Spider Marks (RESEARCH HIM) was in the DOD and heading the WMD search before the war. He repeatdly told the Bush White HOuse to back off of the WMD because there was no ironclad evidence. Yet Bush included in his speeches to Congress and America that iraq "for a fact had WMD" . he misled america and utterly ignored the facts so he manipulate congress for authorization. JEEZ don't you get.
This is from the book State of Denial:
He was not the first American WMD-hunter to suspect that there might not be anything there. The general tasked with finding the hidden weapons programme had reached the same conclusion months before the war even started.
Back in September 2002, six months before the war, Major General James “Spider” Marks was given the assignment of a lifetime: top intelligence officer for the US-led forces planning to invade Iraq. It was his job to find the WMD as the troops went in.
Cheney had recently given a speech that Marks believed must have been cleared by US intelligence. “Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction,” Cheney had said. “There is no doubt that he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies and against us.”
The rhetoric was very strong, and Marks took it as an article of faith that the intelligence behind it was equally strong: Saddam had WMD.
Marks thought he and the rest of the ground force generals would be sitting ducks when they deployed to Kuwait ahead of the invasion. What better target for Saddam to hit with a preemptive chemical or biological attack? Odds were he would not be coming home. Marks kept his fatalistic conclusions from his wife and daughters, but he put his affairs in order.
Before going to Kuwait, Marks arranged to meet the top experts on Iraq and WMD at the Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA). He thought of these experts as “the smart guys”. There were the overhead satellite smart guys, the chemical, biological and nuclear weapons smart guys, the Middle East regional smart guys, and the overall intelligence collection systems smart guys.
What do we really know about Saddam’s WMD? he asked them. They presented him with their highly classified Weapons of Mass Destruction Master Site List (WMDMSL): the 946 locations where intelligence indicated there were production plants or storage facilities for chemical, biological or nuclear-related material.
Marks had some questions. What would the invading forces do with each WMD site? Destroy it? Test it? Guard it? Render it useless? Who will be doing that? “Well, we don’t have their names,” one of the guys answered.
“Why not?” Marks asked. “What units are doing that?” “Oh, we’ve got units who do that.”
“Have you notified them?”
“Of course not.”
“Well, then — how’s this all going to come together?” Marks asked. “I hate to be a jerk here, but I’m the guy who’s going to be — I and about 400 to 500 guys — are going to be holding the bag on this thing. Can you throw me a bone?” Marks left the meeting very disturbed. He dug into the underlying evidence that suggested each of the 946 sites had WMD. It was thin. There were old satellite images, five years or more in some cases, and some signals intelligence — but nothing conclusive. The WMD list was on a computer network, but much of the information was of doubtful value. In fact, he realised, he couldn’t say with confidence that there were any weapons of mass destruction or stockpiles at a single site.
The top generals and planners for the invasion weren’t very focused on WMD, however.
Marks told Lieutenant-General David McKiernan, the commander of US ground forces: “Sir, I can’t confirm what’s inside any of these sites.”
He amplified his concern about a suspected chemical production plant.
“Got it,” McKiernan replied. “Let’s move on.”
Marks selected as his deputy Colonel Steve Rotkoff, a bookish, irreverent New Yorker who summarised his thoughts and emotions with three-line haiku. One of his early observations:
Rumsfeld is a dick
Won’t flow the forces we need
We will be too light.
Like nearly everyone else planning the war in Kuwait, Rotkoff spent days at a time wearing his charcoal-lined chemical weapons jumpsuit because of the WMD threat. He was scared half to death each time he took it off. Monday was the one day he could find 15 minutes in his schedule to shower. Every time he did so he was sure that would be when Saddam would attack with chemical or biological weapons.
This is not a drill . . .
Mask + chem suit on quickly
Try not to panic
Back home, Bush and others in the administration were escalating the WMD rhetoric. White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said on December 5: “The president of the United States and the secretary of defence would not assert as plainly and bluntly as they have that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction if it was not true, and if they did not have a solid basis for saying it.”
Fleischer announced again on January 9: “We know for a fact that there are weapons there.”
Colin Powell, the secretary of state, went before the United Nations on February 5, 2003, to make the WMD intelligence case for war. And in his weekly radio address on February 8, Bush said: “We have sources that tell us that Saddam Hussein recently authorised Iraqi field commanders to use chemical weapons — the very weapons the dictator tells us he does not have.”
But Marks told Lieutenant-General Jeff Kimmons, senior intelligence officer to General Tommy Franks, the war commander, that the intelligence on WMD just wasn’t good enough.
“This is unsat, unsat, unsat,” Marks told Kimmons. “Jeff, you need to move this forward, buddy . . . this is not working.”
He also told Franks’s deputy, Lieutenant-General John Abizaid, about his concerns. Was there anything else he could have done from the Kuwaiti desert, he asked himself, to raise hell up the chain of command until he was heard? For that matter, he wondered, shouldn’t Donald Rumsfeld, the defence secretary, or Franks — or even Bush — have reached down the chain a link or two, found the general handling WMD intelligence for the invading forces and asked him what he thought? When the war began on March 19, the taskforce entering Iraq to look for WMD had to scale back its activities because it had too few people or vehicles. Having planned for four or five WMD-hunting units, it had only two.
“Fri Apr 11,” Marks wrote in his war diary 23 days later. “No WMD.”
“Sunday 11 May D+53 . . . No WMD,” he wrote again.
Marks was now nearly as sure there was nothing to find as he had previously been positive that the weapons were there.
Rotkoff summed up the situation:
Where is WMD?
What a kick if he has none
Sorry about that
Yet President Bush declared in an interview with a Polish television reporter on May 29: “We found the weapons of mass destruction . . . We found biological laboratories. You remember when Colin Powell stood up in front of the world, and he said, Iraq has got laboratories, mobile labs to build biological weapons. They’re illegal. They’re against the United Nations resolutions, and we’ve so far discovered two.”
Bush made similar remarks in France. The only problem was that he was wrong: the weapons hadn’t been found.
Unknown to the president, the DIA had dispatched a team to Iraq to examine the two mobile labs. The day before Bush’s statement the team had sent back a three-page field report saying they were not for biological weapons.
A day after Bush’s remarks, the administration announced the creation of the 1,400-strong Iraq Survey Group to take over the hunt for WMD. Responsibility for it was transferred from the military to the CIA.
ON the afternoon of Thursday June 5, David Kay was at CIA headquarters. Kay, 63, a short, intense, outspoken Texan with a PhD in political science, had been the chief United Nations nuclear weapons inspector inside Iraq after the 1991 Gulf war and had led the successful effort to uncover Saddam’s secret nuclear programme, which had been six to 18 months away from building a bomb. It had been one of the big intelligence shocks of the 1990s.
Now Kay had just returned from Iraq, where he had spent a month for NBC News following Spider Marks’s WMD-hunting taskforce.
“What do you think?” George Tenet asked. “Why aren’t they finding anything?” “These guys probably couldn’t find it if it was in front of them,” Kay said bluntly. “They’re not organised, equipped or led to do it.”
“Okay. If you were king, what would you do?” “You have to treat this like an intelligence operation. You go after people.”
Find the generals, the scientists who made the weapons, those who worked at the production facilities, the guards who provided security, the truck drivers who transported the weapons.
“Yeah, that makes sense,” Tenet said. “F****** military can never get anything organised . . . The president’s unhappy with what’s happening.”
Left unmentioned was the fact that most of the intelligence and conclusions about the “slam dunk” case for the existence of WMD — as Tenet had put it to the president in December 2002, using a basketball analogy — had come from or through the CIA.
Kay agreed to take over the WMD hunt. He was personally convinced that Saddam had WMD stockpiles. He was in for a surprise, however.
He expected some new treasure trove as he spent 15 to 18-hour days reading and sitting through CIA and defence department briefings. He was shocked at what was not there.
“It was nothing new,” he recalled. Anything with a strong or reasonable factual basis came from before 1998, when the UN inspectors had left. “Everything after that either came from a defector or came through a foreign intelligence service in an opaque sort of way.”
For example, Kay found that all the prewar intelligence about the mobile biological weapons labs had come from a single source, an Iraqi defector used by German intelligence who was codenamed Curveball.
Powell had told the UN and the world there were four sources but in truth three of the sources only provided information about Curveball’s career or about an alleged mobile lab facility of some kind. “They had no knowledge of the biological programme,” Kay said.
Kay was aghast to realise that the CIA had never even independently interviewed Curveball but relied instead on the Germans’ reports of 112 interrogations they conducted. Worse still, it appeared that the Germans had warned that Curveball was an alcoholic, although this had been downplayed in the US files.
Kay said later, “The more you look at it, the less is there. It was an eye-opening experience.”