanctions were lifted by preserving assets and expertise. In addition to preserve capability, we have clear evidence of his intent to resume WMD production as soon as sanctions were lifted.” Duelfer continued:
