The little bird lied

Around Christmas of 1998, a little bird told the director of Central Intelligence that Saddam Hussein and his entourage would be spending a specific night in an underground bunker in Baghdad. The DCI knew the Global Positioning Satellite coordinates of the bunker.

Naturally, President Clinton immediately tried to kill Saddam with GPS-homing cruise missiles.

At first, Clinton thought he had.

But he hadn’t.

The intelligence community concluded that Saddam wasn’t killed by our cruise missiles because the non-nuke warheads they carried weren’t powerful enough, nor capable of penetrating deep enough, to destroy underground bunkers.

So, when a little bird told DCI George Tenet on the eve of Operation Iraqi Freedom that Saddam and his entourage were spending that very night in a specific German-designed underground bunker near Baghdad, President Bush decided to try to kill him immediately, 20 hours before Operation Iraqi Freedom was scheduled to begin.

Bush first hit the target with powerful GPS-homing “bunker-busting” bombs specifically designed to penetrate deep into the earth before exploding. After the bunker was busted, then came the GPS-homing cruise-missiles.

Bush thought he had killed Saddam, for sure.

But, apparently, he hadn’t.

According to CBS News, U.S. Army Colonel Tim Madere has been to that GPS site to look for bodies. Not only did Madere not find bodies, he reports that there is no evidence that a bunker was ever there in the first place. All he found were “bunker-buster” holes in the ground. No bunker, busted or otherwise.

It appears to the whole world that the invasion of Iraq to “disarm” Saddam Hussein of his “weapons of mass destruction” was massively misinformed, perhaps deliberately.

For the warhawks – if not you soccer-moms – any excuse to depose Saddam Hussein was as good as any other. So President Bush got the highly skeptical U.N. Security Council to pass Resolution 1441, requiring Saddam to admit U.N. inspectors – allowing them free and unfettered access – and to disarm, or face “serious consequences.”

The warhawks then provided U.N. inspectors considerable selective “sanitized” intelligence – much of it obtained from anonymous little birds – about dozens of suspected WMD sites.

But, when the U.N. inspectors checked out those sites, they found nothing.

Worse, Mohamed ElBaradei – director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency – was able to report to the Security Council that “after three months of intrusive inspections, we have to date found no evidence or plausible indication of the revival of a nuclear weapons program in Iraq.”

Hans Blix – chairman of the U.N. Monitoring and Verification Commission – made a similar, but less definitive, report about ballistic missiles and chem-bio warfare programs.

In so doing, ElBaradei contradicted a little bird named Khidir Hamza and Blix contradicted a whole flock of little birds.

Consequently, Blix and ElBaradei were vilified by the warhawks and their media sycophants, accused of incompetence – and worse – for not finding the weapons the warhawks assured us were there.

So sure did the president become of the warhawk “intelligence,” that even before Operation Iraqi Freedom began, Special Forces units were sent to several sites in western Iraq to secure the Scud missiles and their chemical warheads that Saddam intended to launch against Israel.

They didn’t find any chemical warheads. There, or anywhere else.

Four teams of experts were sent to help Col. Madere of Fifth Army Corps locate and secure Iraqi WMD sites. Almost two hundred of the most promising sites on the list of a thousand have now been searched and nothing has been found. Consequently, three of the teams are no longer searching and have been assigned other duties.

However noble or successful Operation Iraqi Freedom turns out to be, it is already being judged the greatest intelligence fiasco of all time.

But, perhaps we learned our lesson.

Largely because of our override of ElBaradei’s satisfactory report on Iraqi nuke compliance, Kim Jong-il abrogated his IAEA Safeguards Agreement and has restarted his previously “frozen” plutonium production facilities. Obviously, we can’t allow him to get away with that. We must insist that he comply with his IAEA Safeguards Agreement or face “serious consequences.” We must try to undo the damage done to the IAEA nuke proliferation prevention regime by Operation Iraqi Freedom.

But, whoa!

Time magazine reports that the intelligence community has “recruited” a scientist – and “relocated” him to the U.S., a la Khidir Hamza – who claims to have valuable information on the “location” and “capabilities” of North Korean nuclear programs.

With such a song-bird, why do we need the IAEA?