WMD-Day

How A Lie Became Fact
I was watching this doco 'Frontline: The Dark Side' last night on SBS. It's a piece made by the PBS in the USA. It's pretty interesting in dissecting how the outrageous lies about Iraq's WMD capability came to be accepted as fact by the Bush White House and the subsequent push for war on Iraq.

In the initial stages of the war on terror, Tenet's CIA was rising to prominence as the lead agency in the Afghanistan war. But when Tenet insisted in his personal meetings with the president that there was no connection between Al Qaeda and Iraq, Cheney and Rumsfeld initiated a secret program to re-examine the evidence and marginalize the agency and Tenet. Through interviews with DoD staffers who sifted through mountains of raw intelligence, FRONTLINE details how questionable intelligence was "stovepiped" to the vice president and presented to the public.

From stories of Iraq buying yellowcake uranium from Niger to claims that 9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta had met with an Iraqi agent in Prague, "The Dark Side" dissects the now-familiar assertions that led the nation to war. The program also receounts the vice president's unprecedented visits to the CIA, where he questioned mid-level analysts on their conclusions. CIA officers who were there at the time say the message was clear: Cheney wanted evidence that Iraq was a threat.

What was really interesting was how little the Pentagon knew about Afghanistan at the onset, compared to the CIA who were actively trying to graple with the Osama Bin Laden threat, later termed 'Al Qaeda'. The Pentagon didn't even have an operational plan for Afghainstan - it just wasn't one of their priorities - unlike Iraq.

Meanwhile Cheney and Rumsfeld just could not get their heads around the fact that individuals could just do this stuff without the backng off the state, so were convinced that Iraq/Saddam was behind it. Talk about leaping to the wrong conclusions.

What's even more interesting is that the CIA did not have what they call a NIE, a kind of security dossier on Iraq. In fact they didn't even know how close the Iraqis were to a nuke back in the closing days of Gulf War I - which in turn fed the suspicions of Cheney that the CIA didn't know what they were doing. Cheney and Rumsfeld's mistrust of the CIA was such that they started their own intelligence office in the Pentagon.

So the CIA prosecuted the war in Afghanistan and the Pentagon prosecuted the war in Iraq separately because they were basically separate chains of commands with different agendas and different parameters. You could see how these crossed lines and crossed purposes could lead to a point where two separate wars were needed just to shut both of them up.

Soggy Sticks
I've been referring to the North Koreans as the madman in the nieghbourhood with a truck load of dynamite. It seems it's only 6 to 10 according to analysts.

Nuclear experts said today that the analysis of atmospheric samples taken after the test shed new light on the factors that could lead to a second demonstration. American officials who reviewed the results of atmospheric sampling said on Monday that the material used for the test appeared to have been plutonium harvested from North Korea’s small nuclear reactor.

Because the material came from the reactor, which operated under international inspection between 1994 and 2003, and not from a uranium-enrichment program that North Korea began in secret, nuclear experts said that it was easier to gauge how much weapons material the North may now have on hand. Most intelligence analysts estimate that the country has enough plutonium for 6 to 10 bombs.

“It appears clear that the test fell far short of the kind of blast the North Koreans wanted to get world attention,” said Lee Un Chul, a nuclear scientist at Seoul National University. “There is a high possibility of them conducting a second test after finding out what went wrong. A question is how much plutonium they have left. They can’t use it all up with repeated tests. If a second test is a failure, too, it will be a huge humiliation for them.”

That'll be funny if it fails.