26-03-2016, 03:13 PM
I'm reading the 2005 book Feet to the Fire: The Media after 9/11, edited by Kristina Borjesson. There is an interview with Ted Koppel from 2004, and it really reveals what a tool he is for the national security state. Practically everything he says is a milder version of what the Bush administration was saying around that time. He was convinced there were WMD in Iraq - "absolutely, I believed it." And Bush wanted the media to be in Iraq so they could show them the WMD when they found them. And if only Saddam had cooperated with UN inspectors, Bush would have lost his excuse to invade:
Koppel: "And if after all Saddam wanted to avoid an invasion, the easiest way of doing that would be to say, 'Yes, we have a few tons of weapons of mass destruction. Here, take them out. Look anywhere you want to look.'...I don't think that the United States could have gone ahead with it [the war] then. I really don't....Would have been very, very difficult. But as I say, the problem that I see is those who say, 'We should have given it another six months so that the inspectors could do their work.' At the end of six months, the administration would have said, 'We haven't proved anything yet, all we've proved is that they're well hidden.'"
Which is exactly what freaking happened. Koppel also repeats the Bush claim that every other intelligence agency in the world thought Saddam had WMD.
The UN inspectors were at work in Iraq for months before the invasion. In November 2002, Richard Perle, a member of the Defense Policy Board, attends a meeting on global security with members of the British Parliament. At one point he argues that the weapons inspection team might be unable to find Saddam's arsenal of banned weapons because they are so well hidden. According to the London Mirror, he then states that the US would "attack Iraq even if UN inspectors fail to find weapons." [Mirror, 11/21/2002]
British Foreign Minister Robin Cook is personally given an intelligence briefing by John Scarlett, head of the British joint intelligence committee. Cook later says in his diary that Scarlett's summary was "shorn of the political slant with which No. 10 encumbers any intelligence assessment." After the meeting with Scarlett, Cook concludes that "Saddam probably does not have weapons of mass destruction in the sense of weapons that could be used against large-scale civilian targets." [Sunday Times (London), 10/5/2003; Guardian, 10/6/2003; Cook, 8/2/2004]
3/17/2003 UN Secretary General Kofi Annan orders all UN weapons inspectors, peacekeepers, and humanitarian aid workers to withdraw from Iraq. [Washington File, 3/17/2003] UN inspectors have been in Iraq since November 18 (see November 18, 2002). During their four months of work in Iraq, they inspected hundreds of sites (some of them more than once) and found no evidence of ongoing WMD programs. Their work was reportedly obstructed, not by the Iraqis, but by the US, which refused to provide inspectors with the intelligence they needed to identify sites for inspection (see February 12, 2003, December 5, 2002, December 6, 2002, December 20, 2002, and January 11, 2003). Of the 105 sites identified by US intelligence as likely housing illicit weapons, 21 were deliberately withheld from inspectors. [Bamford, 2004, pp. 344] Reflecting on the inspections in 2009, Hans Blix, the chief of the UN weapons inspection team, will say: "In March 2003, when the invasion took place, we could not have stood up and said, There is nothing,' because to prove the negative is really not possible. What you can do is to say that we have performed 700 inspections in some 500 different sites, and we have found nothing, and we are ready to continue. If we had been allowed to continue a couple of months, we would have been able to go to all of the some hundred sites suggested to us, and since there weren't any weapons of mass destruction, that's what we would have reported. And then I think that, at that stage, certainly the intelligence ought to have drawn the conclusion that their evidence was poor." [Vanity Fair, 2/2009]
Koppel: "And if after all Saddam wanted to avoid an invasion, the easiest way of doing that would be to say, 'Yes, we have a few tons of weapons of mass destruction. Here, take them out. Look anywhere you want to look.'...I don't think that the United States could have gone ahead with it [the war] then. I really don't....Would have been very, very difficult. But as I say, the problem that I see is those who say, 'We should have given it another six months so that the inspectors could do their work.' At the end of six months, the administration would have said, 'We haven't proved anything yet, all we've proved is that they're well hidden.'"
Which is exactly what freaking happened. Koppel also repeats the Bush claim that every other intelligence agency in the world thought Saddam had WMD.
The UN inspectors were at work in Iraq for months before the invasion. In November 2002, Richard Perle, a member of the Defense Policy Board, attends a meeting on global security with members of the British Parliament. At one point he argues that the weapons inspection team might be unable to find Saddam's arsenal of banned weapons because they are so well hidden. According to the London Mirror, he then states that the US would "attack Iraq even if UN inspectors fail to find weapons." [Mirror, 11/21/2002]
British Foreign Minister Robin Cook is personally given an intelligence briefing by John Scarlett, head of the British joint intelligence committee. Cook later says in his diary that Scarlett's summary was "shorn of the political slant with which No. 10 encumbers any intelligence assessment." After the meeting with Scarlett, Cook concludes that "Saddam probably does not have weapons of mass destruction in the sense of weapons that could be used against large-scale civilian targets." [Sunday Times (London), 10/5/2003; Guardian, 10/6/2003; Cook, 8/2/2004]
3/17/2003 UN Secretary General Kofi Annan orders all UN weapons inspectors, peacekeepers, and humanitarian aid workers to withdraw from Iraq. [Washington File, 3/17/2003] UN inspectors have been in Iraq since November 18 (see November 18, 2002). During their four months of work in Iraq, they inspected hundreds of sites (some of them more than once) and found no evidence of ongoing WMD programs. Their work was reportedly obstructed, not by the Iraqis, but by the US, which refused to provide inspectors with the intelligence they needed to identify sites for inspection (see February 12, 2003, December 5, 2002, December 6, 2002, December 20, 2002, and January 11, 2003). Of the 105 sites identified by US intelligence as likely housing illicit weapons, 21 were deliberately withheld from inspectors. [Bamford, 2004, pp. 344] Reflecting on the inspections in 2009, Hans Blix, the chief of the UN weapons inspection team, will say: "In March 2003, when the invasion took place, we could not have stood up and said, There is nothing,' because to prove the negative is really not possible. What you can do is to say that we have performed 700 inspections in some 500 different sites, and we have found nothing, and we are ready to continue. If we had been allowed to continue a couple of months, we would have been able to go to all of the some hundred sites suggested to us, and since there weren't any weapons of mass destruction, that's what we would have reported. And then I think that, at that stage, certainly the intelligence ought to have drawn the conclusion that their evidence was poor." [Vanity Fair, 2/2009]