"The Iraqi Body Counts"

Memo To: Sen. Pat Roberts [R KS]
From: Jude Wanniski
Re: More Bad Intelligence

As chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Senator Roberts, you have done the country a great service by issuing the committee's report on the errors made by the Intelligence Community [IC] that led to the President's decision to war against Iraq. You have also been good enough to acknowledge that if what is now known to be true – that Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction and no connection with 9-11 – there would not have been the votes in the Senate in November 2002 to authorize the use of force against Iraq should diplomacy fail. What seems to be the consensus view of the Intelligence Committee, especially its vice chairman Jay Rockefeller [D-WV], is that the IC came to believe the administration was bent on regime change in Iraq and the "group think" produced the erroneous intelligence. That is, the "process" was flawed, directing information up the ladder to the Oval Office in ways that would support a war decision and suppress counter arguments that would prevent that flawed information flow.

I was a bit puzzled, Senator, because I have been following the "genocide" issue in Iraq for several years and wondered how you could get these numbers. If you were not chairman of the Intelligence Committee, I wouldn't bother you today, because most members of Congress have bought the genocide story that has become embedded in the national consciousness because it has been repeated too many times. As a result, I contacted your staff (your eyes and ears, so to speak), and asked: "Can you help me better understand where Senator Roberts gets the numbers of Iraqis killed by Saddam Hussein... particularly the number 500,000. He used it several times in the weekend talk shows. There have been reports of as many as 200,000 killed in the Anfal campaign of 1987–88, but so far no mass graves have been found in Kurdistan, none at all. The Senator also says he watched 18,000 bodies being unearthed at a gravesite at Hillah. The most recent number I've seen relating to that area is 2,200. The Senator's inference is that these dead were victims of genocide, when all the accounts say the victims were Shiite rebels who were attempting to overthrow the government – and were of the belief the USA would come to protect them because they were incited to rebel by CIA agents."

Full Article : lewrockwell.com