 |
| Volume XI,
Summer 2004, Number 2 |
| |
| Drinking the
Kool-Aid |
| |
| W. Patrick
Lang |
| |
Col. Lang is president of
Global Resources, Inc. and former defense intelligence
officer at the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). For a
printable pdf version of this article, click here.
Throughout
my long service life in the Department of Defense, first
as an army officer and then as a member of the Defense
Intelligence Senior Executive Service, there was a
phrase in common usage: "I will fall on my sword over
that." It meant that the speaker had reached a point of
internal commitment with regard to something that his
superiors wanted him to do and that he intended to
refuse even though this would be career suicide. The
speaker preferred career death to the loss of personal
honor.
This phrase is no longer widely in use.
What has taken its place is far more sinister in its
meaning and implications. "I drank the Kool-Aid" is what
is now said. Those old enough to remember the Jonestown
tragedy know this phrase all too well. Jim Jones, a
self-styled "messiah" from the United States, lured
hundreds of innocent and believing followers to Guyana,
where he built a village, isolated from the world, in
which his Utopian view of the universe would be played
out. He controlled all news, regulated all discourse and
expression of opinion, and shaped behavior to his taste.
After a time, his paranoia grew unmanageable and he
"foresaw" that "evil" forces were coming to threaten his
"paradise." He decided that these forces were
unstoppable and that death would be preferable to living
under their control. He called together his followers in
the town square and explained the situation to them.
There were a few survivors, who all said afterward that
within the context of the "group-think" prevailing in
the village, it sounded quite reasonable. Jim Jones then
invited all present to drink from vats of Kool-Aid
containing lethal doses of poison. Nearly all did so,
without physical coercion. Parents gave their children
the poison and then drank it themselves. Finally Jones
drank. Many hundreds died with him.
What does
drinking the Kool-Aid mean today? It signifies that the
person in question has given up personal integrity and
has succumbed to the prevailing group-think that
typifies policymaking today. This person has become
"part of the problem, not part of the
solution."
What was the "problem"? The sincerely
held beliefs of a small group of people who think they
are the "bearers" of a uniquely correct view of the
world, sought to dominate the foreign policy of the
United States in the Bush 43 administration, and
succeeded in doing so through a practice of excluding
all who disagreed with them. Those they could not drive
from government they bullied and undermined until they,
too, had drunk from the vat.
What was the result?
The war in Iraq. It is not anything like over yet, and
the body count is still mounting. As of March 2004,
there were 554 American soldiers dead, several thousand
wounded, and more than 15,000 Iraqis dead (the Pentagon
is not publicizing the number). The recent PBS special
on Frontline concerning Iraq mentioned that senior
military officers had said of General Franks, "He had
drunk the Kool-Aid." Many intelligence officers have
told the author that they too drank the Kool-Aid and as
a result consider themselves to be among the "walking
dead," waiting only for retirement and praying for an
early release that will allow them to go away and try to
forget their dishonor and the damage they have done to
the intelligence services and therefore to the
republic.
What we have now is a highly corrupted
system of intelligence and policymaking, one twisted to
serve specific group goals, ends and beliefs held to the
point of religious faith. Is this different from the
situation in previous administrations? Yes. The
intelligence community (the information collection and
analysis functions, not "James Bond" covert action,
which should properly be in other parts of the
government) is assigned the task of describing reality.
The policy staffs and politicals in the government have
the task of creating a new reality, more to their taste.
Nevertheless, it is "understood" by the government
professionals, as opposed to the zealots, that a certain
restraint must be observed by the policy crowd in
dealing with the intelligence people. Without objective
facts, decisions are based on subjective drivel. Wars
result from such drivel. We are in the midst of one at
present.
The signs of impending disaster were
clear from the beginning of this administration.
Insiders knew it all along. Statements made by the Bush
administration often seem to convey the message that
Iraq only became a focus of attention after the
terrorist attacks on 9/11. The evidence points in
another direction.
Sometime in the spring of
2000, Stephen Hadley, now Condoleeza Rice's deputy at
the National Security Council (NSC), briefed a group of
prominent Republican party policymakers on the
national-security and foreign-policy agenda of a future
George W. Bush administration. Hadley was one of a group
of senior campaign policy advisers to then-Texas
Governor Bush known collectively as "the Vulcans." The
group, in addition to Hadley, included Rice, Paul
Wolfowitz and Richard Perle and had been assembled by
George Shultz and Dick Cheney beginning in late 1998,
when Bush first launched his presidential
bid.
Hadley's briefing shocked a number of the
participants, according to Clifford Kiracofe, a
professor at the Virginia Military Institute, who spoke
to several of them shortly after the meeting. Hadley
announced that the "number-one foreign-policy agenda" of
a Bush administration would be Iraq and the unfinished
business of removing Saddam Hussein from power. Hadley
also made it clear that the Israel-Palestine conflict,
which had dominated the Middle East agenda of the
Clinton administration, would be placed in the deep
freeze.
Dr. Kiracofe's account of the
pre-election obsession of the Vulcans with the ouster of
Saddam Hussein is corroborated by former U.S. Treasury
Secretary Paul O'Neill's memory of the first meetings of
the Bush National Security Council, which he attended in
late January and early February of 2001. Ron Suskind's
book The Price of Loyalty, based on O'Neill's memory and
notes, tells us of an NSC meeting, ten days into the
Bush administration, at which both the Israel-Palestine
and Iraq situations were discussed.
Referring to
President Clinton's efforts to reach a comprehensive
peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians,
President Bush declared, "Clinton overreached, and it
all fell apart. That's why we're in trouble. If the two
sides don't want peace, there's no way we can force
them. I don't see much we can do over there at this
point. I think it's time to pull out of the
situation."
Next, Condoleeza Rice raised the
issue of Iraq and the danger posed by Saddam's arsenal
of weapons of mass destruction. A good deal of the
hour-long meeting was taken up with a briefing by CIA
Director George Tenet on a series of aerial photographs
of sites inside Iraq that "might" be producing WMD.
Tenet admitted that there was no firm intelligence on
what was going on inside those sites, but at the close
of the meeting, President Bush tasked Secretary of
Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Joint Chiefs of Staff
Chairman Hugh Shelton to begin preparing options for the
use of U.S. ground forces in the northern and southern
no-fly zones in Iraq to support an insurgency to bring
down the Saddam regime. As author Ron Suskind summed it
up: "Meeting adjourned. Ten days in, and it was about
Iraq. Rumsfeld had said little, Cheney nothing at all,
though both men clearly had long entertained the idea of
overthrowing Saddam." If this was a decision meeting, it
was strange. It ended in a presidential order to prepare
contingency plans for war in Iraq.
Surely, this
was not the first time these people had considered this
problem. One interesting thing about those at the
meeting is that no one present or in the background had
any substantive knowledge of the Middle East. It is one
thing to have traveled to the area as a senior
government official. It is another to have lived there
and worked with the people of the region for long
periods of time. People with that kind of experience in
the Muslim world are strangely absent from Team Bush. In
the game plan for the Arab and Islamic world, most of
the government's veteran Middle East experts were
largely shut out. The Pentagon civilian bureaucracy of
the Bush administration, dominated by an inner circle of
think-tankers, lawyers and former Senate staffers,
virtually hung out a sign, "Arabic Speakers Need Not
Apply." They effectively purged the process of Americans
who might have inadvertently developed sympathies for
the people of the region.
Instead of including
such veterans in the planning process, the Bush team
opted for amateurs brought in from outside the Executive
Branch who tended to share the views of many of
President Bush's earliest foreign-policy advisors and
mentors. Because of this hiring bias, the American
people got a Middle East planning process dominated by
"insider" discourse among longtime colleagues and old
friends who ate, drank, talked, worked and planned only
with each other. Most of these people already shared
attitudes and concepts of how the Middle East should be
handled. Their continued association only reinforced
their common beliefs. This created an environment in
which any shared belief could become sacrosanct and
unchallengeable. A situation like this is, in essence, a
war waiting for an excuse to happen. If there is no
"imminent threat," one can be invented, not as a matter
of deliberate deception, but rather as an artifact of
group self-delusion. In normal circumstances, there is a
flow of new talent into the government that melds with
the old timers in a process both dynamic and creative.
This does not seem to have happened in the Bush 43
administration. Instead, the newcomers behaved as though
they had seized control of the government in a silent
coup. They tended to behave in such a way that civil
servants were made to feel that somehow they were the
real enemy, barely tolerated and under suspicion. There
seemed to be a general feeling among the newcomers that
professional intelligence people somehow just did not
"get it." To add to the discomfort, the new Bush team
began to do some odd things.
INFORMATION
COLLECTION
Early in the Bush 43 administration,
actions began that clearly reflected a predisposition to
place regime change in Iraq at the top of the
foreign-policy agenda. Sometime in January 2001, the
Iraqi National Congress (INC), the opposition group
headed by Ahmed Chalabi, began receiving U.S. State
Department funds for an effort called the
"Information-Collection Program." Under the Clinton
administration, some money had been given to Iraqi
exiles for what might be called agit-prop activities
against Saddam's government, but the INC (Chalabi) had
not been taken very seriously. They had a bad reputation
for spending money freely with very little to show for
it. The CIA had concluded that Chalabi and his INC
colleagues were not to be trusted with taxpayers' money.
Nevertheless, Chalabi had longstanding ties to a group
of well-established anti-Saddam American activists who
were installed by the Bush administration as leading
figures of the politically appointed civilian
bureaucracy in the Pentagon and in the Office of the
Vice President.
Those ties paid off. The
Information-Collection Program, launched in the early
months of the Bush administration, was aimed at
providing funds to the INC for recruiting defectors from
Saddam's military and secret police, and making them
available to American intelligence. But what the program
really did was to provide a steady stream of raw
information useful in challenging the collective wisdom
of the intelligence community where the "War with Iraq"
enthusiasts disagreed with the intelligence agencies. If
the president and Congress were to be sold the need for
war, information had to be available with which to argue
against what was seen as the lack of imagination and
timidity of regular intelligence analysts. To facilitate
the flow of such "information" to the president, a
dedicated apparatus centered in the Office of the Vice
President created its own intelligence office, buried in
the recesses of the Pentagon, to "stovepipe" raw data to
the White House, to make the case for war on the basis
of the testimony of self-interested émigrés and
exiles.
At the time of the first Gulf War in
1991, I was the defense intelligence officer for the
Middle East in the Defense Intelligence Agency. This
meant that I was in charge of all DIA substantive
business for the region. In discussions at the time of
the victorious end of that campaign and the subsequent
Shia and Kurdish revolts in Iraq, it became abundantly
clear that the same people who later made up the war
party in the Bush 43 administration were not completely
reconciled to the failure of U.S. forces to overthrow
the Saddam regime. In spite of the lack of U.N. sanction
for such an operation and the probable long-term costs
of the inevitable American occupation of Iraq, the group
later known as the neocons seemed deeply embittered by
the lack of decisive action to remove the Iraqi
dictator. Soon after the dust settled on Operation
Desert Storm, the first Bush administration helped
launch the Iraqi National Congress (INC). The INC was
initially an umbrella of anti-Saddam groups largely
composed of Kurdish and Shia organizations. In the
beginning, the CIA provided seed money as a result of
presidential direction, and a private consulting firm,
the Rendon Group, provided the initial public-relations
support. To this day, one of the Rendon advisors to the
INC, Francis Brooke, serves as the INC's chief
Washington lobbyist.
Chalabi's American
connections played a dominant role in the INC's
evolution over the next dozen years. At the University
of Chicago, Chalabi had been a student of Albert
Wohlstetter, a hard-line Utopian nuclear-war planner who
had been the dissertation adviser to another University
of Chicago Ph.D., Paul Wolfowitz. Wohlstetter had also
been a mentor to Richard Perle. In the summer of 1969,
Wohlstetter arranged for both Wolfowitz and Perle to
work for the short-lived Committee to Maintain a Prudent
Defense Policy, a Washington-based group co-founded by
two icons of American Cold War policy, Dean Acheson and
Paul Nitze. Wolfowitz and Perle remained close
collaborators from that time forward.
Chalabi, an
Iraqi Shia Arab, had fled Iraq in 1958, just after the
overthrow of the royal Hashemite government. His father
and grandfather had held cabinet posts in the
British-installed Hashemite regime. Before coming to the
United States to obtain a doctorate, Chalabi lived in
Jordan, Lebanon and Britain. He returned to Beirut after
obtaining his doctorate, but in 1977, he moved to Jordan
and established a new company, the Petra Bank, which
grew into the second largest commercial bank in the
country. Twelve years later, the Jordanian government
took over the bank and charged Chalabi, who fled the
country, with embezzling $70 million. In 1992, Chalabi
was tried and convicted in absentia and sentenced to 22
years at hard labor. One of the persistent stories
concerning this scandal is that Chalabi's Petra Bank was
involved in arms sales to Iran during the Iran-Iraq War,
and that Saddam Hussein discovered this and pressured
King Hussein of Jordan to crack down on
Chalabi.
Shortly after his hasty departure from
Jordan, Chalabi, with the backing of his neocon allies
in Washington, most notably, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard
Perle and Professor Bernard Lewis of Princeton, helped
launch the INC. Chalabi had first been introduced to
Perle and Wolfowitz in 1985 by their mutual mentor,
Albert Wohlstetter. Bernard Lewis met Chalabi in 1990
and soon thereafter asked his own allies inside the Bush
41 administration, including Wolfowitz's Pentagon aide
Zalmay Khalilzad, to help boost the Iraqi exile. Another
future Bush 43 Iraq War player also met Chalabi about
that time. General Wayne Downing was first introduced to
Chalabi in 1991, when Downing commanded the Joint
Special Operations Command (JSOC) at Fort Bragg, North
Carolina.
In November 1993, Chalabi presented the
newly inaugurated Clinton administration with a scheme
for the overthrow of the Saddam Hussein regime. Dubbed
"End Game," the plan envisioned a limited revolt by an
insurgent force of INC-led Kurds and Shiites in the oil
regions around Basra in the south and Mosul and Kirkuk
in the north. The "End Game" scenario: at the first sign
of revolt against Saddam, there would be a full-scale
insurrection by military commanders, who would overthrow
the Saddam clique and install a Washington- and Tel
Aviv-friendly, INC-dominated regime in Baghdad. The plan
was based on a belief that Iraq was ripe for revolt and
that there were no units in the armed forces that would
fight to preserve Saddam's government. Since the same
units had fought to keep Saddam in power during the
Kurdish and Shia revolts of a few years before, it is
difficult to see why the sponsors of End Game would have
thought that. A limited effort to implement End Game
ended in disaster in 1995, when the Iraqis did fight to
defeat the rebels and the Iraqi Army killed over 100 INC
combatants. From that point on, both the CIA and DIA
considered Chalabi "persona non grata." The CIA also
dropped all financial backing for Chalabi, as the INC,
once an umbrella group of various opposition forces,
degenerated into little more than a cult of personality,
gathered together in London, where Chalabi and his small
group of remaining INC loyalists retreated.
In
spite of this, neoconservatives inside the United
States, largely in exile during the Clinton
administration, succeeded in influencing the Congress
enough to obtain passage of the "Iraq Liberation Act of
1998," largely to revive Chalabi's End Game scheme. Now
retired, Gen. Downing, along with retired CIA officer
Duane "Dewey" Clarridge of Iran-contra fame, became
military "consultants" to Chalabi's INC and then drafted
their own updated version of the Chalabi plan, now
dubbed "the Downing Plan." It was different in name
only. The Downing-Clarridge plan insisted that a "crack
force" of no more than 5,000 INC troops, backed by a
group of former U.S. Army Special Forces soldiers (Green
Berets), could bring down the Iraq Army. "The idea from
the beginning was to encourage defections of Iraqi
units," Clarridge insisted to The Washington Post. "You
need to create a nucleus, something for people to defect
to. If they could take Basra, it would be all over." It
is difficult to understand how a retired four-star army
general could believe this to be true.
In
subsequent congressional testimony, then-Central Command
head General Anthony Zinni (USMC) denounced the Downing
scheme in no uncertain terms, warning that it would lead
to a "Bay of Goats," adding that, by his most recent
counts, there were 91 Iraqi opposition groups. None of
them had "the viability to overthrow Saddam." Elsewhere
he mocked Chalabi and the INC as "some silk-suited,
Rolex-wearing guys in London." Despite CIA and uniformed
military repudiation of End Game, the Downing Plan and
other variations on the same theme, the neoconservative
group continued to crank out advocacy for Chalabi's
proposed revolution.
On February 19, 1998, a
group of neocons calling themselves the Committee for
Peace and Security in the Gulf issued an "Open Letter to
the President" (this was before the passage of the Iraq
Liberation Act) calling for the implementation of yet
another revised plan for the overthrow of Saddam. The
letter was remarkable in that it adopted some of the
very formulations that would later be used by Vice
President Cheney and other current administration
officials to justify the preventive war in Iraq that
commenced on March 20, 2003. The letter stated,
Despite his defeat in the Gulf War,
continuing sanctions, and the determined effort of
U.N. inspectors to root out and destroy his weapons of
mass destruction, Saddam Hussein has been able to
develop biological and chemical munitions . . . . This
poses a danger to our friends, our allies, and to our
nation. Equally striking were the
recommendations in the letter. Chapter and verse, the
document called for the implementation of the Downing
Plan with a few added wrinkles. After demanding that the
Clinton administration recognize a "provisional
government of Iraq based on the principles and leaders
of the Iraqi National Congress (INC)," the letter called
for the creation of INC-controlled "liberated zones" in
the north and south of the country; the lifting of
sanctions in those areas and the release of billions of
dollars of frozen Iraqi government funds to the INC; the
launching of a "systematic air campaign" against the
Republican Guard divisions and the military-industrial
infrastructure of Iraq; and the prepositioning of U.S.
ground-force equipment "so that, as a last resort, we
have the capacity to protect and assist the anti-Saddam
forces in the northern and southern parts of Iraq."
The letter was co-authored by former Congressman
Stephen Solarz (D-NY) and Richard Perle. The signers
included some people merely sympathetic to the cause of
Iraqi freedom and a pantheon of Beltway neocons, many of
whom would form the core of the Bush administration's
national security apparatus: Elliot Abrams, Richard
Armitage, John Bolton, Stephen Bryen, Douglas Feith,
Frank Gaffney, Fred Ikle, Robert Kagan, Zalmay
Khalilzad, William Kristol, Michael Ledeen, Bernard
Lewis, Peter Rodman, Donald Rumsfeld, Gary Schmitt, Max
Singer, Casper Weinberger, Paul Wolfowitz, David Wurmser
and Dov Zakheim. Some of these gentlemen may have had
cause to reconsider their generosity in signing this
document. This was in February 1998. A month after the
release of the letter, Paul Wolfowitz and Gen. Wayne
Downing briefed a group of U.S. senators on the INC war
scheme. The senators at the meeting may also have cause
to regret their subsequent sponsorship of the Iraq
Liberation Act. This law clearly set the stage for
renewed fighting in the Middle East in
2003.
THE BUSH-CHENEY "CLEAN BREAK"
A
core group of neoconservatives, including Vulcans Paul
Wolfowitz and Richard Perle, came into the Bush
administration fully committed to the overthrow of the
Saddam Hussein regime in Baghdad as the number-one
foreign-policy priority for the United States, but they
found it necessary to spend much of the first nine
months in bureaucratic combat with the State Department,
the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the CIA, all of whom
remained unconvinced that Saddam posed any serious
threat to American strategic interests. At the first NSC
meeting of the new administration, Colin Powell argued
that the existing sanctions regime against Iraq was
ineffective, and he promoted the idea of a change to
"smart sanctions." These would zero in on vital military
technologies that might enable Saddam to rebuild his
military machine, which had been devastated by Desert
Storm, a decade of sanctions, no-fly-zone bombing
sorties, six years of U.N. inspections, and the 1998
Operation Desert Fox 70-hour bombing
campaign.
Arguments like this were hard to deal
with for those completely convinced of the necessity of
a new government in Baghdad. But Colin Powell cast a
mighty shadow on the American political scene, and his
military credentials were formidable. If there had not
been a cataclysmic event that tipped the balance, it is
possible that the war party would never have won the
struggle to have their point of view accepted as policy.
It was the attacks on New York and Washington on
September 11, 2001, that provided the neocons with the
opportunity to turn dreams into reality. In a
war-cabinet meeting at the presidential retreat at Camp
David four days after the 9/11 attacks, Deputy Defense
Secretary Paul Wolfowitz made an appeal for an immediate
American military invasion of Iraq in retaliation for
the terrorist attacks. Wolfowitz argued that attacking
Afghanistan would be uncertain. He worried about 100,000
American troops getting bogged down in mountain fighting
in Afghanistan indefinitely. In contrast, he said, Iraq
was a brittle, oppressive regime that might break
easily. He said that Iraq was "doable." He estimated
that there was a 10-50 percent chance Saddam was
involved in the September 11 terrorist attacks (this, of
course, is a judgment that he was not involved). The
United States "would have to go after Saddam at some
time if the war on terrorism was to be taken seriously."
Wolfowitz's pitch for war against Iraq, rather than
against the Afghan strongholds of Osama Bin Laden's
al-Qaeda, was rejected at the Camp David session, and
two days later, on September 17, President Bush signed a
two-and-a-half page directive marked "Top Secret," which
spelled out the plan to go to war against Afghanistan.
The document also ordered the Pentagon to begin
preparing military options for an invasion of
Iraq.
Instantly, the neocon apparatus inside the
Pentagon and in the office of Vice President Dick Cheney
seized upon the opportunity represented by the
authorization. On September 19, 2001, the Defense Policy
Board (DPB) convened a closed-door meeting to discuss
Iraq. Vulcan Richard Perle chaired the DPB. In the past,
the board had been recruited from defense experts from
both parties and with a broad range of views. In
contrast, Perle's DPB had become a neocon sanctuary,
including such leading advocates of war on Saddam as
former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich (R-GA), former
CIA Director James R. Woolsey (a Democrat, but
nevertheless a longstanding member of the neocon group),
former arms control adviser Ken Adelman, former
Undersecretary of Defense Fred C. Ikle, and former Vice
President Dan Quayle. Wolfowitz and Defense Secretary
Donald Rumsfeld attended the September 19 session. The
speakers at the event, who aggressively advocated U.S.
military action to overthrow Saddam Hussein, were Ahmed
Chalabi and Princeton professor Bernard
Lewis.
One consequence of the DPB meeting was
that former CIA Director Woolsey was secretly dispatched
by Wolfowitz to London to seek out evidence that Saddam
Hussein was behind the 9/11 attacks and the earlier 1993
attack on the World Trade Center. Part of Woolsey's
mission involved making contact with INC officials to
get their help in further substantiating the link
between hijacker Mohammed Atta and Iraqi intelligence.
This theory was the brainchild of Laurie Mylroie, a
scholar completely "in tune" with neocon thinking.
According to news accounts at the time, Woolsey's
actions drew the attention of police officials in Wales,
who contacted the U.S. embassy to confirm that Woolsey
was on "official U.S. government business," as he
claimed. It was only then that Secretary of State Colin
Powell and CIA Director Tenet found out about Woolsey's
mission.
By October 2001, Undersecretary of
Defense for Policy Douglas Feith had established a
two-man intelligence cell inside his office with the job
of combing the intelligence community's classified files
to establish a pattern of evidence linking Saddam
Hussein to al-Qaeda and the 9/11 attacks. The permanent,
statutory agencies of the national intelligence
community could not support such beliefs on the basis of
what they saw in their own files. Therefore, some other
means was sought to obtain the conclusion that the Iraqi
government had been involved in 9/11. The team's mission
was to cull the massive holdings of the intelligence
database and to uncover intelligence reports accumulated
on the subject of Iraq-al-Qaeda links. The issue of
whether or not the intelligence agencies considered
these reports to be true was thought immaterial. Not
surprisingly, some of the sweetest cherries picked in
the data searches came from informants provided by the
INC's "Information Collection Program." The team in
Feith's office was later more formally constituted as
the "Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group."
This kind of single-minded intensity in pursuing
his goals was nothing new for Feith. In July 1996, he
had been a principal author of a study prepared for
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. This paper
advocated abrogation of the Oslo accords and the launch
of a new regional balance-of-power scheme based on
American-Israeli military dominance with a subsidiary
military role for Turkey and Jordan. The study was
produced by the "Institute for Advanced Strategic and
Political Studies" (IASPS), a Jerusalem-based
Likud-party-linked think tank, and was called "A Clean
Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm." In it,
Feith and company wrote, "Israel can shape its strategic
environment, in cooperation with Turkey and Jordan, by
weakening, containing and even rolling back Syria. This
effort can focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power
in Iraq -- an important Israeli strategic objective in
its own right -- as a means of foiling Syria's regional
ambitions." The study-group leader was Richard Perle.
Other members of the team included Charles Fairbanks
Jr., a longtime friend of Paul Wolfowitz since their
student days together at the University of Chicago; and
David Wurmser, an American Enterprise Institute Middle
East fellow, and his wife, Meyrav Wurmser, who headed
the Washington, DC office of the Middle East Media
Research Institute (MEMRI). Her boss in that group was a
retired Israeli intelligence officer, Yigal Carmon. On
July 8, 1996, Richard Perle presented the "Clean Break"
document to Netanyahu, who was visiting Washington. Two
days later, the Israeli prime minister unveiled the
document as his own regional foreign-policy design in a
speech before a joint session of the U.S. Congress.
The initial team selected by Feith to conduct
the cherry picking data search in the Pentagon,
consisted of "Clean Break" co-author David Wurmser and
Michael Maloof. Maloof was a career Pentagon bureaucrat
who had joined forces with Perle during the Reagan
years, when Perle was a Pentagon official. At that time
Maloof was a deputy to Stephen Bryen. The existence of
the Wurmser-Maloof unit was kept a secret within the
Pentagon for more than a year. Only on October 24, 2002,
did Defense Secretary Rumsfeld formally announce that he
had commissioned what The Washington Post called "a
small team of defense officials outside regular
intelligence channels to focus on unearthing details
about Iraqi ties with al-Qaeda and other terrorist
networks." The unveiling of the "Policy Counterterrorism
Evaluations Group," as Pentagon officials dubbed it,
coincided with a move by Rumsfeld to directly take over
the financing and management of the INC's "Information
Collection Project" from the State Department, which had
developed serious reservations about maintaining an "off
the reservation" intelligence operation.
Rumsfeld
defensively told the Pentagon press corps on October 24,
2002, "Any suggestion that it's an
intelligence-gathering activity or an intelligence unit
of some sort, I think would be a misunderstanding of
it." But former CIA case officer and AEI fellow Reuel
Marc Gerecht, a relatively late recruit to the neocon
cause, could barely conceal his enthusiasm in discussing
the group: "The Pentagon is setting up the capability to
assess information on Iraq in areas that in the past
might have been the realm of the agency (CIA). They
don't think the product they receive from the agency is
always what it should be." Gerecht was then consulting
with the Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group. In
September 2001, the State Department inspector general
issued a scathing audit of the INC, charging that the
group had failed to account for how it was spending its
U.S. government cash. "The Information Collection
Project" was singled out as one of the particular
problem cases. According to the audit, there was no
accounting for how informants were paid or what benefit
had been derived from their work. As a result of the
audit, the State Department placed severe restrictions
on the INC, suspended some payouts, and insisted that an
outside auditor co-sign for all funds drawn by the
group.
It was not until June 2002 that the State
Department loosened the restrictions on the INC's cash
flows. By then, the drive for a war against Iraq was in
high gear inside the Pentagon civilian bureaucracy, and
Feith and company (as opposed to the State Department)
sought direct control over the INC, particularly the
informant program.
NO SADDAM-AL-QAEDA
TIES
The overwhelming view within the
professional U.S. intelligence community was (and is)
that there was no Saddam Hussein link to the 9/11
terrorists. Admiral Bob Inman, who served in both
Democratic and Republican administrations as head of the
Office of Naval Intelligence, Director of the National
Security Agency and Deputy Director of the CIA, bluntly
stated,
There was no tie between Iraq and 9/11,
even though some people tried to postulate one . . . .
Iraq did support terror in Israel, but I know of no
instance in which Iraq funded direct, deliberate
terrorist attacks on the United
States. Vincent Cannistraro, who headed the
CIA's counterterrorism office before his retirement in
1990, maintains close ties to the intelligence community
to this day. He debunks the Saddam-9/11 claims:
The policymakers already had conceits they
had adopted without reference to current intelligence
estimates. And those conceits were: Saddam was evil, a
bad man, he had evil intentions, and they were greatly
influenced by neoconservative beliefs that Saddam had
been involved with the sponsorship of terrorism in the
United States since as early as 1993, with the first
World Trade Center bombing. . . . None of this is
true, of course, but these were their conceits, and
they continue in large measure to be the conceits of a
lot of people like Jim Woolsey. This, he
added, is not the view of the intelligence
community:
No, no, no. The FBI did a pretty thorough
investigation of the first World Trade Center bombing,
and while it's true that their policy was to treat
terrorism as a law-enforcement problem, nevertheless,
they understood how the first World Trade Center
bombing was supported . . . and had linkages back to
Osama Bin Laden. He was of course, not indicted . . .
because the FBI until recently believed that you
prosecuted perpetrators, not the sponsors. In any
event they knew there was no Saddam linkage. Laurie
Mylroie promoted a lot of this, and people who came in
[to the Bush Administration], particularly in the
Defense Department -- Wolfowitz and Feith -- were
acolytes, promoting her book, The Study of Revenge,
particularly in the Office of Special Plans, and the
Secretary's Policy Office. In any event, they already
had their preconceived notions….So the intelligence,
and I can speak directly to the CIA part of it, the
intelligence community's assessments were never
considered adequate. The Office of
Special Plans
Some time before the 9/11 attacks,
Vice President Cheney dispatched one of his Middle East
aides, William Luti, over to the Pentagon as deputy
undersecretary of defense for Near East and South Asian
affairs (NESA). Luti, a retired Navy captain, is a
member of the neocon group, recruited by Albert
Wohlstetter. They had met in the early 1990s, when Luti
was part of an executive panel of advisers to the chief
of naval operations.
Parenthetically, I received
what seems to have been an exploratory recruiting visit
from Dr. Wohlstetter and his wife, Roberta. In 1992, the
Wohlstetters unexpectedly arrived at my doorstep at the
Pentagon with the news that a mutual friend, now a
senior personage in the Pentagon, had told them to visit
me. There followed an hour and a half of conversation
involving European and world history, philosophy and a
discussion of the various illustrious people who were
friends and associates of the Wohlstetters. Roberta
Wohlstetter went so far as to show me various books that
they and their friends had written. An unspoken question
seemed to hang in the air. After a while they became
impatient with my responses and left, never to return.
Clearly, I had failed the test. At the time, I only
vaguely knew who these people were and did not really
care, but since they have become so important to this
story, I have inquired of various people who might have
received similar visits and found that this was not
uncommon. An old academic colleague of Wohlstetter has
also told me that the couple had done similar things in
the university setting.
In any case, Luti landed
a job as a military aide to Speaker of the House
Gingrich from 1996 to 1997. There, he worked with Air
Force Col. William Bruner, another active-duty military
officer on loan to the speaker. Still on active duty
when the Bush 43 administration came into office, Luti
worked in the vice president's office as part of a
shadow National Security Council staff, under the
direction of Cheney's chief of staff and chief policy
aide, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby.
Libby was a Yale
Law School protégé of Paul Wolfowitz. Beginning in the
1980s, Libby followed Wolfowitz into the Reagan and Bush
41 administrations. When he was not working for Uncle
Sam or Wolfowitz, Libby was the law partner/protégé of
Richard Nixon's personal attorney, Leonard Garment.
Under his direction, for a period of 16 years, on and
off, Libby was the attorney for fugitive swindler and
Israeli Mossad agent, Marc Rich. In the first Bush
administration, Libby served with Wolfowitz in the
policy office of then-Defense Secretary Cheney, where he
gained some notoriety as one of the principal authors,
along with Wolfowitz and Zalmay Khalilzad, of the draft
1992 "Defense Planning Guidance" that advocated
preventive war and the development of a new arsenal of
mini-nuclear weapons, to be used against Third World
targets thought to be developing WMD arsenals.
Midway through 2001, Luti retired from the Navy
and took a civilian Pentagon post as head of NESA. Under
normal circumstances, NESA is a Pentagon backwater,
responsible primarily for arranging bilateral meetings
with military counterparts from a region stretching
"from Bangladesh to Marakesh." Before the recent war,
the NESA staff worked daily with the defense
intelligence officer for the Near East, South Asia and
Counterterrorism. This was the most senior officer in
DIA for that region and the person responsible for
seeing that NESA was well provided with intelligence
information. During the early Luti period at NESA, the
DIO was Bruce Hardcastle. There were DIOs for each of
the major regions of the world; Hardcastle happened to
be the man for the Middle East. I knew Hardcastle and
respected his work. He had been a middle-level analyst
in DIA when I held the job of DIO for the Middle
East.
Abruptly last year, the Defense Department
dismantled the entire DIO system. It now seems likely
that frictions that developed between Luti and
Hardcastle were a significant factor in this destruction
of a very worthwhile intelligence-analytic system.
Historically, the DIO oversaw all of the regional
analysts and assets of DIA, but reported directly to the
director of the DIA, avoiding bureaucratic and
managerial duties while retaining responsibility for all
analysis within his or her geographical domain. The
roots of the friction between Hardcastle and Luti were
straightforward: Hardcastle brought with him the
combined wisdom of the professional military
intelligence community. The community had serious doubts
about the lethality of the threat from Saddam Hussein,
the terrorism links and the status of the Iraqi WMD
programs. Luti could not accept this. He knew what he
wanted: to bring down Saddam Hussein. Hardcastle could
not accept the very idea of allowing a desired outcome
to shape the results of analysis.
Even before the
Iraq desk at NESA was expanded into the "Office of
Special Plans" in August 2002, Luti had transformed NESA
into a "de facto" arm of the vice president's office.
While the normal chain of command for NESA ran through
Undersecretary for Policy Feith and up to Deputy
Secretary Wolfowitz and Secretary Rumsfeld, Luti made it
clear that his chain of command principally ran directly
up to Scooter Libby, Cheney's chief of staff. We are
lucky enough to have a description of this relationship
from a participant in the business of the office
itself.
Lt. Col. (ret.) Karen Kwiatkowski (USAF),
who served at NESA from June 2002 to March 2003,
provides an interesting perspective. She says she was
"shocked to learn that Luti was effectively working for
Libby . . . . In one of the first staff meetings that I
attended there," she recalled recently, "Bill Luti said,
‘Well, did you get that thing over to Scooter? Scooter
wants this, and somebody's got to get it over to him,
and get that up to him right away.' After the meeting, I
asked one of my co-workers, who'd been there longer,
‘Who is this Scooter?' I was told, `That's Scooter Libby
over at the OVP (Office of the Vice President). He's the
Vice President's chief of staff.' Later I came to
understand that Cheney had put Luti
there."
Kwiatkowski learned that OSP personnel
were participating, along with officials from the DIA
and CIA, in the debriefings of Chalabi-delivered
informants. John Trigilio, a DIA officer assigned to
NESA, confirmed it to her in a heated discussion.
I argued with him (Tregilio) after the
president's Cincinnati speech (in October 2002). I
told him that the president had made a number of
statements that were just not supported by the
intelligence. He said that the president's statements
are supported by intelligence, and he would finally
say, ‘We have sources that you don't have.' I took it
to mean the sources that Chalabi was bringing in for
debriefing. . . . Trigilio told me he participated in
a number of debriefs, conducted in hotels downtown, or
wherever, of people that Chalabi brought in. These
debriefs had Trigilio from OSP, but also CIA and DIA
participated. . . . If it (the information) sounded
good, it would go straight to the OVP or elsewhere. I
don't put it out of possibility that the information
would go straight to the media because of the
(media's) close relationship with some of the
neoconservatives. So this information would make it
straight out into the knowledge base without waiting
for intelligence (analysts) to come by with their
qualifications and reservations. NESA/OSP
apparently carried the cherry-picking methods of the
smaller Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group to a
new level of effectiveness, according to Lt. Col.
Kwiatkowski,
At the OSP, what they were doing was
looking at all the intelligence they could find on
WMD. That was the focal point, picking bits and pieces
that were the most inflammatory, removing any context
that might have been provided in the original
intelligence report, that would have caused you to
have some pause in believing it or reflected doubts
that the intelligence community had, so if the
intelligence community had doubts, those would be left
out. . . . They would take items that had occurred
many years ago, and put them in the present tense,
make it seem like they occurred not many years ago . .
. . But they would not talk about the dates; they
would say things like, ‘He has continued since that
time' and ‘He could do it tomorrow,' which of course,
wasn't true. . . .The other thing they would do would
be to take unrelated events that were reported in
totally unrelated ways and make connections that the
intelligence community had not made. This was
primarily in discussing Iraq's activities and how they
might be related to al-Qaeda or other terrorist groups
that might be against us, or against Israel. . . .
These kinds of links would be made. They would be made
casually, and they would be made in a calculated way
to form an image that is definitely not the image that
anyone reading the original reports would have. The
summaries that we would see from Intelligence did not
match the kinds of things that OSP was putting out. So
that is what I call propaganda development. It goes
beyond the manipulation of intelligence to propaganda
development. A number of people have made
the observation that Lt. Col. Kwiatkowski did not have
sufficient access to have seen what was going on with
intelligence materials. The previous paragraphs would
seem to disprove that idea.
Kwiatkowski also
knows a lot about Luti's efforts to exclude DIO Bruce
Hardcastle from the briefings to foreign military
officials. Luti ordered that Hardcastle was not to be
included in briefings on Iraq, its WMD, and its links to
terrorism. Instead, the Iraq desk of NESA, and later the
Office of Special Plans, would produce "talking points"
which, Luti insisted, were to be the only briefings
provided on Iraq. Kwiatkowski says,
With the talking points, many of the
propagandistic bullets that were given to use in
papers for our superiors to inform them -- internal
propaganda -- many of those same phrases and
assumptions and tones, I saw in Vice President
Cheney's speeches and the president's speeches. So I
got the impression that those talking points were not
just for us, but were the core of an overall agenda
for a disciplined product, beyond the Pentagon. Over
at the vice president's office and the Weekly
Standard, the media, and the neoconservative talking
heads and that kind of thing, all on the same sheet of
music. Lt. Col. Kwiatkowski identified Abram
Shulsky as the principal author of the NESA/OSP talking
points on Iraq. Shulsky was one of the Pentagon's
"defense intellectuals" who had been involved on the
periphery of intelligence work since the late 1970s,
when he first came to Washington as an aide to Sen.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-NY). He also worked for Sen.
Henry "Scoop" Jackson (D-WA.) Shulsky shared a common
background with Paul Wolfowitz. Both men had graduated
from the University of Chicago and had studied under Leo
Strauss. In 1999, Shulsky, along with his fellow Chicago
alumnus and Strauss protégé Gary Schmitt, founder of the
"Project for the New American Century" (PNAC), wrote an
essay entitled, "Leo Strauss and the World of
Intelligence," which attacked American
intelligence-community icon Sherman Kent for failing to
understand that all intelligence work ultimately comes
down to deception and counterdeception. For Shulsky (as
expressed in his article), the goal of intelligence is
to serve the needs of policymakers in making possible
the attainment of policy goals. Intelligence, he wrote,
"was the art of deception." Shulsky seems to have set
out to use the OSP as the means for providing the Bush
administration policymakers all the ammunition they
needed to get their desired results. Interestingly,
neither Shulsky nor the great majority of the people
employed at one time or another by all these ad hoc
intelligence groups were people with any previous
experience of intelligence work. They were former
congressional staffers, scholars and activists of one
kind or another. They were people embarked on a great
adventure in pursuit of a goal, not craftsmen devoted to
their art.
SUBVERTING AND SUBDUING THE
PROFESSIONALS
Supporting the statements of
Kwiatkowski and others about the pipeline of unevaluated
information that flowed straight into the hands of Vice
President Cheney and other key policymakers, there is
extant a June 2002 letter from the INC's Washington
office addressed to the Senate Appropriations Committee
that argues for the transfer of the "Information
Collection Program" from the State Department to the
Defense Intelligence Agency's Defense HUMINT Service (a
service I was instrumental in founding). In a clumsy act
of indiscretion, the letter's author explained that
there was already a direct flow of information from the
INC into the hands of Bill Luti and John Hannah, the
latter being Scooter Libby's deputy in Cheney's
office.
Armed with the INC product, Vice
President Cheney made a series of visits to the CIA
headquarters at Langley to question agency analysts who
were producing assessments that did not match the
material that had been funneled to him through Luti and
Hannah. The vice president also made personal visits to
many members of Congress, to persuade them, in the
autumn of 2002, to grant the president the authority to
go to war with Iraq. One leading Democratic senator says
that Cheney sat in his office and made what now appear
to be greatly exaggerated claims about Saddam's nuclear
weapons program. The fear of Saddam's possessing a
nuclear bomb compelled the senator to vote in favor of
granting the war powers.
Part of the "Saddam bomb
plot" tale came from Khadir Hamza, an Iraqi nuclear
scientist who defected in 1994 and settled in the United
States through the assistance of the INC. Hamza
initially went to work for the Institute for Science and
International Security, a think tank headed by former
U.N. weapons inspector David Albright. According to a
May 12, 2003, New Yorker interview with Albright by
Seymour Hersh, Hamza and his boss drafted a 1998
proposal for a book that would have exposed how Saddam's
quest for a nuclear bomb had "fizzled." There were no
takers. But two years later, Hamza co-authored a very
different book, with Jeff Stein, vastly exaggerating
Saddam's nuclear weapons program. This, despite the fact
that, in 1995, Saddam Hussein's son-in-law, General
Hussein Kamel, who was the head of Iraq's weapons
agency, escaped to Jordan with a large collection of
Iraqi government documents showing how little was left
of Iraqi WMD programs. Kamel was interviewed by a team
of U.N. weapons inspectors headed by Rolf Ekeus,
chairman of the U.N. teams, and he confirmed that the
inspections had, in effect, uprooted most of what was
left of the Iraqi WMD program after the 1991 Gulf War.
It is telling that, in the more than two-year
run-up to the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, nobody in the
Bush administration sought to commission a National
Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Saddam Hussein's WMD
programs. Perhaps it is unsurprising that they did not
want such an estimate. An estimate, if conducted over a
period of months, would undoubtedly have revealed deep
skepticism about the threat posed by Saddam's weapons
program. It would have exposed major gaps in the
intelligence picture, particularly since the pullout of
U.N. weapons inspectors from Iraq at the end of 1998,
and it would have likely undercut the rush to war. It
was only as a result of intense pressure from Sen. Bob
Graham (D-FL.), chairman of the Senate Select Committee
on Intelligence, that the intelligence community was
finally tasked, in September 2002, to produce an NIE on
Saddam's WMD programs. The report was to be rushed to
completion in three weeks, so it could reach the desks
of the relevant congressional committee members before a
vote on war-powers authorization scheduled for early
October, on the eve of the midterm elections. As the NIE
went forward for approval, everyone knew that there were
major problems with it.
The issue of the Niger
yellowcake uranium precursor had been a point of
controversy since late 2001, when the Italian secret
service, SISMI, reported to their American, British and
Israeli counterparts that they had obtained documents on
Niger government letterhead indicating that Iraq had
attempted to purchase 500 tons of yellowcake. The
yellowcake lead had been reported to the vice president
by his CIA daily-briefing officer, and Cheney had tasked
the CIA to dig deeper. Obviously, if the case could be
made that Saddam was aggressively seeking nuclear
material, no one in Congress could justifiably oppose
war. The story proved to be a hoax. In February 2002,
the CIA dispatched former Ambassador Joseph Wilson to
Niger to look into the report. Wilson had served in
several African countries, including Niger, and had also
been the U.S. chargé d'affaires in Baghdad, at the time
of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. He knew all the
players. After several days of meetings in Niger, he
returned to Washington and was debriefed by the CIA. The
yellowcake story simply did not check out. Case closed.
Contrary to Wilson's expectations, variations on
the matter continued to creep into policy speeches by
top administration officials. Although CIA Director
Tenet personally intervened to remove references to the
discredited African uranium story from President Bush's
early October 2002 speech in Cincinnati, Ohio, promoting
the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, bogus yellowcake
information appeared in a December 19, 2002, State
Department "fact sheet" on Saddam's failure to disclose
his secret WMD programs. As we all know, President
Bush's January 2003 State of the Union speech contained
the now infamous 16 words citing British intelligence
claims about Saddam's seeking uranium in Africa.
For Greg Thielmann, who retired in September
2002 from his post as director of the Strategic,
Proliferation and Military Affairs Office at the State
Department's Intelligence Bureau, the issue of the
aluminum tubes was an even more egregious case of
policymakers' contamination of the intelligence process
than the Wilson yellowcake affair. His position is,
What was done with the aluminum tubes was
far worse than what was done with the uranium from
Africa. Because the intelligence community had debated
over a period of months, and involved key scientists
and engineers in the National Laboratories -- and
foreigners as well -- in a long and detailed
discussion. The way I would have characterized it, if
you had asked me in July 2002, when I turned over the
leadership of my office, there was a growing consensus
in the intelligence community that this kind of
aluminum was not suitable for the nuclear weapons
program. So I was really quite shocked to see -- I was
just retired -- the National Intelligence Estimate say
that the majority of agencies came to the opposite
interpretation, that it was going into the nuclear
weapons program. Even with this "majority"
view, Thielmann points out that anyone at the White
House or the National Security Council who was genuinely
seeking the truth would have seen through the subterfuge
and drawn the proper conclusion:
If they had read the NIE in October, it is
transparent that there were different views in the
intelligence community. They could have read, for
example, that the Department of Energy and the State
Department INR believed that the aluminum tubes were
not going into the nuclear weapons program and instead
were going into conventional artillery rockets. And,
if one assumes a modicum of intelligence understanding
at the NSC, they should know that the agency that is
most able to judge on this would be the Department of
Energy. They control all the laboratories that
actually over the years have enriched uranium and
built centrifuges. Thielmann also had an
important observation about the Office of Special Plans
and the other intelligence boutiques that Cheney and
Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz had established inside the
Pentagon's policy shop:
It was a stealth organization. They didn't
play in the intelligence community proceedings that
our office participated in. When the intelligence
community met as a community, there was no OSP
represented in these sessions. Because, if they had
done that, they would have had to subject their views
to peer review. Why do that when you can send stuff
right in to the vice president? THE NIE
CONTAMINATION
Two other major INC-foisted
fabrications made their way into the NIE and from there
into policy speeches by top Bush administration
officials, including the president, the vice president
and the secretaries of Defense and State. The first
involved claims that Iraq had mobile biological-weapons
labs that could produce deadly agents. The declassified
version of the October 2002 NIE stated, "Baghdad has
mobile facilities for producing bacterial and toxin BW
agents; these facilities can evade detection and are
highly survivable. Within three to six months, these
units probably could produce an amount of agent equal to
the total that Iraq produced in the years prior to the
Gulf war." The same claim was a dramatic highlight of
Colin Powell's February 5, 2003, presentation before the
Security Council.
But, a subsequent review of the
intelligence files -- long after the NIE had been
produced -- revealed that the sole source for the
mobile-lab story was an Iraqi military defector, a
major, who had been produced by the INC via the
"Information Collection Program." The CIA and DIA had
both given warnings about the defector, after concluding
that he was a fabricator. But, as CIA Director Tenet
would later admit in a February 2004 speech at
Georgetown University, those warnings fell on deaf ears.
The fabrication judgment was shown to be correct after
the U.S. invasion, when two of the mobile labs were
captured. They were, as other Iraqi sources had claimed,
mobile facilities for producing hydrogen for weather
balloons.
A somewhat different fiasco occurred
on the issue of the equally inflammatory claim that Iraq
had unmanned airborne vehicles (UAVs), outfitted to
deliver biological and chemical weapons. Allegations
about the UAVs surfaced in early September 2002,
prompting both CIA Director Tenet and Vice President
Cheney to visit House and Senate leaders on the day
Congress reconvened after the Labor Day recess to
present their new "smoking gun" argument for war. The
UAV story appeared in President Bush's October 7, 2002,
speech in Cincinnati. It was also featured in Colin
Powell's Security Council presentation four months
later. Powell warned the Council then that "Iraq could
use these small UAVs, which have a wingspan of only a
few meters, to deliver biological agents to its
neighbors or, if transported, to other countries,
including the United States."
Yet the
declassified version of the October 2002 NIE, while
reporting that "Baghdad's UAVs could threaten Iraq's
neighbors, U.S. forces in the Persian Gulf and, if
brought close to or into the United States, the U.S.
homeland," also noted that "the Director, Intelligence,
Surveillance and Reconnaissance, US Air Force, does not
agree that Iraq is developing UAVs primarily intended to
be delivery platforms for chemical and biological
warfare (CBW) agents. The small size of Iraq's new UAV
strongly suggests a primary role of reconnaissance,
although CBW delivery is an inherent capability."
Indeed, the specifications of the Iraqi UAVs, known to
U.S. Air Force Intelligence, proved that they were
ill-suited for CBW dissemination. According to several
news accounts, even the formulation that "CBW delivery
is an inherent capability" was foisted upon the Air
Force during the negotiating sessions over the final
wording of the NIE.
The subversion of the
intelligence process was death by a thousand cuts, a
cumulative process of badgering in which the pipeline of
disinformation from the INC, through OSP, to the desk of
the vice president played a decisive role.
Vincent Cannistraro puts it this way:
Over a long period of time, there was a
subtle process of pressure and intimidation until
people started giving them what was wanted . . . .
When the Senate Intelligence Committee interviewed,
under oath, over 100 analysts, not one of them said,
‘I changed my assessment because of pressure.' . . .
The environment was conditioned in such a way that the
analyst subtly leaned toward the conceits of the
policymakers. . . .The intelligence community was
vulnerable to the aggressiveness of neoconservative
policymakers, particularly at the Pentagon and at the
VP's office. As one analyst said to me, ‘You can't
fight something with nothing, and those people had
something. Whether it was right or wrong, fraudulent
or specious, it almost didn't make any difference,
because the policymakers believed it already, and if
you didn't have hard countervailing evidence to
persuade them, then you were at a loss.' Lt.
Col. Dale Davis (USMC, ret.) concurs that the
intelligence process was badly subverted by a "political
operation." Davis, through March 2004, headed
International Programs at the Virginia Military
Institute. A fluent Arabic speaker, he has served
throughout the Arab world. Davis initially said that he
did not think that the intelligence analysts were
pressured, "per se":
They created an organization that would
give them the answers they wanted. Or at least piece
together a very compelling case by rummaging through
all the various intelligence reports and picking out
the best, the most juicy, but quite often the most
flimsy pieces of information. . . . By creating the
OSP, Cheney was able to say, ‘Hey, look at what we're
getting out of OSP. How come you guys aren't doing as
well? What is your response to what this alternative
analysis that we're receiving from the Pentagon says?'
That's how you do it. You pressure people
indirectly. THE COUNTDOWN
Why on earth didn't [Saddam] let the
inspectors in and avoid the war?
-- Sen. Pat
Roberts, Chairman, Senate Select Committee on
Intelligence, quoted by Paul Krugman in a New York
Times, column February 6, 2004 Sen. Pat
Roberts of Kansas is the Republican chairman of the
Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, which is today
investigating the misuse of intelligence prior to the
Iraq war, the failures of intelligence, the Iraqi
National Congress, and the Office of Special Plans. The
answer to his question is simple: Saddam did let the
inspectors in, at a level of cooperation that was
unprecedented. The question that Senator Roberts should
really be asking is, Why didn't it matter?
It
should have been a dire warning to the U.S. Congress
when the man who had been convicted of lying to Congress
during the Iran-contra affair -- Elliot Abrams -- was
put in charge of the Middle East section of the NSC
staff. One underestimated talent of the neocon group in
the run-up to this war was its ability to manipulate
Congress. They were masters of the game, having made the
team in Washington in the 1970s on the staffs of two of
the most powerful senators in recent decades, New York's
Patrick Moynihan and Washington's Henry "Scoop" Jackson.
The old boy's club -- Abe Shulsky at OSP, Undersecretary
of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, Assistant Secretary of
Defense for Policy Douglas Feith, Middle East Desk
Officer at the NSC Elliot Abrams, Defense Policy Board
Chairman Richard Perle -- had not only worked together
in their early government years in these two Senate
offices, but they had stayed together as a network
through the ensuing decades, floating around a small
number of businesses and think tanks, including the
American Enterprise Institute and the openly
neoimperialist Project for a New American Century. The
neocons were openly contemptuous of Congress, as they
were of the U.N. Security Council. And a number of
tricks and manipulations of the congressional process
have now been exposed. But was the trickery planned? Was
it a well-orchestrated obfuscation, an accident or
coincidence? What is the evidence?
First, there
was the consistent refusal to provide witnesses and
information to the U.S. Senate, especially regarding the
projected costs of the war and the lack of opportunities
to question key players such as General Jay Garner, who
was appointed by the Defense Department to be the first
head of the U.S. provisional authority in Iraq. There
was also the subtle hiding of the objections of the
Department of Energy and the State Department's Bureau
of Intelligence and Research (INR) in the NIE of October
2002. One congressional source explained that the
classified NIE was made available in its entirety to
only a select few members of Congress. There were verbal
briefings and an elaborate process to access the
document in a secure location. But it was never clear
that the 27-page unclassified version that was available
to every office was missing any crucial
information.
There were also false statements to
Congress about providing the U.N. inspectors all the
intelligence that might have helped them locate the
Iraqi WMD and programs. Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan has
accused the administration, and especially CIA Director
Tenet, of withholding information because "the truth" --
that the United States had withheld the locations of 21
high- and middle-priority sites -- might have slowed
down the drive for war. The truth might have convinced
Congress to take action to delay military action until
the inspections were completed.
The March 7,
2003, appearance by the chairmen of UNMOVIC (Hans Blix)
and the IAEA (Mohamed ElBaradei) before the U.N.
Security Council was a disaster for the
neoconservatives. The Iraqis and Saddam Hussein had
"accelerated" cooperation with the United Nations, said
Dr. Blix. Blix told the Council that Iraq had made a
major concession: they had agreed to allow the
destruction of the Al Samoud ballistic missiles. "We are
not watching the breaking of toothpicks," Blix said.
"Lethal weapons are being destroyed. . . . The
destruction undertaken constitutes a substantial measure
of disarmament -- indeed, the first since the middle of
the 1990s."
The Al Samoud, a massive missile
seven meters long weighing two tons with its warhead,
was being destroyed, without the slightest obstruction
or even complaint from the Iraqis. Major Corrine Heraud,
a French woman who served as the chief weapons inspector
for UNMOVIC in this operation and who had also served
from 1996 with UNSCOM, says that the level of
cooperation from the Iraqis was unprecedented, something
that she never would have expected and did not encounter
during the 1996-98 inspections. Each missile cost more
than $1 million, estimates Maj. Heraud, who also
cautions that this would be equivalent to a much higher
amount in Western dollars, considering the difficulty
that Iraq encountered in buying materials and parts, due
to the U.N. sanctions. Yet, to President Bush, the
destruction of the Al Samoud, a missile often mistaken
in photographs for the better-known SCUD missile, was
meaningless. The missile destruction, said Bush, was a
"campaign of deception." For the U.N. inspectors, Bush's
words were a shock. "We didn't know what to make of
this," an UNMOVIC official said.
"Blix came down
hard on the Iraqis, and we actually were in the process
of destroying all these Al Samoud missiles," says Greg
Thielman, the former head of the WMD section of INR. "As
soon as the Iraqis agreed to do that, I sighed a big
sigh of relief. I thought, the U.N. inspectors are
working; we've stared Saddam down; we've forced him to
do what he desperately didn't want to do, in that area
of activity that was of most concern to us." Thielman
believes that the Al Samoud incident shows that the
administration was so intent on war that this compliance
with the inspections "made no difference."
But it
was after the next presentation, by IAEA chairman
Mohammed ElBaradei, that "all hell broke loose" in
Washington. ElBaradei, in his statement, sank the U.S.
intelligence community's prestigious NIE, President
Bush's State of the Union address, and Colin Powell's
February 5 address to the U.N. Security Council with one
blow. ElBaradei was calm in what he had to say: "Based
on thorough analysis, the IAEA has concluded, with the
concurrence of outside experts, that these documents,
which form the basis for reports of recent uranium
transactions between Iraq and Niger are, in fact, not
authentic." The Niger yellowcake documents were
forgeries. Then, ElBaradei told the press that an IAEA
staff member had, in fact, used the common search engine
Google to determine, within hours, that the Niger
documents, which had been passed on to the U.S. embassy
in Rome through an anonymous source, were fakes! Members
of Congress then began to grumble. In light of the
contradictions, a bill was introduced demanding that the
administration disclose the intelligence reports that
were the basis for the statements made by Bush, Cheney,
Rumsfeld and Powell about the Iraqi WMD threat. It was
still locked in committee when the war began.
The
destruction of the Al Samoud missiles continued. It was
not only missiles, reports UNMOVIC chief weapons
inspector Corrine Heroud, it was engines, launchers,
training missiles and missiles still in production that
were destroyed. Heroud, called "the terminator" in her
native France for her expertise in destroying missiles,
described the delicate process of disarming the
missiles, then crushing them over and over till they
"were a pancake" that was then encased in concrete and
buried.
How did the White House respond to these
instances of effective work by the United Nations in
Iraq? In the final weeks of the countdown to war, the
administration's actions resembled nothing so much as
some of the madder scenes from Alice in Wonderland. The
fact that the documents the administration had used to
"prove" that Iraq was working on nuclear weapons were
forged only led to greater insistence that Iraq was a
danger. The absence of discovery of WMD by the U.N.
inspectors was only further evidence that the Iraqis
were the greatest deceivers in history and that they had
succeeded in concealing their location. The destruction
of the Al Samoud missiles was just more evidence of a
"grand deception."
George Tenet has now told us,
on February 5, 2004, exactly one year after he and Colin
Powell drank the Kool-Aid at the U.N. Security Council,
that there was no imminent danger. The administration
spin-doctors immediately responded to this statement by
saying that nobody from the administration ever claimed
there was an "imminent danger."
On March 7, 2003,
Mohammed ElBaradei spoke to the U.N. Security Council in
an open session watched by tens of millions of Americans
and countless congressional and government offices. He
said,
In conclusion, I am able to report today
that, in the area of nuclear weapons -- the most
lethal weapons of mass destruction -- inspections in
Iraq are moving forward. One, there is no indication
of resumed nuclear activities in those buildings that
were identified through the use of satellite imagery
as being reconstructed or newly erected since 1998,
nor any indication of nuclear-related activities at
any inspected sites. Second, there is no indication
that Iraq has attempted to import uranium since 1990.
Third, there is no indication that Iraq has attempted
to import aluminum tubes for use in centrifuge
enrichment. Moreover, even had Iraq pursued such a
plan, it would have encountered practical difficulties
in manufacturing centrifuges out of the aluminum tubes
in question. Fourth, … there is no indication to date
that Iraq imported magnets for use in a centrifuge
enrichment programme.
After three months of
intrusive inspections, we have to date found no
evidence or plausible indication of the revival of a
nuclear weapons programme in Iraq. . . . I should note
that, in the past three weeks, possibly as a result of
ever-increasing pressure by the international
community, Iraq has been forthcoming in its
co-operation, particularly with regard to the conduct
of private interviews and in making available evidence
that contributes to the resolution of matters of IAEA
concern. On March 16, 2003, the neocons
struck back with the heavy artillery. Vice President
Dick Cheney appeared on Meet the Press. When pressured
by Tim Russert about Iraq's nuclear danger, Cheney
retorted,
We know he has been absolutely devoted to
trying to acquire nuclear weapons. And we believe he
has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons (emphasis
mine). I think Mr. ElBaradei frankly is wrong. And I
think if you look at the track record of the
International Atomic Energy Agency on this kind of
issue, especially where Iraq's concerned, they have
consistently underestimated or missed what it was
Saddam Hussein was doing. I don't have any reason to
believe they're any more valid this time than they've
been in the past. On March 17, 2003,
President George W. Bush went on national television to
tell Saddam and his sons, "They have 48 hours to get out
of town." No new evidence or reason was given. It was
the ultimate imperial moment.
On March 19, 2003,
the bombs began to fall.
|
| | |
