The speech delivered yesterday by Lawrence Wilkerson, chief of staff to former Secretary of State Colin Powell, got a lot of press attention. But while all these reports highlighted the negative remarks he made about the Bush White House, they didn’t mention Wilkerson’s other seemingly newsworthy comments. Take the Washington Post‘s Dana Milbank and Brian Knowlton of the New York Times. Apparently, they couldn’t find space in their “reporting” pieces for stuff like this: Wilkerson confirmed that the US and other foreign intelligence agencies believed that what Powell presented to the UN was “the truth” and that the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research also believed Powell was “right” on Saddam’s chemical and biological weapons.
…I can’t tell you why the French, the Germans, the Brits and us thought that most of the material, if not all of it, that we presented at the U.N. on 5 February 2003 was the truth. I can’t. I’ve wrestled with it. I don’t know – and people say, well, INR dissented. That’s a bunch of bull. INR dissented that the nuclear program was up and running. That’s all INR dissented on. They were right there with the chems and the bios…. When you see a satellite photograph of all the signs of the chemical weapons ASP – Ammunition Supply Point – with chemical weapons, and you match all those signs with your matrix on what should show a chemical ASP, and they’re there, you have to conclude that it’s a chemical ASP, especially when you see the next satellite photograph which shows the U.N. inspectors wheeling in in their white vehicles with black markings on them to that same ASP and everything is changed, everything is clean. None of those signs are there anymore. But George [Tenet] was convinced, John McLaughlin [then deputy DCI] was convinced that what we were presented [for Powell’s UN speech] was accurate….
Wilkerson also said that French intelligence believed the aluminum tubes were designed for centrifuges.
The French came in in the middle of my deliberations at the CIA and said, we have just spun aluminum tubes, and by god, we did it to this RPM, et cetera, et cetera, and it was all, you know, proof positive that the aluminum tubes were not for mortar casings or artillery casings, they were for centrifuges. Otherwise, why would you have such exquisite instruments?
There’s another lesson in the Wilkerson coverage. Relying solely on the news media to be informed of what’s in all the publicly available speeches and reports produced before and after March 2003 on Iraqi WMD is a mistake. Here and here and here and here are just some examples.
