Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: In mancanza di wmd reali, si "cercano" quelle "possibili"

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/iraq/la-na-wmd20aug20,1,101425.story
?coll=la-home-headlines
August 20, 2004
CIA Study on Iraq Weapons Is Off Course, Officials Say
The agency is trying to project what Hussein may have developed had the U.S.
not invaded.
By Greg Miller, Times Staff Writer
WASHINGTON - Having failed to find banned weapons in Iraq, the CIA is
preparing a final report on its search that will speculate on what the
deposed regime's capabilities might have looked like years from now if left
unchecked, according to congressional and intelligence officials.
The CIA plans for the report, due next month, to project as far as 2008 what
Iraq might have achieved in its illegal weapons programs if the United
States had not invaded the country last year, the officials said.
The new direction of the inquiry is seen by some officials as an attempt to
obscure the fact that no banned weapons - or even evidence of active
programs - have been found, and instead emphasize theories that Iraq may
have been planning to revive its programs.
The change in focus has angered some intelligence officials and at least one
key Democrat in Congress and has brought charges of political motivation.
Rep. Jane Harman (D-Venice) protested the decision in a sharply worded
letter to acting CIA Director John E. McLaughlin last week. Trying to
forecast Iraq's weapons capabilities four years into the future would be,
"by definition, highly speculative" and "inconsistent with the original
mission of the Iraq Survey Group," Harman wrote, according to a copy of the
letter obtained by The Times.
Such an effort would be a significant departure for a survey group whose
primary mission when it was established last year was to locate and destroy
stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons that the CIA and other
agencies believed were hidden across Iraq.
David Kay, who led the group before resigning in January, said that
speculating on Iraq's future capabilities was never part of the team's
mission.
"Absolutely not," Kay said in a telephone interview Thursday. "We were to
search for Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. No one ever suggested to me
in any of the discussions before I took the job, afterward, or even when I
left, that [assessing Iraq's future capabilities] was a thing that should
have been done."
Kay and others also questioned how such an assessment would be possible
given the disarray that characterized President Saddam Hussein's government
in recent years and external events that had altered the flow of illicit
weapons technologies around the world.
Kay reported in January that Iraq's programs were dormant before the war.
The country was still subject to United Nations sanctions and was facing a
new round of inspections. Since then, authorities have cracked down on
global weapons markets, most notably by unraveling the proliferation of
nuclear weapons technology by Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan.
Kay was replaced in January by former U.N. weapons inspector Charles
Duelfer, who is overseeing the production of the survey group's final
report. A CIA spokesman declined to say whether the report would attempt to
forecast what Iraq's weapons programs might have looked like if there had
not been a U.S. invasion.
"Charles Duelfer's mission is to search for the truth, and he made clear
when he took the job that he was absolutely committed to following the
evidence wherever it takes us," CIA spokesman Mark Mansfield said. "That is
what he's doing, and that is what will be reflected in his report."
The failure to find stockpiles of banned weapons has been a source of
embarrassment to the CIA, as well as to the Bush administration, which made
ridding Hussein of illicit arms the main rationale for a preemptive war
against Iraq.
For that reason, some officials familiar with the CIA's plans for the final
report said they thought it was politically motivated and designed to focus
the public's attention on hypothetical future threats.
"The case made by the Bush White House was that [Iraq] was an imminent
threat that must be dealt with today," said a senior congressional official
who spoke on condition of anonymity. "Coming out later and saying [Hussein]
would have had the weapons in 2006 or 2008 . is basically a way to justify
preemption."
A U.S. intelligence official denied that political pressure was playing a
role in shaping Duelfer's report. "That's nonsense," the official said.
The plan to have the report project the potential of Baghdad's weapons
programs was disclosed during a classified briefing on Capitol Hill last
month by Maj. Gen. Keith Dayton, the former military commander of the
weapons search group, according to congressional officials familiar with the
briefing.
In her Aug. 13 letter, Harman said that Dayton had "told staff that the
report will focus on what the state of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction
programs would have been in 2006 or 2008 had the United States not gone to
war with Iraq in 2003."
In a media briefing in May describing the formation of the survey group,
Dayton said its mission was "the search for and elimination of weapons of
mass destruction." Dayton has since moved to another assignment in the Army,
and a spokesman said he did not wish to comment.
Other sources familiar with the work of the Iraq Survey Group confirmed the
change in direction, saying they had learned of it in recent months even
before Dayton discussed it at the congressional briefing.
Harman's letter asked McLaughlin for his "personal assurances that the focus
of [the CIA] report will remain on what the search efforts in Iraq actually
yielded and that it will be rooted in hard facts."
A spokeswoman for Harman said the congresswoman had not received a CIA
response.
The U.S. intelligence official said that describing Iraq's future
capabilities was "not the focus at all" of the final report and that "the
report will not be speculative." But the official declined to say whether
such projections would be part of the document, saying he could not comment
"on a report that hasn't been completed."
Examining Iraq's future capabilities would allow the CIA to emphasize some
evidence that suggested Baghdad might have been interested in resurrecting
its weapons programs.
Duelfer delivered a status report to Congress in March in which he said
there was evidence that Iraq had "ongoing research suitable for a
capability" to produce chemical or biological agents on short notice.
The Tuwaitha agricultural complex south of Baghdad, for example, was doing
civilian research but had "equipment suitable" to produce biological agents,
he said.
Duelfer also said that having failed to locate weapons stocks, he was
refocusing the hunt to determine what the Iraqi regime's intentions had
been.
"We're looking at it from soup to nuts, from the weapons end to the planning
end to the intentions end," Duelfer said in March.
The survey group found evidence last year that Hussein had launched a crash
program to develop ballistic missiles in violation of U.N. restrictions.
The search team also collected millions of pages of documents and
interviewed hundreds of scientists and other Iraqi officials.
Kay was critical of the CIA during Senate testimony this week on
intelligence reform proposals, saying, "Iraq was an overwhelming systemic
failure of the Central Intelligence Agency."
He cited a "broken culture and management" as well as a "breakdown in
analytical tradecraft," and said that when he headed the search team he had
to deal with analysts who were threatening to quit over jealousies that
others were getting larger bonuses.
The CIA disputes such criticism.
Kay is "knowledgeable about some of Iraq's [weapons] programs, but he now
sees himself as qualified to make sweeping judgments on national
intelligence," said Mansfield, the CIA spokesman.
"We welcome informed, constructive criticism; we could not welcome much of
what Kay had to say."

administration,
Se lo dice lui...:)
*LOL*
-Stefano

 wrote in message
news:412675CB...@people.it...

#_Sei rimasto l'unico al mondo a SAPERE che esistono ancora e che erano
pronte ad essere usate in 45 minuti di tempo,ora ti devi sforzare di
convincere anche Blair e Bush a resistere nelle loro vecchie affermazioni.
G.   rrrr

E ora pulisciti il culo con la bandiera arcobaleno stronzo !
W LA GLOBALIZZAZIONE
Charlie
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 E ora pulisciti il culo con la bandiera arcobaleno stronzo !
C.osa
H.ai
A.ncora
R.igurgitato
L.urido
I.mmondo
E.bete !?
"Support your troops"...
            $
            $
  $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $
            $
            $
            $
            $
...Che crepano per il petrolio di Bush e Cheney

pronte ad essere usate in 45 minuti di tempo,
Se lo dici tu.... :)
*LOL*
-Stefano

 wrote in message
news:4126E673...@people.it...

#_Chi e`stato. tu o il nonno a timbrare quel "se lo dici tu...:)" ?  Tu non
e`che puoi smentire daltronde; continui a contestare quello che tutti
affermano.
G.

continui a contestare quello che tutti affermano.
Se lo dici tu... :)))
*LOL*
-Stefano

 wrote in message
news:4126F755...@people.it...

Si...addio !!!
G.

 il culo
Ora sì che discuti di materie che conosci! A quando una dotta dissertazione
sui prodotti dell'exitus intestinale?
Namib