The spooks speak - to NPR? Via NY Transfer News * All the News That Doesn't Fit The Spooks Speak - To NPR? This is a transcript of an NPR piece which ran on May 9, 2002, and is the best refutation of the US claims I've run across to date. It has a number of specific rejections of Bolton's charges. It is studded with eye-opening quotes from named and unnamed sources in the US government refuting Bolton's charges. The General in charge of the Southern Command when the most recent assessment of Cuba was released by the DIA says: "During my three-year tenure, which was from September of 1997 until September of 2000, at Southern Command, I didn't receive a single report or a single piece of evidence that would have led me to the conclusion that Cuba was in fact developing, producing, or weaponizing biological or chemical agents." Not even Rumsfeld was warned that Bolton was getting ready to step into this filth. After the transcript, a speculation about why these folks were willing to speak. Source: http://www.npr.org/ramfiles/atc/20020509.atc.14.ram (you'll need Real Audio to listen, or you can take this transcription on faith. A smart person would never take anything on faith - unlike Undersecretary Bolton, who knows what he believes and expects the rest of us to know it on his say-so.) --------- transcript begins --------------------- [Leann Hansen.] A new accusation against Cuba this week from the State Department. Undersecretary John Bolton charged that the Castro regime has a biological warfare research program. Bolton criticized US military and intelligence officials for having previously, in his words, " underplayed the danger cuba poses the United States." Now, some of those other US officials say it's bolton who's misrepresenting the Cuban threat. NPRs Tom Gjelten reports. [Gjelten] For decades, the top US concern about Fidel Castro has been his poor human rights record. The US government hasn't really taken Castro seriously as a US security concern since he surrendered his Soviet missiles and gave up efforts to foment revolution in other countries. In 1998, the Defense Intelligence Agency took another look at Cuba; after input from the CIA, the US military, the National Security Agency and the State Department, the DIA concluded that Cuba did not pose a significant military threat. Marine General Charles Wilhelm in 1998 was the top US military official following Cuba as chief of the US Southern Command. "When the report was issued, I obviously studied it very carefully. It was my view then and it's my view now that it correctly reflected the views of a very very broad range of senior officials, all of whom were qualified and competent to discuss Cuba and the threats, if any, that it posed to the United States." The DIA report, however, was controversial. Cuban-American exiles in particular said it did not pay enough attention to Cuba's vaccine and biotechnology industry, which some experts saw as a possible cover for the development of biological weapons. In his speech this week, Undersecretary of State John Bolton challenged the 1998 DIA report as unbalanced and then he dramatically revised a key DIA finding. The 1998 report concluded that Cuba's scientific facilities and expertise could support an offensive biological warfare program; Bolton said flatly the United States believes Cuba has at least a limited offensive biological warfare research and development effort. He would not back up the charges with evidence, concerned, he said, that doing so could jeopardize sources of information about Cuba's activities. "I don't doubt, however, that the record and empirical evidence for this is extremely well-documented." Charges that Cuba could be developing biological weapons have been around for years. General Charles Wilhelm, now retired, says he heard many allegations about a Cuban biological warfare effort but he says none were persuasive. "During my three-year tenure, which was from September of 1997 until September of 2000, at Southern Command, I didn't receive a single report or a single piece of evidence that would have led me to the conclusion that Cuba was in fact developing, producing, or weaponizing biological or chemical agents." In fact, Bolton's allegation that Cuba has an offensive biological warfare program is not being supported by other senior US military and intelligence officials. When asked this week for his reaction to Bolton's charge, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said, quote, "I have not seen the intelligence that apparently led Undersecretary Bolton to make those remarks." Another senior US official says Bolton's claim was, quote "way overstated" unquote. This official, who is familiar with the latest intelligence on Cuba's biotechnology programs says the Cubans do have the facilities and expertise to support an offensive biological warfare effort, but the official insists there is still no evidence that Cuba has such a program. "We also have no information," the official says, "indicating that Cuba is supporting biological warfare programs in other countries." A defense official familiar with Cuba was even more critical of the State Department's declaration that Cuba is engaged in biological weapons research. "We take these issues very seriously," the official says; "every time you manipulate them politically, it diminishes our credibility." No official who challenged Bolton's claim wanted to be identified out of concern for sparking an inter-agency dispute on the issue. On Capitol Hill, Republican Lincoln Diaz-Ballart, a prominent Cuban-American Congressman from Florida says he's not surprised that some military and intelligence officials remain unimpressed by the threat Fidel Castro may pose. "There are some points within the intelligence community, yes, that are problematic. I have found numerous instances of downplaying and more - covering up - reality within Cuba, such as drug trafficking, money laundering, logistical and other support for terrorists in this hemisphere and biological weapons development." The Cuban Government, having said nothing for two days about the charge that it's engaged in biological warfare research, today called the accusation vile. The government statement promised a complete response tomorrow. Tom Gjelten, NPR news, Washington. ----------- end excerpt ------------------- One question here is - why are the intel people stepping up to the plate like this? Several reasons. Bolton, as Anya Landau has pointed out, essentially told the US intel community that a single spy made them all unprofessional boobs - that one woman in an office at DIA had singlehandedly subverted the agency's entire analytic capacity. That's not a real bright thing to say about people who you're hoping will back up your assertions. Also, any bioweapons charge is a "third rail" in public opinion, in US military doctrine (that is, we've essentially stated that our response to an attack would be nuclear,) and in the intel community itself. That last, I think, results from a combination of things: the experience of being accused so often themselves, the strategic implications of the charge, and perhaps also because the people in the intel community who attend to this stuff tend to be scientifically trained and know that the foundation of a charge like that has to be scientific, ultimately - and those data are essentially impossible to deal with once something's a political football, as they learned to their lasting shame during the Yellow Rain affair. (It is obvious in retrospect that not only were the Army people having trouble establishing the presence or absence of trace mycotoxins in their samples, but far worse they were playing games with the data on how toxic the substances they occasionally found traces of actually were. No lab outside the US defense establishment ever found that the mycotoxins were nearly as deadly as the Army labs did; the Army labs had Al Haig and his statements to back up, which would have been hard to do if they'd found that - despite the scary name - the mycotoxins, uhm, aren't actually that toxic.) ================================================================= NY Transfer News Collective * A Service of Blythe Systems Since 1985 - Information for the Rest of Us 339 Lafayette St., New York, NY 10012 http://www.blythe.org e-mail: nyt@blythe.org ================================================================= nytmed-05.14.02-03:39:08-19034