The Deal (PART TWO)
By Seymour M. Hersh
The New Yorker

In the official’s opinion, Pakistan and Iran have survived the crisis: “They both did what they said they’d do, and neither one has been hurt. No one has been damaged. The public story is still that Iran never really got there,which is bullshit.” And analysts throughout the American intelligence community, he said, are asking, “How could it be that Pakistan’s done all these things,developed a second generation of miniaturized and boosted weapons,and yet the investigation has been shorted to ground?”
A high-level intelligence officer who has access to the secret Iran-Pakistan exchanges told me that he understood that “the Pakistanis were very worried that the Iranians would give their name to the I.A.E.A.” The officer, interviewed in Tel Aviv, told me that Israel remains convinced that “the Iranians do not intend to give up the bomb. What Iran did was report to the I.A.E.A. the information that was already out in the open and which they cannot protect. There is much that is not exposed.” Israeli intelligence, he added, continues to see digging and other nuclear-related underground activity in Iran. A nonproliferation official based in Vienna later explained that Iran has bored two holes near a uranium-mining operation that are “deep enough to do a test”,as deep as two hundred metres. The design of the bomb that could be tested, he added, if Iran chose to do so, came from Libya, via Pakistan and A. Q. Khan.

Last December, President Bush and Tony Blair, the British Prime Minister, jointly announced that Muammar Qaddafi, the Libyan leader, had decided to give up his nuclear-weapons program and would permit I.A.E.A. inspectors to enter his country. The surprise announcement, the culmination of nine months of secret talks, was followed immediately by a six-day inspection by the I.A.E.A., the first of many inspections, and the public unveiling, early this year, of the role of yet another country, Malaysia, in the nuclear black market. Libya had been able to purchase hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of nuclear parts, including advanced centrifuges designed in Pakistan, from a firm in Malaysia, with a free-trade zone in Dubai serving as the main shipping point. It was a new development in an old arms race: Malaysia, a high-tech nation with no indigenous nuclear ambitions, was retailing sophisticated nuclear gear, based on designs made available by Khan.

The centrifuge materials that the inspectors found in Libya had not been assembled,in most cases, in fact, the goods were still in their shipping cases. “I am not impressed by what I’ve seen,” a senior nonproliferation official told me. “It was not a well-developed program,not a serious research-and-development approach to make use of what they bought. It was useless. But I was absolutely struck by what the Libyans were able to buy. What’s on the market is absolutely horrendous. It’s a Mafia-type business, with corruption and secrecy.”

I.A.E.A. inspectors, to their dismay, even found in Libya precise blueprints for the design and construction of a half-ton nuclear weapon. “It’s a sweet little bomb, put together by engineers who know how to assemble a weapon,” an official in Vienna told me. “No question it’ll work. Just dig a hole and test it. It’s too big and too heavy for a Scud, but it’ll go into a family car. It’s a terrorist’s dream.”

In a speech on February 5th at Georgetown University, George Tenet, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, hailed the developments in Libya as an American intelligence coup. Tenet said, “We learned of all this through the powerful combination of technical intelligence, careful and painstaking analytic work, operational daring, and, yes, the classic kind of human intelligence that people have led you to believe we no longer have.” The C.I.A. unquestionably has many highly motivated and highly skilled agents. But interviews with former C.I.A. officials and with two men who worked closely with Libyan intelligence present a different story.

Qaddafi had been seeking a reconciliation with the West for years, with limited success. Then, a former C.I.A. operations officer told me, Musa Kusa, the longtime head of Libyan intelligence, urged Qaddafi to meet with Western intelligence agencies and open up his weapons arsenal to international inspection. The C.I.A. man quoted Kusa as explaining that, as the war with Iraq drew near, he had warned Qaddafi, “You are nuts if you think you can defeat the United States. Get out of it now. Surrender now and hope they accept your surrender.”

One Arab intelligence operative told me that Libyan intelligence, with Qaddafi’s approval, then quickly offered to give American and British intelligence details about a centrifuge deal that was already under way. The parts were due to be shipped aboard a German freighter, the B.B.C. China. In October, the freighter was seized, and the incident was proclaimed a major intelligence success. But, the operative said, it was “the Libyans who blew up the Pakistanis,” and who made the role of Khan’s black market known. The Americans, he said, asked “questions about those orders and Libya said it had them.” It was, in essence, a sting, and was perceived that way by Musharraf. He was enraged by what he called, in a nationally televised speech last month,delivered in Urdu, and not officially translated by the Pakistani government,the betrayal of Pakistan by his “Muslim brothers” in both Libya and Iran. There was little loyalty between seller and buyer. “The Pakistanis took a lot of Libya’s money and gave second-grade plans,” the Arab intelligence operative said. “It was halfhearted.”

The intelligence operative went on, “Qaddafi is very pragmatic and studied the timing. It was the right time. The United States wanted to have a success story, and he banked on that.”

Because of the ongoing investigation into Khan and his nuclear-proliferation activities, the I.A.E.A.’s visibility and credibility have grown.The key issue, Mohamed ElBaradei, the director-general of the I.A.E.A., told me, in an interview at the organization’s headquarters in Vienna, is non-state actors. “I have a nightmare that the spread of enriched uranium and nuclear material could result in the operation of a small enrichment facility in a place like northern Afghanistan,” he said. “Who knows? It’s not hard for a non-state to hide, especially if there is a state in collusion with it. Some of these non-state groups are very sophisticated.”

Many diplomats in Vienna expressed frustration at the I.A.E.A.’s inability, thanks to Musharraf’s pardon, to gain access to Khan. “It’s not going to happen,” one diplomat said. “We are getting some coöperation from Pakistan, but it’s the names we need to know. ‘Who got the stuff?’ We’re interested to know whether other nations that we’re supposed to supervise have the stuff.” The diplomat told me he believed that the United States was unwilling to publicly state the obvious: that there was no way the Pakistani government didn’t know about the transfers. He said, “Of course it looks awful, but Musharraf will be indebted to you.”

The I.A.E.A.’s authority to conduct inspections is limited. The nations that have signed the nonproliferation treaty are required to permit systematic I.A.E.A. inspections of their declared nuclear facilities for research and energy production. But there is no mechanism for the inspection of suspected nuclear-weapons sites, and many at the I.A.E.A. believe that the treaty must be modified. “There is a nuclear network of black-market centrifuges and weapons design that the world has yet to discover,” a diplomat in Vienna told me. In the past, he said, the I.A.E.A. had worked under the assumption that nations would cheat on the nonproliferation treaty “to produce and sell their own nuclear material.” He said, “What we have instead is a black-market network capable of producing usable nuclear materials and nuclear devices that is not limited to any one nation. We have nuclear dealers operating outside our front door, and we have no control over them,no matter how good we are in terms of verification.” There would be no need, in other words, for A. Q. Khan or anyone else in Pakistan to have a direct role in supplying nuclear technology. The most sensitive nuclear equipment would be available to any country,or any person or group, presumably,that had enough cash.

“This is a question of survival,” the diplomat said, with a caustic smile. He added, “Iraq is laughable in comparison with this issue. The Bush Administration was hunting the shadows instead of the prey.”

Another nonproliferation official depicted the challenge facing the I.A.E.A. inspection regime as “a seismic shift,the globalization of the nuclear world.” The official said, “We have to move from inspecting declared sites to ‘Where does this shit come from?’ If we stay focussed on the declared, we miss the nuclear supply matrix.” At this point, the international official asked me, in all seriousness, “Why hasn’t A. Q. Khan been taken out by Israel or the United States?”

After Pakistan’s role in providing nuclear aid to Iran and Libya was revealed, Musharraf insisted once again, this time at the World Economic Forum, in Davos, Switzerland, in January, that he would not permit American troops to search for Al Qaeda members inside Pakistan. “That is not a possibility at all,” he said. “It is a very sensitive issue. There is no room for any foreign elements coming and assisting us. We don’t need any assistance.”

Nonetheless, a senior Pentagon adviser told me in mid-February, the spring offensive is on. “We’re entering a huge period of transition in Iraq,” the adviser said, referring to the coming changeover of forces, with many of the experienced regular Army combat units being replaced by National Guard and Army Reserve units. “We will not be conducting a lot of ops, and so you redirect and exploit somewhere else.”

The operation, American officials said, is scheduled to involve the redeployment to South Asia of thousands of American soldiers, including members of Task Force 121. The logistical buildup began in mid-February, as more than a dozen American C-17 cargo planes began daily flights, hauling helicopters, vehicles, and other equipment to military bases in Pakistan. Small teams of American Special Forces units have been stationed at the Shahbaz airbase, in northwestern Pakistan, since the beginning of the Afghanistan war, in the fall of 2001.

The senior Pentagon adviser, like other military and intelligence officials I talked to, was cautious about the chances of getting what the White House wants,Osama bin Laden. “It’s anybody’s guess,” he said, adding that Ops Sec,operational security,for the planned offensive was poor. The former senior intelligence official similarly noted that there was concern inside the Joint Special Operations Command, at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, over the reliability of intercepted Al Qaeda telephone calls. “What about deception?” he said. “These guys are not dumb, and once the logistical aircraft begin to appear”,the American C-17s landing every night at an airbase in Pakistan,”you know something is going on.”

“We’ve got to get Osama bin Laden, and we know where he is,” the former senior intelligence official said. Osama bin Laden is “communicating through sigint”,talking on satellite telephones and the like,”and his wings have been clipped. He’s in his own Alamo in northern Pakistan. It’s a natural progress,whittling down alternative locations and then targeting him. This is not, in theory, a ‘Let’s go and hope’ kind of thing. They’ve seen what they think is him.” But the former official added that there were reasons to be cautious about such reports, especially given that bin Laden hasn’t been seen for so long. Bin Laden would stand out because of his height; he is six feet five. But the target area is adjacent to Swat Valley, which is populated by a tribe of exceptionally tall people.

Two former C.I.A. operatives with firsthand knowledge of the PakistanAfghanistan border areas said that the American assault, if it did take place, would confront enormous logistical problems. “It’s impenetrable,” said Robert Baer, who visited the Hindu Kush area in the early nineties, before he was assigned to lead the C.I.A.’s anti-Saddam operations in northern Iraq. “There are no roads, and you can’t get armor up there. This is where Alexander the Great lost an entire division. The Russians didn’t even bother to go up there. Everybody’s got a gun. That area is worse than Iraq.” Milton Bearden, who ran the C.I.A.’s operations in Afghanistan during the war with the Soviet Union, recounted, “I’ve been all through there. The Pashtun population in that belt has lived there longer than almost any other ethnic group has lived anywhere on earth.” He said, “Our intelligence has got to be better than it’s been. Anytime we go into something driven entirely by electoral politics, it doesn’t work out.”

One American intelligence consultant noted that American forces in Afghanistan have crossed into Pakistan in “hot pursuit” of Al Qaeda suspects in previous operations, with no complaints from the Pakistani leadership. If the American forces strike quickly and decisively against bin Laden from within Pakistan, he added, “Musharraf could say he gave no advance authorization. We can move in with so much force and firepower,with so much shock and awe,that we will be too fast for him.” The consultant said, “The question is, how deep into Pakistan can we pursue him?” He added, “Musharraf is in a very tough position.”

At home, Musharraf is in more danger than ever over his handling of the nuclear affair. “He’s opened up Pandora’s box, and he will never be able to manage it,” Chaudry Nisar Ali Khan, a former government minister who now heads an opposition party, said. “Pakistani public opinion feels that A.Q. has been made a scapegoat, and international opinion thinks he’s a threat. This is a no-win situation for Musharraf. The average man feels that there will be a nuclear rollback, and Pakistan’s immediate deterrent will be taken away. It comes down to an absolute disaster for Musharraf.”

Robert Gallucci, a former United Nations weapons inspector who is now dean of the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service, calls A. Q. Khan “the Johnny Appleseed” of the nuclear-arms race. Gallucci, who is a consultant to the C.I.A. on proliferation issues, told me, “Bad as it is with Iran, North Korea, and Libya having nuclear-weapons material, the worst part is that they could transfer it to a non-state group. That’s the biggest concern, and the scariest thing about all this,that Pakistan could work with the worst terrorist groups on earth to build nuclear weapons. There’s nothing more important than stopping terrorist groups from getting nuclear weapons. The most dangerous country for the United States now is Pakistan, and second is Iran.” Gallucci went on, “We haven’t been this vulnerable since the British burned Washington in 1814.”

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

Did One Woman’s Obsession Take America To War?
By Peter Bergen
The Guardian

July 5th, 2004

She is a conspiracy theorist whose political conceits have consistently been proved wrong. So why were Bush and his aides so keen to swallow Laurie Mylroie’s theories on Saddam and terrorism?
Americans supported the war in Iraq not because Saddam Hussein was an evil dictator - they knew that - but because President Bush made the case that Saddam might hand weapons of mass destruction to his terrorist allies to wreak havoc on the United States. In the absence of any evidence for that theory, it’s fair to ask: where did the administration’s conviction come from? It was at the American Enterprise Institute - a conservative Washington DC thinktank - that the idea took shape that overthrowing Saddam should be a goal. Among those associated with AEI is Richard Perle, a key architect of the president’s get-tough-on-Iraq policy, and Paul Wolfowitz, now the number-two official at the Pentagon. But none of the thinkers at AEI was in any real way an expert on Iraq. For that they relied on someone you probably have never heard of: a woman named Laurie Mylroie.

Mylroie has credentials as an expert on the Middle East, national security and, above all, Iraq, having held faculty positions at Harvard and the US Naval War College. During the 1980s she was an apologist for Saddam’s regime, but became anti-Saddam around the time of his invasion of Kuwait in 1990. In the run-up to that Gulf war, with New York Times reporter Judith Miller, Mylroie wrote Saddam Hussein and the Crisis in the Gulf, a well-reviewed bestseller.

It was the first bombing of the World Trade Centre in 1993 that launched Mylroie’s quixotic quest to prove that Saddam’s regime was the chief source of anti-US terrorism. She laid out her case in a 2000 book called Study of Revenge: Saddam Hussein’s Unfinished War Against America. Perle glowingly blurbed the book as “splendid and wholly convincing”. Wolfowitz and his then wife, according to Mylroie, “provided crucial support”.

Mylroie believes that Saddam was behind every anti-American terrorist incident of note in the past decade, from the levelling of the federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995 to September 11 itself. She is, in short, a cranky conspiracist - but her neoconservative friends believed her theories, bringing her on as a terrorism consultant at the Pentagon.

The extent of Mylroie’s influence is shown in the new book Against All Enemies, by the veteran counterterrorism official Richard Clarke, in which he recounts a senior-level meeting on terrorism months before September 11. During that meeting Clarke quotes Wolfowitz as saying: “You give Bin Laden too much credit. He could not do all these things like the 1993 attack on New York, not without a state sponsor. Just because FBI and CIA have failed to find the linkages does not mean they don’t exist.” Clarke writes: “I could hardly believe it, but Wolfowitz was spouting the Laurie Mylroie theory that Iraq was behind the 1993 truck bomb at the World Trade Centre, a theory that had been investigated for years and found to be totally untrue.”

Mylroie’s influence can also be seen in the Bush cabinet’s reaction to the September 11 attacks. According to Bob Woodward’s recent book, Plan of Attack, Wolfowitz told the cabinet immediately after the attacks that there was a 10 to 50% chance that Saddam was implicated. Around the same time, Bush told his aides: “I believe that Iraq was involved, but I’m not going to strike them now.”

The most comprehensive criminal investigation in history - pursuing 500,000 leads and interviewing 175,000 people - has turned up no evidence of Iraqi involvement.

How is it that key members of the Bush administration believed otherwise? Mylroie, in Study of Revenge, claims to have discovered what everyone missed: that the plot’s mastermind, a man generally known by one of his many aliases, “Ramzi Yousef”, was actually an Iraqi intelligence agent. Some time after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990, Mylroie argues, Yousef was given access to the passport of a Pakistani named Abdul Basit whose family lived in Kuwait, and assumed his identity. She reached this deduction following an examination of Basit’s passport records that indicated Yousef and Basit were four inches different in height. But US investigators say that “Yousef” and Basit are the same person, and that he is a Pakistani with ties to al-Qaida, not to Iraq. Yousef’s uncle, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, was al-Qaida’s military commander until his capture in Pakistan in 2003.

The reality is that by the mid-90s, the FBI, the CIA and the State Department had found no evidence implicating the Iraqi government in the first Trade Centre attack. Vincent Cannistraro, who headed the CIA’s counterterrorist centre in the early 90s, told me, “My view is that Laurie has an obsession with trying to link Saddam to global terrorism. Years of strenuous effort to prove the case have been unavailing.” Ken Pollack, a former CIA analyst and author of The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq, dismissed Mylroie’s theories: “[The National Security Council] had the intelligence community look very hard at the allegations that the Iraqis were behind the 1993 Trade Centre attack … The intelligence community said there were no such links.”

Neil Herman, the FBI official who headed the Trade Centre investigation, explained that one of the lower-level conspirators, Abdul Rahman Yasin, did flee New York to live with a family member in Baghdad: “The one glaring connection that can’t be overlooked is Yasin. We looked at that rather extensively. There were no ties to the Iraqi government.”

In July last year, Mylroie published a new book, Bush v the Beltway: How the CIA and the State Department Tried to Stop the War on Terror. The book charges that the US government suppressed information about Iraq’s role in anti-American terrorism, including the investigation of 9/11. It claims that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the now captured mastermind of 9/11, is an Iraqi intelligence agent who, like his nephew Ramzi Yousef, adopted the identity of a Pakistani living in Kuwait.

The US government doesn’t seem to have explored this theory. Why not? Mylroie explained to the commission investigating the 9/11 attacks: “A senior administration official told me in specific that the question of the identities of the terrorist masterminds could not be pursued because of bureaucratic obstructionism.” We are expected to believe that the Bush administration could not find anyone to investigate supposed Iraqi links to 9/11, at the same time as 150,000 American soldiers were sent to fight a war in Iraq.

Mylroie had only this comment when I asked about her research: “This issue [of Iraq’s involvement in anti-US terrorism] has become enormously politicised. When I first wrote about it in 1995, major magazines and newspapers and the Israeli ambassador commented positively on my research.” The only other chance I have had to talk with Mylroie came last February, when we both appeared on Canadian television to discuss the impending war. “Listen,” she declared, “we’re going to war because President Bush believes Saddam was involved in 9/11. Al-Qaida is a front for Iraqi intelligence.”

Towards the end of the interview, Mylroie became agitated, jabbing her finger at the camera: “There is a very acute chance as we go to war that Saddam will use biological agents against Americans, that there will be anthrax in the US and smallpox in the US. Are you in Canada prepared for Americans who have smallpox and do not know it crossing the border?”

Such hyperbole is emblematic of Mylroie’s method. She has said that Terry Nichols, one of the Oklahoma City plotters, was in league with Ramzi Yousef, the supposed Iraqi agent. The federal judge who presided over the Oklahoma case ruled this theory inadmissible. Mylroie implicates Iraq in the 1996 bombing of a US military facility in Saudi Arabia that killed 19 servicemen. In 2001, a grand jury indicted members of Saudi Hezbollah, a group with ties to Iran. Mylroie suggests that the attacks on US embassies in Africa in 1998 were “the work of Bin Laden and Iraq”. An investigation uncovered no connection. Mylroie has written that the crash of TWA flight 800 in 1996 was probably an Iraqi plot; a two-year investigation found it was an accident. Saddam is guilty of many crimes, but there is no evidence linking him to any act of anti-US terrorism for a decade, while there is a mountain of evidence against al-Qaida.

Mylroie has also recently taken on the role of defender of Ahmed Chalabi, the head of the Iraqi National Congress, who is accused of providing fraudulent information about Iraq’s WMD programme and passing intelligence to Iran. In May, in the conservative newspaper the New York Sun, Mylroie described Chalabi as the victim of a “longstanding grudge” by the CIA.

Mylroie’s theories have bolstered the argument that led us into a costly war in Iraq, and swayed key opinion-makers in the Bush administration, who in turn persuaded Americans that the Iraqi dictator had a role in the 9/11 attacks. In November Mylroie told Newsweek: “I take satisfaction that we went to war with Iraq and got rid of Saddam Hussein. The rest is details.” Now she tells us.

Peter Bergen, a fellow of the New America Foundation in Washington DC and adjunct professor, school of advanced international studies, Johns Hopkins University, is the author of Holy War, Inc: Inside the Secret World of Osama bin Laden.

In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

Army, CIA Want Torture Truths Exposed
By Martin Sieff
UPI Senior News Analyst

May 18th, 2004

Washington - Efforts at the top level of the Bush administration and the civilian echelon of the Department of Defense to contain the Iraq prison torture scandal and limit the blame to a handful of enlisted soldiers and immediate senior officers have already failed: The scandal continues to metastasize by the day.
Over the past weekend and into this week, devastating new allegations have emerged putting Stephen Cambone, the first Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, firmly in the crosshairs and bringing a new wave of allegations cascading down on the head of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, when he scarcely had time to catch his breath from the previous ones.

Even worse for Rumsfeld and his coterie of neo-conservative true believers who have run the Pentagon for the past 3 1/2 years, three major institutions in the Washington power structure have decided that after almost a full presidential term of being treated with contempt and abuse by them, it’s payback time.

Those three institutions are: The United States Army, the Central Intelligence Agency and the old, relatively moderate but highly experienced Republican leadership in the United States Senate.

None of those groups is chopped liver: Taken together they comprise a devastating Grand Slam.

The spearhead for the new wave of revelations and allegations - but by no means the only source of them - is veteran investigative journalist Seymour Hersh. In a major article published in the New Yorker this week and posted on to its Web-site Saturday, Hersh revealed that a high-level Pentagon operation code-named Copper Green “encouraged physical coercion and sexual humiliation” of Iraqi prisoners. He also cited Pentagon sources and consultants as saying that photographing the victims of such abuse was an explicit part of the program meant to force the victims into becoming blackmailed reliable informants.

Hersh further claimed in his article that Rumsfeld himself approved the program and that one of his four or five top aides, Cambone, set it up in Baghdad and ran it.

These allegations of course are anathema to the White House, Rumsfeld and their media allies. In a highly unusual step for any newspaper, the editorially neo-conservative tabloid New York Post ran an editorial Monday seeking to ridicule and discredit Hersh. However, it presented absolutely no evidence to query, let alone discredit the substance of his article and allegations.

Instead, the New York Post editorial inadvertently pointed out one, but by no means all, of the major sources for Hersh’s information. The editorial alleged that Hersh had received much of his material from the CIA.

Based on the material Hersh quoted, his legendary intelligence community contacts were probably sources for some of his information. However, Hersh has also enjoyed close personal relations with many now high-ranking officers in the United States Army, going all the way back to his prize-winning coverage and scoops in Vietnam more than 30 years ago.

Indeed, intelligence and regular Army sources have told UPI that senior officers and officials in both communities are sickened and outraged by the revelations of mass torture and abuse, and also by the incompetence involved, in the Abu Ghraib prison revelations. These sources also said that officials all the way up to the highest level in both the Army and the Agency are determined not to be scapegoated, or allow very junior soldiers or officials to take the full blame for the excesses.

President George W. Bush in his weekly radio address Saturday claimed that the Abu Ghraib abuses were only “the actions of a few” and that they did not “reflect the true character of the Untied States armed forces.”

But what enrages many serving senior Army generals and U.S. top-level intelligence community professionals is that the “few” in this case were not primarily the serving soldiers who were actually encouraged to carry out the abuses and even then take photos of the victims, but that they were encouraged to do so, with the Army’s well-established safeguards against such abuses deliberately removed by high-level Pentagon civilian officials.

Abuse and even torture of prisoners happens in almost every war on every side. But well-run professional armies, and the U.S. Army has always been one, take great pains to guard against it and limit it as much as possible. Even in cases where torture excesses are regarded as essential to extract tactical information and save lives, commanders in most modern armies have taken care to limit such “dirty work” to very small units, usually from special forces, and to keep it as secret as possible.

For senior Army professionals know that allowing patterns of abuse and torture to metastasize in any army is annihilating to its morale and tactical effectiveness. Torturers usually make lousy combat soldiers, which is why combat soldiers in every major army hold them in contempt.

Therefore, several U.S. military officers told UPI, the idea of using regular Army soldiers, including some even just from the Army Reserve or National Guard, and encouraging them to inflict such abuses ran contrary to received military wisdom and to the ingrained standards and traditions of the U.S. Army.

The widespread taking of photographs of the victims of such abuses, they said, clearly revealed that civilian “amateurs” and not regular Army or intelligence community professionals were the driving force in shaping and running the programs under which these abuses occurred.

Hersh has spearheaded the waves of revelations of shocking abuse. But other major U.S. media organizations are now charging in behind him to confirm and extend his reports. They are able to do so because many senior veteran professionals in both the CIA and the Army were disgusted by the revelations of the torture excesses. Now they are being listened to with suddenly receptive ears on Capitol Hill.

Republican members in the House of Representatives have kept discipline and silence on the revelations. But with the exception of the increasingly isolated and embarrassed Senate Republican Leader, Bill Frist of Tennessee, other senior mainstream figures in the GOP Senate majority have refused to go along with any cover-up.

Sens. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Orrin Hatch of Utah, Richard Lugar of Indiana, Pat Roberts of Kansas and John Warner of Virginia have all been outspoken in their condemnation of the torture excesses. And they did so even before the latest, most far-reaching and worst of the allegations and reports surfaced. Warner, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, lost no time in hauling Rumsfeld before it to testify.

The pattern of the latest wave of revelations is clear: They are coming from significant numbers of senior figures in both the U.S. military and intelligence services. They reflect the disgust and contempt widely felt in both communities at the excesses; and at long last, they are being listened to seriously by senior Republican, as well as Democratic, senators on Capitol Hill.

Rumsfeld and his team of top lieutenants have therefore now lost the confidence, trust and respect of both the Army and intelligence establishments. Key elements of the political establishment even of the ruling GOP now recognize this.

Yet Rumsfeld and his lieutenants remain determined to hang on to power, and so far President Bush has shown every sign of wanting to keep them there. The scandal, therefore, is far from over. The revelations will continue. The cost of the abuses to the American people and the U.S. national interest is already incalculable: And there is no end in sight.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

Condi Rice’s Other Wake-Up Call
By David Talbot
Salon.com

April 2, 2004

Richard Clarke was not the only national security expert who warned National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and other Bush administration officials about terrorist threats before 9/11. Former Democratic Sen. Gary Hart of Colorado also directly told senior Bush officials loudly and clearly that, in his words, “The terrorists are coming, the terrorists are coming.”
Hart was co-chair (with former Sen. Warren Rudman, R-N.H.) of the U.S. Commission on National Security, a bipartisan panel that conducted the most thorough investigation of U.S. security challenges since World War II. After completing the report, which warned that a devastating terrorist attack on America was imminent and called for the immediate creation of a Cabinet-level national security agency, and delivering it to President Bush on January 31, 2001, Hart and Rudman personally briefed Rice, Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin Powell. But, according to Hart, the Bush administration never followed up on the commission’s urgent recommendations, even after he repeated them in a private White House meeting with Rice just days before 9/11.

Hart, who is now advising the Kerry campaign on national security issues, spoke with Salon this week about the Bush administration’s failures to heed his warnings and why he feels the country is still at grave risk. Even at this late date, says Hart, Bush has failed to sufficiently coordinate federal, state, local and private-sector security efforts, leaving open American ports as possible entry points for weapons of mass destruction and exposing such prime targets as petrochemical facilities located near major urban areas. And two and a half years after 9/11, Hart observes, no government official has been held responsible for the disastrous security failures of that day. The Bush White House, he charges, is locked in a strange and delicate dance with intelligence officials, maneuvering to place blame on the CIA but fearing if it does so too blatantly, the Bush team’s own failings will be exposed.

Hart spoke with Salon by phone from Denver, where he works for the international law firm Coudert Brothers.

What was the reaction from Bush officials to your warnings about terrorism when you delivered your final report to the president in late January 2001?

We didn’t meet with President Bush. But we briefed at length Don Rumsfeld, Colin Powell and Condi Rice. And all of them at that time treated it seriously. I conducted the briefing, along with my co-chairman Warren Rudman, and Gen. Charles Boyd, who was our commission’s executive director, and maybe one or two other commissioners. I would say the response was respectful, professional, serious. And Rumsfeld, as I recall, made pages of notes on a yellow pad.

After your briefings, do you think the administration responded adequately to your warnings?

Well, let me just go through the history of things. Because we also sent copies of the report to every member of Congress. And we lobbied specific members of Congress, including Joe Lieberman, who took it very seriously. And in the spring of 2001, some members of Congress introduced legislation to create a homeland security agency. Hearings were scheduled. And our commission, which was scheduled to go out of operation on Feb. 15, 2001, was given a six-month extension so we could testify with some authority. Which we did in March and April.

And then as Congress started to move on this, and the heat was turned up, George Bush — and this is often overlooked — held a press conference or made a public statement on May 5, 2001, calling on Congress not to act and saying he was turning over the whole matter to Dick Cheney.

So this wasn’t just neglect, it was an active position by the administration. He said, “I don’t want Congress to do anything until the vice president advises me.” We now know from Dick Clarke that Cheney never held a meeting on terrorism, there was never any kind of discussion on the department of homeland security that we had proposed. There was no vice presidential action on this matter.

In other words, a bipartisan commission of seven Democrats and seven Republicans who had spent two and a half years studying the problem, a group of Americans with a cumulative 300 years in national security affairs, recommended to the president of the United States on a reasonably urgent basis the creation of a Cabinet-level agency to protect our country — and the president did nothing!

By the way, when our final report came out in 2001, it did not receive word one in the New York Times. Zero. The Washington Post put it on Page 3 or 4, below the fold.

So there was absolutely no follow-up on your commission’s recommendations once Bush referred the matter to Cheney?

Right.

And were you ever consulted again by the administration?

No. But as one of those fearing a near-term attack, I went out on my own throughout the spring and summer of 2001 saying, “The terrorists are coming, the terrorists are coming.” One of the speeches I gave was, ironically enough, to the International Air Transportation Association in Montreal. And the Montreal newspapers headlined the story, “Hart predicts terrorist attacks on America.”

By pre-arrangement I had gotten an appointment with Condi Rice the following day and had gone straight from Montreal to Washington to meet with her. And my brief message to her was, “Get going on homeland security, you don’t have all the time in the world.” This was on Sept. 6, 2001.

What was her response?

Her response was “I’ll talk to the vice president about it.” And this tracks with Clarke’s testimony and writing that even at this late date, nothing was being done inside the White House.

And your sense from talking with Rice that day was …

She didn’t seem to feel a terrible sense of urgency. Her response was simply “I’ll talk to the vice president about it.”

Did you get a sense that the administration had made any progress on security since you first briefed her, Rumsfeld and Powell in January?

No. I think she made some kind of gratuitous statements like, “We’ve taken your report very seriously, we’re looking at it, we’re thinking about it, we’ve asked people to give comments on it.”

But you felt that was more or less a pro forma response?

I thought so. Now the backdrop here is that I’d known Condi Rice for about 20 years. She supported me in my presidential effort in 1984. She later said she changed parties in the early ’80s, but I know she was a supporter of mine in ‘84. She was completing her Ph.D. at the University of Denver at the time. She helped me with foreign policy in my ‘84 campaign. I think that’s the only reason I got in to the White House to see her.

One more thing: I met with Rice not long after the president was in Crawford and being briefed by CIA officials on the possible use of aircraft against American targets. This was all happening in the weeks before 9/11.

So I think it’s terribly disingenuous for the president of the United States to say, “If somebody had told us they were going to use aircraft against the World Trade Center, we would of course have taken action.” I think it’s just ridiculous to say, “We’re not going to do anything until someone tells us where, when and how.”

How would you grade the administration’s response after 9/11?

I have said for over two and a half years that no one has been held accountable for 9/11. No one lost his or her job, not [CIA Director] George Tenet, not [FBI Director] Robert Mueller, not anybody. Now this is the president who claims to be strong and tough, but he clearly does not have on his desk a sign that says, “The buck stops here.” I honor Dick Clarke for what he said to the victims’ families. I think George Bush should say that, I think he should apologize. I think he should take responsibility, as John Kennedy did after the Bay of Pigs. That’s presidential leadership, that’s a strong president. This is a weak president. He will not take responsibility.

In Kennedy’s case, he was clearly misled by his national security advisors who were bound and determined to go ahead with their Cuban adventure.

And he fired some of them. None of that happened here. You know why I think George Tenet is still in his job? I think there are smoking guns all over the White House. I think if you crack the White House safe, you’re going to find memos from Tenet saying, “The terrorists are coming, the terrorists are coming.”

So you think the intelligence community was giving Bush information he should have acted on before 9/11?

Precisely. And that’s the only explanation I can think of for why no one’s been fired. Which leaves open the possibility that the president misled the American people.

Clearly there are a number of intelligence professionals who are not happy with this administration and the way it has politicized the intelligence process. Do you sense there’s a growing restiveness in that community against Bush?

Oh, absolutely. And here’s how it works. Career intelligence officers are in constant touch with their colleagues who are retired. And I believe the vast majority of those people are honorable, oath-taking, straight-talking professionals who love their country. But, as with any other human beings, when pushed too far — by being blamed for something they didn’t do or being unfairly held out to ridicule for not doing their job — they will do what most human beings will do. They will fight back. They will have lunch with one of their colleagues, and they will say, “Let me bring you up to date,” and they will give chapter and verse on what the White House and the CIA did and did not do. And they have the understanding that their retired colleague may very well have lunch with somebody from the New York Times. You can say this is shameful or disloyal — but for these people, who have given their lives to their country, if they think that our political leadership is not protecting the country, they’re going to do something about it. Their loyalty is not to George W. Bush — their loyalty is to the flag of the United States of America.

So a growing number of intelligence and security professionals like Clarke, Joe Wilson and Karen Kwiatkowski are getting fed up with the Bush administration and are doing something about it?

I think that’s true. And I think Karl Rove is taking a huge risk. I think since 9/11 they’ve been walking a very fine line, between wanting to put the blame on the CIA and knowing if they did so unjustifiably, they’re going to get whacked. And I think that’s exactly what this little dance is about, and I think that’s why they did not fire Tenet. They want him and those who work for him not to retaliate.

Has the war in Iraq increased our security in the U.S.?

Absolutely not — it’s increased our vulnerability. It’s helped with terrorist recruitment, the spawning of cells in various countries. Don’t take my word for it — that’s what the security authorities have said. The directors of the CIA, FBI and DIA have all warned that when America attacks an Arab state, the risk to America skyrockets, it doesn’t go down. Now Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle have said we’re safer, of course — the more we keep them on the run abroad, the safer we are at home. I think that’s just patent nonsense.

If Bush has not made us safer, why hasn’t there been another terrorist attack in the U.S.? Have we just been lucky?

No, we have made it somewhat more difficult. But my analogy is that when I got Secret Service protection during my presidential run in 1984, the head of the Secret Service said to me, “If someone wants to kill you, they will probably kill you. Our job is to make it as difficult as possible.” So nearly three years later, we are making it somewhat more difficult for terrorists. Are we making it as difficult as we can? The answer is no.

The first attack on the World Trade Center occurred almost two years after its triggering event, which was the stationing of American troops in Saudi Arabia. Of course that barracks subsequently got blown up. So when people say, “Gee whiz, we must be safe, we haven’t been attacked again,” well, these enemies we’re confronting are patient people.

What would it take for the American people to begin to doubt that Bush has made them safer?

Well, God forbid, another attack, and I don’t rule that out. I know we’re going to be attacked again.

Do you think that terrorists learned from Spain that they can affect the outcome of a presidential election?

I think they’d be wrong to assume that about this nation. And I think they’d be dead wrong to assume they’d be better off with a Kerry administration. John Kerry is not soft on terrorism.

Do you think there’s ever a role for unilateral American action?

Of course.

But Iraq did not meet the proper criteria?

Right. The global rules for nations throughout history have been pretty consistent: a threat must be immediate and unavoidable. Iraq was neither. If someone knocks on your door, and you’ve been robbed before, you’re not justified in blowing that person away simply because you’re afraid. The same is true of nations.

Will the nonexistent weapons of mass destruction come back to haunt Bush in November?

I think what will haunt this administration is its lack of accountability. Either George Bush was misled, which is his story, or he misled the American people. There are no other choices. If he’s a strong president, as he and his supporters claim, then heads should roll. If the president of the United States is misled by those who advise him, heads should roll. And we have not seen this. If he misled the American people, then he must go.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

Guardian Interview: Richard Clarke
By Julian Borger
Guardian, U.K.

March 23, 2004

Julian Borger in Washington talks to former White House insider Richard Clarke about US’s vulnerability to al-Qaida before the September 11 attack.

JB: Condoleezza Rice wrote today in response to your book - that the Bush administration did have a strategy for eliminating al-Qaida and that the administration worked on it in the spring and summer of 2001? Is that true?
RC: We developed that strategy in the last several months of the Clinton administration and it was basically an update on that strategy. We briefed Condi on that strategy. The point is that it was done before they came to office and she never held a meeting on it. It was done before she asked for it.

JB: What about the claim that the administration did work hard on the issue?

RC: Its not true. I asked - on January 24 in writing to Condi - urgently for a meeting on cabinet level - the principal’s committee - to review the plan and I was told I can’t have that. It had to go to the deputies. They had a principals meeting on September 4. Contrast that with the principal’s meeting on Iraq, on February 1. So what was urgent for them was Iraq. Al-Qaida was not important to them.

JB: In the plan developed under the Clinton administration, was the potential use of ground forces included?

RC: That option was included in the plan, and the Clinton people had never rejected it. Yes it was there. But when they finally did the ground invasion they kind of botched it, because all they did initially was send special forces with the northern alliance. They did not insert special forces to go in after Bin Laden. They let Bin Laden escape. They only went in two months after.

JB: So were there any principals meetings about al-Qaida in all this time?

RC: It didn’t come up in the principal’s meetings. Between April and July only four of the 30 or 35 deputy principal meetings touched on al-Qaida. But three of those were mainly about US-Pakistan relations, or US-Afghan relations or South Asian policy, and al-Qaida was just one of the points. One of the meetings looked at the overall plan. It was the July one. April was an initial discussion of terrorism policy writ large and at that meeting I said we had to talk about al-Qaida. And because it was terrorism policy writ large [Paul] Wolfowitz said we have to talk about Iraqi terrorism and I said that’s interesting because there hasn’t been any Iraqi terrorism against the United States. There hasn’t been any for 8 years. And he said something derisive about how I shouldn’t believe the CIA and FBI, that they’ve been wrong. And I said if you know more than I know tell me what it is, because I’ve been doing this for 8 years and I don’t know about any Iraqi-sponsored terrorism against the US since 1993. When I said let’s start talking about Bin Laden, he said Bin Laden couldn’t possibly have attacked the World Trade Centre in ‘93. One little terrorist group like that couldn’t possibly have staged that operation. It must have been Iraq.

JB: So what were all the principal’s meetings about then?

RC: There were a lot of meetings on ‘Star Wars’. We had a lot of meetings about Russia policy, because Condi is a Russian specialist. There were a lot of meetings on China.

JB: And after the February meeting any more on Iraq?

RC: Yes there were many more, it was central. The buzz in national security staff administration wanted to go after Iraq.

JB: Do you think they came into office with that as a plan?

RC: If you look at the so-called Vulcans group [Bush’s pre-election foreign policy advisors] talked about publicly in seminars in Washington. They clearly wanted to go after Iraq and they clearly wanted to do this reshaping of the middle east and they used the tragedy of 9/11 as an excuse to test their theories.

JB: Do you think President Bush was already on board when he came to office.

RC: I think he was. He got his international education from the Vulcans group the previous year. They were people like Richard Perle, Jim Woolsey, Paul Wolfowitz. They were all espousing this stuff. So he probably had been persuaded. He certainly wasn’t hearing any contrary view during this education process.

JB: If there had been meetings on terrorism in that first eight months, do you think it would have made a difference?

RC: Well let me ask you: Contrast December ‘99 with June and July and August 2001. In December ‘99 we get similar kinds of evidence that al-Qaida was planning a similar kind of attack. President Clinton asks the national security advisor to hold daily meetings with attorney-general, the CIA, FBI. They go back to their departments from the White House and shake the departments out to the field offices to find out everything they can find. It becomes the number one priority of those agencies. When the head of the FBI and CIA have to go to the White House every day, things happen and by the way, we prevented the attack. Contrast that with June, July, August 2001 when the president is being briefed virtually every day in his morning intelligence briefing that something is about to happen, and he never chairs a meeting and he never asks Condi rice to chair a meeting about what we’re doing about stopping the attacks. She didn’t hold one meeting during all those three months. Now, it turns out that buried in the FBI and CIA, there was information about two of these al-Qaida terrorists who turned out to be hijackers [Khalid Almidhar and Nawaf Alhazmi]. We didn’t know that. The leadership of the FBI didn’t know that, but if the leadership had to report on a daily basis to the White House, he would have shaken the trees and he would have found out those two guys were there. We would have put their pictures on the front page of every newspaper and we probably would have caught them. Now would that have stopped 9/11? I don’t know. It would have stopped those two guys, and knowing the FBI the way they can take a thread and pull on it, they would probably have found others.

JB: So might they have stopped the September 11 attacks?

RC: I don’t want to say they could have stopped the attacks. But there was a chance.

JB: A reasonable chance? A good chance?

RC: There was a chance, and whatever the probability was, they didn’t take it.

JB: Condoleezza Rice argued today that when President Bush was asking you to find evidence linking September 11 to Iraq, he was simply showing due diligence, asking you to explore the options.

RC: That’s very funny. There are two ways of asking. There’s: ‘check every possibility - don’t assume its al-Qaida look at everybody’. That’s due diligence. Then there’s the: ‘I want you to find every shred of evidence that it was Iraq and Saddam’ - and said in a very emphatic and intimidating way, and the other people who were with me got the same impression as I did. This was not due diligence. This was: ‘come back with a memo that says it was an Iraqi attack’.

JB: And when you didn’t find any evidence, the memo was bounced back?

RC: Yes

JB: Stephen Hadley [deputy national security advisor] said he bounced it back saying just update this?

RC: Well as soon as he got it he said update it, even though it was very current. Hadley’s a good lawyer, he knows how to cover his ass. He not going to write: ‘I don’t like the answer’. But when your memo is immediately bounced and its got very current information and its bounced back to you and you’re told to do over, its pretty clear what the implication is.

JB: What do you think drove these people on Iraq?

RC: Some are ideologues - they have a superpower vision of us reshaping the Middle East. Changing the historical balance. Condi Rice has this phrase: ‘We needed to change the middle east so terrorists would not fly aircrafts into buildings’.

JB: Do you believe they felt they had to finish what Bush’s father started?

RC: That’s a big part of it. For Wolfowitz and Cheney feels some guilt for having stopped the war, a couple of days early, not that we should have marched on Baghdad but at least we should have gone after the Republican Guard.

JB: Do you believe there were also political motives.

RC: You have to bifurcate the White House team between the national security types and the political types. For the political types like Karl Rove this has been a godsend. They ran on the war in the congressional elections two years ago. They’re running on the war now. They’re painting this election as a vote on terrorism, a vote against Osama Bin Laden. And they’re succeeding to a certain extent because 70 per cent of American people last year thought that Iraq had something to do with 9/11. But the political benefit is clearly a secondary benefit.

JB: Do you believe the administration believed the intelligence on Iraqi WMD?

RC: We all believed Saddam had WMD. What I kept saying was: So what?. They said he could give it to terrorists. But I said he’s not that stupid. If he gave WMD to terrorists he would lose power. The question was: Is there an imminent threat or had we contained him? And I thought we had successfully contained him. I didn’t see it as a first-tier issue.

JB: Did the Pentagon and the office of special plans play an important role in the processing of intelligence?

RC: Certainly. The people in Rumsfeld’s office and in Wolfowitz’s operation cherry-picked intelligence to select the intelligence to support their views. They never did the due diligence on the intelligence that professional intelligence analysts are trained to do. [The OSP] would go through the intelligence reports including the ones that the CIA was throwing out. They stitched it together they would send it out, send it over to Cheney. All the stuff that a professional would have thrown out. As soon as 9/11 happened people like Rumsfeld saw it was opportunity. During that first week after September 11, the decision was made. It was confirmed by president We should do Afghanistan first. But the resources necessary to do a good job in Afghanistan were withheld. There was not enough to go in fast, to go in enough to secure the country. Troops were held back. There were 11,000 troops in Afghanistan. There were fewer in whole country than police in the borough of Manhattan.

JB: The White House is suggesting that this is sour grapes from a Clinton holdover, scoring political points.

RC: I was a Bush [senior] holdover. I’m not a registered Demcrat. I don’t want a job in the Kerry admin. What I want to do is to provide the American people with a set of facts and let them draw their own conclusions.

JB: What conclusions did you draw about President Bush’s leadership style.

RC: He doesn’t like to read a lot - not terribly interested in analysis. He is very interested in getting to the bottom line. Once he’s done he puts a lot of strength behind pushing it, but there’s not a lot of analysis before the decision.

JB: Do you think Britain had much influence in the run-up to the war?

RC: They would have done it without Britain. I don’t think it made a lot of difference. I think the British were able to help Colin Powell to persuade them to go to the UN. It did go to the UN for a period of time, and it may have helped a little. It may also have forced president to issue a statement on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He went out there and read the words like he was seeing them for the first time. There hasn’t been a lot of follow through, and I don’t think the Brits got very much. They got the minimum possible out of us. I think Blair tried to influence the decision making and thought he could do better inside, but his influence was small.

JB: What was Cheney’s role in all this.

RC: Quite enormous. Huge. Very quietly and behind the scenes he sat in all the national security meetings chaired by Condi Rice, and no vice president had done that before. He would listen and then give his thoughts. But he bought the compromise that it was al-Qaida first, Iraq second.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

Decoding The PDB
By Larry C. Johnson
Tom Paine.com

April 12th, 2004

Larry C. Johnson is a member of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity. He served with the CIA from 1985 through 1989 and worked in the State Department’s office of Counter Terrorism from 1989 through 1993. He also is a registered Republican who contributed financially to the Bush Campaign in 2000.
————————————-

Are George W. Bush and Condoleezza Rice really as clueless as they are claiming to be? Bush and Rice are both on the record misstating what was in the 6 August 2001 PDB (Presidential Daily Briefing). They both insist the information was only “historical” and “not actionable.” They apparently are not alone in their faux ignorance. Republican partisans and even some members of the media are busy bolstering the spin that this was “an historical memo.” Absolute nonsense!

I wrote about 40 PDB’s during my four-year tenure at the CIA. This particular PDB article was written in response to a presidential request. I am told that Bush’s request was a reaction to the intelligence warnings he was hearing during the daily CIA morning briefings. Something caught his attention and awakened his curiosity. He reportedly asked the CIA to come back with its assessment of Bin Laden’s intentions. The CIA answered the question ‘Bin Laden was targeting the United States’.

The PDB article released Saturday is a classic CIA response to such a request. It lays out the historical and evidentiary antecedents that undergird the analyst’s belief about the nature of the threat and provides current intelligence indicators that reinforce the basic conclusion of the piece, i.e., ‘Bin Laden was determined to attack the United States’. It is true that the piece did not contain specific details about the plot that was launched subsequently on 9/11. However, the details that are included in the piece are so alarming that anyone familiar with the nature of Bin Laden and Al Qaeda should have asked, “What are they planning and what can we do to stop it?”

Remember the furious attacks against Richard Clarke during the past month? Now that we have seen the content of the PDB we know he was telling the truth when he said that President Bush and Condoleezza Rice did not make fighting Al Qaeda a priority prior to 9/11. At a minimum, the details in the 6 August PDB should have motivated Rice to convene a principals meeting. Such a meeting would have ensured that all members of the president’s national security team were aware of the information that had been shared with the president. George Bush should have directed the different department heads to report back within one week on any information relevant to the Al Qaeda threat. Had he done this there is a high probability that the FBI field agents concerns about Arabs taking flight training would have rung some bells. There is also a high probability that the operations folks at CIA would have shared the information they had in hand about the presence of Al Qaeda operators in the United States. While Condoleezza Rice is correct that there was no “silver bullet” in that PDB, she conveniently ignores the huge pieces of the puzzle that were in the hands of various members of the U.S. government.

None of these steps were taken. Bush was on vacation and Condi, the smartest woman in Washington, we are told, was asleep at the switch.

The PDB revealed another very fascinating item, the analyst who wrote the piece had access to details about FBI investigations. This is something I never had access to when I was writing PDBs. It was forbidden territory. In other words, Bill Clinton has opened some level of cooperation between the FBI and CIA. The FBI, in a break with tradition, was telling the CIA what it was doing in some measure. Unfortunately, with the benefit of hindsight, not enough was shared.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

New Evidence Bush Pushed Iraq War Right After 9/11
The Daily Mis-Lead
April 6, 2004

The White House continues to deny that the president immediately began planning an invasion of Iraq in the days after 9/11, calling such charges “revisionist history” (1) and claiming Iraq was “to the side”(2) immediately after the attacks. But new revelations by a former top British official confirm that, immediately after 9/11, President Bush started planning to use the terrorist attacks as a justification for war in Iraq, despite having no proof that Iraq had any connection to Al Qaeda or 9/11. (3)
According to a report in the new edition of Vanity Fair, former British Ambassador to the United States Christopher Meyer said that President Bush made clear at a dinner (4) with Prime Minister Tony Blair nine days after the 9/11 attacks that he wanted to confront Iraq. The assertion is corroborated by the Washington Post, which reported that President Bush personally signed a two-and-a-half page directive on September 17th, 2001 ordering the Pentagon to begin drawing up Iraq invasion plans. (5) The assertion is also corroborated by CBS News, which reported on September 4, 2002 that, five hours after the 9/11 attacks, “Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was telling his aides to come up with plans for striking Iraq.”(6) The account by the former British Ambassador confirms similar accounts by former Bush counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke and former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill.

The result of President Bush’s preoccupation with Iraq has been dramatic: the diversion of critical resources to Iraq and away from the hunt for Osama bin Laden/Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. As reported by USA Today, “In 2002, troops from the 5th Special Forces Group who specialize in the Middle East were pulled out of the hunt for Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan to prepare for their next assignment: Iraq.” (7) Similarly, Senator Bob Graham (D-FL) reported that, in February 2002, a senior military commander told him, “We are moving military and intelligence personnel and resources out of Afghanistan to get ready for a future war in Iraq.” (8) That has left many dangerous terrorists still at large, and the UN now reporting that the country is “in danger of reverting to a terrorist breeding ground.” (9)

Sources:

1. White House Press Briefing, 3/23/04, http://daily.misleader.org/ctt.asp?u=1202081&l=26545.

2. “Neither Silent Nor a Public Witness,” Washington Post, 3/26/04, http://daily.misleader.org/ctt.asp?u=1202081&l=26546.

3. ” Doubts cast on efforts to link Saddam, al-Qaida,” Knight-Ridder, 3/2/04, http://daily.misleader.org/ctt.asp?u=1202081&l=26547

4. “Report Details Bush-Blair Meeting on Iraq,” Associated Press, 4/4/04, http://daily.misleader.org/ctt.asp?u=1202081&l=26548

5. “U.S. Decision On Iraq Has Puzzling Past,” Washington Post, 1/12/03, http://daily.misleader.org/ctt.asp?u=1202081&l=26549

6. “Plans For Iraq Attack Began On 9/11,” CBS News, 9/4/02, http://daily.misleader.org/ctt.asp?u=1202081&l=26550

7. Shifts from bin Laden hunt evoke questions,” USA Today, 3/28/04, http://daily.misleader.org/ctt.asp?u=1202081&l=26551

8. Senator Bob Graham Remarks to the Council on Foreign Relations,” Council on Foreign Relations, 3/26/04, http://daily.misleader.org/ctt.asp?u=1202081&l=26552

9. “UN warns on Aghanistan reverting to terrorism ,” Financial Times, 3/28/04, http://daily.misleader.org/ctt.asp?u=1202081&l=26553

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

Note to Eric: U Need 2B More Careful
By Al Kamen
The Washington Post

March 31, 2004

Did you hear the one about the guy at Starbucks? No? Okay. A guy walks into the Starbucks at Connecticut Avenue and R Street NW on Sunday to get his favorite latte, and sits down at a table.

On the table, he spots four pieces of paper. One is stationery with the heading “Office of the Secretary of Defense,” and right under that “The Special Assistant.”
It has a penciled map of directions from the Pentagon to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld’s house in Northwest Washington. Another sheet says, “Eric’s Telephone Log.” Someone has written “Conf. call” at the top and some notes, some in partial shorthand, on one side. These apparently were taken by Eric.

The notes say: “Took threat v seriously and then segue to wh we have been doing. Rise above [ Richard A.] Clarke.

“Emphasize importance of 9/11 commission and come back to what we have been doing.

“[Commission member Jamie] Gorelick pitting Condi [ Condoleezza Rice] v. [Deputy Secretary of State Richard] Armitage

“Our plan had military plans to attack Al Q — called on def to draw up targets in Afg — develop mil options.”

There’s an underlined notation “DR” in the margin and a quotation, apparently from DR, perhaps Rumsfeld, to “Stay inside the line — we dont need 2 ruff [or puff] this at all. we need 2b careful as hell about it. This thing will go away soon and what will keep it alive will be one of us going over the line.”

A third sheet is dated Saturday, 4:30 p.m., and headed “Possible Q’s for Sunday Talk Shows,” but there are no answers.

A fourth sheet describes actions taken to change a policy of treating terrorism as a law enforcement matter to treating it as war.

Our good citizen, no dummy he, concluded these were significant papers and should be turned over to the appropriate people. So that would be the Pentagon or the White House?

Oh, no. He turned them over to none other than that most left-leaning think tank, Center for American Progress, headed by none other than former Clinton chief of staff John D. Podesta.

The CAP folks have been having so much fun with this, they’ve taken to providing answers for the “Possible Q’s.” For example, in answer to the question, “Why did the Administration think it had 7 months to develop policy?” the CAP people offer: “We made a point of ignoring as long as possible anything that was recommended to us by the Clinton Administration.”

In answer to the question, “Commission member [ Richard] Ben-Veniste said a long string of reports on the use of airplanes as missiles was available. Did you ever see them?” the Center, adapting the administration’s “Clarke Attack,” proposes: “Ben-Veniste is disgruntled. He’s angry that he was demoted from Watergate prosecutor to 9/11 commissioner. He’s writing a book . . . and just wants to make a lot of money. Ann Coulter and Robert Novak told me he can’t deal with an African-American woman.”

Clearly, they’re having too much fun with this.

© 2004 The Washington Post Company

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

Cheney’s Latest Distortions
By The Center for American Progress
January 23, 2004

In January 2004, Vice President Dick Cheney did a round of media interviews with NPR and others in which he reinforced his claims of a connection between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda. To back these claims up, he cited documents already discredited as “inaccurate” by the Bush Administration.
SADDAM-AL QAEDA CONNECTION

CHENEY CLAIM: “There’s overwhelming evidence there was a connection between al Qaeda and the Iraqi government. I am very confident that there was an established relationship there.” - Vice President Cheney, 1/22/04

FACT: According to documents, “Saddam Hussein warned his Iraqi supporters to be wary of joining forces with foreign Arab fighters entering Iraq to battle U.S. troops. The document provides another piece of evidence challenging the Bush administration contention of close cooperation between Saddam’s regime and al Qaeda terrorists.” [NY Times, 1/15/04]

FACT: “CIA interrogators have already elicited from the top Qaeda officials in custody that, before the American-led invasion, Osama bin Laden had rejected entreaties from some of his lieutenants to work jointly with Saddam.” [NY Times, 1/15/04]

FACT: “Sec. of State Colin Powell conceded Thursday that despite his assertions to the United Nations last year, he had no ’smoking gun’ proof of a link between the government of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and terrorists of al-Qaeda.’I have not seen smoking-gun, concrete evidence about the connection,’ Powell said.” [NY Times, 1/9/04]

FACT: “Three former Bush Administration officials who worked on intelligence and national security issues said the prewar evidence tying Al Qaeda was tenuous, exaggerated and often at odds with the conclusions of key intelligence agencies.” [National Journal, 8/9/03]

FACT: Declassified documents “undercut Bush administration claims before the war that Hussein had links to Al Qaeda.” [LA Times, 7/19/03].

FACT: “The chairman of the monitoring group appointed by the United Nations Security Council to track Al Qaeda told reporters that his team had found no evidence linking Al Qaeda to Saddam Hussein.” [NY Times, 6/27/03]

FACT: “U.S. allies have found no links between Iraq and Al Qaeda.’We have found no evidence of links between Iraq and Al Qaeda,’ said Europe’s top investigator. ‘If there were such links, we would have found them. But we have found no serious connections whatsoever.’” [LA Times, 11/4/02]

YASIM ALLEGATION

CHENEY CLAIM: “Abdul Rahman Yasim arrived back in Iraq and was put on the payroll and provided a house, safe harbor and sanctuary. So Saddam Hussein had an established track record of providing safe harbor and sanctuary for terrorists.” - Vice President Cheney, 1/22/04

FACT: “Even if the new information holds up - and intelligence and law enforcement officials disagree on its conclusiveness - the links tying Yasin, Saddam and al-Qaeda are tentative.” [USA Today, 9/17/03]

SUPPORTING EVIDENCE

CHENEY CLAIM: “You ought to go look at an article that Stephen Hayes did in the Weekly Standard here a few weeks ago, that goes through and lays out in some detail, based on an assessment that was done by the Department of Defense and forwarded to the Senate Intelligence Committee some weeks ago. That’s your best source of information” to justify the Saddam-Al Qaeda claim. - Vice President Cheney, 1/9/04

FACT: “Reports that the Defense Department recently confirmed new information with respect to contacts between al Qaeda and Iraq in a letter to the Senate Intelligence Committee are inaccurate. Individuals who leak or purport to leak classified information are doing serious harm to national security; such activity is deplorable and may be illegal.” [DoD, 11/15/03]

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

Claim vs. Fact: Administration Officials Respond to Richard Clarke Interview
By Bob Boorstin
March 22, 2004

In the wake of Richard Clarke’s well-supported assertions that the Bush Administration neglected counterterrorism in the face of repeated terror warnings before 9/11, the Bush Administration has launched a frantic misinformation campaign ˆ often contradicting itself in the process.
CLAIM #1: “Richard Clarke had plenty of opportunities to tell us in the administration that he thought the war on terrorism was moving in the wrong direction and he chose not to.”
ˆ National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, 3/22/04

FACT: Clarke sent a memo to Rice principals on 1/24/01 marked “urgent” asking for a Cabinet-level meeting to deal with an impending Al Qaeda attack. The White House acknowledges this, but says “principals did not need to have a formal meeting to discuss the threat.” No meeting occurred until one week before 9/11.
ˆ White House Press Release, 3/21/04

CLAIM #2: “The president returned to the White House and called me in and said, I’ve learned from George Tenet that there is no evidence of a link between Saddam Hussein and 9/11.”
ˆ National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, 3/22/04

FACT: If this is true, then why did the President and Vice President repeatedly claim Saddam Hussein was directly connected to 9/11? President Bush sent a letter to Congress on 3/19/03 saying that the Iraq war was permitted specifically under legislation that authorized force against “nations, organizations, or persons who planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11.” Similarly, Vice President Cheney said on 9/14/03 that “It is not surprising that people make that connection” between Iraq and the 9/11 attacks, and said “we don’t know” if there is a connection.

CLAIM #3: “[Clarke] was moved out of the counterterrorism business over to the cybersecurity side of things.”
ˆ Vice President Dick Cheney on Rush Limbaugh, 3/22/04

FACT: “Dick Clarke continued, in the Bush Administration, to be the National Coordinator for Counterterrorism and the President’s principle counterterrorism expert. He was expected to organize and attend all meetings of Principals and Deputies on terrorism. And he did.”
ˆ White House Press Release, 3/21/04

CLAIM #4: “In June and July when the threat spikes were so high, we were at battle stations. The fact of the matter is [that] the administration focused on this before 9/11.”
ˆ National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, 3/22/04

FACT: “Documents indicate that before Sept. 11, Ashcroft did not give terrorism top billing in his strategic plans for the Justice Department, which includes the FBI. A draft of Ashcroft’s ‘Strategic Plan’ from Aug. 9, 2001, does not put fighting terrorism as one of the department’s seven goals, ranking it as a sub-goal beneath gun violence and drugs. By contrast, in April 2000, Ashcroft’s predecessor, Janet Reno, called terrorism ‘the most challenging threat in the criminal justice area.’”
ˆ Washington Post, 3/22/04

CLAIM #5: “The president launched an aggressive response after 9/11.”
ˆ National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, 3/22/04

FACT: “In the early days after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the Bush White House cut by nearly two-thirds an emergency request for counterterrorism funds by the FBI, an internal administration budget document shows. The papers show that Ashcroft ranked counterterrorism efforts as a lower priority than his predecessor did, and that he resisted FBI requests for more counterterrorism funding before and immediately after the attacks.”
ˆ Washington Post, 3/22/04

CLAIM #6: “Well, [Clarke] wasn’t in the loop, frankly, on a lot of this stuff.”
ˆ Vice President Dick Cheney, 3/22/04

FACT: “The Government’s interagency counterterrorism crisis management forum (the Counterterrorism Security Group, or “CSG”) chaired by Dick Clarke met regularly, often daily, during the high threat period.”
ˆ White House Press Release, 3/21/04

CLAIM #7: “[Bush] wanted a far more effective policy for trying to deal with [terrorism], and that process was in motion throughout the spring.”
ˆ Vice President Dick Cheney on Rush Limbaugh, 3/22/04

FACT: “Bush said [in May of 2001] that Cheney would direct a government-wide review on managing the consequences of a domestic attack, and ‘I will periodically chair a meeting of the National Security Council to review these efforts.’ Neither Cheney’s review nor Bush’s took place.” By comparison, Cheney in 2001 formally convened his Energy Task Force at least 10 separate times, meeting at least 6 times with Enron energy executives.
ˆ Washington Post, 1/20/02 , GAO Report, 8/22/03, AP, 1/8/02

CLAIM #8: All the chatter [before 9/11] was of an attack, a potential al Qaeda attack overseas.
ˆ Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley, 3/22/04

FACT: Page 204 of the Joint Congressional Inquiry into 9/11 noted that “In May 2001, the intelligence community obtained a report that Bin Laden supporters were planning to infiltrate the United States” to “carry out a terrorist operation using high explosives.” The report “was included in an intelligence report for senior government officials in August [2001].” In the same month, the Pentagon “acquired and shared with other elements of the Intelligence Community information suggesting that seven persons associated with Bin Laden had departed various locations for Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States.”
[Joint Congressional Report, 12/02]

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)