If you click
here, you will be able to participate in a discussion with Michael Smith, a reporter for the Sunday Times of London who has broken the DSM story. It's 10:15 EDT now, and I imagine he'll be on for another 45 minutes or so.
Sample question and answer:
Carlisle, Pa.: In your research, did you or any reporter you know come across War College or other military-academic research that indicated that Saddam Hussein likely no longer had weapons of mass destruction and that a foreign invasion of a country such as Iraq with a strong anti-American sentiment would be a costly venture? It seems the military academicians and intelligence reports had the facts right, but this information never filtered upwards to the White House or, if it did, it was ignorned, nor did the press ever consider any of it useful except for perhaps a one day news spin and then was quickly forgotten.
Michael Smith: I think it is clear from the documents themselves that the whole venture was widely viewed as being highly dubious with no certainty of what would come out of it. The administration ensured that it only got the answers it wanted. But they either ignored the advice they were getting on the likely cost or managed to filter it out with this highly pressurised regime of come up with the right answers, or we will be on your back to do so all the time. That is what resulted in the National Intelligence Estimated of October 2002 which was designed by George Tenet to get a questioning Congress off the President's back. Everyone has heard about the British "dodgy" dossiers but the actual intelligence analysis, the so-called JIC report, on which the main dossier was based spoke mostly of weapons programmes, ie production of the agent that would be put into weapons, rather than actual stockpiled weapons.The closest it came to saying there were actually any weapons was to say there "may be" 1.5tons of VX gas, a conclusion that went back to the conclusions of the UNSCOM weapons inspectors in 1998. The CIA's October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on the other hand, said there were probably up to 500 tons of chemical weapons in Iraq. That gives you a feel of the kind of distortion that was going on. But as for the idea that he had very active programmes going on, well everyone, including the French and the Russians, thought that. There was a kind of group think that no-one was challenging. Long answer but I hope it's helpful.