Veterans for Common Sense

HOW damaged is the US by the row over its use of white phosphorus in Fallujah last year? On the facts available now, it is within the letter of the law, even though it has not signed the most relevant protocol on the use of the weapon.

But that assertion depends on the US claim that there were few civilians left in Fallujah by the time the assault began last November. There is strong evidence to support the US position. But conflicting reports, inevitable in the circumstances, leave room for debate, and even more for rumour.

Even if the US is right on the legality, there is no question that it has inflicted a serious propaganda blow on itself. No matter the technical explanations of how useful the chemical is in flushing out insurgents from cellars. In using a weapon notorious in Vietnam, with effects on the human body straight from a science fiction film, it has given a gift to its enemies. It is now loudly accused of hypocrisy: justifying the war partly by Saddam Hussein’s use of chemical weapons, but then using particularly nasty ones itself.

Worse: the muddle of official denials, followed by an admission of use (in a limited sense), has fuelled those who disbelieve every American assertion.

The most directly applicable international law is Protocol III of the 1980 Convention on Conventional Weapons. Under this, the use of white phosphorus is prohibited as an incendiary weapon against civilian populations. It is also banned (with clear inspiration from Vietnam) in air attacks against military forces in civilian areas.

The US is not a signatory to Protocol III, although Britain and 80 other countries are. Defence Secretary John Reid said this week that British troops “do not use white phosphorus . . . for anything other than a smokescreen to protect our troops when in action”.

So the US has no problem arguing that it has broken no law to which it is a signatory. But it can also argue that it has not broken Protocol III — provided that its claim that civilians had left Fallujah before the attack started is right.

It strongly denies the claim by an Italian documentary that it used the weapon against civilians. It is true that it gave them clear warning over days, and an estimated 300,000 people did leave. But the US’s critics say that many remained.

The US is a signatory to the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention, but denies that this covers white phosphorus.

The convention bans the use of any “toxic chemical” weapons that cause “death, harm or temporary incapacitation to humans or animals through their chemical action on life processes”. It says that the effect is incendiary, not chemical.

But even if it considers itself on firm legal ground, it has created a nightmare of public relations at the point when it is trying to court support in Europe and the Middle East.

Allegations of unusual weapons have been around since the assault. The US denied them, until internet bloggers unearthed personal accounts by the US military. On Tuesday Pentagon spokesman Lieutenant-Colonel Barry Venable said that the substance had been used as an “incendiary weapon against enemy combatants”, contradicting earlier statements by the London and Rome ambassadors, and the State Department website.

If there was anything that could make perceptions worse, it was the military slang of “shake and bake” attacks, phosphorus being the “bake” part.

It will take a lot of work by Karen Hughes, the President’s emissary, to improve the American image abroad, to make up for the incendiary effect on hearts and minds.

Democrats Have Proof Pre-War Intel Was Manipulated

    By Jason Leopold, TruthOut, Thursday, November 17, 2005

    Senate Democrats have dug up additional explosive evidence over the past week that they say will help prove the Bush administration deliberately manipulated pre-war Iraq intelligence that was used to convince Congress and the public to support a pre-emptive strike against the Middle East country in March of 2003.

    Specifically, Carl Levin, the senior Democrat who sits on the Senate Intelligence Committee, is interested in permanently debunking the administration’s assertion that it “mistakenly” included the 16-word reference in President Bush’s January 2003 State of the Union address claiming that Iraq tried to purchase yellowcake uranium – the key component to building an atomic bomb – from Niger. Levin’s aides said the administration knew months before that the veracity of the allegations was dubious because it was based on forged documents.

    Many critics of the war cite those 16 words in the State of the Union address as the silver bullet that convinced Congress and the American public to back the war against Iraq. The Niger uranium allegations are also at the heart of a federal probe into the outing of covert CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson, whose husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, was the envoy sent to Niger in February 2002 to investigate the uranium rumor and reported back to the CIA that there was no truth to it. The leak of Wilson’s wife’s identity and undercover CIA status was an attempt to muzzle Wilson, a vocal critic of the war, who had accused the Bush administration of citing the phony Niger uranium documents to dupe Congress into supporting the war.

    The probe has so far resulted in a five-count criminal indictment against I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, who resigned from his position last month following the indictment for lying to prosecutors about his role in the leak.

    Since Libby’s indictment, the Bush administration has launched a full-scale public relations campaign to shore up Bush’s sagging poll numbers. In doing so, senior officials at the White House and the National Security Council have publicly attacked Democratic critics of the war, as well as the bipartisan investigation into pre-war intelligence, claiming Democrats saw the exact same intelligence as those in the White House and voted in favor of military action.

    On Wednesday, Cheney called critics of the war “dishonest” and “reprehensible” and said Democrats accusing the Bush administration of manipulating intelligence were “opportunists.”

    But aides to Sen. Levin rebutted that, saying they have smoking-gun proof that they were lied to by Bush and Cheney about not only the existence of weapons of mass destruction but also claims that Iraq had tried to obtain yellowcake uranium from Niger.

    In building their case against the administration, Levin, with the help of Congressman Henry Waxman, D-Calif., has obtained the December 2002 letter sent to the White House and the National Security Council by Mohammed ElBaradei, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, warning that the Niger claims were bogus and should not be cited by the administration as evidence that Iraq was actively trying to obtain WMDs.

    Waxman had written ElBaradei in March 2003, inquiring about the Niger documents and the allegations that Iraq tried to purchase uranium there in order to determine if the Bush administration manipulated the intelligence it had relied upon. Waxman received a three-page response from ElBaradei on June 20, 2003, around the same time that Joseph Wilson had started to publicly question the Bush administration’s rationale for war and around the same time White House officials had disclosed his wife’s CIA status to a handful of reporters. Baradei’s response letter lays out in full detail the play-by-play in his attempt to get to the bottom of the Niger uranium story.

    ElBaradei said, when the Niger claims were included in the State Department fact sheet on the Iraqi threat in December 2002, “the IAEA asked the U.S. Government, through its Mission in Vienna, to provide any actionable information that would allow it to follow up with the countries involved, viz Niger and Iraq.” ElBaradei said he was assured that his letter was forwarded to the White House and to the National Security Council. ElBaradei added that he and his staff were suspicious about the Niger documents because it had long been rumored that documents pertaining to Iraq’s attempt to obtain uranium from Niger had been doctored.

    The evidence that Iraq sought to purchase uranium from an African country was first revealed by the British government on September 24, 2002, when Prime Minister Tony Blair released a 50-page report on Iraqi efforts to acquire weapons of mass destruction. This report ultimately became a significant part of the US case against Iraq.

    ElBaradei had said he repeatedly requested copies of the Niger documents prior to Bush’s State of the Union address but never received anything. When he finally did receive the documents – six weeks later – on February 4, 2003, a week after Bush’s State of the Union address, his suspicions turned out to be on the money. He was the person who first revealed that the Niger documents cited by the Bush administration to win support for the war were crude forgeries.

    ElBaradei told Waxman that the White House had turned over the Niger material “without qualification” and provided no specific comments on whether US intelligence considered the documents to be authentic.

    In conversations and correspondence with Waxman, ElBaradei said he personally had tried to contact Stephen Hadley, then Deputy National Security Adviser, and aides to former Secretary of State Colin Powell, warning them not to rely on the Niger documents as evidence of the Iraqi threat, but was continuously rebuffed. He said the White House officials pledged to cooperate with United Nations inspectors but repeatedly withheld evidence from them.

    Cheney did the rounds on the cable news outlets, and tried to discredit ElBaradei’s conclusion that the documents were forged.

    “I think Mr. ElBaradei frankly is wrong,” Cheney said. “[The IAEA] has consistently underestimated or missed what it was Saddam Hussein was doing. I don’t have any reason to believe they’re any more valid this time than they’ve been in the past.”

    Four months later, Hadley, as well as former CIA Director George Tenet, took responsibility for allowing the Niger uranium claims to be included in Bush’s speech. Aides to Levin said that when the bipartisan investigation is complete there will be ample proof that the Bush administration, specifically, Hadley, Cheney, and other top officials, knowingly manipulated intelligence to fit their agenda in launching a war.

War Without Rules — Yes, the US has used chemical weapons

By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 15th November 2005

Did US troops use chemical weapons in Falluja? The answer is yes. The proof is not to be found in the documentary broadcast on Italian TV last week, which has generated gigabytes of hype on the internet. It’s a turkey, whose evidence that white phosphorus was fired at Iraqi troops is flimsy and circumstantial(1). But the bloggers debating it found the smoking gun.

The first account they unearthed comes from a magazine published by the US Army. In the March 2005 edition of Field Artillery, officers from the 2nd Infantry’s Fire Support Element boast about their role in the attack on Falluja in November last year. On page 26 is the following text. “White Phosphorous. WP proved to be an effective and versatile munition. We used it for screening missions at two breeches and, later in the fight, as a potent psychological weapon against the insurgents in trench lines and spider holes when we could not get effects on them with HE [high explosives]. We fired “shake and bake” missions at the insurgents, using WP to flush them out and HE to take them out.”(2)

The second comes from a report in California’s North County Times, by a staff reporter embedded with the Marines during the siege of Falluja in April 2004. “”Gun up!” Millikin yelled …, grabbing a white phosphorus round from a nearby ammo can and holding it over the tube. “Fire!” Bogert yelled, as Millikin dropped it. The boom kicked dust around the pit as they ran through the drill again and again, sending a mixture of burning white phosphorus and high explosives they call “shake ‘n’ bake” into a cluster of buildings where insurgents have been spotted all week.”(3)

White phosporus is not listed in the shedules of the Chemical Weapons Convention. It can be legally used as a flare to illuminate the battlefield, or to produce smoke to hide troop movements from the enemy. Like other unlisted substances, it may be deployed for “Military purposes … not dependent on the use of the toxic properties of chemicals as a method of warfare”(4). But it becomes a chemical weapon as soon as it is used directly against people. A chemical weapon can be “any chemical which through its chemical action on life processes can cause death, temporary incapacitation or permanent harm”(5).

White phosphorus is fat-soluble and burns spontaneously on contact with the air. According to globalsecurity.org, “The burns usually are multiple, deep, and variable in size. The solid in the eye produces severe injury. The particles continue to burn unless deprived of atmospheric oxygen. … If service members are hit by pieces of white phosphorus, it could burn right down to the bone.”(6) As it oxidises, it produces a smoke composed of phosphorous pentoxide. According to the standard US industrial safety sheet, the smoke “releases heat on contact with moisture and will burn mucous surfaces. … Contact with substance can cause severe eye burns and permanent damage.”(7)

Until last week, the US State Department maintained that US forces used white phosphorus shells “very sparingly in Fallujah, for illumination purposes. They were fired into the air to illuminate enemy positions at night, not at enemy fighters.”(8) Confronted with the new evidence, on Thursday it changed its position. “We have learned that some of the information we were provided … is incorrect. White phosphorous shells, which produce smoke, were used in Fallujah not for illumination but for screening purposes, i.e., obscuring troop movements and, according to … Field Artillery magazine, ‘as a potent psychological weapon against the insurgents in trench lines and spider holes ….’ The article states that U.S. forces used white phosphorous rounds to flush out enemy fighters so that they could then be killed with high explosive rounds.”(9) The US government, in other words, appears to admit that white phosphorus was used in Falluja as a chemical weapon.

The invaders have been forced into a similar climbdown over the use of napalm in Iraq. In December 2004, the Labour MP Alice Mahon asked the British armed forces minister Adam Ingram “whether napalm or a similar substance has been used by the Coalition in Iraq (a) during and (b) since the war”. “No napalm,” the minister replied, “has been used by Coalition forces in Iraq either during the war-fighting phase or since.”(10)

This seemed odd to those who had been paying attention. There were widespread reports that in March 2003 US Marines had dropped incendiary bombs around the bridges over the Tigris and the Saddam Canal on the way to Baghdad. The commander of Marine Air Group 11 admitted that “We napalmed both those approaches”(11). Embedded journalists reported that napalm was dropped at Safwan Hill on the border with Kuwait(12). In August 2003 the Pentagon confirmed that the Marines had dropped “Mark 77 firebombs.” Though the substance they contained was not napalm, its function, the Pentagon’s information sheet said, was “remarkably similar”(13). While napalm is made from petrol and polystyrene, the gel in the Mark 77 is made from kerosene and polystyrene. I doubt it makes much difference to the people it lands on.

So in January this year, the MP Harry Cohen refined Alice Mahon’s question. He asked “whether Mark 77 firebombs have been used by Coalition forces”. “The United States,” the minister replied “have confirmed to us that they have not used Mark 77 firebombs, which are essentially napalm canisters, in Iraq at any time.”(14) The US government had lied to him. Mr Ingram had to retract his statements in a private letter to the MPs in June(15).

We were told that the war with Iraq was necessary for two reasons. Saddam Hussein possessed biological and chemical weapons and might one day use them against another nation. And the Iraqi people needed to be liberated from his oppressive regime, which had, among its other crimes, used chemical weapons to kill them. Tony Blair, Colin Powell, William Shawcross, David Aaronovitch, Nick Cohen, Ann Clwyd and many others referred, in making their case, to Saddam’s gassing of the Kurds in Halabja in 1988. They accused those who opposed the war of caring nothing for the welfare of the Iraqis.

Given that they care so much, why has none of these hawks spoken out against the use of unconventional weapons by coalition forces? Ann Clwyd, the Labour MP who turned from peace campaigner to chief apologist for an illegal war, is, as far as I can discover, the only one of these armchair warriors to engage with the issue. In May this year, she wrote to the Guardian to assure us that reports that a “modern form of napalm” has been used by US forces “are completely without foundation. Coalition forces have not used napalm – either during operations in Falluja, or at any other time.”(16) How did she know? The foreign office minister told her. Before the invasion, Ann Clwyd travelled through Iraq to investigate Saddam’s crimes against his people. She told the Commons that what she had discovered moved her to tears. After the invasion, she took the minister’s word at face value, when a thirty-second search on the internet could have told her it was bunkum. It makes you wonder whether she, or any of the other enthusiasts for war, really gave a damn about the people for whom they claimed to be campaigning.

Saddam Hussein, facing a possible death sentence, is accused of mass murder, torture, false imprisonment, the embezzlement of billions and the use of chemical weapons. He is certainly guilty on all counts. So, it now seems, are the people who overthrew him.

www.monbiot.com

References:

1. You can watch the film at http://www.rainews24.rai.it/ran24/inchiesta/video.asp

2. Captain James T. Cobb, First Lieutenant Christopher A. LaCour and Sergeant First Class William H. Hight, March 2005. TF 2-2 in FSE AAR: Indirect Fires in the Battle of Fallujah. Field Artillery, March-April 2005.

3. Darrin Mortenson, 10th April 2004. Violence subsides for Marines in Fallujah. North County Times.
http://www.nctimes.com/articles/2004/04/11/military/iraq/19_30_504_10_04.txt

4. Article 2.9©. Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production, Stockpiling and Use of Chemical Weapons and on Their Destruction. The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons.

5. Article 2.2.

6. http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/systems/munitions/wp.htm

7. Mallinckrodt Baker, Inc., 2nd November 2001. Material Safety Data Sheet: Phosphorus Pentoxide. http://164.107.52.42/MSDS/P/phosphorous{cd9ac3671b356cd86fdb96f1eda7eb3bb1367f54cff58cc36abbd73c33c82e1d}20pentoxide.pdf

8. US State Department, viewed 9th November 2005. Did the U.S. Use “Illegal” Weapons in Fallujah? http://usinfo.state.gov/media/Archive_Index/Illegal_Weapons_in_Fallujah.html

9. US State Department, viewed 14th November 2005. Did the U.S. Use “Illegal” Weapons in Fallujah? http://usinfo.state.gov/media/Archive_Index/Illegal_Weapons_in_Fallujah.html

10. Adam Ingram, 6th December 2004. Written Answer. Hansard Column 339W, 201991.
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200405/cmhansrd/cm041206/text/41206w19.htm

11. Colonel Randolph Alles, quoted by James W. Crawley, 5th August 2003. Officials confirm dropping firebombs on Iraqi troops. San Diego Union-Tribune. http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/military/20030805-9999_1n5bomb.html

12. Eg Martin Savidge, 22nd March 2003. Protecting Iraq’s oil supply. CNN.
http://edition.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/meast/03/21/otsc.irq.savidge/

13. James W. Crawley, 5th August 2003. Officials confirm dropping firebombs on Iraqi troops. San Diego Union-Tribune. http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/military/20030805-9999_1n5bomb.html

14. Adam Ingram, 11th January 2005. Written Answer. Hansard Column 374W, 207246. http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200405/cmhansrd/cm050111/text/50111w01.htm#50111w01.html_sbhd3

15. Colin Brown, 17th June 2005. US lied to Britain over use of napalm in Iraq war. The Independent.

16. Ann Clwyd, 2nd May 2005. Letter to The Guardian.

Decoding Mr. Bush’s Denials

To avoid having to account for his administration’s misleading statements before the war with Iraq, President Bush has tried denial, saying he did not skew the intelligence. He’s tried to share the blame, claiming that Congress had the same intelligence he had, as well as President Bill Clinton. He’s tried to pass the buck and blame the C.I.A. Lately, he’s gone on the attack, accusing Democrats in Congress of aiding the terrorists.

Yesterday in Alaska, Mr. Bush trotted out the same tedious deflection on Iraq that he usually attempts when his back is against the wall: he claims that questioning his actions three years ago is a betrayal of the troops in battle today.

It all amounts to one energetic effort at avoidance. But like the W.M.D. reports that started the whole thing, the only problem is that none of it has been true.

Mr. Bush says everyone had the same intelligence he had – Mr. Clinton and his advisers, foreign governments, and members of Congress – and that all of them reached the same conclusions. The only part that is true is that Mr. Bush was working off the same intelligence Mr. Clinton had. But that is scary, not reassuring. The reports about Saddam Hussein’s weapons were old, some more than 10 years old. Nothing was fresher than about five years, except reports that later proved to be fanciful.

Foreign intelligence services did not have full access to American intelligence. But some had dissenting opinions that were ignored or not shown to top American officials. Congress had nothing close to the president’s access to intelligence. The National Intelligence Estimate presented to Congress a few days before the vote on war was sanitized to remove dissent and make conjecture seem like fact.

It’s hard to imagine what Mr. Bush means when he says everyone reached the same conclusion. There was indeed a widespread belief that Iraq had chemical and biological weapons. But Mr. Clinton looked at the data and concluded that inspections and pressure were working – a view we now know was accurate. France, Russia and Germany said war was not justified. Even Britain admitted later that there had been no new evidence about Iraq, just new politics.

The administration had little company in saying that Iraq was actively trying to build a nuclear weapon. The evidence for this claim was a dubious report about an attempt in 1999 to buy uranium from Niger, later shown to be false, and the infamous aluminum tubes story. That was dismissed at the time by analysts with real expertise.

The Bush administration was also alone in making the absurd claim that Iraq was in league with Al Qaeda and somehow connected to the 9/11 terrorist attacks. That was based on two false tales. One was the supposed trip to Prague by Mohamed Atta, a report that was disputed before the war and came from an unreliable drunk. The other was that Iraq trained Qaeda members in the use of chemical and biological weapons. Before the war, the Defense Intelligence Agency concluded that this was a deliberate fabrication by an informer.

Mr. Bush has said in recent days that the first phase of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s investigation on Iraq found no evidence of political pressure to change the intelligence. That is true only in the very narrow way the Republicans on the committee insisted on defining pressure: as direct pressure from senior officials to change intelligence. Instead, the Bush administration made what it wanted to hear crystal clear and kept sending reports back to be redone until it got those answers.

Richard Kerr, a former deputy director of central intelligence, said in 2003 that there was “significant pressure on the intelligence community to find evidence that supported a connection” between Iraq and Al Qaeda. The C.I.A. ombudsman told the Senate Intelligence Committee that the administration’s “hammering” on Iraq intelligence was harder than he had seen in his 32 years at the agency.

Mr. Bush and other administration officials say they faithfully reported what they had read. But Vice President Dick Cheney presented the Prague meeting as a fact when even the most supportive analysts considered it highly dubious. The administration has still not acknowledged that tales of Iraq coaching Al Qaeda on chemical warfare were considered false, even at the time they were circulated.

Mr. Cheney was not alone. Remember Condoleezza Rice’s infamous “mushroom cloud” comment? And Secretary of State Colin Powell in January 2003, when the rich and powerful met in Davos, Switzerland, and he said, “Why is Iraq still trying to procure uranium and the special equipment needed to transform it into material for nuclear weapons?” Mr. Powell ought to have known the report on “special equipment”‘ – the aluminum tubes – was false. And the uranium story was four years old.

The president and his top advisers may very well have sincerely believed that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. But they did not allow the American people, or even Congress, to have the information necessary to make reasoned judgments of their own. It’s obvious that the Bush administration misled Americans about Mr. Hussein’s weapons and his terrorist connections. We need to know how that happened and why.

Mr. Bush said last Friday that he welcomed debate, even in a time of war, but that “it is deeply irresponsible to rewrite the history of how that war began.” We agree, but it is Mr. Bush and his team who are rewriting history.

President Bush and his national security adviser have answered critics of the Iraq war in recent days with a two-pronged argument: that Congress saw the same intelligence the administration did before the war, and that independent commissions have determined that the administration did not misrepresent the intelligence.

Neither assertion is wholly accurate.

The administration’s overarching point is true: Intelligence agencies overwhelmingly believed that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, and very few members of Congress from either party were skeptical about this belief before the war began in 2003. Indeed, top lawmakers in both parties were emphatic and certain in their public statements.

But Bush and his aides had access to much more voluminous intelligence information than did lawmakers, who were dependent on the administration to provide the material. And the commissions cited by officials, though concluding that the administration did not pressure intelligence analysts to change their conclusions, were not authorized to determine whether the administration exaggerated or distorted those conclusions.

National security adviser Stephen J. Hadley, briefing reporters Thursday, countered “the notion that somehow this administration manipulated the intelligence.” He said that “those people who have looked at that issue, some committees on the Hill in Congress, and also the Silberman-Robb Commission, have concluded it did not happen.”

But the only committee investigating the matter in Congress, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, has not yet done its inquiry into whether officials mischaracterized intelligence by omitting caveats and dissenting opinions. And Judge Laurence H. Silberman, chairman of Bush’s commission on weapons of mass destruction, said in releasing his report on March 31, 2005: “Our executive order did not direct us to deal with the use of intelligence by policymakers, and all of us were agreed that that was not part of our inquiry.”

Bush, in Pennsylvania yesterday, was more precise, but he still implied that it had been proved that the administration did not manipulate intelligence, saying that those who suggest the administration “manipulated the intelligence” are “fully aware that a bipartisan Senate investigation found no evidence of political pressure to change the intelligence community’s judgments.”

In the same speech, Bush asserted that “more than 100 Democrats in the House and the Senate, who had access to the same intelligence, voted to support removing Saddam Hussein from power.” Giving a preview of Bush’s speech, Hadley had said that “we all looked at the same intelligence.”

But Bush does not share his most sensitive intelligence, such as the President’s Daily Brief, with lawmakers. Also, the National Intelligence Estimate summarizing the intelligence community’s views about the threat from Iraq was given to Congress just days before the vote to authorize the use of force in that country.

In addition, there were doubts within the intelligence community not included in the NIE. And even the doubts expressed in the NIE could not be used publicly by members of Congress because the classified information had not been cleared for release. For example, the NIE view that Hussein would not use weapons of mass destruction against the United States or turn them over to terrorists unless backed into a corner was cleared for public use only a day before the Senate vote.

The lawmakers are partly to blame for their ignorance. Congress was entitled to view the 92-page National Intelligence Estimate about Iraq before the October 2002 vote. But, as The Washington Post reported last year, no more than six senators and a handful of House members read beyond the five-page executive summary.

Even within the Bush administration, not everybody consistently viewed Iraq as what Hadley called “an enormous threat.” In a news conference in February 2001 in Egypt, then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said of the economic sanctions against Hussein’s Iraq: “Frankly, they have worked. He has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction.”

Bush, in his speech Friday, said that “it is deeply irresponsible to rewrite the history of how that war began.” But in trying to set the record straight, he asserted: “When I made the decision to remove Saddam Hussein from power, Congress approved it with strong bipartisan support.”

The October 2002 joint resolution authorized the use of force in Iraq, but it did not directly mention the removal of Hussein from power.

The resolution voiced support for diplomatic efforts to enforce “all relevant Security Council resolutions,” and for using the armed forces to enforce the resolutions and defend “against the continuing threat posed by Iraq.”

Hadley, in his remarks, went further. “Congress, in 1998, authorized, in fact, the use of force based on that intelligence,” he said. “And, as you know, the Clinton administration took some action.”

But the 1998 legislation gave the president authority “to support efforts to remove the regime of Saddam Hussein” by providing assistance to Iraqi opposition groups, including arms, humanitarian aid and broadcasting facilities.

President Bill Clinton ordered four days of bombing of Iraqi weapons facilities in 1998, under the 1991 resolution authorizing military force in response to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. Describing that event in an interview with CBS News yesterday, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said: “We went to war in 1998 because of concerns about his weapons of mass destruction.”