I can’t blog as much as I would like to right now because I’m trying to keep my editor from hiring a hit man. So I’ll write about something I’ve been thinking about for a while.

If the SSCI ever gets to it, there’s something more I would like to know about the whole Iraq intel fiasco.

Shortly before the 2003 US-led invasion, I saw Colin Powell give “a speech”:http://geneva.usmission.gov/press2003/powellCSIS0305.htm at CSIS where he said that the UNMOVIC inspections weren’t working. For example, he dismissed Iraq’s destruction of its al-Samoud II missiles and argued that Iraq was planning to build more:

… from recent intelligence, we know that the
Iraqi regime intends to declare and destroy only a portion of its
banned al-Samoud inventory and that it has, in fact, ordered the
continued production of the missiles that you see being destroyed. Iraq has brought its machinery that produces such missiles out into the daylight for all to see. But *we have intelligence that says, at the very same time, it has also begun to hide machinery it can use to convert other kinds of engines to power al-Samouds II.*

… Even as he [Saddam Hussein] orders some to be destroyed, he is continuing with activities that will allow more to be produced.

Powell also claimed that Iraq was otherwise deceiving the inspectors by “moving weapons of mass destruction materials around the country to avoid detection.”

Specifically, he charged that

in late January, *the Iraqi Intelligence Service transported chemical and biological agents to areas far away from Baghdad, near the Syrian and Turkish borders, in order to conceal them, and they have concealed them from the prying eyes of inspectors.*

In early February, fearing that UNMOVIC had precise intelligence about storage locations, the *Iraqis were moving prohibited materials every 12 to 24 hours.* And in mid-February, concerned about the surveillance capabilities of the U-2 overflights that they finally were going to permit, *Iraq was transferring banned materials in old vehicles and placing them in poor, working class neighborhoods outside the capital.*

Given that the various investigations so far have not, as far as I know, addressed this speech, I would be very interested to know where this “intelligence” came from. Especially because it was crap.

Happy rest-of-weekend.