Bush admits that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction and the intelligence was faulty.
President George W. Bush admitted in an interview with US network ABC on Monday that "The biggest regret of all the presidency has to have been the intelligence failure in Iraq."
The intelligence failure he was referring to was the faulty evidence that accused Saddam Hussein's regime of possessing weapons of mass destruction, an accusation that was used as the official reason for the US administration's invasion of Iraq back in 2003.
The admission comes a bit late: the invasion left more than half a million Iraqis killed and over 4000 American soldiers. And he spend $40 billion on home land security. But President Bush says he will leave the presidency with his head held high.
In the interview he talked about the highs and lows of his eight years in office.
And he acknowledged what the rest of the world already has taken for granted for quite some time: That he may have been unprepared for what happened under his rule.
In this edition of Inside Story we ask if Bush's statements reflect any feelings of guilt and if he can be held accountable for launching a war under a false pretext?
This episode of Inside Story airs from Wednesday, December 03, 2008 at 1730GMT and 2230GMT with repeats at 0430GMT and 0830GMT on Thursday, December 04, 2008.
3 comments:
There was no faulty intelligence, Bush simply lied.
Bush often claimed that the information provided by Saddam's son-in-law, Hussein Kamel, (in an interview with Western security services in 1995) on the extent of Iraq's attempts to develop weapons proved that Iraq still had WMD.
This was a straight lie, there's absolutely NO way that the US Intelligence Services believed otherwise.
http://middleeastreference.org.uk/kamel.html
In the transcript of the interview, Kamel states categorically:
"I ordered destruction of all chemical weapons. All weapons - biological, chemical, missile, nuclear were destroyed"
(p. 13).
Kamel specifically discussed the significance of anthrax, which he portrayed as the "main focus" of the biological programme (pp.7-. Smidovich asked Kamel: "were weapons and agents destroyed?"
Kamel replied: "nothing remained".
He confirmed that destruction took place "after visits of inspection teams. You have important role in Iraq with this. You should not underestimate yourself. You are very effective in Iraq." (p.7)
Kamel added: "I made the decision to disclose everything so that Iraq could return to normal." (p.
Furthermore, Kamel describes the elimination of prohibited missiles: "not a single missile left but they had blueprints and molds for production. All missiles were destroyed." (p.
On VX, Kamel claimed: "they put it in bombs during last days of the Iran-Iraq war. They were not used and the programme was terminated." (p.12).
Ekeus asked Kamel: "did you restart VX production after the Iran-Iraq war?"
Kamel replied: "we changed the factory into pesticide production. Part of the establishment started to produce medicine [...] We gave insturctions [sic] not to produce chemical weapons." (p.13).
Despite the significance of these claims, it was not known that Kamel made this assertion until February 2003. Kamel's claim was first carried on 24 February 2003 by Newsweek, who reported that Kamel told U.N. inspectors that Iraq had destroyed its entire stockpile of chemical and biological weapons and banned missiles, as Iraq claims (Newsweek, 3/3/03). Newsweek reported that the weapons were destroyed secretly, in order to hide their existence from inspectors, in the hopes of someday resuming production after inspections had finished. The CIA and MI6 were told the same story, Newsweek reported.
http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=1845
Kamel's defection has been cited repeatedly by George W. Bush and leading administration officials as evidence that 1) Iraq has not disarmed; 2) inspections cannot disarm it; and 3) defectors such as Kamel are the most reliable source of information on Iraq's weapons.
Bush declared in an October 7, 2002 speech: "In 1995, after several years of deceit by the Iraqi regime, the head of Iraq's military industries defected. It was then that the regime was forced to admit that it had produced more than 30,000 liters of anthrax and other deadly biological agents. The inspectors, however, concluded that Iraq had likely produced two to four times that amount. This is a massive stockpile of biological weapons that has never been accounted for, and capable of killing millions."
Secretary of State Colin Powell's February 5 presentation to the U.N. Security Council claimed: "It took years for Iraq to finally admit that it had produced four tons of the deadly nerve agent, VX. A single drop of VX on the skin will kill in minutes. Four tons. The admission only came out after inspectors collected documentation as a result of the defection of Hussein Kamel, Saddam Hussein's late son-in-law."
In a speech last August (8/27/02), Vice President Dick Cheney said Kamel's story "should serve as a reminder to all that we often learned more as the result of defections than we learned from the inspection regime itself."
Deputy National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley recently wrote in the Chicago Tribune (2/16/03) that "because of information provided by Iraqi defector and former head of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs, Lt. Gen. Hussein Kamel, the regime had to admit in detail how it cheated on its nuclear non-proliferation commitments."
Why Bush is saying that in this particular time of 'end presidency' ? why not before?
Because making it like an intelligence failure is better that a Crime of War.
He is sure that a lot of truth seekers will will be anxious to put him in trial
Yes I'm pleased to say he's getting worried.
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