“Blix came down hard on the Iraqis, and we actually were in the process of destroying all these Al Samoud missiles,” says Greg Thielmann, the former head of the WMD section of INR. “As soon as the Iraqis agreed to do that, I sighed a big sigh of relief. I thought, the UN inspectors are working; we've stared Saddam down; we've forced him to do what he desperately didn't want to do, in that area of activity that was of most concern to us.” Thielmann believes that the Al Samoud incident shows that the administration was so intent on war that this compliance with the inspections “made no difference.”
But it was after the next presentation, by IAEA chairman Mohammed ElBaradei, that “all hell broke loose” in Washington. ElBaradei, in his statement, sank the U.S. intelligence community's prestigious NIE, President Bush's State of the Union address, and Colin Powell's February 5 address to the UN Security Council with one blow. ElBaradei was calm in what he had to say: “Based on thorough analysis, the IAEA has concluded, with the concurrence of outside experts, that these documents, which form the basis for reports of recent uranium transactions between Iraq and Niger are, in fact, not authentic.” The Niger yellowcake documents were forgeries. Then, ElBaradei told the press that an IAEA staff member had, in fact, used the common search engine Google to determine, within hours, that the Niger documents, which had been passed on to the U.S. embassy in Rome through an anonymous source, were fakes! Members of Congress then began to grumble. In light of the contradictions, a bill was introduced demanding that the administration disclose the intelligence reports that were the basis for the statements made by Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Powell about the Iraqi WMD threat. It was still locked in committee when the war began.
The destruction of the Al Samoud missiles continued. It was not only missiles, reports UNMOVIC chief weapons inspector Corrine Heroud, it was engines, launchers, training missiles and missiles still in production that were destroyed. Heroud, called “the terminator” in her native France for her expertise in destroying missiles, described the delicate process of disarming the missiles, then crushing them over and over till they “were a pancake” that was then encased in concrete and buried.
How did the White House respond to these instances of effective work by the United Nations in Iraq? In the final weeks of the countdown to war, the administration's actions resembled nothing so much as some of the madder scenes from Alice in Wonderland. The fact that the documents the administration had used to “prove” that Iraq was working on nuclear weapons were forged only led to greater insistence that Iraq was a danger. The absence of discovery of WMD by the UN inspectors was only further evidence that the Iraqis were the greatest deceivers in history and that they had succeeded in concealing their location. The destruction of the Al Samoud missiles was just more evidence of a “grand deception.”
George Tenet has now told us, on February 5, 2004, exactly one year after he and Colin Powell drank the Kool-Aid at the UN Security Council, that there was no imminent danger. The administration spin-doctors immediately responded to this statement by saying that nobody from the administration ever claimed there was an “imminent danger.”
On March 7, 2003, Mohammed ElBaradei spoke to the UN Security Council in an open session watched by tens of millions of Americans and countless congressional and government offices. He said:
In conclusion, I am able to report today that, in the area of nuclear weapons – the most lethal weapons of mass destruction – inspections in Iraq are moving forward. One, there is no indication of resumed nuclear activities in those buildings that were identified through the use of satellite imagery as being reconstructed or newly erected since 1998, nor any indication of nuclear-related activities at any inspected sites. Second, there is no indication that Iraq has attempted to import uranium since 1990. Third, there is no indication that Iraq has attempted to import aluminum tubes for use in centrifuge enrichment. Moreover, even had Iraq pursued such a plan, it would have encountered practical difficulties in manufacturing centrifuges out of the aluminum tubes in question. Fourth, … there is no indication to date that Iraq imported magnets for use in a centrifuge enrichment programme.
After three months of intrusive inspections, we have to date found no evidence or plausible indication of the revival of a nuclear weapons programme in Iraq …. I should note that, in the past three weeks, possibly as a result of ever-increasing pressure by the international community, Iraq has been forthcoming in its cooperation, particularly with regard to the conduct of private interviews and in making available evidence that contributes to the resolution of matters of IAEA concern.
On March 16, 2003, the neocons struck back with the heavy artillery. Vice President Dick Cheney appeared on Meet the Press. When pressured by Tim Russert about Iraq's nuclear danger, Cheney retorted:
We know he has been absolutely devoted to trying to acquire nuclear weapons. And we believe he has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons (emphasis mine). I think Mr. ElBaradei frankly is wrong. And I think if you look at the track record of the International Atomic Energy Agency on this kind of issue, especially where Iraq's concerned, they have 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.
On March 17, 2003, President George W. Bush went on national television to tell Saddam and his sons, “They have 48 hours to get out of town.” No new evidence or reason was given. It was the ultimate imperial moment.
On March 19, 2003, the bombs began to fall.
1. Quoted by Paul Krugman in a New York Times column, February 6, 2004.
2. As of July 2005 “phase II” of the Roberts-led investigation – the phase that was supposed to look not at the alleged “failures” of the intelligence community but at the political use made by the administration of the intelligence that they claim to have had in persuading the American public to support going to war in Iraq – has still not occurred, in spite of repeated promises from the committee chairmen to conduct it. Democrats are now taking the lead – though one wonders if it's too little, too late, or whether the administration will respond one way or the other – in pushing the “use of intelligence” part of the investigation forward. The congressional Democrats' efforts include (1) a June 22, 2005, letter from Senator John Kerry (D-Mass.) and nine of his colleagues to the chairmen of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence requesting the second phase of the investigation, promised in February 2004, that was to look into “the use of intelligence by policy makers, the comparison of pre-war assessments and post-war findings, the activities of the Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group (PCTEG) and the Office of Special Plans in the Office (OSP) of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, and the use of information provided by the Iraqi National Congress”; (2) the holding up of the nomination of a replacement for Defense Under Secretary for Policy Douglas Feith by Senator Carl Levin (D-Mich.) in order to coerce the Bush administration into turning over documents Levin has requested relating to his own investigation into the OSP; (3) the investigation (and resultant report, vide infra, p. 285, note 1) by Levin's staff into the use that OSP made of intelligence regarding alleged ties between Iraq and al-Qaeda; (4) the construction of a comprehensive database of misleading Bush-administration statements regarding Iraq during the run-up to the war by the minority office of the House Committee on Government Reform, and as directed by the ranking member of the Committee, Congressman Henry Waxman (D-Calif.); (5) the informal hearing held by several House Democrats on allegations arising from the “Downing Street Memo” (DSM) (see Ray McGovern's essay following the present one, pp. 277–305); (6) a Resolution of Inquiry introduced by Congresswoman Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) and co-sponsored by 39 House Democrats, requesting DSM-related information from the executive branch, and (7) Congressman Conyers's letter, signed by over 120 House Democrats and several hundred thousand individuals, requesting that President Bush provide information on what he knew, when he knew it, as it relates to the
infamous memo.—Ed.
THE EDITORS' GLOSS: Following the completion of the Presidential Commission's March 31, 2005, report on WMD intelligence, Senator Pat Roberts (R-Ks.) of the intelligence committee said, “… we have now heard it all regarding prewar intelligence …. it would be a monumental waste of time to re-plow this ground any further.” Promises were made on Capitol Hill that there would be a second phase of inquiry by the Senate to determine how “faulty” (read misrepresented) intelligence was used by the Bush administration to mislead the American public. Now we are told there's no reason to “re-plow” this ground. But the dirt continues to come out, indicating that re-plowing is precisely what's needed.
First there's the recent report that, in 2001, intelligence was provided by a credible source to a 20-year-plus veteran CIA agent indicating that Baghdad dropped segments of its nuclear program in the mid-90s, but the agency refused to share that information with senior policymakers or other agencies. Then there's a comment that Roberts made on Meet the Press, April 10, 2005, that a statement he received indicated that “some of the activities [in the Office of Special Plans] may have been illegal [and that] everybody down there got a lawyer.” Finally there's the denial (the hard-nosed might call it a “lie”) of Secretary Rumsfeld, on Face the Nation, March 14, 2004, before Bob Schieffer and Thomas Friedman, that he said Iraq was an “immediate threat”:
SCHIEFFER: If they did not have these weapons of mass destruction … why then did they pose an immediate threat to us, to this country?
RUMSFELD: Well, you're the—you and a few other critics are the only people I've heard use the phrase “immediate threat.” I DIDN'T. The President didn't. And it's become kind of folklore that that's what's happened ….
SCHIEFFER: You're saying that nobody in the administration said that.
RUMSFELD: I—I can't speak for nobody—everybody in the administration and say nobody said that.
SCHIEFFER: Vice president didn't say that? The …
RUMSFELD: Not—if—if you have any citations, I'd like to see 'em ….
FRIEDMAN: [quoting a Rumsfeld statement] “No terrorist state poses a greater or more immediate threat to the security of our people and the stability of the world than the regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq.”
Telling the story of how credible this bloody farce has been from the start is Rumsfeld's “persuasive” reply to Schieffer and Friedman: “Mm-hmm. It—my view of—of the situation was that he—he had—we—we believe, the best intelligence that we had and other countries had and that—that we believed and we still do not know—we will know.” Right.
CHAPTER
18
Sham Dunk:
Cooking Intelligence for the President
………
Ray McGovern
LET'S REVIEW. It was bad intelligence that forced an unwitting President to invade Iraq, right? The sad fact that so many Americans believe this myth is eloquent testimony to the effectiveness of the White House spin machine. The intelligence was indeed bad – shaped that way by an administration determined to find a pretext to effect “regime change” in Iraq. Senior administration officials – first and foremost Vice President Dick Cheney – played a strong role in ensuring that the intelligence analysis was corrupt enough to justify,” ex post facto, the decision to make war on Iraq. It is not altogether clear how witting President George W. Bush was of all this, but there is strong evidence that he knew chapter and verse. Had he been mouse trapped into this “preemptive” war, one would expect some heads to roll. None have. And where is it, after all, that the buck is supposed to stop?
The intelligence-made-me-do-it myth has helped the Bush administration attenuate the acute embarrassment it experienced early last year when the casus belli became a casus belly laugh. When U.S. inspector David Kay, after a painstaking search to which almost a billion dollars – and many lives – were given, reported that there had been no “weapons of mass destruction” (WMD) in Iraq since 1991, someone had to take the fall. Elected was CIA director George Tenet, the backslapping fellow from Queens – always eager to do whatever might be necessary to play with the bigger kids. For those of you just in from Mars, the grave danger posed by Iraqi “weapons of mass destruction” was what President Bush cited as the casus belli for invading Iraq. It was only after Kay had the courage to tell the truth publicly that Bush fell back on the default rationale for the war – the need to export democracy, about which we are hearing so much lately.
Not surprisingly, the usual suspects in the mainstream media that played cheerleader for the war are now helping the President (and the media) escape blame. “Flawed intelligence that led the United States to invade Iraq was the fault of the U.S. intelligence community,” explained the Washington Times last July 10, after regime loyalist Senator Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, released his committee's findings.1 Nine months later, after publication of similar findings2 by a commission handpicked by the President, the Washington Post's lead headline was “Data on Iraqi Arms Flawed, Panel Says.” The date was, appropriately, April Fools Day, 2005. In a word, they are playing us for fools. The remarkable thing is that most folks don't seem able, or willing, to recognize that – or even to mind.
On May 1, 2005, a highly sensitive document published by The Sunday Times of London provided the smoking gun showing that President Bush had decided to make war on Iraq long before the National Intelligence Estimate was produced to conjure up “weapons of mass destruction” there and mislead Congress into granting authorization for war. The British document is classified “SECRET AND STRICTLY PERSONAL – U.K. EYES ONLY.” And small wonder. It contains an official account of Prime Minister Tony Blair's meeting with top advisers on July 23, 2002, at which Sir Richard Dearlove, head of MI6 (the U.K. equivalent to the CIA) – simply “C” in the written document – reported on talks he had just held in Washington with top U.S. officials. (Blair has now acknowledged the authenticity of the document.)
As related in the document, Dearlove told Blair and the others that President Bush wanted to remove Saddam Hussein through military action, that this “was seen as inevitable,” and that the attack would be “justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD.” He continued: “… but the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy” (emphasis added), and tacked on yet another telling comment: “There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.” British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw concurred that Bush had made up his mind to take military action, but noted that finding justification would be challenging, for “the case was thin.” Straw pointed out that Saddam was not threatening his neighbors, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea, or Iran.
As head of MI6, Dearlove was CIA Director George Tenet's British counterpart. We Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) have been saying since January 2003 that the two intelligence chiefs' marching orders were to “fix” the intelligence “around the policy.” It was a no-brainer. Seldom, however, does one acquire documentary evidence that this – the unforgivable sin in intelligence analysis – was used by the most senior government leaders as a way to “justify” a prior decision for war. There is no word to describe our reaction to the fact that the two intelligence chiefs quietly acquiesced in the corruption of our profession on a matter of such consequence. “Outrage” doesn't even come close.
Denial: Not an Option
What has become painfully clear since the trauma of 9/11 is that most of our fellow citizens have felt an overriding need to believe that administration leaders are telling them the truth and to ignore all evidence to the contrary. Many Americans seem impervious to data showing that it was the administration that misled the country into this unprovoked war and that the “intelligence” was conjured up well after the White House decided to effect “regime change” in Iraq (or introduce democracy, if you favor the default rationale) by force of arms.
I have been a
sking myself why Americans find it so painful to delve deeper and let their judgment be influenced by the abundance of evidence showing this to be the case. Perhaps it is because most of us know that responsible citizenship means asking what might seem to be “impertinent” questions, ferreting out plausible answers, and then – if necessary – rectifying the situation and ensuring it does not happen again. Resistance, however, is strong. At work – in all of us to some degree – is the same convenient denial mechanism that immobilized so many otherwise conscientious German citizens during the 1930s, enabling Germany to launch its own unprovoked wars and curtail civil liberties at home. Taking action, or just finding one's voice, entails risk; denial is the more instinctive, easier course.
So, fair warning. If you prefer denial, you may wish to page directly to the next chapter. No hard feelings.
Neo-Conned! Again Page 40
