'Just World News' with Helena Cobban

Excavating the pre-9/11 record

From John Pilger via the Sydney Morning Herald via this post on Juan Cole's blog comes a useful reminder that we should look at what Bush administration heavies were saying about Iraq's WMD capabilities before Sept. 11, 2001.

Pilger had apparently found a tape of Colin Powell speaking to an audience in Cairo in February 2001, when CP apparently said that Saddam "has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction..."

That prompted me to go into the State Department's website and see what relevant texts and transcripts I might find there from that same period. Just a quick search turned up some very similar utterances by CP. Like this one from a press briefing he gave while on his plane traveling to Cairo Feb 23, 2001:

I think it's important to point out that for the last 10 years, the policy that the United Nations, the United States has been following, has succeeded in keeping Iraq from rebuilding to the level that it was before... [E]ven though they may be pursuing weapons of mass destruction of all kinds, it is not clear how successful they have been. So to some extent, I think we ought to declare this a success. We have kept him contained, kept him in his box.

Or this one, when CP was on a plane two days later, traveling to Kuwait:

QUESTION: Are you stunned that he [Saddam] is still in power after all these years?

SECRETARY POWELL: Stunned isn?t the word. I never ever have underestimated the power of a dictator, and I don?t think you?ll find me on the record ever predicting his demise at that time. But I also thought that we had pretty much removed his stings and frankly for ten years we really have.

Or this one, which records remarks he made on arrival in Kuwait:

it is at the top of the agenda to make sure that we continue to contain Iraq so that it does not develop the kind of weapons that it is trying to develop. We have been successful for the last ten years in keeping him from developing those weapons and we will continue to be successful.

So, having found those extremely suggestive quotes, I thought let's hike on over to the White House website, see what they have in the National Security Council archive over there that relates to pre-Sept. 11, 2001 utterances by, oh, the Prez, or Condi Rice, or whoever...

But here's something scary. If you go to the White House site and look for the texts of speeches etc on the subject of "National Security" by clicking this button, the texts they give only go back to September 11, 2001. Not a day earlier!

Is someone trying to whitewash the record there or something? (By contrast, if you click on "Middle East", which is a section that deals with Israeli-Arab issues but NOT Iraq, the statements there go back to February 14, 2001.)

There is one intriguing-looking button on the White House site that says simply: "Iraq: Apparatus of lies". But my understanding is that it may not actually refer to the White House itself...