The Day I Realized I Would Never Find Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq
My line of questioning was simple: Tell me about the nuclear material you were transporting. His answers also were simple: I wasn’t transporting nuclear material; I didn’t do it. For a while I assumed his tears were a ploy. I applied greater pressure: Stop lying to me; tell me where you got it; we know everything. His crying intensified.
In the famous deck of cards that depicted Hussein’s henchmen, my subject wouldn’t even rank as a two of clubs. The truth is that this old man — caught with car parts patched together to look like a small radioactive-material container — was no more than a con artist. He probably just wanted to make some cash by selling the fake material to a sucker. Almost certainly he was crying in front of me out of genuine despair.
But my questions were unrelenting. I was determined to eke out any details that could offer clues about Al-Zarqawi. A colleague in the tent gave me a confused look, and later commented that my face was indecipherable during the interrogation. My subject protested his innocence and even tried to take my hands in his, pleading for his family’s security. In the end, I turned to the interpreter and whispered, “He doesn’t belong here.” He promised to tell the commanding officer. My comment was as much about the absurdity of the whole situation as it was about the prisoner’s innocence. I had risked the lives of a dozen soldiers to be there — only to find a small-scale confirmation of the ludicrous false premises under which we had invaded and occupied Iraq. The Iraqi weapons of mass destruction were no more than a bit of improvised sham, a con man’s counterfeit goods. In the process I had stumbled into one of the darkest places in wartime Iraq and into the most revealing truth of the conflict: Nobody belonged there.
When I returned to Washington, some weeks later, it was clear to me that people who hadn’t served in Iraq knew little of what was really going on. A friend asked me how the search for weapons of mass destruction was going. I responded wryly, “Well, I’m back, aren’t I?” I avoided explaining the enormity of it. I relied on funny stories of swimming in Uday’s pool or peeing in Hussein’s golden toilets to escape the conversation.
When the Iraq Survey Group’s interim progress report was released, in October 2003, the truth became unavoidable. It offered a thinly veiled admission of failure to find any convincing evidence of recent W.M.D. activity. I had often justified my participation as my duty, but that claim began to sound more and more like an excuse for blind adventurism. It became impossible to square my American sense of free will — our image of ourselves as empowered citizens participating in informed choices — with the reality of the way that we were hoodwinked into going along with the invasion of Iraq. I had been taught throughout my childhood and my military training that America conducts wars based on just cause, but the reality emerging from Iraq was that we had been compelled by deception.
A few months later, in April 2004, CBS News broke the story of torture at Abu Ghraib prison, revealing that American guards, maybe even some of the people whom I had seen at the prison, had beaten and abused prisoners. I was horrified. There had been little to stop me from harming my interviewee there, but doing so would have required moral bankruptcy. The actions of the guards at Abu Ghraib invalidated the American idea of liberation that I believed in. To me, the cruelty and abuse of power represented a perversion of American values.
In that moment, it became clear to me that the administration’s public narrative of the war was exactly what drove us to that dark place. The time-tested tropes of war for freedom and war of liberation had been used masterfully, and had been enabled by false claims of the Hussein regime’s involvement with Al Qaeda. We were fighting in a fantasy and our leaders knew it, even while we were there, yet we persisted.
I was repulsed by the idea that we could have been so easily manipulated. For a time I considered ending my government career. But I also felt that walking away would make me powerless to do anything to push back against the administration’s dishonesty. Instead, I refocused my intelligence career on understanding the underlying causes of war. Later, as an adjunct professor, I spent time developing an assessment of historical false justifications, and taught on the subject. To this day, I’m chastened by the memory of my experience at Abu Ghraib, and I’m haunted by the unknown fate of my interviewee. Like many veterans, I carry a deep desire to prevent another conflict like the invasion of Iraq, fueled by my understanding of the war’s absurdities. But I’m struck by the power of our national momentum toward going to war — especially unnecessary ones — and alarmed that this momentum seems nearly impossible to halt.
Experts debunk fringe theory linking China’s coronavirus to weapons research
But in conversations with The Washington Post, experts rejected the idea that the virus could be man-made.
“Based on the virus genome and properties there is no indication whatsoever that it was an engineered virus,” said Richard Ebright, a professor of chemical biology at Rutgers University.
Tim Trevan, a biological safety expert based in Maryland, said most countries had largely abandoned their bioweapons research after years of work proved fruitless.
“The vast majority of new, nasty diseases are zygotic: They come from nature,” he said.
The British newspaper Daily Mail was among the first to suggest the possibility of a link between the newly spreading virus and the Wuhan National Biosafety Laboratory, reporting last week that the lab, which opened in 2014 and is part of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, had been the subject of safety concerns in the past.
A separate article published by the Washington Times, a conservative newspaper in Washington, D.C., took the theories a step further, suggesting the “Coronavirus may have originated in lab linked to China’s biowarfare program” and pointing to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
The article cited research by Dany Shoham, a former Israeli military intelligence officer, who told The Post he did not want to comment further.
The Wuhan National Biosafety Laboratory is a “Cellular Level Biosafety Level 4” facility, which means it has a high level of operational security and is authorized to work on dangerous pathogens, including Ebola.
Those entering the level 4 lab use airlocks and protective suits. Waste, and even air, is heavily filtered and cleaned before leaving the facility.
Milton Leitenberg, an expert on chemical weapons at the University of Maryland, said that he and other analysts around the world had discussed the possibility that weapons development at the Wuhan lab could have led to the coronavirus outbreak in a private email chain but that no one had found convincing evidence to support the theory.
“Of course, if they are doing bioweaponry, it is covert,” Leitenberg said in a phone call, but added that it was unlikely the Chinese government would use such a facility for production or even research and development of bioweapons.
The Wuhan lab is well-known and it is relatively open compared with other Chinese institutes: It has strong ties to the Galveston National Laboratory at the University of Texas Medical Branch and was developed with the aid of French engineers.
“Wuhan Institute of Virology is a world-class research institution that does world-class research in virology and immunology,” Ebright said, noting that one specialty of the facility was researching coronaviruses transmitted by bats.
Trevan, who wrote a 2017 article for Nature that warned of possible risks at the Wuhan facility that was cited by the Daily Mail, said in a phone call to The Post that he was concerned at the time about how to “manage risk in these complex systems when you cannot predict all the ways in which the system could fail.”
A former British diplomat and political adviser to the United Nations, he said that he had not followed affairs at the facility closely since 2017 and was not aware of any specific problems there, but that he doubted the coronavirus outbreak could have come from a weapons program.
Elsa Kania, a fellow at the Center for a New American Security, said that while Chinese officials had expressed public interest in the potential weaponization of biotechnology, a coronavirus would not be a useful weapon.
“Hypothetically, a bioweapon would be designed to be highly targeted in its effects, whereas since its outbreak the coronavirus is already on track to become widespread in China and worldwide,” she said.
Vipin Narang, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, wrote in a message on Twitter that a good bioweapon “in theory has high lethality but low, not hi, communicability” and that spreading such ideas would be “incredibly irresponsible.”
After the 2014 Ebola outbreak, fringe news outlets suggested spuriously that the U.S. Department of Defense had manufactured the virus. In the Soviet Union, military labs did look into whether the virus could be used as a weapon but ultimately abandoned those hopes.
The speculation may be linked to uncertainty over where the ongoing novel coronavirus outbreak originated. Some scientists initially suspected that a seafood market in Wuhan may have been the starting point, but a study written by Chinese researchers and published in the Lancet on Friday questioned that analysis.
Late Tuesday, Hu Xijin, editor of the nationalistic Global Times newspaper wrote that a conspiracy theory had emerged in China that the United States was responsible for the outbreak. “Their logic: Why always China?” Hu wrote on Twitter. “But most Chinese don’t believe it.”
Kweisi Mfume meets his past as he seeks the US House seat of the late Elijah Cummings
BALTIMORE — Kweisi Mfume steps out of his Porsche in Baltimore’s Mount Vernon neighborhood and heads to a campaign stop at the Waxter Center for Senior Citizens, where a woman in the gym recognizes him immediately.
“I voted for him before and will again,” says retiree Jovita Harris-Okonkwo after the former congressman greeted her as she exercised on a step machine. “It’s a comfort level.”
Twenty-four years after leaving Congress to become president of the NAACP, the 71-year-old Mfume is hoping to renew old acquaintances — and his political life — to win back the 7th Congressional District seat he held for a decade.
The Democrat regularly zooms to events in the leased Porsche, a fast car for a speedy race. Republican Gov. Larry Hogan had to quickly schedule an election to replace Mfume’s friend, U.S. Rep. Elijah Cummings, who died in October. The special primary is Feb. 4.
In such a truncated campaign, there is little time for lesser-known candidates to introduce themselves to voters. The Mfume campaign believes that plays to their candidate’s advantage in the district, which includes parts of Baltimore City, Baltimore County and Howard County.
“I’ve always been around,” says Mfume, who chronicled his early life in Baltimore in a 1996 autobiography, “No Free Ride: From the Mean Streets to the Mainstream.” In it, he describes a misguided young man who quits school, fathers five children out of wedlock and runs with a gang.
The book recounts a street-corner “epiphany” one summer night nearly 50 years ago, which Mfume says began his transformation from an aimless punk in West Baltimore to an influential black leader who led the NAACP for nine years.
Mfume says that on that July evening in 1971, he was in a craps game when he saw his mother — who had died of cancer more than seven years earlier — looking at him, first with sadness, then with love.
“All I could hear was my mother’s voice — it sounded exactly like it sounded the last night that she was alive — just saying that she wanted more from me, she expected more from me, that she loved me. It transformed my thinking and my beliefs and my faith,” he said in an interview.
Mfume, who is Baptist, describes it as a story of redemption and faith that makes him accessible to voters. “I think it makes it easier for them to relate to me,” he said.
Born Frizzell Gray, he attended Morgan State University, changed his name and became a radio personality at WEBB-AM and later WEAA-FM. He still possesses a rich, disc jockey voice.
Voters elected him to the Baltimore City Council in 1978 and to Congress in 1986.
“He was just a very solid member of Congress,” said Democrat Tom McMillen, who served with Mfume in Maryland’s House delegation. “He’s always been a great orator. He was well liked in the Congress, which is always important. He wasn’t a bomb thrower.”
Mfume was named NAACP president in 1996 and stayed until 2004. He was credited with steering the historic civil rights organization out of debt through fundraising and fiscal austerity.
He abruptly left the job, saying he had no specific plans other than taking “a break” and spending time with his children. But a recent review of records by The Baltimore Sun found Mfume left following the threat of a lawsuit alleging sexual harassment, several negative performance reviews and a 2004 vote by the executive committee of the NAACP’s board not to grant him a new contract.
The departure followed “a long period of growing dissatisfaction with high and constant staff turnovers, falling revenues, falling memberships, three consecutive negative performance appraisals, highly questionable hiring and promotion decisions, creation of new staff positions with no job descriptions, and personal behavior which placed each of us at legal and financial risk,” wrote then-NAACP Chairman Julian Bond as he prepared to share the executive committee’s vote on Mfume with the full board.
Mfume declined to be interviewed about the records in Bond’s archives. He said in a statement: “Sometimes strong-willed leaders have differences of opinion. Julian and I were no different.” He said he took the organization from debt to a surplus, and received a raise in his final three-year contract in 2001.
Mfume’s leadership at the NAACP was the subject of two internal investigations that described allegations of nepotism and sexual harassment at its headquarters. Among other allegations, a former manager alleged that after she rebuffed an advance by Mfume, she was passed over for raises and a promotion. The NAACP paid her about $100,000 to avoid a lawsuit, according to an anonymous source who described the agreement’s terms to The Sun in 2005.
During his campaign announcement in November, Mfume — as he has in the past — acknowledged an affair with an NAACP subordinate.
“As a single man, I had a dating relationship with a single woman for six or seven months. It was clearly a bonehead thing to do,” he said. Mfume said he knew of no other payments to women during his tenure.
In a later interview, he said he was surprised he is still being asked about his mistake. “My guess is, that’s not the first time that that has happened with people in our society,” he said.
While he said it was “dumb” for anybody to date someone who works under them, he asked voters to “judge me the way you’ve known me and have always known me.”
In recent years, Mfume has served on the boards of universities and associations, and is the longtime chairman of Morgan State’s board of regents. He hadn’t run for political office since losing a 2006 primary for the seat of retiring U.S. Sen. Paul Sarbanes of Baltimore.
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Running now for his old House seat “was a very difficult decision,” said his wife, Tiffany Mfume, a Morgan State administrator. “We’re doing really well in our lives. We’re really enjoying our families and the blessings that we have.”
But she said Mfume “had such a great friendship with Elijah spanning four-plus decades of his life. He feels, and I feel, that he has almost a commitment to honor his memory.”
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Mfume says his congressional priorities would include lowering the cost of prescription drugs, improving the Affordable Care Act health care system, and reinstating a federal assault weapons ban.
He calls himself “a progressive moderate,” saying he is “very, very progressive” on social issues, but “a little more moderate” on fiscal concerns.
State Sen. Jill Carter criticized Mfume at a recent debate for supporting in Congress a 1994 crime bill blamed by progressives for fueling “mass incarceration” disproportionately affecting minorities. He replied that murders and other crimes were exceedingly high at the time and that other progressives — such as current presidential candidate Bernie Sanders — also backed the measure.
In campaign appearances, Mfume has been touting his congressional seniority. Former members who return to the House are typically granted more senior status than brand-new arrivals. It is up to House Democratic leaders to decide how much seniority a returning member gets. Seniority is important because it helps lawmakers move up the ladder towards leadership positions, such as subcommittee and committee chairmanships.
Other Democrats in the race include Carter; Maya Rockeymoore Cummings, Cummings’ widow and a former Maryland Democratic Party chairwoman; longtime Cummings staffer Harry Spikes; Maryland House of Delegates Majority Whip Talmadge Branch; University of Baltimore law professor F. Michael Higginbotham; state Del. Terri L. Hill, a physician, and community activist Saafir Rabb.
After the primary, a special general election will be held April 28 to fill the rest of Cummings’ two-year term. April 28 is also the date of the regular U.S. House primary for candidates who want to win a full term of their own.
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