Jay Inslee: Washington's 1st Congressional District
Issues
Iraq
Iraq Statement Citations
Error #1:
“Officials said that the 1,000 page report by Charles A. Duelfer, the chief U.S. weapons inspector in Iraq, concluded that Hussein had the desire but not the means to produce unconventional weapons that could threaten his neighbors of the West.” Also, “The official said that Iraq’s nuclear-related activity in particular had been dormant for years before the invasion.They probably didn’t have a program for some period of time, well before we went in there, he said.”
– Allen, Mike and Dana Priest. “Report Discounts Iraqi Arms Threat: U.S Inspector Says Hussein Lacked Means.” WashingtonPost.com. 6 Oct. 2004: A01.
“Iraq had no stockpiles of biological and chemical weapons before last year’s U.S. – led invasion and its nuclear program had decayed since the 1991 Gulf War, according to a weapons inspector appointed by the Bush Administration. The assessment contrasted with statements by President Bush before the invasion, when he cited a growing threat from Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction as the reason for overthrowing President Saddam Hussein. “I still do not expect that militarily significant WMD stocks are cached in Iraq,” Charles Duelfer, the CIA special adviser who led the hunt for weapons of mass destruction, said in testimony prepared for the Senate Armed Services Committee.”
– "Inspector: Iraq had no WMD before invasion: Final report says Saddam had ambitions, but no chem or bio arms.” MSNBC News Services. 6 Oct 2004.
Error #2:
“Asked to describe the connection between the Iraqi leader and the Al-Qaeda terror network at an appearance Monday at the Council on Foreign Relations, the Pentagon chief first refused to answer, then said: “To my knowledge, I have not seen any strong, hard evidence that links the two.”
– Pyle, Richard. “Rumsfeld: No Link Between Saddam, Al Qaeda.” AP wire Kentucky.com. 5 Oct. 2004.
“A reassessment by the Central Intelligence Agency has cast doubt on a central piece of evidence used by the Bush administration before the invasion of Iraq to draw links between Saddam Hussein’s government and Al-Qaeda’s terrorist network, government officials said Tuesday. The C.I.A. report, sent to policy makers in August, says it is now not clear whether Mr. Hussein’s government harbored members of a group led by the Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the officials said. The assertion that Iraq provided refuge to Mr. Zarqawi was the primary basis for the administration’s prewar assertions connecting Iraq to Al Qaeda.”
– Jehl, Douglas. “A New C.I.A. Report Casts Doubt on a Key Terrorist’s Tie to Iraq.” The New York Times. 6 Oct. 2004.
Error #3:
“Some officials' predictions may yet be realized, even if early signs have not been encouraging. For example, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul D. Wolfowitz said in a speech earlier this month that "the Iraqi people understand what this crisis is about. Like the people of France in the 1940s, they view us as their hoped-for liberator." Wolfowitz said yesterday that "we probably did underestimate the willingness of this regime to commit war crimes," but he said other forecasts were on course.”
– Milbank, Dana, “Upbeat Tone Ended With War” Washington Post. 29 Mar. 2004: A01.
Error #4:
“Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) also supports releasing the NIE and says: “We made serious mistakes right after the initial successes by not having enough troops there on the ground, by allowing the looting, by not securing the borders.”
– Fox News Sunday, transcript. September 19, 2004.
“The former U.S. official who governed Iraq after the invasion said yesterday that the United States made two major mistakes: not deploying enough troops in Iraq and then not containing the violence and looting immediately after the ouster of Saddam Hussein. Ambassador L. Paul Bremer, administrator for the U.S.-led occupation government until the handover of political power on June 28, said he still supports the decision to intervene in Iraq but said a lack of adequate forces hampered the occupation and efforts to end the looting early on. “We paid a big price for not stopping it because it established an atmosphere of lawlessness,” he said yesterday in a speech at an insurance conference in White Sulphur Springs, W. VA. “We never had enough troops on the ground.”
– Wright, Robin and Thomas Ricks. “Bremer Criticizes Troop Levels.” Washington Post. 5 Oct. 2004. A01.
Error #6:
“As little as 27 cents of every dollar spent on Iraq’s reconstruction has actually filtered down to projects benefiting Iraqis, a statistic that is prompting the State Department to fundamentally rethink the Bush administration’s troubled reconstruction effort. Administration officials, lawmakers and think tanks say major changes are needed not only in what reconstruction money is spent on but also how it is spent. Too much money has been filtered through major American businesses such as Halliburton Company and Bechtel corp. on large-scale electricity, water and oil infrastructure projects, and not nearly enough has gone to smaller, more decentralized reconstruction efforts that could be handled by Iraqis, they say.”
– Weisman, Jonathan and Robin Wright. “Funds to Rebuild Iraq Are Drifting Away From Target.” Washington Post. 6 Oct. 2004. A18.
Error #7:
“The roots of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal lie not in the criminal inclinations of a few Army reservists but in a decision, approved last year by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, to expand a highly secret operation, which had been focussed on the hunt for Al Qaeda, to the interrogation of prisoners in Iraq. Rumsfeld’s decision embittered the American intelligence community, damaged the effectiveness of élite combat units, and hurt America’s prospects in the war on terror.
According to interviews with several past and present American intelligence officials, the Pentagon’s operation, known inside the intelligence community by several code words, including Copper Green, encouraged physical coercion and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners in an effort to generate more intelligence about the growing insurgency in Iraq. A senior C.I.A. official, in confirming the details of this account last week, said that the operation stemmed from Rumsfeld’s long-standing desire to wrest control of America’s clandestine and paramilitary operations from the C.I.A.”
“The internal Army report on the abuse charges, written by Major General Antonio Taguba in February, revealed that Miller urged that the commanders in Baghdad change policy and place military intelligence in charge of the prison. The report quoted Miller as recommending that “detention operations must act as an enabler for interrogation.”
– Hersh, Seymour. “The Gray Zone: How a Secret Pentagon Program Came to Abu Ghraib.” The New Yorker. 24 May 2004.
Error #8:
“The top U.S. commander in Iraq complained to the Pentagon last winter that his supply situation was so poor that it threatened Army troops’ ability to fight, according to an official document that has surfaced only now. The lack of key spare parts for gear vital to combat operations, such as tanks and helicopters, was causing problems so severe, Army Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez wrote in a letter to a top Army officials, that “I cannot continue to support sustained combat operations with rates this low.”
“Sanchez, who was the senior commander on the ground in Iraq from the summer of 2003 until the summer of 2004, said in his letter that Army units in Iraq were “struggling just to maintain ... relatively low readiness rates” on key combat systems, such as M-1 Abrams tanks, Bradley Fighting Vehicles, anti-mortar radars and Black Hawk helicopters.”
– Ricks, Thomas. “General Reported Shortages in Iraq.” Washington Post. 18 Oct.2004. A1 & A14.
Error #9:
“After Congress gave the Bush administration $87 billion last November for Iraq and Afghanistan, the White House began this year insisting it would need no extra money until 2005, a move critics said was to delay a full disclosure of costs until after November’s election. Under congressional pressure the White House in May requested $25 billion to start using during the last three months of 2004. Thursday’s action around Capitol Hill came a day after auditors reported the defense Department will need an additional $12.3 billion to get through September due to the worse than expected violence in Iraq as well as continuing campaigns in Afghanistan and the global war on terrorism.”
– Jelinek, Pauline. “Congress Debates $100 Billion Iraq Costs.” Associated Press. 23 July 2004.
“In the run-up to the Iraq war, administration officials gave the impression, co-author Phyllis Bennys points out, that the cost of reconstruction would largely covered by Iraqi oil revenues. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld told a Senate hearing last March: “When it comes to reconstruction, before we turn to the American taxpayer. We will turn first to the resources of the Iraqi government and the international community. There’s a lot of money to pay for this that doesn’t have to be U.S. taxpayer money, and it starts with the assets of the Iraqi people,” said Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz at a House of Representatives appropriations hearing the same day. However it later emerged that behind the scenes experts had warned officials that the Iraqi oil industry has badly dilapidated and would in no way cover reconstruction costs.”
– Strange, Hannah. “ Report: The ‘real’ costs of the Iraq war.” United Press International. 1 June 2004.
Error #10:
“He also protested in his letter sent Dec. 4 to the number two officer in the Army, with copies to other senior officials, that his soldiers still needed protective inserts to upgraded 36,000 sets of body armor but that their delivery had been postponed twice in the month before he was writing. There were 131,000 U.S. troops in Iraq at the time.”
– Ricks, Thomas. “General Reported Shortages in Iraq.” Washington Post. 18 Oct.2004. A1 & A14.
“Congress has allocated funds for all U.S. troops to wear 16-pound, ceramic-plated Interceptor body armor, but as many as 51,000 American soldiers and civilian administrators in Iraq have not yet been equipped with the gear, and have been asking friends and families at home to purchase and send them off-the-shelf models for protection. . . U.S. soldiers not issued the Interceptor equipment are using enhanced versions of the Vietnam-era flak jackets, which are incapable of stopping a round from a Kalashnikov or AK-47, the most common weapon in Iraq.”
– Brownfeld, Peter. “ U.S. Troops in Iraq Have Limited Body Armor.” Fox News, transcript. 24 Oct 2003.