Rather than admit the undeniable truth, Bush and others have tried to magically transform it.

ATLANTA, GEORGIA, October 9, 2003

 

Bush officials bend Iraq facts till they break

Jay Bookman

DID Bush officials exaggerate and distort prewar evidence about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction? Or were they, like the rest of us, simply the victims of poor intelligence work by the CIA and other agencies?

The answer is important. Incompetence is one thing; a conscious decision by our top leaders to deceive us into war would be far more troubling. And getting to the truth will be difficult as long as Republican leaders in Congress refuse to conduct a full-scale investigation into the question.

Fortunately, there are other ways to gauge the decision-making process in the Bush administration. The most obvious proof that Bush officials hyped and distorted evidence about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction in the past is that they continue to hype and distort that evidence today, with a shamelessness that is stunning.

Let's review briefly:

Before the war, the American people heard repeated warnings from prominent members of the administration -- President Bush, Secretary of State Colin Powell, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, etc. -- about the dire threat posed by Iraq. We heard warnings of Iraqi nuclear bombs and mushroom clouds drifting over American cities. We heard talk of Iraqi unmanned aerial vehicles that could fly over the continental United States, spreading chemical and biological weapons. We heard ominous reports of growing Iraqi stockpiles of the most vicious weapons devised by mankind, weapons that could be slipped easily to Saddam Hussein's bosom buddies in al-Qaida.

Now, almost six months after the war ended, we know that none of those fears was grounded in reality. David Kay, the head of the Iraq Survey Group, grudgingly reported to Congress last week that so far he has found no chemical or biological weapons, not even a program to produce chemical or biological weapons. He found no Iraqi program to develop nuclear weapons. He found no evidence of unmanned aerial vehicles capable of spreading biological or chemical weapons. The list goes on and on.

However, rather than admit the undeniable truth, Bush and others have tried to magically transform it. If you believe their version of the story, the fact that we have found no WMD in Iraq -- and no WMD programs -- is of little or no importance. In fact, they argue that the Kay report actually vindicates their claim that Saddam posed an imminent danger to the region and the world. It seems they were right all along.

Uh huh. And the Braves are going to win the World Series this year.

This is precisely how a discredited forgery about enriched uranium is transformed into proof that Iraq is building a nuclear weapon. This is how CIA dismissals of a link between Saddam and Osama bin Laden -- dismissals backed by investigation and expert analysis -- are made to disappear because they inconveniently contradict policy. This is how hype, exaggeration and distortion can be used to alter reality, right out where everyone can see it.

To justify their bizarre claim, Bush officials have pounced upon a handful of minor finds by Kay's group, in particular the discovery of a biological agent in the possession of an Iraqi scientist. What they found, of course, was not the tons of weaponry that Powell so famously promised in his speech to the United Nations. It was not pounds or even ounces of the material. It was one small vial.

That vial contained the B strain of botulinum, not the more deadly A strain. It did not contain botulinum toxin, the actual nerve agent known in this country as Botox, only the fairly common botulinum bacteria that can produce the toxin.

Most tellingly, the vial was given to the Iraqi scientist for safekeeping back in 1993, and it has sat untouched in his home refrigerator ever since. For the next 10 years, nobody in the Iraqi government showed the slightest interest in reclaiming that vial, not even after U.N. inspectors left the country in 1998.

The vial, in other words, is not evidence of a living, fire-breathing dragon that had to be slain before it could threaten our homes. It's a dinosaur bone, an ancient relic of a long-departed beast. All the spinning and hyping in the world can't change that.

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