by Alan Colmes
September 11 was the best thing that could have happened to the Bush presidency. As former Bush 43 speechwriter David Frum writes in The Right Man, "George Bush was not on his way to a very successful presidency. . . . Bush's political vision was unclear. He was a politician of conservative instincts rather than conservative principles. . . . Above all, Bush lacked a big organizing idea." Well, September 11 gave him something around which to organize. This now became the basis of the Bush presidency: "It's 'The "War" on Terror', Stupid." And that morphed into the campaign against Iraq, and a push for a set of political objectives by this administration that couldn't have been accomplished without the help of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. Lost in all of this was what should have been our true objectives: stopping the very people who perpetrated the atrocity of September 11, and protecting the people of the United States of America. "The 'War' on Terror" became a sham.
It was a beautiful day, that autumn Tuesday in New York. It was primary day, and New Yorkers were getting ready to decide which Democratic candidate would be on the mayoral ballot eight weeks later. I woke up a few minutes before 9 a.m. and reached out to tap on the clock radio, relishing the idea of a few more minutes in bed while I listened just long enough to know that the world hadn't changed drastically overnight. Through my haze, however, I heard something about a plane going into the World Trade Center. What a horrible accident, I thought. Too troubled to stay in bed, I hastily made myself presentable enough to go out for the newspapers and a bagel. If you live in New York, bagels are mandatory. It's in the state constitution. As I returned home, I looked up, and saw the billowing smoke blocking the downtown Manhattan skyline. By the time I flipped on the television and logged online, there were reports of a second airplane, and then a third. I knew I had to get to the office as soon as possible, but the only way to get there was on foot, because mass transit had stopped operating, and large sections of New York City were blocked off to traffic. As I walked toward the midtown headquarters of Fox News, I was struck by an eerie sense of calm, as pedestrians stopped in their tracks and looked toward the smoke now blanketing the sky. Their faces were blank with disbelief, as though they were watching a distant movie. This couldn't be actually happening to us.
WMDs: Words of Mass Deception
On September 11, 2001, after being brutally attacked by a terror group that was based in Afghanistan, had cells in Iran and Pakistan, and consisted mostly of Saudi nationals, the Bush 43 administration did the only logical thing. It planned for a war against Iraq. You may think I'm being facetious, but on September 4, 2002, CBS News reported on its website that "barely five hours after American Airlines Flight 77 plowed into the Pentagon, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld was telling his aides to come up with plans for striking Iraq—even though there was no evidence linking Saddam Hussein to the attacks."
Amazingly and outrageously, in the year-and-a-half period after the September 11 attacks, Bush 43 was able to convince much of the American public and a large number of nations that focusing on Saddam Hussein was a really good idea soon after we were attacked by forces with no proven operational links with Saddam Hussein. The reasons given for going to war were various, prolific, and, most sadly, not always true.
In his State of the Union address on January 28, 2003, Bush 43 averred: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." It was later discovered that the information came from a forged document bearing the signature of a Nigerian official who had been out of office for a decade.
It turns out that the CIA informed the White House ten months before the State of the Union address that one of their sources who went to Niger couldn't confirm that Iraq was trying to acquire uranium. "Three senior administration officials said Vice President Dick Cheney and some officials on the National Security Council staff and at the Pentagon ignored the CIA's reservations and argued that the president and others should include the allegation in their case against Saddam," reported Jonathan S. Landay of Knight Ridder Newspaper on June 13, 2003, concluding that this provided "the strongest evidence to date that pro-war administration officials manipulated, exaggerated or ignored intelligence information in their eagerness to make the case for invading Iraq."
A Sunday, July 6, 2003, op-ed piece in the New York Times by Ambassador Joseph Wilson suggested that he was that source. Wilson had been ambassador to Gabon from 1992 to 1995, and Bush 43 's charge d'affaires to Iraq, where he was the last diplomat to speak with Saddam Hussein before Gulf War I. In February 2002, Wilson was sent to Iraq by the CIA at the request of Vice President Cheney's office to investigate the intelligence report about Iraq attempting to purchase uranium from Niger.
"Based on my experience with the administration in the months leading up to the war," Wilson wrote, "I have little choice but to conclude that some of the intelligence related to Iraq's nuclear weapons program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat."
With questions swirling about the veracity of the president's State of the Union address, the White House issued a carefully worded statement on Monday, July 7, 2003: "Knowing all that we know now, the reference to Iraq's attempt to acquire uranium from Africa should not have been included in the State of the Union speech." Put another way: "Niger did not have commercial relations with that man, Mr. Hussein."
Donald Rumsfeld went on Meet the Press to claim that Bush's statement in the State of the Union address was "technically correct." He might as well have said, "It depends what the meaning of 'uranium' is."
Left out in all the official explanations was how our own CIA warned the administration to go with the British intelligence. But why believe our own sources, when another country stands by the story that supports your agenda?
Trotted out to accept blame for the uranium mess was CIA director George Tenet, who delivered the official mea culpa:
First, CIA approved the president's State of the Union address before it was delivered. Second, I am responsible for the approval process in my agency. And third, the president had every reason to believe that the text presented to him was sound. These 16 words should never have been included in the text written for the president.
The problem here is that not only had the CIA already warned the administration not to go with the information nine months before the State of the Union speech, but on October 7, 2002, Bush 43 gave a major, nationally televised address at the Cincinnati Museum Center laying out the case for war, and Tenet told the administration to remove the uranium reference then. The top deputy to National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice, Steven Hadley, was told by Tenet personally that the reference to Niger uranium story could not be supported.
It's inconceivable that Rice's top aide would get such information and not share it with his boss. Nevertheless, on the June 8, 2003, Meet the Press, Rice had this to say about the revelation that the uranium story was false: "We did not know at the time—no one knew at the time, in our circles—maybe someone knew down in the bowels of the agency, but no one in our circles knew that there were doubts and suspicions that this might be a forgery."
But wait a minute! One month later, this time after the Wilson piece had appeared in the Times, Rice offered a different story during a press briefing aboard Air Force One as she was accompanying Bush 43 on a trip to Africa. She was asked why just nine days after the State of the Union address, Secretary of State Colin Powell omitted the uranium reference when he gave a speech promoting the case for war to the United Nations Security Council: "I was with Secretary Powell when he was doing a lot of this. You will remember that it was the Secretary's own intelligence arm, the INR, that was the one that within the overall intelligence assessment had objected to that sentence, had said that they doubts about—not to that sentence, had doubts about the uranium yellow cake story."
It appears, then, that she did know there were doubts about the uranium story.
In a closed-door session with the Senate Intelligence Committee on Wedne
sday, July 16, a week and a half after Ambassador Wilson's mission became public, Tenet discussed negotiations between the CIA and the White House about the content of the State of the Union address. According to Senator Richard Durbin of Illinois, the White House was "hell-bent" on including the uranium story and they "had to go into bargaining mode with the CIA to skirt around the misleading nature of the statement." This jibes with a New York Times report on July 11, 2003, that said Robert G. Allen, a nuclear proliferation expert at the National Security Council had a negotiating session with Alan Foley, a CIA proliferation expert. The Times reported:
There is still a dispute over what exactly was said in their conversations. Mr. Foley was said to recall that before the speech, Mr. Joseph called him to ask about putting into the speech a reference to reports that Iraq was trying to buy hundreds of tons of yellowcake from Niger. Mr. Foley replied that the C.I.A. was not sure that the information was right. Mr. Joseph then came back to Mr. Foley and pointed out that the British had already included the information in a report. Mr. Foley said yes, but noted that the C.I.A. had told the British that they were not sure that the information was correct. Mr. Joseph then asked whether it was accurate that the British reported the information. Mr. Foley said yes.
So the CIA warned the administration before both the Cincinnati speech and the State of the Union address not to go with the uranium story. And so what is that reason again to be blaming George Tenet?
Bush 43 defenders acted indignant that liberals would get all up in arms about "just sixteen words" in the president's speech. These are the same people who can't get over the fact that Bill Clinton used six fewer words when he said, "I did not have sex with that woman, Ms. Lewinsky." And it was more than just those sixteen words that were questionable. There appeared to be other examples of fudging in the State of Union address, the Cincinnati speech, and in various statements by top administration officials. For example, the president used his State of the Union speech to claim that Hussein had high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production. A month earlier, appearing on CNN's Late Edition, Rice said this about the aluminum tubing: "Saddam Hussein is actively pursuing a nuclear weapon. We do know that there have been shipments into Iraq of aluminum tubes that really are only suited to nuclear weapons programs."
But the National Intelligence Estimate, published in October 2002, and declassified on July 18, 2003, had a dissenting view from Powell's intelligence unit, stating it "considers it far more likely that the tubes are intended for another purpose, most likely the production of artillery rockets."
In September 2002, the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS), the very group that Bush 43 used for information on past Iraqi weapons procurements, issued a report about Iraq's desire to procure these materials that said, "By themselves, these attempted procurements are not evidence that Iraq is in possession of or close to possessing nuclear weapons. They also do not provide evidence that Iraq has an operating centrifuge plant or when such a plant could be operational."
David Albright, the former UN nuclear scientist in charge of the ISIS, commented on the aluminum tubing issue in an in-depth analysis called "The Selling of the Iraq War," which appeared in the June 30, 2003, New Republic: "I became dismayed when a knowledgeable government scientist told me that the administration could say anything it wanted about the tubes while government scientists who disagreed were expected to remain quiet."
"The Selling of the Iraq War" concluded, "The administration ignored, and even suppressed, disagreement within the intelligence agencies and pressured the CIA to reaffirm its preferred version of the Iraqi threat. Similarly, it stonewalled, and sought to discredit, international weapons inspectors when their findings threatened to undermine the case for war."
Senior Editor John B. Judis and Assistant Editor Spencer Ackerman neatly summed up the various ways the Bush 43 administration tried to impress on the American public the imperative that we go to war with Iraq, and that we do so in a timely fashion:
In Nashville on August 26, 2002, Vice President Dick Cheney warned of a Saddam "armed with an arsenal of these weapons of terror" who could "directly threaten America's friends throughout the region and subject the United States or any other nation to nuclear blackmail." In Washington on September 26, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld claimed he had "bulletproof evidence of ties between Saddam and Al Qaeda. And, in Cincinnati President George W. Bush warned, "The Iraqi dictator must not be permitted to threaten America and the world with horrible poisons and diseases and gases and atomic weapons." Citing Saddam's association with Al Qaeda, the president added that this "alliance with terrorists could allow die Iraqi regime to attack America without leaving any fingerprints."
Would you agree that such dire warnings, if based on faulty intelligence, are a much more egregious offense than the words, "I did not have sex with that woman, Ms. Lewinsky"? Skewed statements that lead us to war have considerably more dire consequences for our nation than one person's belief about what just which activities should be rightfully called "sex."
In so many ways and on so many days the Bush 43 administration told the American public and the world it was convinced of Iraq's possession of weapons of mass destruction. On the September 8, 2002, Meet the Press Cheney said that Hussein was aggressively building his nuclear program, adding, "Increasingly, we believe that the United States may well become the target of those activities."
The president claimed in his Cincinnati speech, "It possesses and produces chemical and biological weapons." But a letter dated the very same day of this speech and sent to the Senate Intelligence Committee by John McLaughlin, the deputy CIA director, on behalf of Tenet said, "Baghdad for now appears to be drawing a line short of conducting terrorist attacks with conventional or CBW (chemical and biological weapons) against the United States."
On February 6, 2002, the New York Times reported, "The Central Intelligence Agency has no evidence that Iraq has engaged in terrorist operations against the United States in nearly a decade, and the agency is convinced that Saddam Hussein has not provided chemical or biological weapons to al-Qaeda or related terrorist groups."
In his February 8, 2003, weekly radio address Bush 43 said, "We have sources that tell us that Saddam Hussein recently authorized Iraqi field commanders to use chemical weapons—the very weapons the dictator tells us he does not have." As it turned out, no such weapons were used against our troops, thankfully. During his March 17 speech, when he gave the Iraqi dictator forty-eight hours to get out of town, Bush 43 said, "intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised. The regime has already used weapons of mass destruction. . . ." On the March 30 edition of ABC's This Week Donald Rumsfeld said that not only were there WMDs in Iraq, but "we know where they are, they are in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north of that."
It was reported in the June 7, 2003, Los Anegks Times that a Defense Intelligence Agency report entitled "Iraq: Key Weapons Facilities—An Operational Support Study" that was issued last September found "no reliable information on whether Iraq is producing and stockpiling chemical weapons, or whether Iraq has—or will— establish its chemical warfare agent production facilities." It was also revealed that a previously covert army group called "Task Force 20" had been in Iraq since before the war looking for weapons of mass destruction. Funny how when the UN inspection team couldn't find this stuff they were literally run out of town, but the inability of a secret army task force to do the same thing got scant attention.
Make that the "DIM": The Divided Nations
How often did we hear that war with Iraq was proper because of Saddam's flagrant disregard for United Nations resolutions? Although it's true that Iraq has not been resolution-friendly, other countries have also ignored UN mandates. Indonesia disregarded mandates to withdraw from East Timor, which finally won its independence in 1999,
after a twenty-four-year-long U.S.-backed occupation. Turkey ignored Resolutions 353 and 354 to get it to leave Cyprus,. Several countries have had even more violations than Iraq. Israel, for example, has thirty, Turkey more than twenty, and Morocco, more than fifteen. Morocco was asked in 1975 to withdraw its forces of occupation from the western Sahara, but it ignored that request. And Morocco has defied more recent resolutions calling for an internationally supervised referendum to be voted on by the western Saharan population. This defiance has been supported by Bush 43.
More important, since when can one country decide that a Security Council resolution has been breached without the consent of the other member nations? This is a basic Security Council guideline, which the United States accepted when it signed on as a member of the community of nations.
It was often argued that war was justified since Iraq violated Resolution 1441, which put it in "material breach." But 1441 didn't automatically allow the United States to start a war. Even our own ambassador to the United Nations, John Negroponte, offered this view: "There's no automaticity and this is a two-stage process, and in that regard we have met the principal concerns that have been expressed for the resolution. Whatever violation there is, or is judged to exist, will be dealt with in the [Security] Council, and the Council will have an opportunity to consider the matter before any other action is taken." But that consideration was not to be.
We were told by the president that the International Atomic Energy Agency had a report that the Iraqis were "six months away from developing a weapon." In fact, Mark Gwozdecky, the chief spokesman of the International Atomic Energy Agency said, "There's never been a report like that issued from this agency," and he added, "We've never put a time frame on how long it might take Iraq to construct a nuclear weapon in 1998."
