arch/ive/ief (2000 - 2005)

"Verrassende ontboezemingen, noemt de hoofdredactie van Vanity Fair de verklaring van Wolfowitz."

Vanity fair heeft Wolfowitz geïnterviewd in het kader van een "studie over ,,de intellectuele junta van neoconservatieve haviken rond Donald Rumsfeld'', die in juli verschijnt."

Daarin zei Wolfowitz dat "De massavernietigingswapens van Saddam Hoessein waren slechts een handig politiek voorwendsel voor de aanval op Irak"

In Amerika en Europa lokte dit protest uit bij criticasters van de gevoerde oorlog tegen Irak.

Rumsfeld zei in het begin van de week in een toespraak voor de Council On Foreign Affairs dat Saddam zijn wapens waarschijnlijk al had vernietigd voor de oorlog.

"It is also possible that they decided that they would destroy them prior to a conflict." Pentagon

Later deze week pakte de BBC uit met het verhaal dat het rapport over de vernietigingswapens in Irak, dat op 24 september in het Britse Lagerhuis werd bekend gemaakt,herschreven was. Dit vertelde een hoge Britse verantwoordelijke aan de BBC.

"A senior British intelligence official has told the BBC the original version of the document had added little to what was already publicly known.

But a week before it was published it had been "transformed" on the orders of Downing Street, he said.

The aim was to make the report more hard-hitting, the official said, adding that the intelligence services were unhappy about the changes." BBC

De Guardian onthulde dat Straw en Powell hun bedenkingen hadden bij het rapport dat gepresenteerd werd aan de VN-veiligheidsraad.

"Jack Straw and his US counterpart, Colin Powell, privately expressed serious doubts about the quality of intelligence on Iraq's banned weapons programme at the very time they were publicly trumpeting it to get UN support for a war on Iraq"

Ze hebben elkaar vlak voor de vergadering van de VN ontmoet:

"The meeting took place at the Waldorf hotel in New York, where they discussed the growing diplomatic crisis. The exchange about the validity of their respective governments' intelligence reports on Iraq lasted less than 10 minutes, according to a diplomatic source who has read a transcript of the conversation."

"he Waldorf meeting took place a few days after Downing Street presented Mr Powell with a separate dossier on Iraq's banned weapons which he used to try to strengthen the impact of his UN speech."

"What are called the "Waldorf transcripts" are being circulated in Nato diplomatic circles. It is not being revealed how the transcripts came to be made; however, they appear to have been leaked by diplomats who supported the war against Iraq even when the evidence about Saddam Hussein's programme of weapons of mass destruction was fuzzy, and who now believe they were lied to."Guardian

Schaamtelijk voor Powell want:

"The Waldorf transcripts are all the more damaging given Mr Powell's dramatic 75-minute speech to the UN security council on February 5, when he presented declassified satellite images, and communications intercepts of what were purported to be conversations between Iraqi commanders, and held up a vial that, he said, could contain anthrax."

Herinner u nog de professor uit Cambridge die naar buiten kwam met volgend verhaal?

"Powell's presentation relied in no small part upon an intelligence dossier prepared by the British Government entitled, "Iraq - Its Infrastructure of Concealment, Deception and Intimidation." That report plagiarized large swaths of an essay written in September of 2002 by a graduate student from California named Ibrahim al-Marashi. Al-Marashi's essay appeared in the September 2002 edition of a small journal, the Middle East Review of International Affairs."

"According to the story from Channel 4 News, which was later augmented by an Associated Press report by Jill Lawless, the duplicate text was first spotted by a Cambridge, England academic named James Ranwala. Apparently, Ranwala read the British dossier when it became available and believed he had seen it before. As it turns out, he was correct. Entire sections of the al-Marashi essay, including six full paragraphs in one section, had been cut and pasted into the British dossier, including several spelling and grammatical errors that are identical.

According to the Associated Press, al-Marashi had no idea his paper was being used by the British. "It was a shock to me," he told the Associated Press, and expressed the hope that the British would credit his work "out of academic decency." Truth out

Net zoals nu met Blair was er eventjes opschudding maar de dat ging vlug over.

Downing Street ontkent dat er iets zou vervalst zijn:

"But Downing Street denied the claims, saying: "Not one word of the dossier was not entirely the work of the intelligence agencies."

Mr Blair has said he is still absolutely sure that weapons of mass destruction will be found."BBC

Het meest gestoorde is de reactie van het Pentagon over de uitlatingen van Wolfowitz.

Het Pentagon meldt doodleuk dat de woorden van Wolfowitz uit hun context gerukt zijn of verkort zijn.

"The article by Sam Tanenhaus quoted Wolfowitz as saying, "For bureaucratic reasons we settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction, because it was the one reason everyone could agree on."

Volgens het Pentagon staat er in de tekst van het interview:

"The truth is that for reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S. government bureaucracy we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on, which was weapons of mass destruction, as the core reason."

"After a brief pause to take another phone call, Wolfowitz continues, "There have always been three fundamental concerns. One is weapons of mass destruction, the second is support for terrorism, the third is the criminal treatment of the Iraqi people. Actually, I guess you could say there's a fourth overriding one, which is the connection between the first two." CNN

Het volledige interview, dat nog moet verschijnen in Vanity fair kan u lezen op: Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz Interview with Sam Tannenhaus, Vanity Fair

Wat opvallend is aan het interview met Wolfowitz is dat het deze week vermeld werd in de pers maar toch al dateert van 9 mei. En niemand die daar over schrijft of zo, enkel dat Wolfowitz een aantal dingen gezegd heeft.

Enkele andere artikels.

Een aantal ex-CIA agenten hebben een brief geschreven naar Bush:

"A GROUP of former US intelligence officials has written to President Bush claiming that the US Congress and the American public were misled about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction before the war.
The group’s members, most of them former CIA analysts, say that they have close contacts with senior officials working inside the US intelligence agencies, who have told them that intelligence was “cooked” to persuade Congress to authorise the war."
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,5944-698028,00.html

Enkele democraten schreven een brief naar Tenet, directeur CIA:

"President Bush's contention that America went to war with Iraq to rid Saddam Hussein of hidden biological and chemical weapons "could be the greatest intelligence hoax of all time," the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee warned Friday.

Rep. Jane Harman, D-Rancho Palos Verdes (Los Angeles County), has sent a letter along with Rep. Porter Goss, R-Fla., the Intelligence Committee chairman, to CIA Director George Tenet asking him to explain what intelligence led spy agencies to believe Iraq had stocks of the banned weapons or that al Qaeda operated on Iraqi territory."
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2003/05/31/MN163599.DTL

Ook veiligheidsagenten beginnen Bush en co te verwijten dat ze gelogen hebben:

"A growing number of U.S. national security professionals are accusing the Bush administration of slanting the facts and hijacking the $30 billion intelligence apparatus to justify its rush to war in Iraq.

A key target is a four-person Pentagon team that reviewed material gathered by other intelligence outfits for any missed bits that might have tied Iraqi President Saddam Hussein to banned weapons or terrorist groups."
http://asia.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=2854511

Intussen komt er ook almaar meer druk op het Witte Huis ivm het blokkeren van het 9-11 onderzoek, voornamelijk door Graham en Friedman, twee kandidaten bij de volgende presidentsverkiezingen.

Zie:
Witte Huis houdt 9-11 onderzoek tegen.
http://archive.indymedia.be/news/2003/05/66576.php

De Iraakse vertegenwoordiger bij de UNO (thans in Amerikaanse handen en dus definitie het zwijgen opgelegd) heeft altijd blijven volhouden dat er geen massavernietigingswapens meer waren. Wat er nog was van vroeger was in het verleden al vernietigd.
De officiële UNO inspecteurs hebben ditzelfde ter plaatse kunnen vaststellen.
Ondanks de normale wettelijke gang van zaken moesten de VS zonodig koste wat het kost een oorlog ontketenen om ter plaatse voet aan de grond te krijgen. Dit was duidelijk een oorlog met voorbeachten rade. De gevolgen zijn des te zwaarder.