Category Archives: Weapons of Mass Destruction

Viceroy

Posted on by

Mo Dowd’s on a roll today–

The shocking thing about the trellis of revelations showing Dick Cheney, the self-styled Mr. Strong America, as the central figure in dark conspiracies to juice up a case for war and demonize those who tried to tell the public the truth is how unshocking it all is.

It’s exactly what we thought was going on, but we never thought we’d actually hear the lurid details: Cheney and Rummy, the two old compadres from the Nixon and Ford days, in a cabal running the country and the world into the ground, driven by their poisonous obsession with Iraq, while Junior is out of the loop, playing in the gym or on his mountain bike.

Mr. Cheney has been so well protected by his Praetorian guard all these years that it’s been hard for the public to see his dastardly deeds and petty schemes. But now, because of Patrick Fitzgerald’s investigation and candid talk from Brent Scowcroft and Lawrence Wilkerson, he’s been flushed out as the heart of darkness: all sulfurous strands lead back to the man W. aptly nicknamed Vice.

La Dowd sites the Tenet to The Dick to Scooter connection, then continues:

The Bush hawks presented themselves as protectors and exporters of American values. But they were so feverish about projecting the alternate reality they had constructed to link Saddam and Al Qaeda Рand fulfilling their id̩e fixe about invading Iraq Рthey perverted American values.

Whether or not it turns out to be illegal, outing a C.I.A. agent – undercover or not – simply to undermine her husband’s story is Rove-ishly sleazy. This no-leak administration was perfectly willing to leak to hurt anyone who got in its way.

In the Bush Administration, all dark roads lead to The Dick. In Salon, Jim Lobe writes that Cheney was at the center of the administration’s propaganda and intelligence-fixing efforts leading up to the Iraq War. Cheney, Lobe says, “started beating the nuclear drum with vigor significantly earlier than most remember; indeed at a time that was particularly curious given its proximity to the famous mission former Ambassador Joseph Wilson took on behalf of the CIA.”

Cheney’s drum-beating about Saddam Hussein’s alleged nuclear capabilities began

… just after his return from a tour of Arab capitals where he had tried in vain to gin up local support for military action against Iraq. Indeed, the specific date on which his campaign was launched was March 24, 2002, when, on return from the Middle East, he appeared on three major Sunday public-affairs television programs bearing similar messages on each. On CNN’s “Late Edition,” he offered the following comment on Saddam:

“This is a man of great evil, as the President said. And he is actively pursuing nuclear weapons at this time.”

On NBC’s “Meet the Press,” he said:

“[T]here’s good reason to believe that he continues to aggressively pursue the development of a nuclear weapon. Now will he have one in a year, five years? I can’t be that precise.”

And on CBS’s “Face the Nation”:

“The notion of a Saddam Hussein with his great oil wealth, with his inventory that he already has of biological and chemical weapons, that he might actually acquire a nuclear weapon is, I think, a frightening proposition for anybody who thinks about it. And part of my task out there was to go out and begin the dialogue with our friends to make sure they were thinking about it.”

Lobe writes that in March 2002 there were only two pieces of evidence of Saddam’s nuclear capabilities known to be available. One was a “defector” offered by Ahmed Chalabi who delivered testimony seized upon eagerly by the Cheney cabal, and reported in the New York Times by Judy Miller in December 2001, even though both the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency thought the testimony was a fabrication. And the other piece was …

The infamous forged Niger yellowcake documents that, at some point in December, 2001 or January, 2002 somehow appeared on Cheney’s desk, supposedly through the Defense Intelligence Agency or the CIA, though accounts differ on the precise route it took from Italian military intelligence (SISMI) to the Vice President’s office. It was these and related documents that spurred Cheney to ask for additional information, a request that would eventually result in Wilson’s trip to Niger in late February, which, of course, set the Plame case in motion. Wilson’s conclusion — that there was nothing to the story — would echo the conclusions of both U.S. ambassador to Niger Barbro Owens-Kirkpatrick and Marine Gen. Carlton W. Fulford Jr., then-deputy commander of the U.S. European Command who was also sent to Niger in February. A couple of days after his return to Washington, Wilson would be debriefed by the CIA.

How far up their respective chains of command Wilson’s and Fulford’s reports made it remains a significant mystery to this day. Cheney’s office, which reportedly had reminded the CIA of the Vice President’s interest in the agency’s follow-up efforts even while Wilson was in Niger, claims never to have heard about either report. We do know that Fulford’s report made it up to Joint Chiefs Chairman Richard Myers whose spokesman, however, told the Washington Post in July 2003, shortly after Wilson went public on the New York Times op-ed page, that the general had “no recollection” of it and so no idea whether it continued on to the White House or Cheney’s office.

If you can get around Salon‘s subscription firewall I recommend the Jim Lobe article, as it contains a good account of how the neocons, the Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal, and other players like Judy Miller worked together to wave the nuclear shirt in support of an invasion of Iraq. But now I want to go on to Kevin Drum at Washington Monthly, who recently wrote a series of posts on the forged Niger yellowcake documents. See, for example, this and this. A story emerges that the documents were put together by some part of the Italian government to curry favor with the White House and push for war with Iraq. Via Kevin, we learn from Laura Rozen at TAP,

In an explosive series of articles appearing this week in the Italian newspaper La Repubblica, investigative reporters Carlo Bonini and Giuseppe d’Avanzo report that Nicolo Pollari, chief of Italy’s military intelligence service, known as Sismi, brought the Niger yellowcake story directly to the White House after his insistent overtures had been rejected by the Central Intelligence Agency in 2001 and 2002.

….Today’s exclusive report in La Repubblica reveals that Pollari met secretly in Washington on September 9, 2002, with then–Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley. Their secret meeting came at a critical moment in the White House campaign to convince Congress and the American public that war in Iraq was necessary to prevent Saddam Hussein from developing nuclear weapons. National Security Council spokesman Frederick Jones confirmed the meeting to the Prospect on Tuesday.

Kevin comments,

La Repubblica‘s story suggests that the Italians pushed hard on the documents because they were eager to impress the Americans with their loyalty to the war cause. When the CIA and the State Department didn’t bite, they went straight to the White House. Read Laura’s entire piece for all the details.

And the forged documents made their way to Cheney’s desk in December 2001 or January 2002. The Big Dick took it from there.

In spite of the pressure he is under at the moment, the Dickster is still busy shaping American policy. This is from today’s New York Times:

Amid all the natural and political disasters it faces, the White House is certainly tireless in its effort to legalize torture. This week, Vice President Dick Cheney proposed a novel solution for the moral and legal problems raised by the use of American soldiers to abuse prisoners and the practice of turning captives over to governments willing to act as proxies in doing the torturing. Mr. Cheney wants to make it legal for the Central Intelligence Agency to do this wet work.

Mr. Cheney’s proposal was made in secret to Senator John McCain, the Arizona Republican who won the votes of 89 other senators this month to require the civilized treatment of prisoners at camps run by America’s military and intelligence agencies. Mr. McCain’s legislation, an amendment to the Defense Department budget bill, would ban the “cruel, inhuman and degrading” treatment of prisoners. In other words, it would impose age-old standards of democracy and decency on the new prisons.

President Bush’s threat to veto the entire military budget over this issue was bizarre enough by itself, considering that the amendment has the support of more than two dozen former military leaders, including Colin Powell. They know that torture doesn’t produce reliable intelligence and endangers Americans’ lives.

But Mr. Cheney’s proposal was even more ludicrous. It would give the president the power to allow government agencies outside the Defense Department (the administration has in mind the C.I.A.) to mistreat and torture prisoners as long as that behavior was part of “counterterrorism operations conducted abroad” and they were not American citizens. That would neatly legalize the illegal prisons the C.I.A. is said to be operating around the world and obviate the need for the torture outsourcing known as extraordinary rendition. It also raises disturbing questions about Iraq, which the Bush administration has falsely labeled a counterterrorism operation.

The obvious question is: What is wrong with these people?

The answer, IMO, appears in an article Josh Marshall wrote for Washington Monthly in September 2002, titled “Confidence Men.”

Dick Cheney was the signature figure [of the Bush Administration]: a former White House chief of staff, congressman, and wartime defense secretary, whose vaunted government savvy had been validated in the private sector as CEO of the energy giant Halliburton. Like the administration, Cheney was right-wing, but in a way that was at once daunting and oddly reassuring. You may not have liked what he was doing. But you had little doubt that he knew what he was doing.

Today, that record doesn’t look nearly so impressive. We now know that as CEO, Cheney got snookered into a disastrous merger that has since sent Halliburton’s stock price plummeting, while signing off on dubious balance sheets that have sparked a Securities and Exchange Commission investigation. His mastery of the Beltway is similarly in question. Last year’s Cheney-led energy task force produced an all-drilling-no-conservation energy bill that went nowhere. The task force’s real legacy was to mire the administration in a thicket of congressional investigations and private lawsuits, all springing from Cheney’s insistence on Nixonian secrecy. His major foreign policy gambit–last spring’s shuttle-diplomacy mission to the Middle East to secure support for an invasion of Iraq–was a debacle. The tough-talking VP went to the region to line up the Arab states behind the United States against Saddam; days after Cheney’s return they were lining up behind Saddam against the United States. Less well known, but no less embarrassing, was Cheney’s leadership of the pre-9/11 anti-terrorism task force. In spring 2001, rather than back congressional efforts to implement the findings of the Hart-Rudman commission, Cheney opted to spearhead his own group, to put the administration’s stamp on whatever reforms occurred. But the task force did almost nothing for four months until terrorists struck on September 11. More recently, it was Cheney who advised Bush not to include any serious corporate reforms in his July speech on Wall Street, the one that sent markets plunging. While no one bats a thousand in politics, it’s actually difficult to think of one thing the vice president has been responsible for that has not ended in muddle or disaster. Yet his reputation for competence has survived.

Josh goes on to exlain how the Bushies emanate an aura of competence in spite of the fact that it’s a wonder they can keep their shoes tied. Much of that aura was destroyed only recently by Hurricane Katrina. And for all his repuation for smarts, Cheney’s history reveals plenty of massive blunders and misjudgments. And, unfortunately, he is a big enough fool not to have noticed his own shortcomings. Given near unlimited power, he’s been able to do a lot of damage.

Maybe it’s all about to catch up to him. Let’s hope.

Update: See also “The Cheney Factor” by Dan Froomkin.

Update update: See “Treasongate: The Real Significance of the Niger Uranium Forgery Stories in La Repubblica” by eriposte at The Left Coaster.

Cross-posted on The American Street.

Are You Experienced?

Posted on by

Oh, my. Some people do sound a tad shrill.

Looks like Steve Clemons’s interview with Brent Scowcroft in the October 31 issue of the New Yorker (article not online, but the issue goes on sale tomorrow) is going to be a must-read. You can find excerpts at the links above. I want to mention this paragraph in particular:

Like nearly everyone else in Washington, Scowcroft believed that Saddam maintained stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, but he wrote that a strong inspections program would have kept him at bay. “There may have come a time when we would have needed to take Saddam out,” he told me. “But he wasn’t really a threat. His Army was weak, and the country hadn’t recovered from sanctions.” Scowcroft’s colleagues told me that he would have preferred to deliver his analysis privately to the White House. But Scowcroft, the apotheosis of a Washington insider, was by then definitively on the outside, and there was no one in the White House who would listen to him. On the face of it, this is remarkable: Scowcroft’s best friend’s son is the President; his friend Dick Cheney is the Vice-President; Condoleezza Rice, who was the national-security adviser, and is now the Secretary of State, was once a Scowcroft protege; and the current national-security adviser, Stephen Hadley, is another protege and a former principal at the Scowcroft Group.

Now, this is exactly what I thought about Saddam Hussein before the invasion. Many’s the time before the invasion I had this exchange with a rightie:

Rightie: You looney lefties would just leave Saddam in charge of Iraq.

Me: Well, yes. I think he’s contained. And what’s he gonna do with UN weapons inspectors running all over the place, poking into things?

Rightie: You leftie idiots don’t know anything. You are so naive.

Yes, I may be naive. I have no experience directing foreign policy or national security. But, I might add, I’ve never argued with a rightie with any more experience than I have. Yet they always assume they know more than I do.

But Scowcroft has experience, and he says I was right.

Speaking of Saddam, in today’s Washington Post Jim Hoagland writes that Saddam’s lawyers may present testimony that might cause the Bushies some discomfort.

Saddam Hussein’s lawyers have announced their intention to make past U.S. complicity with the Iraqi dictator an essential part of the defense in his Baghdad trial. Let’s hope they keep their poisonous word. …

“Americans . . . want to blame Saddam for the mass graves and killing Kurds,” Khalil Dulaimi, the dictator’s lead lawyer, told the Wall Street Journal. “But they forget that they supported Saddam back then.”…

… Official Washington helped Hussein suppress Iraqis so he could fight Iran (Reagan), called on the people to rise up against the dictator only to abandon them when they did (Bush 41) or relied on economic sanctions that slowly ground Iraqi society into dust while providing a political alibi at home for not acting (Clinton). The unnecessary misery, political strife and corruption that a misbegotten and mismanaged occupation now contributes to Iraq must also be added to the list.

Hoagland argues that Americans owe Iraq “more than a sudden case of moral amnesia to bolster precipitous withdrawal.” I agree with Hoagland in principle. But it’s hard to see how not-withdrawing is helping Iraq, either.

Before I forget–we are about to reach the 2000 mark–2,000 U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq. We may have reached it already, but as I keyboard the most recent information says we’re at 1,996, ten of which have not yet been confirmed by the Department of Defense. United for Peace and Justice and other organizations are calling for an antiwar action the day after the U.S. announces the 2,000th death. You can follow the link to see if anything is being organized near you.

Judy Miller Smackdown

Posted on by

Crooks & Liars posts the text of a memo from editor Bill Keller to the New York Times staff.

Short version: I apologize for letting Judy Miller screw the New York Times.

Sample:

I wish that when I learned Judy Miller had been subpoenaed as a witness in the leak investigation, I had sat her down for a thorough debriefing, and followed up with some reporting of my own. It is a natural and proper instinct to defend reporters when the government seeks to interfere in our work. And under other circumstances it might have been fine to entrust the details — the substance of the confidential interviews, the notes — to lawyers who would be handling the case. But in this case I missed what should have been significant alarm bells. Until Fitzgerald came after her, I didn’t know that Judy had been one of the reporters on the receiving end of the anti-Wilson whisper campaign. I should have wondered why I was learning this from the special counsel, a year after the fact. (In November of 2003 Phil Taubman tried to ascertain whether any of our correspondents had been offered similar leaks. As we reported last Sunday, Judy seems to have misled Phil Taubman about the extent of her involvement.) This alone should have been enough to make me probe deeper. …

… if I had known the details of Judy’s entanglement with Libby, I’d have been more careful in how the paper articulated its defense, and perhaps more willing than I had been to support efforts aimed at exploring compromises.

It’s not just Bill Keller. Miller’s colleague Mo Dowd writes a column today (behind the bleeping subscription wall) that takes Judy down, although gently (for Dowd).

Shorter version: Somebody should have stopped her a long time ago.

Sample:

She never knew when to quit. That was her talent and her flaw. Sorely in need of a tight editorial leash, she was kept on no leash at all, and that has hurt this paper and its trust with readers. She more than earned her sobriquet “Miss Run Amok.”

Judy’s stories about W.M.D. fit too perfectly with the White House’s case for war. She was close to Ahmad Chalabi, the con man who was conning the neocons to knock out Saddam so he could get his hands on Iraq, and I worried that she was playing a leading role in the dangerous echo chamber that Senator Bob Graham, now retired, dubbed “incestuous amplification.” Using Iraqi defectors and exiles, Mr. Chalabi planted bogus stories with Judy and other credulous journalists.

Even last April, when I wrote a column critical of Mr. Chalabi, she fired off e-mail to me defending him.

When Bill Keller became executive editor in the summer of 2003, he barred Judy from covering Iraq and W.M.D. issues. But he acknowledged in The Times’s Sunday story about Judy’s role in the Plame leak case that she had kept “drifting” back. Why did nobody stop this drift?

Judy admitted in the story that she “got it totally wrong” about W.M.D. “If your sources are wrong,” she said, “you are wrong.” But investigative reporting is not stenography.

At the Los Angeles Times, Tim Rutten discusses the Keller memo.

Shorter version: Miller’s a liar.

Sample:

The Times is a great news organization with a newfound capacity for self-criticism and a demonstrated capacity to renew itself. Miller, the reporter, represents something far more persistent and pernicious in American journalism. She’s virtually an exemplar of an all-too-common variety of Washington reporter: ambitious, self-interested, unscrupulous and intoxicated by proximity to power. …

… As Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball reported in Newsweek’s online edition this week, Libby deceived Miller during that breakfast meeting when he told her — according to her own account — that a classified National Intelligence Estimate “had firmly concluded that Iraq was seeking uranium” for a nuclear bomb. In fact, it called reports of Baghdad’s purchase of African uranium “highly dubious.”

Miller makes no mention whatsoever of this in her evasive published account of their dealings; what does that make her?

Sloppy and reckless — but apparently something more….

…Given Miller’s demonstrable conviction that a true picture can be repainted in situationally convenient hues, it’s not hard to figure out whom you believe on this one. A line of poetry comes to mind:

And what is truth, said Pilate, and washed his hands.

Ouch.

Colbert King of the Washington Post suggests that Miller’s relationship with her sources was way too cozy.

Shorter version: The White House did a no-no, and Judy helped.

Sample:

…the CIA leak case belongs in a class of its own. The Bush administration, having denied any knowledge or involvement in the disclosure of Valerie Plame’s CIA affiliation, appears to be up to its eyeballs in the whole affair. But security transgressions, if that’s what they are, appear to extend beyond blowing an agent’s cover.

Last Sunday, the New York Times published reporter Judith Miller’s firsthand account of her grand jury appearance in connection with the leak case. According to Miller, the inquiry that special counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald conducted before the grand jury roamed beyond the disclosure of Valerie Plame’s name. Miller wrote that Fitzgerald, referring to Vice President Cheney’s chief of staff, asked “if I had discussed classified information with Mr. Libby, and I said I believed so, but could not be sure.” Miller said she told Fitzgerald and the grand jury that I. Lewis Libby treated classified material very carefully and that while he had not shown her any documents, “I thought I remembered him at one point reading from a piece of paper he pulled from his pocket.”

Miller does not have a security clearance, though she claimed she had one when she was embedded with a special military unit in Iraq two years ago. She later modified that statement to say she had signed a nondisclosure form with the military giving her temporary access to classified information under rules set by her military hosts, according to Thursday’s Times. At any rate, she no longer had authorized access to classified information after the Iraq assignment.

Before the release of the Keller memo, Jack Shafer at Slate was calling for an exorcism at the Times.

Shorter version: Miller should not only be dismissed from the Times, she should be drummed out of journalism.

Sample:

The Sunday Times account about Miller read alone paints her as an insubordinate, self-serving, and undisciplined menace you couldn’t trust to assemble entertainment listings let alone file national-security stories. Conceding in the Times piece that her WMD reporting was “totally wrong,” Miller proves she doesn’t understand how journalism works when she says, “The analysts, the experts and the journalists who covered them—we were all wrong. If your sources are wrong, you are wrong. I did the best job that I could.” That is a lie. Reporters aren’t conduits through which sources pour information into newspapers. And sources aren’t to blame if a reporter gets a story wrong. A real reporter tests his sources’ findings against other evidence in hopes of discovering the truth, something Miller was apparently loath to do. …

…Asking the Times to exhume Miller’s work and revisit the methods and practices that led to flawed WMD journalism at the paper isn’t a veiled way of asking that witches be arrested for burning at the stake. Journalistic standards were betrayed at the Times. It was the Times, not me, that stated in its May 26, 2004, mini culpa that “the story of Iraq’s weapons, and of the pattern of misinformation” is “unfinished business” and promised that the paper would “continue aggressive reporting aimed at setting the record straight.” Unless the paper wants to hear Judith Miller’s name yodeled with that of Walter Duranty on every occasion Times haters assemble, one last public exorcism must be conducted to drive out the demons forever.

Time will tell if the New York Times has actually learned anything from this mess. As I wrote here, the Times has a pattern of compromised reporting that predates the Bush Regime. Let’s see if they can remember how to cover news.

Update: More on MoDo from Steve Gilliard.

Punchin’ Judy

Posted on by

Judy Miller’s eagerly anticipated account of her grand jury testimony is published. Already there is enough commentary on the Blogosphere to fill a library.

And today there are new questions about whether Scooter Libby tried to keep Judy quiet. Pete Yost of the Associated Press writes today,

The dispute centers on year-ago conversations that the lawyer Cheney aide I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby had with one of Miller’s lawyers and on a letter from Libby to Miller last month regarding their talks in the summer of 2003 that touched on covert CIA officer Valerie Plame.

In urging her to cooperate with prosecutors, Libby wrote Miller while she was still in jail in September, “I believed a year ago, as now, that testimony by all will benefit all. … The public report of every other reporter’s testimony makes clear that they did not discuss Ms. Plame’s name or identity with me.”

One of Miller’s lawyers, Robert Bennett, was asked Sunday whether he thought Libby’s letter was an attempt to steer her prospective testimony.

“I wouldn’t say the answer to that is yes, but it was very troubling,” Bennett said on ABC’s “This Week.”

“Our reaction when we got that letter, both Judy’s and mine, is that was a very stupid thing to put in a letter because it just complicated the situation,” Bennett said.

“It was a very foolish thing to put in a letter, as evidenced by the fact that you’re highlighting it here,” Bennett said. “It was a close call and she was troubled by it; no question about it.”

In today’s Times, Miller wrote that she’d been questioned on this point [emphasis added].

During my testimony on Sept. 30 and Oct. 12, the special counsel, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, asked me whether Mr. Libby had shared classified information with me during our several encounters before Mr. Novak’s article. He also asked whether I thought Mr. Libby had tried to shape my testimony through a letter he sent to me in jail. …

…When I was last before the grand jury, Mr. Fitzgerald posed a series of questions about a letter I received in jail last month from Mr. Libby. The letter, two pages long, encouraged me to testify. “Your reporting, and you, are missed,” it begins.

Mr. Fitzgerald asked me to read the final three paragraphs aloud to the grand jury. “The public report of every other reporter’s testimony makes clear that they did not discuss Ms. Plame’s name or identity with me,” Mr. Libby wrote.

The prosecutor asked my reaction to those words. I replied that this portion of the letter had surprised me because it might be perceived as an effort by Mr. Libby to suggest that I, too, would say we had not discussed Ms. Plame’s identity. Yet my notes suggested that we had discussed her job.

Mr. Fitzgerald also focused on the letter’s closing lines. “Out West, where you vacation, the aspens will already be turning,” Mr. Libby wrote. “They turn in clusters, because their roots connect them.”

How did I interpret that? Mr. Fitzgerald asked.

In answer, I told the grand jury about my last encounter with Mr. Libby. It came in August 2003, shortly after I attended a conference on national security issues held in Aspen, Colo. After the conference, I traveled to Jackson Hole, Wyo. At a rodeo one afternoon, a man in jeans, a cowboy hat and sunglasses approached me. He asked me how the Aspen conference had gone. I had no idea who he was.

“Judy,” he said. “It’s Scooter Libby.”

That’s where Judy ends the article, btw. Very weird, if you ask me.

It seems to me Judy still has some ‘spainin’ to do; if not to Fitzgerald, then to the staff and readers of the New York Times. At Editor & Publisher, Greg Mitchell writes that the Times should fire Miller and apologize to its readers. Howard Kurtz writes at WaPo that the New York Times staff is upset and demoralized by the Judy Miller episode and doubt that the newspaper’s editors and executives are being, shall we say, transparent about what’s really going on. Be sure to read James Wolcott and Steve Gilliard, too.

Other commentaries of note:

Digby argues that the nature of the testimony must have caused Patrick Fitzgerald to at least consider the bogus WMD claims made by the Regime before the invasion.

Judy Hamsher at Firedoglake says Judy and Fitz must’ve played “Let’s Make a Deal.”

Arianna says it’s no clearer now exactly why Judy Miller went to jail.

John Aravosis at AMERICAblog writes that Libby undercut Bush.

Viveca Novak and Mike Allen write in Time that, if indicted, Karl Rove and other White House staff plan to either resign or take unpaid leave. This would apply to Scooter Libby as well. The article implies that this is Karl Rove’s plan, not President Bush’s plan, which seems odd. It’s as if they know the boss can’t make decisions; they have to be made for him.

Payback

Posted on by

Oooo, those Swedes. They gave the Nobel Peace Prize to Mohamed ElBaradei and the International Atomic Energy Agency. The Bushies must be mightily pissed.

Mohamed ElBaradei, you might recall, is the same guy who, before the Iraq invasion, did everything but stand on his head and whistle Dixie to warn that Saddam Hussein did not have nuclear weapons capability (see old Mahablog post on this here). Beginning the day before Bush’s 2003 State of the Union Address–home of the Sixteen Words!–ElBaradei made the rounds of talk shows and said his inspectors were not finding evidence of nuclear weapons of mass desctruction, or even weapons of mass destruction-related program activities. Saddam Hussein’s old nuclear weapons facilities and equipment were still sitting dormant, and sealed, just as the IAEA had left them in 1998.

When it became obvious even to the Bushies that ElBaradei had been right and the Bushies wrong, naturally ElBaradei became a target of Bushie wrath. This past January they tried desperately to replace him as head of the IAEA and failed spectacularly:

The United States has failed to persuade 15 countries to support an effort to replace International Atomic Energy Agency Director General Mohamed ElBaradei, effectively stalling the plan, the Washington Post reported Saturday (see GSN, Jan. 10).

“It’s on hold right now,” said one U.S. policy-maker who lobbied against ElBaradei. “Everyone turned us down, even the Brits.”

In addition to the United Kingdom, the United States also unsuccessfully approached Australia, Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Japan, Mexico, the Netherlands, Pakistan, Poland, South Africa and South Korea, U.S. officials said.

“We can certainly live with another ElBaradei term,” a British official said.

Slap. But the Bushies still have enough clout to keep ElBaradei out of the sandbox, even if they can’t have him evicted from the playground. They’ve refused to allow the IAEA to have full access to Iraq’s old nuclear sites since the March 2003 invasion. After a highly restricted and tightly supervised inspection in the summer of 2003, the IAEA was kept out of Iraq entirely from August 2003 until July 2004, when “sovereignty” was “transferred” to Iraq. The government of Iraq has permitted limited “safeguard” inspection, but the IAEA site adds this disclaimer: “The safeguards inspections are separate from weapons inspections mandated by the UN Security Council that ceased in mid-March 2003.”

Somebody walked off with a lot of old but usable stuff, like milling machines and electron beam welders. I don’t believe the White House has commented on this at all. The only available clue about who is taking this stuff is that the U.S. Department of Energy admitted to taking 1.77 metric tons of low-enriched uranium plus “roughly 1000 highly radioactive sources” in July 2004.

(Note that the uranium was still secured by IAEA seals when IAEA inspectors checked it prior to the invasion, meaning Saddam Hussein hadn’t done anything with the stuff for many years. It was just there. I mention this because righties tend to get all worked up whenever they learn about the uranium. But it was not only sealed, it was years away from being weapons-ready as it was.)

Fred Barbash and Dafna Linzer report in today’s Washington Post that “ElBaradei was virtually unknown when the United States engineered his candidacy eight years ago to run the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog agency.” In other words, the Clinton Administration supported him. Another black mark. Further,

In an interview with The Washington Post last fall, ElBaradei said the day the United States invaded Iraq “was the saddest in my life.” It was not because he was a fan of Hussein, but because he was so sure Washington’s assertions about weapons stockpiles and a secret program would be proved wrong.

Washington responded to ElBaradei’s findings on Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction by trying to prevent him from taking a third term, despite requests from other board members that he stay on. “I am staying because I was asked, because so many board members made me feel guilty about leaving at such a crucial time,” he said in an interview earlier this year.

The Bush administration launched a vigorous but solitary campaign — including a complete halt of intelligence sharing, recruitment of potential replacements for ElBaradei and eavesdropping on him in search of ammunition against him. But as his popularity diminished in Washington, it soared elsewhere.

Heh.

See also Meteor Blades.