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The Sunday Times Online reported today that…

…foreign intelligence agents had enlisted the support of US officials to acquire a network of moles in sensitive military and nuclear institutions. [...]

…one well-known senior official in the US State Department was being paid by Turkish agents in Washington who were selling the information on to black market buyers, including Pakistan…

“He was aiding foreign operatives against US interests by passing them highly classified information, not only from the State Department but also from the Pentagon, in exchange for money, position and political objectives.”

– For Sale: West’s deadly nuclear secrets Sunday Times Online, 1/6/08

The source is Sibel Edmonds, an FBI translator fluent in Farsi and Turkish, who was assigned to a backlog of untranslated documents and wiretaps in 2002. Following what she saw as an unsuccessful effort in late 2001 to enlist her in espionage similar to that reported above, Edmonds reported the Americans involved to the FBI — and was fired for her trouble in March 2002.* In his 2005 Vanity Fair piece “An Inconvenient Patriot,” David Rose described what came next:

But being fired is one thing. Edmonds has also been prevented from proceeding with her court challenge or even speaking with complete freedom about the case.

On top of the usual prohibition against disclosing classified information, the Bush administration has smothered her case beneath the all-encompassing blanket of the “state-secrets privilege”—a Draconian and rarely used legal weapon that allows the government, merely by asserting a risk to national security, to prevent the lawsuits Edmonds has filed contesting her treatment from being heard in court at all. According to the Department of Justice, to allow Edmonds her day in court, even at a closed hearing attended only by personnel with full security clearance, “could reasonably be expected to cause serious damage to the foreign policy and national security of the United States.”

Using the state-secrets privilege in this fashion is unusual, says Edmonds’s attorney Ann Beeson, of the American Civil Liberties Union. “It also begs the question: Just what in the world is the government trying to hide?”

Now we have a better idea.

Remarkably, Ms. Edmonds couldn’t get any major American news organization to agree to publish her allegations naming names. It’s really a bit of a shame the story is getting crushed by ObamaNewHampshireIowaEdwardsClintonHuckabeeRomney, and one may wonder why Ms. Edmonds took so long to go to foreign media with her story, which even as reported in outline form before now seemed like a huge scandal. The answer may have to do with libel laws abroad, or at least in the U.K., that are more protective of public figures than they are in the United States. Certainly no names were named in the Times Article.

However, Ms. Edmonds has now published a “State Secrets Privilege Gallery” on her own web site (”Just A Citizen“) with unlabeled photographs of well known Defense Department and intelligence figures like Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, Brent Scowcroft, and Congressmen Dennis Hastert, Richard Livingston, Stephen Solarz, and Art Lantos, to name a few — the full list is spelled out by lukery (”Let Sibel Edmonds Speak”). The intent appears to be to imply names to put to the allegations in the Times story, without taking the legally fraught step of connecting every dot in writing.

Whoever the weak links in the American chain turn out to be, the nexus of espionage that Edmonds’ story describes is unsettling indeed:

The Turks and Israelis had planted “moles” in military and academic institutions which handled nuclear technology. Edmonds says there were several transactions of nuclear material every month, with the Pakistanis being among the eventual buyers. “The network appeared to be obtaining information from every nuclear agency in the United States,” she said.

If the Israeli angle is true as well, it seems plausible that they were trying to get information about how to build “better” nukes of their own, though I suppose there are Israelis who’d sell nuclear plans to Pakistan. The Times provides a timeline of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons development at the end of the story, and most reactions understandably focus on that country.* Jim Henley (”Unqualified Offerings”) writes, “The thing that most struck me is how much, over the decades, Pakistan has acted not at all like a client state of the US.”

The Turkish Connection
True. I’d add, though, that most of the article tends to point our good friend Turkey’s way in that respect. The Congressional involvement implied by Ms. Edmonds’ photo gallery is certainly all connected to Turkey; sometimes the worthy Congressmen involved were impressed that Turkey has been willing to work with Israel diplomatically and militarily, sometimes they’ve been impressed with Turkish money (Livingston’s lobbying firm is on an annual $1.8M retainer by the Turkish government), and sometimes both. Edmonds says Mr. Hastert may not have been willing to wait to get out of office before pocketing his payoffs. Rose:

[Edmonds] reported hearing Turkish wiretap targets boast that they had a covert relationship with a very senior politician indeed—Dennis Hastert, Republican congressman from Illinois and Speaker of the House since 1999. The targets reportedly discussed giving Hastert tens of thousands of dollars in surreptitious payments in exchange for political favors and information.

What sort of political favors? In an interview with Amy Goodman, Rose says that in secret testimony, Edmonds told Congressional investigators that Speaker Hastert may have sold out his support for the Armenian Genocide Resolution in 2000, withdrawing it just before a final vote:

One of the Turkish targets of these wiretaps claimed that the price for getting Dennis Hastert to withdraw the resolution would be $500,000. Now, I do emphasize there’s no evidence at all that he received such a payment, but that is what is said to have been recorded in one of the wiretaps.

Thus, it’s not all about nukes; denial of the Armenian Genocide is a centerpiece of Turkish policy, since acknowledging it would invite reparations claims — and might undermine the political legitimacy of a Turkish republic that has long and strenuously denied many of its founders’ responsibility for that genocide.

But it is likely very much about money in any case. Since 9/11, Turkey is the 7th largest recipient of military “aid” from the United States,** and Turkish military officials — who wield constitutional power in that country as designated arbiters of the secular tradition in that country — are both well placed and not reluctant to profit from sidelines, or recycle some of that largesse in ambitious ways. Entrepreneurism being universal, and absolute power notoriously corrupting absolutely, it would be little wonder if Turkish military and intelligence might go into all kinds of unexpected business sidelines.

We’ll just have to hope that responsible, upstanding people in Islamabad — and not Al Qaeda — were the final destination for any nuclear secrets said entrepreneurs got their hands on.

CROSSPOSTED TO “American Street”

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* Indeed, I wonder if Benazir Bhutto’s assassination was an additional reason Edmonds went to the Times. The stated reason, however, was that she “approached The Sunday Times last month after reading about an Al-Qaeda terrorist who had revealed his role in training some of the 9/11 hijackers while he was in Turkey.” Joseph Cannon (”Cannonfire”) writes the story was probably this one about Louai Sakka (or Sakra), an Al Qaeda operative now jailed in Turkey. The “hall of mirrors” feeling about the story deepens in that Sakka is apparently linked to many Western intelligence services, according to a CooperativeResearch.org article citing the 9/11 Commission and media reports.
** $1.325 billion from 2002-04, according to PublicIntegrity.org. Countries receiving more aid — or “aid” — were Israel, Egypt, Pakistan, Jordan, Afghanistan, and Colombia, with figures ranging from $9 billion to $2 billion over the same time period.

FULL DISCLOSURE: I’d be remiss not to mention that I’ve often written often about the Armenian Genocide and the struggle to have it acknowledged as such. (See, e.g., 90 years ago: Armenian Genocide Begins and Another Day, Another Turkish New Lira for the Washington Post) While I like to think I’d feel this way in any case, I’m married to an Armenian American.

Yesterday I got to wondering what a big time righty blogger like Glenn Reynolds has to say these days about Iraq’s swirls down the toilet drain. Not much, it appeared. Here’s the first thing I found Wednesday afternoon, halfway down the page, in its entirety:

July 25, 2006

THIS IS INTERESTING: ‘Half of Americans now say Iraq had weapons of mass destruction when the United States invaded the country in 2003 — up from 36 percent last year, a Harris poll finds. Pollsters deemed the increase both ’substantial’ and ’surprising’ in light of persistent press reports to the contrary in recent years.’

Apparently, trust in ‘persistent press reports’ isn’t what it used to be.

So other than a quicky link to someone musing about libertarians and the Iraq war, what you had from Reynolds on his front page about Iraq was… a back-handed rebroadcast of the big WMD lie. To be sure, Reynolds has the perfect right to congratulate Americans holding that mistaken belief, including the tens of thousands of his daily readers he’s continued to encourage in that mistaken belief. That doesn’t make it any less contemptible.

Like Andrew Sullivan, I’m sorry about my role, small though I think mine was, in arguing to support the Iraq war. Of course, that and a dollar or so will buy me a cup of coffee at McDonalds, and I don’t expect to keep everyone reading this from wanting to wring my neck. As I wrote in the February 2003 piece linked by Mr. Reynolds, I thought it was a choice between war now or a bigger war later.*

That in turn was based on the assumption that where there seemed to be so much WMD smoke, there was some fire somewhere, too. And that, in turn, was based on thinking that surely the entire American government (and apparently the German BND besides) couldn’t be turned into a gigantic lying machine about the imminence of Iraqi nuclear and biological WMD.

Wrong.

It’s one of those unanswerable and maybe empty counterfactuals whether things would be any different if Saddam had had WMDs or had been close to it. That would presume Cheney et al had been right, and truthful, and competent, and honorable in a way that might have led them to either convince more allies and send more troops, or find other even better ways of avoiding the quagmire and bloodbath now before us.

But Cheney et al were and are none of those things. Instead, we’re in Evil Spock’s universe now, so to speak, and that’s what we — and to a far greater extent, the Iraqis — are stuck with. Maybe we were in it all along, or maybe it took consecutive triple snake eyes called the 2000 election and 9/11 to knock us into the history we’re stuck with. But here we are, with a small assist from me, sad to say — a small point in the scheme of things, but it looms large for me.

Given their continued influence, maybe it’s more important at this point to look at people like Professor Reynolds and ask where, at long last, their respect for their readers and themselves has gone. There are no WMDs, there were none, and you and I were lied to. That’s bad enough. But therefore there wasn’t ever sufficient evidence for them either, meaning people like me also allowed ourselves to be misled into a war about them. We can at least make sure not to ever be fooled again by snake oil peddlers like Cheney, Rove, or Bush — or even little apprentices like Glenn Reynolds.

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* That piece — With regrets: for war on Saddam — mainly addressed counterarguments to the war as I saw them. My WMD concern was more clearly raised in a pros and cons piece a couple of months earlier. But see Operation Desert Snipe for someone whose grasp of the lack of evidence was clearer than mine.

In the immediate aftermath of the war in Iraq last year, a poll by the University of Maryland’s Program in International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) showed that Americans overwhelmingly advanced two reasons they believed the war had been waged: Iraqi WMDs and Iraq’s possible links with Al Qaeda.*

It’s worth repeating before the election: both of these reasons were dead wrong. First, WMD — my own primary reason. From the Key Findings of the Comprehensive Report of the Special Advisor to the DCI on Iraq’s WMD (the Duelfer report):

Nuclear
Iraq Survey Group (ISG) discovered further evidence of the maturity and significance of the pre-1991 Iraqi Nuclear Program but found that Iraq’s ability to reconstitute a nuclear weapons program progressively decayed after that date.

• Saddam Husayn ended the nuclear program in 1991 following the Gulf war. ISG found no evidence to suggest concerted efforts to restart the program.

• Although Saddam clearly assigned a high value to the nuclear progress and talent that had been developed up to the 1991 war, the program ended and the intellectual capital decayed in the succeeding years. [...]

Chemical
While a small number of old, abandoned chemical munitions have been discovered, ISG judges that Iraq unilaterally destroyed its undeclared chemical weapons stockpile in 1991. There are no credible indications that Baghdad resumed production of chemical munitions thereafter, a policy ISG attributes to Baghdad’s desire to see sanctions lifted, or rendered ineffectual, or its fear of force against it should WMD be discovered.

Biological
In practical terms, with the destruction of the Al Hakam facility, Iraq abandoned its ambition to obtain advanced BW weapons quickly. ISG found no direct evidence that Iraq, after 1996, had plans for a new BW program or was conducting BW-specific work for military purposes. Indeed, from the mid-1990s, despite evidence of continuing interest in nuclear and chemical weapons, there appears to be a complete absence of discussion or even interest in BW at the Presidential level.

(first emphasis in original)

Thus, neither WMD (including chemical or biological ones, which I considered sufficient) nor WMD programs (a fallback I insisted on) were present to any significant degree. The Duelfer report found plenty of intent to reconstitute WMD programs, but little-to-no ability to do so. True, containment was being undermined, but apparently not in ways serious enough to give Saddam what he wanted.

On to the purported Iraq/Al Qaeda links. If the 9/11 Commission’s conclusion — “no credible evidence” — seemed too partisan and biased for you, no less an authority than Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld has permanently discredited the idea. According to a Defense Department press release,

Rumsfeld said he has not seen any strong evidence that direct ties existed, he stressed that he does not work in the intelligence field and that then-CIA Director George Tenet had presented solid evidence of ties between Iraq and al Qaeda.**

As Rumsfeld observes, Iraqi officials were clearly not “Little Sisters of the Poor.” But mere contacts do not rise to the level of a casus belli when we should have been keeping our powder dry for stopping more serious threats — like North Korea, A.Q. Khan, or — remember them? — Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda.

It wasn’t just Bush
I was no better at reading the tea leaves. I was swayed from a conservative to a liberal evaluation of the available evidence — not in the partisan meanings of those words, but in their fundamental meanings: how to evaluate risk.

Sure, I wasn’t alone in my belief that there were WMD and/or WMD programs in Iraq. I thought the German BND intelligence agency, for example, was a reliable second opinion about Iraqi nuclear weapons development. But the BND, too, was probably just another victim of Chalabi “curveballs.” And there was never any clinching, definitive evidence — after all, how could there be? Others noticed; see most notably “RonK”’s summary “Operation Desert Snipe.”

I let my fears influence me towards a “better safe than sorry” view of Iraqi WMD. I still feel a recurring, low-level variety of those fears here in D.C. — I think you’re either crazy or lying if you claim you don’t think about the next 9/11-squared around here. (It was noticeable to me how it went away while I was in Germany, and returned by about the time I was wending my way through customs at Dulles Airport.)

But I did myself no favor on that score by supporting getting into the war as much as I did. Given the smug dunces in charge who apparently aren’t even aware there’s a problem, with huge weapons caches missing, with terror groups gaining recruits and experience, with the U.S. military tied down in a war that could have waited, and with even more serious threats gathering elsewhere, I’m worse off than I was before.

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* 60% said WMD were the main justification for the war, and 19% said Al Qaeda links were; the two reasons also combined for 66% of respondents’ next most important choices. The poll was taken May 14-18 among 1265 respondents, the margin of error was +/- 3% for questions posed to the entire sample.
** Rumsfeld subsequently tried to backpedal, saying that “linkages” were observed, but the notion that these were operational allies instead of “let’s do lunch sometime” contacts was clearly never one that Rumsfeld or his administration colleagues shared.

Full disclosure for most readers dropping by the front page these days: despite initially opposing it, I decided to support the Iraq war in the months and weeks before it began. In February of 2003, I finally laid out my arguments in a lengthy piece titled “With Regrets: For War on Saddam.” I stuck with that position for quite a while.

But my fundamental concern — WMD and WMD development in Iraq — was a mirage, and I have to say that had I known then what I know now, I would not have supported this war. So a reassessment is long overdue, and I’m going to try to do that over the next few days: how wrong was I? Why was I wrong?

I’ll try to have one or two posts that try to answer these questions soon. For most, this might be about as interesting as watching paint dry; for others it will be disappointing, and for still others it will be too little, too late. But I ought to do this, and I will.

You probably know Bush’s controversial 2003 State of the Union speech sentence by heart by now:

The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.

This sentence was clear on its face and in its implications at the time: the British believed something, the United States could not verify it (or Bush would have said “We have learned…”).

To the extent the American public feels deceived by these particular sixteen words, let alone duped by them into supporting the war against Iraq, we can only blame ourselves for listening or reasoning poorly.

The only way the statement would have been deceptive is if the United States had known that the British conclusions were based on the same evidence the United States found unpersuasive.* So far, this does not appear to be the case; rather, the British insist their conclusions were based on evidence not available to the United States. The Washington Post reported last week (”CIA Asked Britain to Drop Iraq Claim“):

The CIA tried unsuccessfully in early September 2002 to persuade the British government to drop from an official intelligence paper a reference to Iraqi attempts to buy uranium in Africa … The British government rejected the U.S. suggestion, saying it had separate intelligence unavailable to the United States. [...]

The government of British Prime Minister Tony Blair, however, has stood behind its September conclusion that Iraq “sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa” for a possible nuclear weapons program despite the release of a report by a British parliamentary commission this week that challenged the allegation and, in effect, Bush’s decision to include it in his address.

British officials have insisted that the Bush administration has never been provided with the intelligence that was the basis for the charge included in London’s September intelligence dossier. [links added]

It remains true that the Bush administration was relying on if not a weak reed, then one of patently unknown strength, however clearly that was stated (or, if you insist, “hidden in plain sight”) in the State of the Union address. Given that the other major clues to Iraqi nuclear WMD development were aluminum tubes later shown to be inconclusive, we’re left with a weak public case for imminent Iraqi nuclear WMD. That deserves to be investigated in the United States with the same thoroughness the House of Commons committee displayed.

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* …And/or on additional evidence the United States knew to be unpersuasive.

On Sunday, Gary Farber published a mea culpa on learning that the U.S. is planning to withdraw the lead group in charge of finding WMD in Iraq (Washington Post, “Frustrated, U.S. Arms Team to Leave Iraq “). Team members seem demoralized, and doubt that they’ll ever find “smoking guns.” Farber, chagrined, writes:

If this bears out, I was terribly, tragically, wrong, on the threat of chemical and biological weapons in Iraq. And if so, I am a fool, a blunderer, and an idiot.

I make no saves, I make no apologies. I was, it appears, wrong. And you should consider my future opinions accordingly.

Not so fast, Gary! It now appears that the U.S. government is not throwing in the towel — the most demoralizing implication of the Post’s story — but shifting gears in the hunt for evidence of Iraqi WMD. Reuters’ Steve Holland reports:

With evidence of weapons of mass destruction elusive, the United States and its war allies are replacing arms inspectors in Iraq with a new, larger team that will try to piece together “a deception program” by Saddam Hussein, a top White House official said on Monday.

The new team will be “more expert” at following the paper trail and other intelligence left behind by the Saddam government, said President Bush’s national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice.

Of course, with all the looting and destruction that’s happened, one might reasonably ask “what paper trail?” Monday’s capture of “Jack of Spades” Ibrahim Ahmad Abd al Sattar Muhammad al Tikriti (whew) and a key scientist may provide more answers. The recent possible mobile bioweapon production find (New York Times, Reuters) is encouraging, too, if not the ideal convincing case for Iraqi WMD.

Ken Pollack’s recent comments to a Council on Foreign Relations editor (via Matthew Yglesias) are still worth considering, although his credibility is on the line here, too:

I still think it is very premature to suggest that Saddam either did or did not have the weapons. Now it’s not just that the fat lady hasn’t sung yet, it’s that in some senses the orchestra is just starting to tune up. We are only at the very beginning of what will have to be a very extensive weapons search throughout Iraq.

Pollack’s ensuing remarks are a bit precious for my taste: he asserts we should have either gone to war as soon as Blix found substantial lack of cooperation, or waited for a year to assemble a stronger coalition.* We waited because Blair needed us to, and were only barely willing to do even that. But if you were as resolved as Pollack and Blair that Saddam was dangerous to the region and the world, assembling the perfect coalition to take to war against him was a luxury, not a necessity.

But Pollack makes a good point: between SCR 1441 and Blix’s report of non-cooperation, the formal justification for the war was there. Saddam’s apparent gamesmanship with the Security Council and the United States could not be tolerated. Saddam was on probation for a good reason; even a minor violation of probation is still a violation.

Still, the whole buildup that led to SCR 1441 was premised on a serious Iraqi WMD threat. If that threat was spurious, the Bush folk have some ’splainin’ to do. If they knew it was spurious, there should be resignations and even impeachment: surely a lie that leads to war is more actionable than a lie that covers up an affair with the office intern. It’s fine to have liberated Iraq; it’s an important relief to know Saddam is gone from power. But it definitely would not be fine to learn the United States went to war after being lied to by the Bush administration.

It won’t just be the Bushies who’ll have to look in the mirror. I will have given an administration I didn’t really like or trust too much leeway in explaining its actions. Ultimately, I will have let my fear of one kind of mistake — asserting Saddam could be lived with, but learning he couldn’t — drive me to make the opposite kind: supporting a war that was fundamentally about weapons programs he then turned out not to have.

I’ll join Gary in mea culpas if (when?) the U.S. ends serious efforts to determine what happened to the Iraqi WMD the Bush administration was warning about, or learns they were never there. That hasn’t happened yet.** If it does, a full investigation and accounting are essential.

What has happened, though, is already bad enough. While it’s obvious that the forces on hand at the beginning of Gulf War II were adequate to the job of conquering Iraq, they were not adequate to the job of securing it. Untold damage has been done by allowing looters to pilfer government offices and weapons sites full of dangerously radioactive materials.*** The failure to secure even critical sites like the Tawaitha nuclear research facility is a black mark against the Bush administration, and raises doubts about what its intentions or competence — take your pick — really are.

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* Tim Dunlop points out how Pollack appears to waffle on this over time. Mr. Dunlop has been after Pollack’s hide for some time now.

** I must mention “Operation Desert Snipe” somewhere in here, so here goes. This is a well researched and argued case against there being any Iraqi WMD before the war began. It deserves the “magisterial” accolade Jim Henley bestows on it. Well written, yes. Compelling, no.

“Cogent provocateur’s” (aka RonK) key device is a “standard WMD” scenario constructed to be wrong now and claimed to be essential to supporting the war. Nutshell counterarguments: one can be 99% sure of the presence of WMD in a country without knowing precisely where they are, just as it’s reasonable to infer there’s a gun in a building by hearing a gunshot or finding a resident’s receipt for a gun in the dumpster. The WMD did not have to be weaponized, i.e., ready to be used, to present a Security Council resolution violation and a real threat to regional peace. Biological and chemical weapons, while not as deadly as nuclear weapons, are quite deadly enough; their concealment would not augur well for efforts to prevent or find nuclear weapons development.

And if Saddam didn’t have WMD, why the song and dance with Blix? Why not just welcome UNMOVIC, say “knock yourselves out, help yourselves to the fridge,” and have frequent photo ops with earnest good people from around the globe?

Finally, one of RonK’s own comments undermines his general “wings of a snipe” criticism:

Tactically, Saddam might have contrived to deal us a PR blow by covertly destroying residual stocks and inviting the inspectors in … while preserving the ability to brew them up again later. [Only enriched nuclear material and biological seed cultures are physically compact and expensive enough to justify preservation.]

The “preserved ability to brew them up later” has (apparently) been found for bioweapons. I expect similar capabilities are not far-fetched for chemical weapons, which RonK points out have cheaper precursors anyway. And as far as RonK’s argument goes, I feel that if WMD stocks were only destroyed in the months before this war, the “material breach” of older resolutions was still there. RonK all but makes a “Saddam was the real WMD” argument here. — Nevertheless, his thesis of collective self-deception is a real possibility.

*** I’m leaving museums out of it here. I’ll update my previous post on that when I’ve read the latest from David “Cronaca” and Francis Deblauwe.

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UPDATE, May 19: On Saturday, Aziz Poonawalla reposted and expanded some of his comments to this item; as always, his thoughts are worth your time.

# In a comment about the Aziziyah school courtyard story I mentioned, Doug provides a link to a London Times article that the discovery petered out: two missiles were dug up, neither had WMD warheads.

# A knowledgeable reader writes about my April 20 Boeing post to explain that one point in favor of the leasing arrangement — from the taxpayer point of view — is that Boeing would do all the maintenance on the planes. The argument is that’s cheaper than paying Air Force mechanics to do the same job, since the Air Force also has to arrange housing, medical benefits, and so forth for its personnel.

# I receive favorable mention by Iris of “Interfaith Nunnery,” just for sending her an e-mail. (I liked the phrase “aggressive apathy” in her comment about the museum looting business.) Well, heck, I should do that more often.

# Sven Gessner provides a fourth German translation of the Gettysburg Address to my collection (in a comment to an old post of mine about translations of that speech). He also defends the translation by Erich Heller, published by the Library of Congress at their Gettysburg Address translations web site, as a product of its time. If you’re fluent in a foreign language, I’d appreciate your evaluation of the translation to that language of Lincoln’s speech published by the Library of Congress. See the post for details and to leave your comments.

# Gary Farber appears to be getting better.

# Sina Motallebi remains in jail.

Once upon a time, a long, long time ago — well, in November 1998– the London Sunday Times printed a report* titled “Israel Developing an Ethno-Bomb,” by former Israeli intelligence officer Uzi Mahnaimi and war correspondent Marie Colvin. The report claimed that researchers at an institute in Nes Tziyona — “the main research facility for Israel’s clandestine arsenal of chemical and biological weapons” — were attempting to develop deadly micro-organisms that would attack only people with distinctive genes carried by some Arabs.

I’m not qualified to assess whether such a weapon could be successfully developed.*** I merely point out that this report features a number of people — reporters, politicians, scientists — who were or seemed respected, knowledgeable, Jewish, or combinations thereof, and who said the idea was conceivable and/or that Israelis were researching it. In addition to the reporters, the report features Knesset member Dedi Zucker and former Defense Secretary William Cohen (quoted on feasibility only; Israel’s pursuits were raised by a second anonymous defense official). That doesn’t mean they were right, of course.

I imagine Mahnaimi and Zucker — now an ex-Knesset member who has left the Meretz party to form an Israeli Green Party — may be dismissed as the usual “Peace Now” suspects by many, and perhaps even their non-self-hating-Jewishness will be in question for some.

For my part, although the story and its sources seemed reasonably credible at first, I’ve come to be skeptical. First, there’s Dedi Zucker — or rather, how he’s used in the Times article:

Dedi Zucker, a member of knesset [sic], the Israeli parliament, denounced the research yesterday. “Morally, based on our history, and our tradition and our experience, such a weapon is monstrous and should be denied,” he said.

At first glance, Zucker’s statement seems to corroborate the report (although “denied” is an odd choice of words). But on re-reading the article, I think he’s just reacting to it. I’m trying to reach Mr. Zucker about this. It’s possible that Mr. Zucker had some knowledge about Israeli research via his participation in the Knesset’s “Committee for Scientific and Technological Research and Development.” The committee concerns itself with research institutes, but probably not with military research, which I’d guess is overseen by a different committee. On the other hand, although (admittedly) judging by a Google search, Mr. Zucker’s interests have seemed to lie elsewhere over the years.

Second, the Times story quotes a South African scientist named Goosen; he’s popped up again recently in a Washington Post story about black-market bioweapons, so that I’m provisionally tagging him with my “shady?” and “joker?” mental magic markers.

The anonymous scientist at Nes Tziyona is the key to the story, of course. His anonymity is “convenient” if you dismiss the story, and understandable if you don’t: Mordechai Vanunu has been in jail since 1986 since claiming Israel has nuclear weapons. The anonymous source “confirming” that Cohen meant Israel with his remarks is secondary. It seems fair — and will hopefully not remain embarrassing — to point out many of us have assumed Iraq had WMD on similarly unsubstantiated (albeit presidential) claims. (For what it’s worth, it seems Mahnaimi’s byline also appears on stories claiming Iraq developed nuclear weapons before 1991, and managed to keep a small stockpile after the Gulf War.)

So what’s this all about? Only that it seems to me that Mr. Aziz Poonawalla had a reasonably good faith basis for believing such weapons were being developed — especially because he relied on the WiredNews abridged version of the story, where Mr. Zucker’s comment seems quite authoritative, at least to non-Israelis. Aziz stumbled into a hornet’s nest of anti-Semitism charges of “blood libel” and the like for daring to repeat the story.** Given the Times article itself, I’d say that’s not justified unless you also level the charge at Mahnaimi, Zucker, and possibly Secretary Cohen as well.*** Furthermore, although I’m not Jewish, nothing I’ve ever seen by Aziz justifies the charge.

One objection commonly raised about the story is that you couldn’t keep such a weapon from affecting the many citizens of your own country who have “enemy” ancestry to one degree or another. That seems easy to counter. You somehow (1) tailor a disease virus or bacterium like smallpox or anthrax to be more lethal or contagious for people with a given genetic makeup. That’s the hard part, of course. You then also (2) vaccinate your population, perhaps especially the susceptible members, against the disease. Step (1) wouldn’t necessarily make existing vaccines useless; at any rate, you might also develop a custom vaccine. The motive for tailored bioweapons-plus-vaccination over regular bioweapons-plus-vaccination would be to limit the “collateral damage” outside the vaccinated population, and inside it as well if the vaccine were known or suspected to not be completely effective.

Here’s something we may all agree on, though: I’d certainly prefer to believe that Israel would not even research such a weapon. The sheer volume of angry reactions to merely reviving the suggestion tells me it would be tremendously controversial among Israelis, and among Jews around the world.

Look at it this way: either Mahnaimi and Colvin were right, or they weren’t. If it ever turns out they were right, shame on the Israelis responsible. If they lied or were wrong, shame on them, and the discussion was unnecessary — but it may also have a small deterrent effect of its own.

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* The story is widely reproduced on the Internet. That doesn’t make it true, but the texts copied seem to match up, so I’m reasonably confident my link is an accurate copy of the Times item itself, for which subscriber access is required.
** As the controversy about Aziz’s post grew, he edited a sentence to read “Israel may be developing” instead of “Israel is developing,” which seemed obvious anyway, but worth stating clearly.
*** I found indirect but credible evidence supporting the Cohen part of the London Times report in a very interesting SIPRI report by Malcolm Dando, where footnote 6 reads:‘Cohen warns of new terrors beyond CW’, Jane’s Defence Weekly, 4 June 1997, p. 27; and Starr, B. and Evers, S., ‘Interview: US Secretary of Defense, William Cohen’, Jane’s Defence Weekly, 13 Aug. 1997, p. 32.; I don’t have access to JDW to follow that further. On the subject of Mahnaimi/Colvin items that more or less check out, they also mention that the British Medical Association was to consider the possibility of genetically tailored bioweapons. This seems to be the 1999 BMA report Biotechnology, Weapons & Humanity.

On April 5, Reuters reported that Marines were digging up a school courtyard in the Iraqi town of Aziziyah, following tips by townspeople that there might be chemical weapons buried there. From the Reuters story:

U.S. Marines were digging up a suspected chemical weapons hiding place in the courtyard of an Iraqi girls’ school in a town southeast of Baghdad on Saturday.

The Marines said that a man who described himself as an ex-member of the Iraqi special forces said that a group of Iraqi men had knocked down a wall of the school two months ago, hidden something and concreted it over in the course of three nights.

“We don’t have a clue now but we’re going to dig it up and see,” General James Mattis, the commander of the Marine Division, the main Marine ground force in Iraq.

“Local people grabbed a Marine’s gas mask and pointed to this site,” Matiss said of tip-offs about feared chemical weapons at the site in the town of Aziziyah 80 km (50 miles) southeast of Baghdad.

I’ve found one Knight Ridder/Tribune item that may refer to what was found:

Marines also found two missiles marked with a chemical symbol buried under recently poured concrete in the town of Aziziyah.

Otherwise, the Aziziyah school courtyard story has dropped off the Google News radar screen. Can anybody tell me what happened?

The case of the missing WMD: speculation

Most Iraqi WMD discovery stories have not checked out.* But regardless of what I learn about the Aziziyah school courtyard story, it seems to me that if coalition forces found a real site like this, they might dig up enough to see there was something, and leave the rest untouched for independent verification. One reason to not publicize a find might be to take the time and ship in the equipment to verify that there is more to it, in a way that leaves the evidence intact and credible. The Pentagon seems to not have believed it would be so difficult to find WMD, and is only now thinking of how to make late discoveries credible to the outside world.

It’s also possible that the Bush administration may have hopes of both finding WMD and slapping UNMOVIC and US opponents on the Security Council one last time. UNMOVIC was near Aziziyah at least once before the war**, and apparently after the school courtyard renovation project. Even a relatively small town and its environs can be a big place to search, but it might feel satisfying to some Bush administration folk to say, “look, the inspections process was hopeless; UNMOVIC guys drove right past this. At the rate they were going, it could have taken years — to miss everything.”

It’s true that the Bush administration is currently opposing UN inspections, which would seem to contradict the “leave untouched” speculation. It might also just be a delaying tactic until coalition forces make discoveries they’re confident of. Anyhow, wait a week; this is the most visibly schizophrenic administration I can remember.

At any rate, I don’t support playing politics with this. I think it’s important that UNMOVIC teams should be given the chance to validate any coalition WMD discoveries (and make discoveries of their own). If there are WMD, the main things are (1) to get the stuff out of circulation and (2) to get some clearly independent people to help put WMD discoveries above suspicion. If that must be UNMOVIC, so be it.

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* The other story I haven’t seen specifically debunked is the “polluted Euphrates” story. The recent Judith Miller story in the New York Times (”Illicit Arms Kept Till Eve of War, an Iraqi Scientist Is Said to Assert“) invites skepticism, despite her stature as a journalist; she wasn’t allowed to see the discoveries or talk to the scientist involved.
** I don’t know whether the “Al-Aziziyah Airfield and Firing Range” frequently mentioned in the NTI report is near Aziziyah, or just has a similar name. But one item in the table at the bottom of this article mentions that UNMOVIC inspected “two facilities near Aziziyah owned by the Mesopotamia State Company for Seeds.”

It was just a statue, admittedly. But whether or not Saddam is dead, Iraqis felt safe enough to start knocking his statues down, and joyously did so. That news, and the all-but-complete defeat of Saddam, seems to have been an eye-opener in the Arab media, judging by items like this one in a Washington Post roundup of Arab reactions:

Arab News: The pride the Arabs felt in the initial stages of the invasion, before those legendary ‘pockets of resistance’ halting the advance of the world’s only superpower were revealed as a myth, has been replaced by immense shame and humiliation. The images of US soldiers taking a picnic in the heart of Baghdad will haunt the Arab psyche for generations to come.

I don’t want their shame or humiliation. Most of the reactions in the article were like that: grudging admissions of what couldn’t be denied, then expressions of shame that were more meant as threats than as insights. Why be surprised? A lot has been invested in seeing the United States as the problem, not Saddam. The most important impact won’t be on Arab media editorials or op-ed columns, at least not right away. It will be on fellow Arabs watching Iraqi joy at Saddam’s fall with their own eyes.

This is not to gloat. No one should dare to gloat when children have been maimed, killed, and orphaned — even if other children have been freed from jail, and yet others spared future abuse as hostages or worse. No one should gloat when many of the Iraqi troops killed in battle were little more than blackmail victims used as cannon fodder by their masters.

At least this war has been swift so far, thanks to the training and courage of the coalition soldiers who’ve fought it and the nations who equipped them. But this war was also terrible, because wars are always terrible. It isn’t over yet, either: Baghdad alone is a big place, and Iraq probably still has a lot of surviving hard-core Baathists and Saddam supporters.*

And while the absence of confirmed WMD discoveries so far may not bother everyone, I’ll confess it bothers me. That story isn’t over yet, of course, and there will be half-convincing explanations for their absence. But as little as it matters to anyone besides myself, and whether it’s inconsistent of me or not: I’ll have some nagging doubts if nothing turns up, even if Iraqi non-cooperation itself provided a legitimate basis for this war and a danger signal for the years to come.

I’ll push aside all misgivings and regrets for now: it was simply great to see those people pull down that statue, to see the jubilation in Baghdad, Sulaimaniyah, Basra, and elsewhere over the past days. Iraqi freedom is a precondition to restoring Iraq’s place among the decent nations, a condition at least on a par with the presence or absence of weapons of mass destruction. Even knowing that a lot of necessary next steps lie ahead: the liberation of Iraq from Saddam is the necessary first step. Credit to all who deserve it, from Bush and Blair through Rumsfeld to Franks and the soldiers who made it happen. Congratulations, and thank you.

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*UPDATE 4/10: …so that Tikrit may be a tougher fight.