I would get arrested for this, friends. My support for free elections and prison without torture would be categorized as “Organizing Resistance to the U.S. Occupation.”291
In the indictment, dear Youseff would pretend to have posed as a Libyan Intelligence Agent.292 Which astonished me. If one thing was clear, it’s that I believed he was American Intelligence. And there was no third meeting.
The Justice Department might have hoped to hang me in the court of public opinion, but they couldn’t possibly sell that to a Judge and jury. And they knew it.
Shocking, isn’t it?
If you ask now, was it worth it? I would say absolutely yes. If supporting genuine democracy anywhere in the world qualifies as “Organizing Resistance to the United States,” then by God, sign me up! Something has gone terribly wrong in America. It’s time to make a stand right now, and take our country back!
What’s extraordinary is not why I chose to devote my activism to supporting a platform of democracy and human rights in the “New Iraq,” but why the U.S. and British governments attacked me for it. My arrest makes a lie of liberation, doesn’t it?
I can sense you’re puzzled. Surely the U.S. and Britain supported democracy in Iraq, without need for watchdogs like me? Wasn’t that a primary justification for the invasion?
Not originally. Not when you read the fine print. Free elections were not part of the original blueprint for Iraq’s future. Working together, activists inside Iraq and around the world brought the U.S. government to it. We won a critical victory in the end. But it was a people’s victory over politicians and bureaucrats. For all of the media hype afterwards, Washington and London did not appreciate our interference at all.
No, the original U.S. policy announced by Paul Bremer, Tsar of Iraq, on November 15, 2003, declared that the Iraqi People would have no direct vote in choosing their new government.293
In the original transition plan, Bremer’s staff at the Coalition Provisional Authority intended to hand pick the new leaders, who would form a transitional government.
Each of Iraq’s 18 provinces would hold a political caucus run by “professionals, experts and tribal leaders.” Participants in the Caucus would be screened by a 15 person “organizing committee,” which would also be hand-picked by the Americans.
The Caucus would choose representatives from its own group to attend a National Convention. The Convention would write a Permanent Constitution and choose candidates for a 250 member transitional assembly.
The assembly would elect a President and cabinet from within its ranks. Through this convoluted process, direct elections by and for the Iraqi people would be delayed for several years.
You could have heard a pin drop when Bremer announced this thinly disguised plan for U.S. autocracy in Iraq. Then there was shouting from all quarters. No! No! No!
So many bad decisions had been foisted on Baghdad by this point. Efforts to deny Iraqis a direct vote for the new government was the last straw. There was open rebellion to the plan.
Ayatollah Sistani emerged from seclusion in Najaf to declare a fatwa—a religious edict—opposing Bremer’s proposal.
“There is no guarantee that the council would create a constitution conforming with the greater interests of the Iraqi people and expressing the national identity, whose basis is Islam, and its noble social values,” Sistani decreed.294
That’s what saved democracy in Iraq. A religious edict. An Ayatollah’s fatwa! Democracy resulted from an uprising of the people so powerful that it overturned the autocracy of Washington.
Oh yes, whatever happened to my good friend, Muthanna al Hanooti?
While other Iraqi Exiles floundered trying to establish a base of political support inside Iraq, Muthanna flourished—always a peace maker, never a collaborator. Unlike exiles from London, Tehran and Detroit, Muthanna brought humanitarian relief to the people during the hated sanctions. Now they honored him for it. He emerged as a respected bridge builder, enjoying a remarkable level of support among the common people.
If Muthanna al Hanooti had won a role in the top leadership of the “New Iraq,” the world could have breathed a huge sigh of relief. It would have created a shot at real peace in the region. Muthanna’s that good.
So what did the unpopular Iraqi Exiles do to knock down this outstanding man?
Jealous of his extensive contacts throughout Iraq, former Iraqi Exiles campaigned vigorously for Muthanna al Hanooti’s arrest in the United States. Five years after the fall of Saddam, they finally got their wish. In March, 2008 Muthanna got indicted as an “unregistered Iraqi Agent,” on the ridiculous allegation that he received 2 million barrels of oil from Saddam’s government.295
Two million barrels of oil?
I was dumb-struck when I heard this. First I was speechless. Then I laughed uproariously, because it’s so incredibly stupid. I first met Muthanna in 2002, while we both campaigned against war and sanctions.296 Because of my past, I made it my business to know a great deal about Muthanna’s private life. Chalk it up to occupational hazard. Anyway, those accusations were the kind of baffling nonsense only the Iraqi Exiles could invent. They’re highly imaginative in their scheming. In all my years covering Baghdad, I never got over my sense of amazement for every new fantasy they concocted, with such embellishes and bellicose lies. I was sure they should win prizes for literary fiction.
They say you can judge a man by the strength of his enemies.
If the Iraqi exiles don’t like somebody, you know that person’s got integrity—like Muthanna al Hanooti.
The corollary is that if pro-war factions in Washington led by Vice President Cheney and Senator John McCain oppose your activities, you must be doing something right.
I was about to discover that for myself.
CHAPTER 16:
THE CRYING GAME
“I am bound to say what seems right to me,”
responded the Senator.
“But if you say it, I will kill you,” the Emperor warned.”
–Senator Robert Byrd
Floor Statement Opposing Homeland Security Act of 2002
Congressional Record, 11/19/2002
Those few rose petals died quickly in the Iraq summer sun.
Simple things in modern life, like shortages of electricity and food, turned Iraqi frustrations to hatred and rage. The hunt for WMDs bagged nothing, disgracing a key justification for the war. And Americans soon realized the only Al Qaeda forces in Iraq arrived shortly after the fall of Saddam, mocking another rationalization for our misadventure. In no time at all, American soldiers hunkered down behind razor wire and concrete barricades, without adequate body armor, while the War of Ramadan launched a full scale insurgency using suicide bombers and improvised explosive devices made of absolutely anything. Violent resistance swept from the mosques to Sunni strongholds in Fallujah and Mosul, and Shi’ite dominated Najaf and Nasiriyah.
The stagecraft of victory collapsed within months. Liberation doctrine lay battered beneath the rubble, smashed beyond recognition, alongside charred claims of triumph.
It happened so fast.
Americans woke up one morning to find themselves a losing army, a conquered Occupier.
“Vietnam” was on everyone’s lips. Soldiers who expected to serve one tour in Iraq got sent back four times, more badly scarred by post traumatic stress with every deployment.
The country demanded to know why. Americans resent getting tagged as “bad guys” in any conflict. Our soldiers want to be the “good guys.”
In Washington, Congressional leaders got scared. They had shut their ears to hundreds of thousands of voter pleas, in letters and faxes and phone calls and demonstrations that begged Congress to stay out of Iraq, and let U.N. weapons inspectors finish their job. Americans never wanted to sacrifice for this war. Now we had to mortgage our future to sustain the failure of it.
Congress faced bitter recriminations and vicious election fights against a backdrop of the most passionate anti-incu
mbent sentiments in years.
Iraq and 9/11 were ubiquitous killjoys in the debate. Were Republicans really more qualified to lead the War on Terror? Had they accomplished what they promised? People started to ask some important questions: When did the CIA get its first itch that a terrorist attack could be imminent? There started to be low rumblings that we expected the 9/11 strike. It would take more time, but whisperings of truth would break out, as ever it does.
The Presidential sweepstakes towered frightfully large. If the Democrats could beat the GOP machine, they would take down a lot of Republicans on Capitol Hill.
Congress fretted. They whined. And they looked for a scapegoat—anything to avoid taking responsibility for their own mistakes in rushing to War. Iraq cost America all of her prestige abroad, and the critical ability to foist a U.S. agenda on trusting international allies. Not to mention boatloads of cash needed for schools and public works projects and police departments.
It was a great deal to lose, exactly as the Intelligence community warned it would be.
Their own congressional seats would be a great deal to lose, too.
Now that would be truly disastrous! If they had to take responsibility for this war, their political careers would be over! They’d be ruined! Oh my!
But what if someone else could take responsibility for them?
Intelligence Assets, perhaps. Someone like me.
Come again?
That’s right. Assets who put together Pre-War Intelligence reports for the CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency. What if we could take the blame instead?
There were very few of us—maybe a dozen, at most.297 If blame could be shifted to our “faulty intelligence” that guided their decisions before the War, they would be saved!
Say now, that was a plan. Congress and the White House could channel public fury onto the Intelligence community, arguing for the failure of Assets and our handlers. Over and over Congress could rip us apart for lacking aggressive risk-taking and strategic thinking skills—“imaginative risk taking,” a Presidential Commission would accuse later on.298
Officially, the White House and Republican attack machine would declare that Assets had performed “incompetently.”
That would have frightening and ominous implications for my future.
It took a Washington heartbeat—which is slow, like a snake— for Republicans and Democrats alike to see that Assets would be the perfect fall guys.
The stakes were so high. I’m sure they expected us to understand.
There’s a time honored tradition on Capitol Hill. When Congress makes a mistake, blame always falls on congressional staff.
As a former staffer myself, I was expected to know this. It’s never a Senator’s or Congress member’s fault that an important speech or constituent meeting got missed. It’s the scheduler or press secretary who screwed up. Republicans are every bit as guilty as the Democrats in this regard. There’s nothing partisan about this trend. It’s the unhappy norm on Capitol Hill.
Unfortunately, playing hooky from responsibility becomes habitual, without consequence.
Cowardice ruled over Capitol Hill
That selfishness, and to a large degree cowardice, explains a lot about why Republicans and Democrats united so quickly to heap scornful epithets on the so-called “incompetence” of the CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency before the war.
It was the ultimate Crying Game. Democrats and Republicans both played the role of victims to what they called a massive “intelligence failure.”
In the months ahead, former Rep. Jane Harman, top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, swore that Assets bore the blame for failing to develop options to War, or speak up to correct assumptions if our work got misrepresented in the public debate. Why didn’t any of us try to set the record straight?299
Rep. Harman concluded that the failure of Assets to take a proactive role in correcting “misinformation” compelled Congress to acquiesce to the White House, instead of resisting the debacle of this war policy. Congress had no options, because Assets created no options.300
There was just one serious flaw in that strategy of denial: I had done all of those things. I had even debriefed Congresswoman Harman’s own Chief of Staff about the CIA’s alternative framework for ending the conflict with Iraq. Her senior legislative staff got copies of the Andy Card letters, too.
Therein lay the problem for Congress.
I wasn’t “feeling” their pain quite the way they hoped.
When I established “Citizens for Public Integrity” after 9/11, I chose the relatively conservative moniker because I despised this lack of accountability. I wanted truth with teeth, not a whitewash. I wanted to take this fight to their door, and I would not stop until I knocked it down. Frankly, I was sick to death of Washington doing business this way.
After the Invasion of Iraq, in my watch dog role, I continued to distribute papers on Capitol Hill, decrying human rights abuses in the “New Iraq.” I championed the rights of detainees to have legal counsel to protest their arrests by U.S. soldiers in the dead of night. I insisted on their rights not to be attacked by dogs or sexually degraded.301 I’d already heard horrors about Abu Ghraib by August or September, 2003—months before the scandal broke. It was right below the surface.
Finally, I campaigned hard for Iraq’s right to form political parties and map a political future without relying on Iraqi exiles, who violently squashed political opposition.302 The “New Iraq” had to be borne from inside, not imposed from outside.
At home, I made no secret that I despised Republicans particularly for lying about our advance knowledge of 9/11, and boasting of their “outstanding leadership performance” on matters of counter-terrorism and national security. That was political fraud, from where I sat.
I scorned suggestions that 9/11 resulted from a lack of mid-level intra-agency cooperation. I whispered through the Washington gossip mill that Republican appointees at the top of the Justice Department had refused requests for multi-agency planning to block the 9/11 attack. Cabinet-level authorization was required for cooperation to occur. Lower level people— read that, non political appointees, like me— recognized that cooperation was vital. Unhappily, we lacked authority to require it to happen. But we certainly raised the alarms. That’s why my CIA handler, Dr. Fuisz, urged me to approach Andy Card at his home in Arlington, Virginia in mid-August, 2001. We wanted to bypass that political constipation at the Justice Department.
Based on threats I delivered to Iraqi diplomats myself from April and May, 2001 onwards, there’s no question that top White House officials had analyzed the 9/11 scenario and seized on it as a rationalization for war with Baghdad. The intelligence community correctly anticipated the strike in all specific details. My own handlers urgently tried to stop it. But that secret agenda to create a war with Iraq was already in motion. Instead of heeding our urgent and proactive warnings, the top echelon of White House policymakers ignored simple counter-measures that would have blocked the terrorists, like alerting NORAD or hoisting a single anti-aircraft gun on top of just one of the Twin Towers. Knowing what was coming, Cabinet officials stood down from their obligations to protect the sovereign territory of the United States, an act of deliberate command negligence. And that’s unforgivable.
There were also serious questions of what happened to all that “black budget” money designated for field-work after 9/11. Almost $75 billion got appropriated by Congress— Yet somehow it got siphoned off from active projects “on the ground” like mine, and diverted to Washington bureaucracy and high-tech gadgetry. There are strong indications that substantial sums of Black Budget money vanished into the private bank accounts and fancy houses of the Beltway Bandits in the CIA’s own back yard.
Where federal dollars for anti-terrorism did not get invested was on Assets like me— who perform the daily work of anti-terrorism — or the recruitment of Agents in the Middle East, like my high ranking friend in Iraq’s Intelligence Service, call
ed the Mukhabarat. That’s the motherlode of counter-terrorism. It would have allowed the U.S. to track who entered Iraq, when, where they stayed, who they met, and their activities.
Our team’s $13 million allotment from the 9/11 investigation should have employed 20 senior FBI Agents in Baghdad, plus a cadre of CIA analysts at Langley Headquarters dedicated to overseeing this Iraqi Agent’s packages. He was that significant. Instead all that taxpayer money got spent on architectural designs for A Single Mega-Mansion in Virginia.
If anti-terrorism policy mattered to Washington beyond the level of propaganda, those problems would fire off alarms all over Capitol Hill. Such a major debacle should demand a Congressional investigation, and an immediate overhaul of “black budget” rules for the oversight of funds. It would demand very serious scrutiny.
And yet Congress has steadfastly refused to examine “black budgets,” or hold federal agencies responsible for financial mis-management. Beltway Bandits are faithful campaign contributors—which sort of implies that “black budget” money gets funneled back to Congress at election time. Those are American tax dollars, friends. That tax money comes from a teacher in North Carolina, a plumber in Ohio, a realtor in Scottsdale, Arizona and a techie geek in Silicon Valley. American taxpayers work hard for that money. There should be accountability.
Who was to blame for all of this?
Indisputably, the Republican Party controlled these federal agencies, for the simple fact that whoever controls the White House controls executive policy and top appointments throughout the executive branch.
This happened on the Republican’s watch. If Democrats had done such a mediocre job managing funds for national security after 9/11, Americans would scream bloody murder against them, too. These are seriously flawed decisions that undercut national security, and continue to threaten us now.
EXTREME PREJUDICE: The Terrifying Story of the Patriot Act and the Cover Ups of 9/11 and Iraq Page 30
