Dead Wrong: Straight Facts on the Country's Most Controversial Cover-Ups (64 page)

Therefore, in any fair assessment, he was far from suicidal over the press coverage, but he was embroiled in a controversy brought about by his professional integrity causing resentment of the overwhelmingly apparent fact: Intelligence material that he had developed was being dramatically misrepresented in order to justify the illegal invasion of another nation.

The Bush and Blair Administrations falsified “intel” that Iraq had WMD (weapons of mass destruction) to justify going to war in the Middle East. That was a lie. The Administration did
not
have that intel and Iraq did not have WMD.

They had an agenda to go to war and off to war they went. The West (the Bush/Cheney Administration in the U.S. and the Tony Blair Administration in the U.K.) were intent upon an invasion of Iraq and were not about to be stopped. Officials within the Bush Administration have stated that from the moment that Bush took office there was never really any doubt that Iraq was going to be invaded, the only question was when. Therefore, a justification, real or imagined, was a top priority.

“Except a desire for regime change is an illegal basis in international law for invading a country. So we had the hyped up dossiers and the pretence that, if only Saddam would cooperate with the UN and its inspectors, invasion could be avoided.”
⁵³⁵

Well folks, Iraq
did
cooperate with the UN weapons inspectors. Dr. David Kelly inspected Iraq’s WMD potential and came to the conclusion that it had none. On June 15 (approximately one month prior to his death), Dr. Kelly clearly struck down the West’s claim that Iraq possessed WMD.
⁵³⁶

But that didn’t stop the Blair and Bush Administrations from disregarding the inspection team’s hard intel, barring the
real
intel from public, and pushing forth its own phony claims about Iraq’s true WMD potential, as well as its having sought enriched uranium for nuclear weaponry from Africa.

The specific claims that The West used in its false justification for the illegal invasion of Iraq are below—and bear in mind that Dr. Kelly’s mysterious death occurred right in the middle of this sadly false scenario. Two completely false claims were made about:

1.Iraq possessed the ability to possess and deliver WMD;

2.Iraq’s attempts to obtain weapons-grade uranium from Africa were indicative that it was a nuclear threat.

And make no mistake about it, for the facts are now crystal clear—they not only lied about the above two claims, they
then
even lied about having falsified them.

That
was their case for an invasion. Therefore, the WMD lie needed to be maintained at any cost.

Some, in the face of such adversity, simply crumble in humility and go quietly along with the Powers That Be. Others—and Dr. Kelly was clearly one—are of such serious integrity and professionalism that they do not shrink from the challenge of speaking the truth. David Kelly did not go quietly; he put up a fight.

Kelly contacted a BBC news journalist and gave him his appraisal of the real on-the-ground intelligence. A political explosion took place in Great Britain as a result of that action.

Britain’s Ministry of Defense became aware of a high-level security leak— an official was disclosing to the press that WMD estimates in Iraq were being grossly overstated. Dr. Kelly had been revealed as the source of the leak. He died shortly thereafter just as he predicted: “found dead in the woods.”

The focus on WMD as the reason for going to war was not an accident, but a decision that was carefully planned. As U.S. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz admitted in a 2003 interview:

“The truth is that for reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S. government bureaucracy, we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on which was weapons of mass destruction as the core reason.”
⁵³⁷

The paper trail proves that it was no accident either—our leaders intentionally overstated the threat through “systematical” misrepresentations to justify their march to war:

“Bush administration officials exaggerated the threats from Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and failed to uncover any links between President Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, a private nonpartisan research organization concluded in a report released yesterday. The study by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace states that ‘administration officials systematically misrepresented the threat from Iraq’s WMD and ballistic missile program’ by treating possibilities as fact and ‘mis- representing inspectors’ findings in ways that turned threats from minor to dire.’”
⁵³⁸

As an example of the result of this gross misrepresentation, in every sense of the phrase, consider that the headline of Britain’s widely-read
Sun
newspaper soon blasted the following (and we cite it precisely) in huge bold print letters at the top of its front page:

BRITS 45mins
FROM DOOM
⁵³⁹

During and after the invasion, no chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons were found in Iraq— no WMDs—even though that was the stated reason to the world for the launching of the invasion into another country that was clearly in violation of international law. Dr. Kelly and his team had been absolutely correct. Pre-invasion, the reality was that there was
no
evidence of WMD, just as Dr. Kelly had said. And
that
was the intelligence assessment that Kelly and his team had provided. Kelly maintained that the true facts were being “sexed up” for political purposes, to justify an invasion that was unjustifiable.
⁵⁴⁰

Dr. Kelly’s group had concluded that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and that Saddam hadn’t even had a program for any such weapons since way back in 1991. The response to the report from Dr. Kelly’s group was to
prevent it from being published.
These were the people to whom the West was looking for the true facts surrounding the reasons of whether or not to go forward to a horrific war, and the forces of British leadership were marshaled to
prevent
that very truth from reaching the public! Changing the report to make it incredibly—and quite intentionally—misleading, they simply made up a claim. Iraq had no WMD and everybody knew it. But the U.S. and U.K., clearly acting in concert, created self-supporting circular evidence. It was unquestionably the subversion and perversion of raw intelligence to conform with a pre-determined march to war. British Intelligence, as the Blair Government, knew that Saddam Hussein did not possess WMD capabilities. So they deliberately chose to use language and semantic subterfuge to intentionally create the contrary impression and thereby fortify their false justification for war.
⁵⁴¹

And it wasn’t just Dr. Kelly who became a victim of that false path to an illegal invasion—anyone who got in the way of it became a victim. During this exact same time period, another component of the falsification of rationale for invasion of Iraq was a claim just as weak as Iraq’s WMD—supposed intelligence showing that Iraq had sought enriched uranium, known as “yellow cake,” from the African nation of Niger. The conclusion was dramatically drawn that
with
this weapons-grade uranium, Iraq’s nuclear capabilities would pose a dire threat to the world. But the reality of that situation was starkly different.

In February, 2002, the CIA had sent Joseph Wilson, former Ambassador, to Niger for the specific purpose of investigating if Iraq had sought weapons- grade uranium. Wilson had spent over a week there, speaking with dozens of contacts, including present and former government officials who had been connected with Niger’s uranium business. Wilson’s investigation concluded that, given his discussions, as well as the restrictions, scrutiny and difficulties associated with uranium, it was extremely unlikely that international oversight had failed in the matter. He expressed his extreme doubt that uranium had been passed from Niger to Iraq and conveyed his opinion of same to the appropriate U.S. authorities.

Therefore, former Ambassador Wilson was quite astonished to see that the Bush Administration had gone full-forward with the claim as though it were accepted intelligence. He voiced his concerns about the matter in an article that appeared in
The New York Times
on July 6, 2003. The article revealed that Wilson found the claim “highly doubtful” and that, furthermore, there was no evidence that Saddam Hussein had even
attempted
to buy uranium from the country.

The White House responded quickly and lethally, revealing its true colors for all to see. On July 14, only three days prior to Dr. Kelly’s death, information was leaked and printed by a journalist on good terms with the Bush Administration, that Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, was an active CIA agent. Obviously, its intention was retribution at Wilson. In the process, it blew Plame’s cover, effectively ending her very honorable intelligence career. But it also did something else—it compromised the relationships and even the lives of dozens of contacts she had, both covert and overt, through a career spanning many years all over the globe. If one checks the
United States Intelligence Identification Act
of 1982, one finds that it is a felony to disclose the name and details of a covert agent. But hey, no problem there, folks—when you have the U.S. Presidency at your disposal, those sorts of problems can be effectively dealt with. When President Bush’s close advisor, “Scooter” Libby, was found to have lied to investigators about mentioning Ms. Plame, quicker than you can say “Get out of jail free-card,” he was the immediate recipient of a Presidential Pardon. It’s a lot like President Lyndon Johnson supposedly investigating the assassination of President Kennedy—it has the effect of getting the real point pushed aside, rather rudely at that, and usually for “national security.” It was a clear shot by the Bush Administration at Ambassador Wilson and a clear warning to anyone else that they were risking everything if they got in the way of this Administration’s march to war. However, Dr. Kelly was a man of much integrity and, although he clearly saw what had taken place with Ambassador Wilson, he was not about to see a major war fought over what he knew to be false intelligence.
⁵⁴²

Colin Powell’s contention before the United Nations that Iraq possessed mobile bio-weapons labs had also been investigated by Dr. Kelly and his team. They concluded that Iraq possessed nothing of the sort—the “mobile bio-terror labs” were established by the weapons inspectors to be simply for the purpose of helium—they posed no threat whatsoever.

Dr. Kelly spoke his conscience, because he
knew
that the information was fraudulent. So he contacted a British source at the
Observer
and spoke candidly and clearly. His comments appeared in a Sunday edition on June 15, 2003, a month before his death. Dr. Kelly is referred to as “a British scientist and biological weapons expert, who has examined the trailers in Iraq.” Here are his exact words:

“They are not mobile germ warfare laboratories. You could not use them for making biological weapons. They do not even look like them. They are exactly what the Iraqis said they were — facilities for the production of hydrogen gas to fill balloons.”
⁵⁴³

But that hadn’t stopped U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell from doing his major media show at the United Nations in which he laid out the need for war. He stated that it was reliable information from a known informant and had three corroborating sources. The “reliable informant” was none other than a man codenamed “Curveball” because that’s exactly what he usually threw. All three of those corroborating sources, by the way, were also thoroughly discredited— they turned out to be “fraudulent,” just as Curveball also was. In fact,
even the
CIA itself, and its chief of European Intelligence, openly questioned Curveball’s credibility.

“Here were the foundations of sand on which were built Mr. Powell’s authoritative call to war at the UN.”
⁵⁴⁴

Colin Powell, before the world at his highly publicized UN presentation, presented the information as “firsthand descriptions” and confidently stated that an “eyewitness account of these mobile production facilities has been corroborated by other sources.”
⁵⁴⁵

That public relations campaign paid off big-time too; albeit with massive misinformation. But that wasn’t important at the time to the Administration. Only the “case for war” was important. To convey an idea of the success of that misinformation, just consider this: A 2003 poll showed that an astounding
seventy-two percent of Americans
believed that Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the attacks of 9-11. Like the old saying goes: Don’t let the facts get in the way of a good story.

Great Britain and the U.S. could certainly breathe a lot easier after the “con-venient” death of Dr. Kelly: Their WMD lie would then remain unchallenged because its biggest critic was gone—the one man who could prove it was a lie. That reality alone mandates a very close look at any role those groups may have played in his death.