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“Why
did the CIA say that they had provided detailed information to the
U.N. inspectors on all of the high and medium suspect sites?"
Levin
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WASHINGTON,
June 18 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) - As Iraq’s weapons of
mass destruction remain a bone of tension in the United States and
Britain, a leading American Democrat accuse the CIA of deliberately
misleading the U.N. weapons inspectors to make the case of the
invasion of Iraq.
When
the U.N. team led by Hans Blix returned to Iraq last autumn, the CIA
did not pass on its full list of 150 high or medium priority suspected
weapons sites, leaving the U.S. government with the ability to shut
down inspections quickly and clear the decks for the invasion, Carl
Levin said on Wednesday, June 18.
“Why
did the CIA say that they had provided detailed information to the
U.N. inspectors on all of the high and medium suspect sites, when they
had not?" Levin was quoted by the Independent as
asking.
Levin,
the senior Democrat on the powerful Senate Armed Services Committee,
said that had it been known that there were still outstanding sites,
there would have been "greater public demand that the inspection
process continue".
On
Monday, June 16, President George Bush yesterday dismissed critics who
doubt his pre-invasion claims about the Iraqi threat. He called them
"revisionist historians".
These days, however, he seems more careful to refer to the existence
of Iraqi "weapons programs," not the weapons themselves,
said the British paper.
Levin’s
charge comes as Congress gears up for its own hearings into whether
the Bush administration misinterpreted or manipulated pre-invasion
intelligence on the scale of the threat posed by Saddam Hussein.
With
the failure to provide hard evidence so far of Iraq's alleged weapons,
key congressional Democrats demanded
an inquiry and presidential contenders turned the table on the
White House.
‘Overstretched’
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"It
was not the case that a fixed decision for war was taken at an
early stage," Straw
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On
his part, former CIA director Stansfield Turner accused the Bush
administration of "overstretching the facts" about Baghdad's
banned weapons in order to justify a war on Iraq.
Turner,
director of the CIA from 1977 to 1981 under President Jimmy Carter,
took aim at the Bush administration when interviewed for an article
published Wednesday in USA Today.
"There
is no question in my mind (that policymakers) distorted the situation,
either because they had bad intelligence or because they
misinterpreted it," the retired admiral told the daily.
A
group of former intelligence specialists, including former CIA
analysts, on May 1 called on Bush to investigate the CIA and other spy
agencies for failure to uncover weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
The
failure, said the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity
(VIPS), constituted a "policy and intelligence fiasco of
monstrous proportions."
‘Exposed’
Meanwhile,
British Prime Minister Tony Blair was also charged with deliberately
misleading the public over Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, as his
two former cabinet ministers revealed that MI6 believed Saddam
Hussein's arsenal posed no immediate threat.
In
extraordinary public hearing at Westminster, Clare Short and Robin
Cook told MPs that intelligence chiefs had concluded that the risk of
Saddam using chemical or biological weapons was not high, reported the
Independent.
Short,
the former secretary of state for international development, said
Blair was guilty of "honorable deception" and said he used
"a series of half-truths, exaggerations, reassurances that were
not the case to get us into conflict by the spring.
"I
believe that the Prime Minister must have concluded that it was
honorable and desirable to back the U.S. going for military action in
Iraq and therefore it was honorable for him to persuade us through
various ruses and ways to get us there - so for him I think it was an
honorable deception," said Short.
Robin
Cook, the former foreign secretary, accused ministers of "not
presenting the whole picture" and presenting selective evidence
to back the case for war.
Cook
condemned the Government's dossier on Saddam's arsenal as
"shoddy" and "thin".
Short,
who saw raw intelligence reports and was briefed repeatedly by MI6 and
the Defense Intelligence Staff before the war, said: "There is a
risk, but the risk of use is not high, was probably the tone."
Short's
successor, Baroness Valerie Amos, said she had postponed a trip to
Iraq because of the security situation.
Amos
told the Financial Times the unrest in the country was
hampering rebuilding efforts, admitting that the U.S.-led forces had
failed to anticipate the magnitude of the post-Saddam problems as the
situation in the country is still far from secure.
Not
‘Fixed’
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Specialist
Kevin Miller from Clearwater, MN and with the 82nd Airborne enters
a room to search for “weapons” during a raid conducted by his
unit at a Baghdad neighborhood
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As
his government face a growing wave of criticisms
that the invasion was launched on a false pretext, British Foreign
Secretary Jack Straw denied on Wednesday that there had been a
"fixed decision" by the government to go to war while
negotiations to resolve the crisis were still taking place in the
United Nations.
At
a briefing for journalists in London, Straw said that it was
"inconceivable" that the government would have taken a
decision to begin military action if Saddam had complied fully with
U.N. resolutions on removing his weapons of mass destruction, reported
Agence France-Presse (AFP).
"It
was not the case that a fixed decision for war was taken at an early
stage," Straw said.
"Had
Saddam complied as he could have done with the terms of resolution
1441 there could not have conceivably been a decision to go to
war."
The
U.S. and British forces launched the invasion on March 20, with no
authorization form the world body, in which France, Russia and China,
three veto-wielder members vowed fierce opposition.
