Weapons of Misperception
The Atlantic
January 13, 2004

Kenneth M. Pollack, the author of “Spies, Lies, and Weapons: What Went Wrong,” explains how the road to war with Iraq was paved with misleading and manipulated intelligence.
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n March of 2003, when America entered into war against Iraq, did Saddam Hussein pose an imminent threat? Theories about this question abound, but the tide of opinion is turning toward “no.” As months go by with little sign of any weapons of mass destruction, and as new evidence surfaces that the Bush Administration relied on false or manipulated intelligence to support its objectives, the reasoning behind America’s assault on Iraq is increasingly coming to seem less sound. Even Kenneth Pollack, whose influential book The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq (2002) swayed a number of officials to join the call for war, has now amended his stance regarding Saddam’s possession of weapons of mass destruction. In “Spies, Lies, and Weapons: What Went Wrong” (March Atlantic) he argues that Saddam most likely scaled back his weapons programs in 1996, keeping only the minimum amount of material necessary to restart the programs at some point in the future, and that the threat Saddam posed was likely far less dire than most imagined.

READ THE FULL ARTICLE:
http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/interviews/int2004-01-13.htm

(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.)

Bush Claims To Never Say Iraq Was “Imminent Threat”
The Daily Mis-Lead
January 28, 2004

Facing mounting pressure over charges that the White House deliberately misled the American people about Iraq’s WMD, President Bush is now claiming that U.N. weapons inspectors were not allowed into Iraq before the war. Yesterday, the pesident said, Iraq “chose defiance. It was [Saddam’s] choice to make, and he did not let us in.”
But U.N. weapons inspections led by Hans Blix began on November 27th, 2003, as noted by the State Department at the time. Over the course of the next five months, those inspections found “little more than ‘debris’” from a WMD program that had long since been destroyed. The weapons inspectors were forced to leave when Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq. President Bush then “refused to permit the U.N. inspectors to return to Iraq.”

When asked about the issue yesterday, White House spokesman Scott McClellan claimed the entire WMD issue was unimportant because the Bush Administration had never said Iraq was a threat. He said, “the media have chosen to use the word ‘imminent’” to describe the Iraqi “threat” - not the Bush Administration.

But the record shows the Administration repeatedly said Iraq was an “imminent threat.” On May 7th, less than a week after the president announced the end of major combat operations, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer was asked, “Didn’t we go to war because we said WMD were a direct and imminent threat to the U.S.?” He replied, “Absolutely.” Similarly, in November 2002, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said, “I would look you in the eye and I would say, go back before September 11 and ask yourself this question: Was the attack that took place on September 11 an imminent threat the month before or two months before or three months before or six months before? When did the attack on September 11 become an imminent threat? Now, transport yourself forward a year, two years or a week or a month…So the question is, when is it such an immediate threat that you must do something?” Most notably, Vice President Cheney said two days after President Bush’s 2003 State of the Union that Saddam Hussein “threatens the United States of America.”

Sources:
-President Bush Welcomes President Kwasniewski to White House, 1/27/2004
-”Weapons Inspections to Begin in Iraq November 27″, US State Department, 11/25/2002
-”Blix Downgrades Prewar Assessment of Iraqi Weapons”, Washington Post, 11/22/2003
-”Weapons Inspectors Leave Iraq”, CBS News, 03/18/2003
-”Bush bars UN weapons teams from Iraq”, SMH, 04/24/2003
-Press Briefing, 01/27/2004
-Press Briefing, 5/7/2003
-”Confronting Iraq Crucial To War Against Terror”, Truth News, 1/30/2003

(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.)

Former Pentagon Insider: ‘Neoconservative Propaganda Campaign Led to Iraq War’
By Karen Kwiatkowski
The American Conservative

January 19th Issue

Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski, a former Pentagon insider, concludes her observations on the run-up to the Iraq war in this last of a three-part series.

As the winter of 2002 approached, I was increasingly amazed at the success of the propaganda campaign being waged by President Bush, Vice President Cheney, and neoconservative mouthpieces at the Washington Times and Wall Street Journal. I speculated about the necessity but unlikelihood of a Phil-Dick-style minority report on the grandiose Feith-Wolfowitz-Rumsfeld-Cheney vision of some future Middle East where peace, love, and democracy are brought about by pre-emptive war and military occupation.
In December, I requested an acceleration of my retirement after just over 20 years on duty and exactly the required three years of time-in-grade as a lieutenant colonel. I felt fortunate not to have being fired or court-martialed due to my politically incorrect ways in the previous two years as a real conservative in a neoconservative Office of Secretary of Defense. But in fact, my outspokenness was probably never noticed because civilian professionals and military officers were largely invisible. We were easily replaceable and dispensable, not part of the team brought in from the American Enterprise Institute, the Center for Security Policy, and the Washington Institute for Near East Affairs.

There were exceptions. When military officers conspicuously crossed the neoconservative party line, the results were predictable - get back in line or get out. One friend, an Army colonel who exemplified the qualities carved in stone at West Point, refused to maneuver into a small neoconservative box, and he was moved into another position, where truth-telling would be viewed as an asset instead of a handicap. Among the civilians, I observed the stereotypical perspective that this too would pass, with policy analysts apparently willing to wait out the neocon phase. In early winter, an incident occurred that was seared into my memory. A coworker and I were suddenly directed to go down to the Mall entrance to pick up some Israeli generals. Post-9/11 rules required one escort for every three visitors, and there were six or seven of them waiting. The Navy lieutenant commander and I hustled down. Before we could apologize for the delay, the leader of the pack surged ahead, his colleagues in close formation, leaving us to double-time behind the group as they sped to Undersecretary Feith’s office on the fourth floor. Two thoughts crossed our minds: are we following close enough to get credit for escorting them, and do they really know where they are going? We did get credit, and they did know. Once in Feith’s waiting room, the leader continued at speed to Feith’s closed door. An alert secretary saw this coming and had leapt from her desk to block the door. “Mr. Feith has a visitor. It will only be a few more minutes.” The leader craned his neck to look around the secretary’s head as he demanded, “Who is in there with him?”

This minor crisis of curiosity past, I noticed the security sign-in roster. Our habit, up until a few weeks before this incident, was not to sign in senior visitors like ambassadors. But about once a year, the security inspectors send out a warning letter that they were coming to inspect records. As a result, sign-in rosters were laid out, visible and used. I knew this because in the previous two weeks I watched this explanation being awkwardly presented to several North African ambassadors as they signed in for the first time and wondered why and why now. Given all this and seeing the sign-in roster, I asked the secretary, “Do you want these guys to sign in?” She raised her hands, both palms toward me, and waved frantically as she shook her head. “No, no, no, it is not necessary, not at all.” Her body language told me I had committed a faux pas for even asking the question. My fellow escort and I chatted on the way back to our office about how the generals knew where they were going (most foreign visitors to the five-sided asylum don’t) and how the generals didn’t have to sign in. I felt a bit dirtied by the whole thing and couldn’t stop comparing that experience to the grace and gentility of the Moroccan, Tunisian, and Algerian ambassadors with whom I worked.

In my study of the neoconservatives, it was easy to find out whom in Washington they liked and whom they didn’t. They liked most of the Heritage Foundation and all of the American Enterprise Institute. They liked writers Charles Krauthammer and Bill Kristol. To find out whom they didn’t like, no research was required. All I had to do was walk the corridors and attend staff meetings. There were several shared prerequisites to get on the Neoconservative List of Major Despicable People, and in spite of the rhetoric hurled against these enemies of the state, most really weren’t Rodents of Unusual Size. Most, in fact, were retired from a branch of the military with a star or two or four on their shoulders. All could and did rationally argue the many illogical points in the neoconservative strategy of offensive democracy - guys like Brent Scowcroft, Barry McCaffrey, Anthony Zinni, and Colin Powell.

I was present at a staff meeting when Deputy Undersecretary Bill Luti called General Zinni a traitor. At another time, I discussed with a political appointee the service being rendered by Colin Powell in the early winter and was told the best service he could offer would be to quit. I heard in another staff meeting a derogatory story about a little Tommy Fargo who was acting up. Little Tommy was, of course, Commander, Pacific Forces, Admiral Fargo. This was shared with the rest of us as a Bill Luti lesson in civilian control of the military. It was certainly not civil or controlled, but the message was crystal.

When President Bush gave his State of the Union address, there was a small furor over the reference to the yellowcake in Niger that Saddam was supposedly seeking. After this speech, everyone was discussing this as either new intelligence saved up for just such a speech or, more cynically, just one more flamboyant fabrication that those watching the propaganda campaign had come to expect. I had not heard about yellowcake from Niger or seen it mentioned on the Office of Special Plans talking points. When I went over to my old shop, sub-Saharan Africa, to congratulate them for making it into the president’s speech, they said the information hadn’t come from them or through them. They were as surprised and embarrassed as everyone else that such a blatant falsehood would make it into a presidential speech.

When General Zinni was removed as Bush’s Middle East envoy and Elliot Abrams joined the National Security Council (NSC) to lead the Mideast division, whoops and high-fives had erupted from the neocon cubicles. By midwinter, echoes of those celebrations seemed to mutate into a kind of anxious anticipation, shared by most of the Pentagon. The military was anxiously waiting under the bed for the other shoe to drop amidst concerns over troop availability, readiness for an ill-defined mission, and lack of day-after clarity. The neocons were anxiously struggling to get that damn shoe off, gleefully anticipating the martinis to be drunk and the fun to be had. The other shoe fell with a thump on Feb. 5 as Colin Powell delivered his United Nations presentation.

It was a sad day for me and many others with whom I worked when we watched Powell’s public capitulation. The era when Powell had been considered a political general, back when he was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, had in many ways been erased for those of us who greatly admired his coup of the Pentagon neocons when he persuaded the president to pursue UN support for his invasion of Iraq. Now it was as if Powell had again rolled military interests - and national interests as well.

Around that same time, our deputy director forwarded a State Department cable that had gone out to our embassy in Turkey. The cable contained answers to 51 questions that had been asked of our ambassador by the Turkish government. The questions addressed things like after-war security arrangements, refugees, border control, stability in the Kurdish north, and occupation plans. But every third answer was either “To be determined, or “We’re working on that” or “This scenario is unlikely.” At one point, an answer included the “fact” that the United States military would physically secure the geographic border of Iraq. Curious, I checked the length of the physical border of Iraq. Then I checked out the length of our own border with Mexico. Given our exceptional success in securing our own desert borders, I found this statement interesting.

Soon after, I was out-processed for retirement and couldn’t have been more relieved to be away from daily exposure to practices I had come to believe were unconstitutional. War is generally crafted and pursued for political reasons, but the reasons given to Congress and the American people for this one were so inaccurate and misleading as to be false. Certainly, the neoconservatives never bothered to sell the rest of the country on the real reasons for occupation of Iraq - more bases from which to flex U.S. muscle with Syria and Iran, better positioning for the inevitable fall of the regional sheikdoms, maintaining OPEC on a dollar track, and fulfilling a half-baked imperial vision. These more accurate reasons could have been argued on their merits, and the American people might indeed have supported the war. But we never got a chance to debate it.

My personal experience leaning precariously toward the neoconservative maw showed me that their philosophy remains remarkably untouched by respect for real liberty, justice, and American values. My years of military service taught me that values and ideas matter, but these most important aspects of our great nation cannot be defended adequately by those in uniform. This time, salvaging our honor will require a conscious, thoughtful, and stubborn commitment from each and every one of us, and though I no longer wear the uniform, I have not given up the fight.

(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.)

For Telling The Truth
By Norman Solomon
The Baltimore Sun

Sunday 14 December 2003

Few Americans have heard of Katharine Gun, a former British intelligence employee facing charges that she violated the Official Secrets Act. So far, the American press has ignored her. But the case raises profound questions about democracy and the public’s right to know on both sides of the Atlantic.
Ms. Gun’s legal peril began in Britain on March 2, when the Observer newspaper exposed a highly secret memorandum by a top U.S. National Security Agency official. Dated Jan. 31, the memo outlined surveillance of a half-dozen delegations with swing votes on the U.N. Security Council, noting a focus on “the whole gamut of information that could give U.S. policy-makers an edge in obtaining results favorable to U.S. goals” - support for war on Iraq.

The NSA memo said that the agency had started a “surge” of spying on diplomats at the United Nations in New York, including wiretaps of home and office telephones along with reading of e-mails. The targets were delegations from six countries considered to be pivotal - Mexico, Chile, Angola, Cameroon, Guinea and Pakistan - for the war resolution being promoted by the United States and Britain.

The scoop caused headlines in much of the world, and sparked a furor in the “Middle Six” countries. The U.S. government and its British ally - revealed to be colluding in the U.N. surveillance caper - were put on the defensive.

A few days after the story broke, I contacted the man responsible for leaking the huge trove of secret documents about the Vietnam War known as the Pentagon Papers more than three decades ago. What was his assessment of the U.N. spying memo?

“This leak,” Daniel Ellsberg replied, “is more timely and potentially more important than the Pentagon Papers.” The exposure of the memo, he said, had the potential to block the invasion of Iraq before it began: “Truth-telling like this can stop a war.”

Katharine Gun’s truth-telling did not stop the war on Iraq, but it did make a difference. Some analysts cite the uproar from the leaked memo as a key factor in the U.S.-British failure to get Security Council approval of a pro-war resolution before the invasion began in late March.

The government of British Prime Minister Tony Blair quickly arrested Ms. Gun. In June, she formally lost her job as a translator at the top-secret Government Communications Headquarters in Gloucester. On Nov. 13, her name surfaced in the British news media when the Labor Party government dropped the other shoe, charging the 29-year-old woman with a breach of the Official Secrets Act.

She faces up to two years in prison if convicted.

Ms. Gun, who is free on bail and is to appear in court Jan. 19, has responded with measured eloquence. Disclosure of the NSA memo, she said Nov. 27, was “necessary to prevent an illegal war in which thousands of Iraqi civilians and British soldiers would be killed or maimed.” And Ms. Gun reiterated something that she had said two weeks earlier: “I have only ever followed my conscience.”

All the realpolitik in the world cannot preclude the exercise of the internal quality that most distinguishes human beings. Of all the differences between people and other animals, Charles Darwin observed, “the moral sense of conscience is by far the most important.”

In this case, Ms. Gun’s conscience fully intersected with the needs of democracy and a free press. The British and American people had every right to know that their governments were involved in a high-stakes dirty tricks campaign at the United Nations. For democratic societies, a timely flow of information is the lifeblood of the body politic.

As it happened, the illegal bugging of diplomats from three continents in Manhattan foreshadowed the illegality of the war that was to come. Shortly before the invasion began, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan pointed out that - in the absence of an authorizing resolution from the Security Council - an attack on Iraq would violate the U.N. Charter.

Ms. Gun’s conspicuous bravery speaks louder than any rhetoric possibly could. Her actions confront Britons and Americans alike with difficult choices: To what extent is the “special relationship” between the two countries to be based on democracy or duplicity? How much do we treasure the substance of civil liberties that make authentic public discourse distinct from the hollowness of secrecy and manipulation? How badly do we want to know what is being done in our names with our tax money? And why is it so rare that conscience takes precedence over expediency?

Norman Solomon is executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy in San Francisco. He is co-author of Target Iraq: What the News Media Didn’t Tell You (Context Books, 2003)

(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.)

The Spy Who Was Thrown Into the Cold
By Julian Borger
The Guardian

Wednesday 22 October 2003

Who outed Valerie Wilson as a CIA secret agent? Clue: her husband, Joseph, had just criticised the Bush administration. Julian Borger talks exclusively to the man who may have started a new Watergate.
It is early autumn in Washington. The leaves are falling, another election season is limbering up, and the nation’s capital is once more embroiled in a gale-force scandal. It is an extraordinary affair that combines espionage, political dirty tricks and weapons of mass destruction - a heady mix normally found only in airport thrillers. But fact has had a knack of trumping fiction in Washington lately. In principle at least, this is worse than Watergate and far worse than Bill Clinton’s sexual liaisons. According to the claims now under scrutiny by the FBI, senior officials in the Bush administration (possibly including aides close to the president himself) blew the cover of a high-ranking CIA agent in order to punish and discredit her husband, a critic of the administration. In doing so, they endangered the very national security in the name of which the administration has so far invaded two countries. Ironically, the agent in question was a leading player in the monitoring and pursuit of weapons of mass destruction around the world. Her outing has undoubtedly hamstrung that pursuit.

If caught, the culprits could face jail sentences of 10 years. Even if they escape jail, the affair could seriously tarnish a president who, in the early stages of a re-election campaign, has made the restoration of “honour and dignity” to the White House his central goal. What happens in the next few days and weeks will determine the extent of the damage.

Meanwhile, the man at the centre of the row, former ambassador Joseph Wilson, is scarcely 100 yards from the White House, contemplating his epitaph. It was going to be “the last American diplomat to meet Saddam Hussein”. Now he prefers “the husband of the CIA agent outed by her own government”.

Valerie Wilson, the woman in question, is not talking about her experience. She has authorised her husband to say only “that she would rather cut off her right arm than speak to the press”. But her discretion will not bring back her secrecy. Whoever leaked her name did not just jam a spoke into the work that her department was doing, Joe Wilson believes, but also exposed her family to serious danger.

He does not fear the intelligence services so much as terrorists bent on finding soft but valuable targets, or just “just somebody who’s a little bit paranoid and thinks somehow that the CIA is responsible for the voices he hears in his head”. They are taking their own security precautions, he says, but they have had no help from the state to keep them safe.

It all started with a little-noticed newspaper article on July 14. Written by veteran conservative commentator Robert Novak, it was about Wilson and the search for Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction. Eight days earlier, Wilson had caused the Bush administration some embarrassment with an article of his own. The retired diplomat, who had been in Baghdad in the run-up to the first Gulf war, had argued that the administration’s claims about Iraq trying to buy uranium in Africa were questionable at best, and pointed out that he was in a position to know. He had been to Niger in February 2002 to check the claims and found little reason to believe them.

Novak, known for his combative style and his excellent contacts in the Republican party, took a sceptical view of Wilson, and quoted “two senior administration officials” as saying that the former diplomat had only been sent to Africa because his wife, a “CIA operative” in the weapons of mass destruction department, got him the assignment. And seemingly to make it clear he knew of which he spoke, Novak published her maiden and professional name, Valerie Plame. Novak later described the reaction to his article as a “firestorm”. “This has stayed alive for several reasons,” he told media students recently. “A lot of people want to use it to bring down President Bush. There are a lot of people - on the left and right - who don’t like me and would like to discredit me.”

Novak’s defence is that he was assured by his CIA contacts that Plame was a desk-driving agency bureaucrat. But it has since emerged that she is anything but. She has a job in the directorate of operations, the agency’s sharp end, where she is an officer with “non-official cover”: a Noc, CIA parlance for spy.

Plame was recruited into her role 18 years ago. “Everyone there was a pretty impressive person with different skills,” says Jim Marcinkowski, a former CIA case officer who was in Plame’s class, and went to the range with her where they practised firing Soviet-made AK-47s. “But if I recall right, she had never fired a gun before, and she pretty much beat the rest of us.”

The Noc operates under deep cover, as a business executive, tourist, journalist or, in Plame’s case, an energy consultant. If the Noc is caught, he or she has no diplomatic protection. “It was the most dangerous assignment you could take. It takes a special sort of person,” says Marcinkowski, now a prosecutor in Michigan.

A Noc’s identity, in the words of Kenneth Pollack, another former CIA man, is the “holiest of holies”. And yet there it was, published in the morning press. Plame’s fellow agents and former colleagues were infuriated. It is said that the groundswell of anger was such that the CIA director, George Tenet, had little choice but to take the case to the justice department.

“In this particular case, it was so far over the line, I think myself and a lot of us were truly outraged that the government would do this,” says Marcinkowski. “I mean, we kept our mouths closed since 1985, when we joined.”

The scandal slowly gathered momentum over the summer, but it was only when official Washington returned from its summer holiday and senior Democrats began to see its potential to damage the administration that the affair began to build up steam. Then, early this month, when news leaked that the CIA had asked for a justice department inquiry, the scandal detonated. It quickly turned out that the senior administration officials Novak had talked to had been busy that week in July, calling up half a dozen Washington journalists to give them the same tip, and potentially committing the same felony six times over.

“My judgment of it when it first happened was that it was clearly designed to intimidate others from coming forward. The word was, if you decide to do what Wilson has done, then we will drag your wife into a public square and administer a beating,” says Wilson.

Wilson believes that Karl Rove, the mastermind behind Bush’s election strategy since the Texas days, was behind the leaks. A couple of the journalists who were contacted have told him they spoke to Rove directly. One of them reported that Rove had referred to Wilson’s wife as “fair game”. At one point over the summer, a furious Wilson said he looked forward to the day when Rove would be “frogmarched out of the White House in handcuffs”. He has since withdrawn the comment and toned down his language, leading the White House, which has vehemently defended Rove, to point out the inconsistencies in his version of events.

Wilson says he still holds Rove responsible, although he can now see how Bush’s trusted adviser might escape charges. His calls to “push” the story along may have come after Novak printed his article, by which time Plame’s identity was no longer a secret. “I have every confidence from what I was told that Karl Rove specifically as well as others in the White House were pushing the story,” he says. “Whether or not illegal, even by Washington’s bare-knuckle political standards, it’s pretty slimy.”

If Rove only arrived on the scene after the original leak, then questions remain over the identity of the two “senior administration officials” behind the original leak. If Wilson has suspects in mind, he is not telling. Even if they are caught, they could argue that they did not know Plame’s identity was classified. The law requires that the culprit is aware of the significance of his actions to put him in jail.

But the Bush administration would nevertheless look fairly tawdry if it tried to dodge the bullet with legal niceties. And in any case, it is far from over. It will be a long autumn in Washington this year .

Wilson seems content to let the show play itself out. He does not appear the sort of person to dodge a fight or, for that matter, the national spotlight. He was the US chargé d’affaires in Baghdad when the Iraqi government ordered diplomats to register their nationals, and in effect hand them over as human shields. Wilson turned up to a press briefing with a noose around his neck, telling the Iraqis that not only could they hang him but: “I’ll bring the fucking rope.”

Valerie Wilson looks on smiling from half a dozen photographs arranged around Wilson’s office, looking less like Hollywood’s idea of a spy than Madison Avenue’s ideal of American womanhood: a 40-year-old with a thick bob of blond hair over a tanned face brimming with health as she poses with the couple’s three-year-old twins. He laughs when asked what was it like being married to a real secret agent. They used to live normal Washington lives, he insists, except that no one else, not even her relatives, knew what she really did for a living.

Among the family shots are a telling series of pictures of Wilson at work. There is a shot of him with Saddam Hussein, one with Clinton, and a couple with George Bush the elder, who took a shine to him and gave him his first ambassadorship. One of them shows Wilson and Bush walking through the White House grounds deep in conversation, 30 hours before the launch of the first Gulf war.

“He was asking what the Iraqis were like, what they were going through, what the country was like. He was asking all the questions you would want a leader to ask,” Wilson recalls. The unspoken comparison is with the less reflective George Junior, but Wilson is proud of his photos because he believes they rebut Republican taunts that he is a Democratic stooge. He did, he admits, contribute money to the Gore-Lieberman campaign in 2000, but adds that he also sent a contribution to the Bush-Cheney headquarters early in the Republican primaries.

He is walking out into the street when he makes the quip about his epitaph. His wife will probably stay at the agency, he believes, but move to less exciting work. They will still go out at night, but will have to fend off more questions. “She was happy to talk about what she does raising twin children, but I think she declined to talk about what score she got firing her AK-47,” he says archly, before a flash of regret crosses his face. “I’m sorry for what they did to her and if there was something I could do to restore her anonymity, I would do it in a New York minute.”

It is the lament of a secret agent’s husband, who knows his wife will never again be able to hide in the shadows.

(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.)

Bush: No Proof Of Saddam Role In 9/11
By Terence Hunt
The Associated Press

Wednesday 17 September 2003

WASHINGTON - President Bush said Wednesday there was no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved in the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, disputing an impression that critics say the administration tried to foster to justify the war against Iraq.
“There’s no question that Saddam Hussein had al-Qaida ties,” the president said. But he also said, “We’ve had no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with September the 11th.”

The president’s comment was the administration’s firmest assertion that there is no proven link between Saddam and Sept. 11. It came after Vice President Dick Cheney (news - web sites) on Sunday clouded the issue by saying, “It’s not surprising people make that connection” between Saddam and the attacks.

Cheney, on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” also repeated an allegation, doubted by many in the intelligence community, that Mohamed Atta, the lead Sept. 11 attacker, met with a senior Iraqi intelligence official in Prague five months before Sept. 11.

“We’ve never been able to develop any more of that yet, either in terms of confirming it or discrediting it,” Cheney said Sunday. However, other U.S. authorities have said information gathered on Atta’s movement show he was on the U.S. East Coast when that meeting supposedly took place.

Critics of the Bush administration have pointed to statements like Cheney’s as evidence that the administration was exaggerating al-Qaida’s prewar links with Saddam to help justify the U.S.-led war against Iraq.

A recent poll indicated that nearly 70 percent of Americans believed the Iraqi leader probably was personally involved. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Tuesday, “I’ve not seen any indication that would lead me to believe that I could say that.”

The administration has argued that Saddam’s government had close links to al-Qaida, the terrorist network led by Osama bin Laden (news - web sites) that masterminded the Sept. 11 attacks.

On Sunday, for example, Cheney said that success in stabilizing and democratizing Iraq would strike a major blow at the “the geographic base of the terrorists who have had us under assault for many years, but most especially on 9-11.”

Bush himself has taken to referring to Iraq as the central front in the war against terror.

And Tuesday, in an interview on ABC’s “Nightline,” White House national security adviser Condoleezza Rice (news - web sites) said that one of the reasons Bush went to war against Saddam was because he posed a threat in “a region from which the 9-11 threat emerged.”

Cheney on Sunday was asked whether he was surprised that more than two-thirds of Americans in a Washington Post poll would express a belief that Iraq was behind the attacks.

“No, I think it’s not surprising that people make that connection,” he replied.

Rice, asked about the same poll numbers, said, “We have never claimed that Saddam Hussein had either direction or control of 9-11.”

Bush said there was no attempt by the administration to try to confuse people about any link between Saddam and Sept. 11.

“No, we’ve had no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with September the 11th,” Bush said. “What the vice president said was is that he (Saddam) has been involved with al-Qaida.

“And al-Zarqawi, al-Qaida operative, was in Baghdad. He’s the guy that ordered the killing of a U.S. diplomat. … There’s no question that Saddam Hussein had al-Qaida ties.”

Most of the administration’s public assertions have focused on the man Bush mentioned, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a senior bin Laden associate who officials have accused of trying to train terrorists in the use of poison for possible attacks in Europe, running a terrorist haven in northern Iraq, an area outside Saddam’s control before the war, and organizing an attack that killed an American aid executive in Jordan last year.

(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.)

9/11 Keane Commission - Attacks Could Have Prevented
CBS News
December 17th, 2003

For the first time, the chairman of the independent commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks is saying publicly that 9/11 could have and should have been prevented, reports CBS News Correspondent Randall Pinkston.
“This is a very, very important part of history and we’ve got to tell it right,” said Thomas Kean.

“As you read the report, you’re going to have a pretty clear idea what wasn’t done and what should have been done,” he said. “This was not something that had to happen.”

Appointed by the Bush administration, Kean, a former Republican governor of New Jersey, is now pointing fingers inside the administration and laying blame.

“There are people that, if I was doing the job, would certainly not be in the position they were in at that time because they failed. They simply failed,” Kean said.

To find out who failed and why, the commission has navigated a political landmine, threatening a subpoena to gain access to the president’s top-secret daily briefs. Those documents may shed light on one of the most controversial assertions of the Bush administration - that there was never any thought given to the idea that terrorists might fly an airplane into a building.

“I don’t think anybody could have predicted that they would try to use an airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as a missile,” said national security adviser Condoleeza Rice on May 16, 2002.

“How is it possible we have a national security advisor coming out and saying we had no idea they could use planes as weapons when we had FBI records from 1991 stating that this is a possibility,” said Kristen Breitweiser, one of four New Jersey widows who lobbied Congress and the president to appoint the commission.

The widows want to know why various government agencies didn’t connect the dots before Sept. 11, such as warnings from FBI offices in Minnesota and Arizona about suspicious student pilots.

“If you were to tell me that two years after the murder of my husband that we wouldn’t have one question answered, I wouldn’t believe it,” Breitweiser said.

Kean admits the commission also has more questions than answers.

Asked whether we should at least know if people sitting in the decision-making spots on that critical day are still in those positions, Kean said, “Yes, the answer is yes. And we will.”

Kean promises major revelations in public testimony beginning next month from top officials in the FBI, CIA, Defense Department, National Security Agency and, maybe, President Bush and former President Clinton.

(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.)

Remember ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’?
For Bush, They Are a Nonissue
By Richard W. Stevenson
The New York Times

Wednesday 17 December 2003

In the debate over the necessity for the war in Iraq, few issues have been more contentious than whether Saddam Hussein possessed arsenals of banned weapons, as the Bush administration repeatedly said, or instead was pursuing weapons programs that might one day constitute a threat.
On Tuesday, with Mr. Hussein in American custody and polls showing support for the White House’s Iraq policy rebounding, Mr. Bush suggested that he no longer saw much distinction between the possibilities.

“So what’s the difference?” he responded at one point as he was pressed on the topic during an interview by Diane Sawyer of ABC News.

To critics of the war, there is a big difference. They say that the administration’s statements that Iraq had chemical and biological weapons that it could use on the battlefield or turn over to terrorists added an urgency to the case for immediate military action that would have been lacking if Mr. Hussein were portrayed as just developing the banned weapons.

“This was a pre-emptive war, and the rationale was that there was an imminent threat,” said Senator Bob Graham of Florida, a Democrat who has said that by elevating Iraq to the most dangerous menace facing the United States, the administration unwisely diverted resources from fighting Al Qaeda and other terrorists.

The overwhelming vote in Congress last year to authorize the use of force against Iraq would have been closer “but for the fact that the president had so explicitly said that there were weapons of mass destruction that posed an imminent threat to citizens of the United States,” Mr. Graham said in an interview on Wednesday.

As early as last spring, Mr. Bush suggested that the Iraqis might have dispersed their biological and chemical weapons so widely that they would be extremely difficult to find. And some weapons experts have suggested that Mr. Hussein may have destroyed banned weapons that he had in the early 1990’s but left in place the capacity to produce more.

This week, at a news conference on Monday and in the ABC interview on Tuesday, Mr. Bush’s answers to questions on the subject continued a gradual shift in the way he has addressed the topic, from the immediacy of the threat to an assertion that no matter what, the world is better off without Mr. Hussein in power.

Where once Mr. Bush and his top officials asserted unambiguously that Mr. Hussein had the weapons at the ready, their statements now are often far more couched, reflecting the fact that no weapons have been found, “yet,” as Mr. Bush was quick to interject during the interview.

In the interview, Mr. Bush said removing Mr. Hussein from power was justified even without the recovery of any banned weapons. As he has since his own weapons inspector, David Kay, issued an interim report in October saying he had uncovered extensive evidence of weapons programs in Iraq but no actual weapons, Mr. Bush said the existence of such programs, by violating United Nations Security Council resolutions, provided ample grounds for the war.

“If he were to acquire weapons, he would be the danger,” Mr. Bush continued, referring to Mr. Hussein. “That’s what I’m trying to explain to you. A gathering threat, after 9/11, is a threat that needed to be dealt with, and it was done after 12 long years of the world saying the man’s a danger.”

Pressed to explain the president’s remarks, Scott McClellan, the White House spokesman, said Mr. Bush was not backing away from his assertions about Mr. Hussein’s possession of banned weapons.

“We continue to believe that he had weapons of mass destruction programs and weapons of mass destruction,” Mr. McClellan said on Wednesday.

Mr. Bush has always been careful to have multiple reasons ready for his major policy proposals, and his administration has deployed them deftly to adapt to changing circumstances.

In trying to build public and international support for toppling Mr. Hussein, the administration cited, with different emphasis at different times, the banned weapons, links between the Iraqi leader and terrorist organizations, a desire to liberate the Iraqi people and a policy of bringing democracy to the Middle East.

When it came to describing the weapons program, Mr. Bush never hedged before the war. “If we know Saddam Hussein has dangerous weapons today, and we do, does it make any sense for the world to wait to confront him as he grows even stronger and develops even more dangerous weapons?” Mr. Bush asked during a speech in Cincinnati in October 2002.

In the weeks after the fall of Baghdad in April, the White House was equally explicit. “One of the reasons we went to war was because of their possession of weapons of mass destruction,” Ari Fleischer, then the White House spokesman, told reporters on May 7. “And nothing has changed on that front at all.”

On Wednesday Mr. McClellan, when pressed, only restated the president’s belief that weapons would eventually be found. Mr. Bush, despite being asked repeatedly about the issue in different ways by Ms. Sawyer, never did say it, except to note Mr. Hussein’s past use of chemical weapons. He emphasized Mr. Hussein’s capture instead.

“And if he doesn’t have weapons of mass destruction?” Ms. Sawyer asked the president, according to a transcript provided by ABC.

“Diane, you can keep asking the question,” Mr. Bush replied. “I’m telling you, I made the right decision for America because Saddam Hussein used weapons of mass destruction, invaded Kuwait. But the fact that he is not there is, means America’s a more secure country.”

(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.)

Bush’s Other War
By Sidney Blumenthal
The Guardian

Saturday November 1st, 2003

US Intelligence is Being Scapegoated for Getting it Right on Iraq

In Baghdad, the Bush administration acts as though it is astonished by the postwar carnage. Its feigned shock is a consequence of Washington’s intelligence wars. In fact, not only was it warned of the coming struggle and its nature - ignoring a $5m state department report on The Future of Iraq - but Bush himself signed another document in which that predictive information is contained.
According to the congressional resolution authorising the use of military force in Iraq, the administration is required to submit to the Congress reports of postwar planning every 60 days. The report, bearing Bush’s signature and dated April 14 - previously undisclosed but revealed here - declares: “We are especially concerned that the remnants of the Saddam Hussein regime will continue to use Iraqi civilian populations as a shield for its regular and irregular combat forces or may attack the Iraqi population in an effort to undermine Coalition goals.” Moreover, the report goes on: “Coalition planners have prepared for these contingencies, and have designed the military campaign to minimise civilian casualties and damage to civilian infrastructure.”

Yet, on August 25, as the violence in postwar Iraq flared, the secretary of defence, Donald Rumsfeld, claimed that this possibility was not foreseen: “Now was - did we - was it possible to anticipate that the battles would take place south of Baghdad and that then there would be a collapse up north, and there would be very little killing and capturing of those folks, because they blended into the countryside and they’re still fighting their war?”

“We read their reports,” a senate source told me. “Too bad they don’t read their own reports.”

In advance of the war, Bush (to be precise, Dick Cheney, the de facto prime minister to the distant monarch) viewed the CIA, the state department and other intelligence agencies not simply as uncooperative, but even disloyal, as their analysts continued to sift through information to determine what exactly might be true. For them, this process is at the essence of their professionalism and mission. Yet the strict insistence on the empirical was a threat to the ideological, facts an imminent danger to the doctrine. So those facts had to be suppressed, and those creating contrary evidence had to be marginalised, intimidated or have their reputations tarnished.

Twice, in the run-up to the war, Vice-president Cheney veered his motorcade to the George HW Bush Center for Intelligence in Langley, Virginia, where he personally tried to coerce CIA desk-level analysts to fit their work to specification.

If the CIA would not serve, it would be trampled. At the Pentagon, Rumsfeld formed the Office of Special Plans, a parallel counter-CIA under the direction of the neoconservative deputy secretary of defence, Paul Wolfowitz, to “stovepipe” its own version of intelligence directly to the White House. Its reports were not to be mingled or shared with the CIA or state department intelligence for fear of corruption by scepticism. Instead, the Pentagon’s handpicked future leader of Iraq, Ahmed Chalabi of the Iraqi National Congress, replaced the CIA as the reliable source of information, little of which turned out to be true - though his deceit was consistent with his record. Chalabi was regarded at the CIA as a mountebank after he had lured the agency to support his “invasion” of Iraq in 1995, a tragicomic episode, but one which hardly discouraged his neoconservative sponsors.

Early last year, before Hans Blix, chief of the UN team to monitor Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, embarked on his mission, Wolfowitz ordered a report from the CIA to show that Blix had been soft on Iraq in the past and thus to undermine him before he even began his work. When the CIA reached an opposite conclusion, Wolfowitz was described by a former state department official in the Washington Post as having “hit the ceiling”. Then, according to former assistant secretary of state James Rubin, when Blix met with Cheney at the White House, the vice-president told him what would happen if his efforts on WMDs did not support Bush policy: “We will not hesitate to discredit you.” Blix’s brush with Cheney was no different from the administration’s treatment of the CIA.

Having already decided upon its course in Iraq, the Bush administration demanded the fabrication of evidence to fit into an imminent threat. Then, fulfilling the driven logic of the Bush doctrine, preemptive action could be taken. Policy a priori dictated intelligence á la carte.

In Bush’s Washington, politics is the extension of war by other means. Rather than seeking to reform any abuse of intelligence, the Bush administration, through the Republican-dominated senate intelligence committee, is producing a report that will accuse the CIA of giving faulty information.

While the CIA is being cast as a scapegoat, FBI agents are meanwhile interviewing senior officials about a potential criminal conspiracy behind the public identification of a covert CIA operative - who, not coincidentally, happens to be the wife of the former US ambassador Joseph Wilson, author of the report on the false Niger yellowcake uranium claims (originating in the Cheney’s office). Wilson’s irrefutable documentation was carefully shelved at the time in order to put 16 false words about Saddam Hussein’s nuclear threat in the mouth of George Bush in his state of the union address.

When it comes to responsibility for the degradation of intelligence in developing rationales for the war, Bush is energetically trying not to get the bottom of anything. While he has asserted the White House is cooperating with the investigation into the felony of outing Mrs Wilson, his spokesman has assiduously drawn a fine line between the legal and the political. After all, though Karl Rove - the president’s political strategist and senior adviser, indispensable to his re election campaign - unquestionably called a journalist to prod him that Mrs. Wilson was “fair game”, his summoning of the furies upon her apparently occurred after her name was already put into the public arena by two other unnamed “senior administration officials”.

Rove is not considered to have committed a firing offence so long as he has merely behaved unethically. What Bush is not doing - not demanding that his staff sign affidavits swearing their innocence, or asking his vice-president point-blank what he knows - is glaringly obvious. Damaging national security must be secondary to political necessity.

“It’s important to recognise,” Wilson remarked to me, “that the person who decided to make a political point or that his political agenda was more important than a national security asset is still there in place. I’m appalled at the apparent nonchalance shown by the president.”

Now, postwar, the intelligence wars, if anything, have got more intense. Blame shifting by the administration is the order of the day. The Republican senate intelligence committee report will point the finger at the CIA, but circumspectly not review how Bush used intelligence. The Democrats, in the senate minority, forced to act like a fringe group, held unofficial hearings this week with prominent former CIA agents: rock-ribbed Republicans who all voted for and even contributed money to Bush, but expressed their amazed anger at the assault being waged on the permanent national security apparatus by the Republican president whose father’s name adorns the building where they worked. One of them compressed his disillusionment into the single most resonant word an intelligence agent can muster: “betrayal”.

(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.)

Intelligence War is Trouble for Bush
By Joe Conason
The New York Observer

Wednesday 29 October 2003

As reality intrudes upon the myth-laden arguments for war in Iraq, a strange proxy war has erupted between the White House and Washington’s intelligence community. That conflict could determine the outcome of next year’s Presidential election and the future security of the United States.
The latest salvo landed on Sunday, Oct. 26, when the administration suffered a front-page humiliation in The Washington Post.

Citing internal records and interviews with members of the Iraq Survey Group, the special C.I.A.-led team of military experts dispatched to find Saddam Hussein’s forbidden weapons, The Post’s Barton Gellman reported that investigators have reached a devastating conclusion: “Although Hussein did not relinquish his nuclear ambitions or technical records??? it is now clear he had no active program to build a weapon, produce its key materials or obtain the technology he needed for either.”

Moreover, added Mr. Gellman, it is now also clear that “Iraq’s nuclear weapons scientists did no significant arms-related work after 1991, that facilities with suspicious new construction proved benign, and that equipment of potential use to a nuclear program remained under seal or in civilian industrial use.”

The Post report also reveals that those famous Iraqi aluminum tubes, emphasized by Colin Powell during his war speech at the U.N. Security Council, could never have been used in a uranium-enrichment centrifuge. Australian Brigadier General Stephen D. Meekin, a top defense-intelligence official who commands the largest unit in the Iraq Study Group, told Mr. Gellman that the tubes were “innocuous” items of no use in building nuclear bombs. He speculated that since the war’s end, most of them had likely been sold as “drain pipes.”

In short, despite all the ominous blather about “mushroom clouds” emanating from the highest ranks of the U.S. government, this administration’s own investigators have established that the Iraqi nuclear program was dismantled after the first Gulf War — just as the United Nations inspectors and the Iraqis themselves insisted last December.

As significant as the facts adduced in the Sunday Post article was its sourcing: The intelligence agents in the Iraq Study Group don’t appear to be following the lead of their boss, David Kay, who has vainly sought to bolster the White House position. The investigators who spoke with Mr. Gellman and leaked documents to him seem to be doing their best to undermine the administration.

If so, they are only responding in kind to attacks on their agency from the White House, which would like to hang the intelligence fiasco on the C.I.A. Shifting blame to the intelligence services also seems to be the objective of Senator Pat Roberts, the Kansas Republican who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee. On Oct. 24, Mr. Roberts said his committee’s investigation had found that “the executive was ill-served by the intelligence community.”

The following day, three former C.I.A. officers shot back on behalf of their colleagues during a public hearing and press conference called by the Senate Democratic leadership. What Vincent Cannistraro, Larry Johnson and Jim Marcinowski said got little attention from the mainstream media. They described an ongoing clandestine war between the intelligence services and the Bush administration over Iraq.

As explained by Mr. Cannistraro, who served as the C.I.A.’s counterterrorism chief, “We had a pattern of pressure directed at C.I.A. analysts for a long period of time, beginning almost immediately after Sept. 11??? The pressure was directed at providing supporting data for the belief that Saddam Hussein was, one, linked to global terrorism and, two, was a clear danger not only to his neighbors but to the United States of America.”

That pressure came directly from Vice President Dick Cheney and his chief of staff, Lewis (Scooter) Libby, during repeated visits to C.I.A. headquarters in Langley, Va.

The Beltway warfare escalated dramatically when former Ambassador Joseph Wilson exposed the hollowness of the administration’s claims about Iraqi attempts to buy uranium “yellowcake” from Niger — and persons unknown responded last July by outing his wife, Valerie Plame, as a C.I.A. officer.

Still angry, Mr. Cannistraro told the Senators that the unknown administration officials who committed that “dirty trick” did so not only to “undermine and trash Ambassador Wilson, but to demonstrate their contempt for C.I.A. by bringing Valerie’s name into it.”

Mr. Johnson expressed the bitterness felt by many in the intelligence community toward this President, whose father’s name adorns their Langley headquarters. “We’re all Republicans. We all voted for Bush. And we all contributed funds to him,” he said. But after the assault on the Wilsons and the C.I.A., he believes “there are some bullies in this administration, and the essence of being a bully is being a coward. And I expect President Bush — having voted for him, I expected something different from him.”

All those disappointed patriots know much more than they have yet disclosed. But then, the election year has yet to begin.

(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.)