He said war was too important to be left to the generals. When he said that, 50 years ago, he might have been right. But today, war is too important to be left to politicians. They have neither the time, the training, nor the inclination for strategic thought. I can no longer sit back and allow Communist infiltration, Communist indoctrination, Communist subversion and the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.
The hijab, which is literally any modest dress that covers the contours of a woman's body and her face, is a personal choice for most Muslims. In Saudi Arabia, Iran and possibly Hamas controlled Gaza and West Bank, it is not. The political parties and regimes that advocate cumpulsory hijab seek to bring back the caliphate of the seventh century AD. For Europe this was a period marked by fuedal wars, remote paganism, disease and torture. For Arabia it was a golden era. Compared to today however, this political system is unenlightened.
Why did the editor of Harper???s waste this on the page. It would work best as a script shouted in front of a power plant from a doddering old man in a tattered, sauce stained cardigan. One can almost see the spit globule forming at the corner of Lapham???s mouth as he wrote this foaming lie. To start, there is no mention of the fact that Congress not only authorized the war, but subsequently appropriated the money to fight it. Now Lapham has in the past offered the defense that Democrats were too gullible, they believed the ???fixed intelligence??? they were given. Not only does this insult the intelligence of the many capable Democrats who voted for the war, it also presumes that no member of Congress can independently ascertain facts having to do with war and peace without getting pre-approved secrets from the executive. As it stands there was a rich public record making the case that Iraq was a WMD threat. One can read any of the late 1990s UNSCOM reports, or the later filings of UNMVC, or the memoirs of Scott Ritter, published in 1999, or the speeches of Bill Cohen, Madeleine Albright, Sandy Berger or President Clinton.
Lapham like many other war critics have settled on the following evidence of deception. In some cases segments of the intelligence community doubted the pre-war intelligence in speeches, estimates and what not. Why didn???t Bush listen to the Energy Department on the aluminum tubes, or Joe Wilson on the Niger documents, or any number of specific pieces of information that later proved wrong? This is as good as it goes, but rarely do the proponents of this theory ask the next logical question. If so and so said this was wrong, who said it was correct? The Bush Cheney junta, office of special plans, the neocons, Chalabi, they squeal. Anyway, just to harp on the tubes, it was the CIA???s own division dealing with WMD that approved the intel about the aluminum tubes. DOE believed Saddam had an active nuke program as he was importing specialized magnets for centrifuges. Even the State Department???s Department of Intelligence and Research believed Saddam had active biological and chemical weapons. And the report that everyone sites as proof positive that Iraq had no WMD, the Duelfer report, says Saddam had semi dormant programs he intended to restart when sanctions were lifted.
Lapham makes a rather big deal, along with Conyers, on the fact that the Bush administration planned the invasion all along. And this is barely true. Neoconservatives favored what was spelled out in the Iraq Liberation Act, which was to train and support an all Iraqi army to foment an open rebellion. This plan only changed after Powell and the joint chiefs persuaded Cheney to support an invasion as the contra strategy was too risky and Saddam was too much a threat. The numerous arms depots and mass graves discovered in Iraq since the invasion put the lie to this piffle: ???the regime destined to be changed poses no imminent threat, certainly not to the United States, probably not to any country defended by more than four batteries of light artillery.??? America to this day is still sifting through the massive stocks of Saddam???s conventional arms stockpile. A large part of the resistance it???s facing is comprised of former officers in his military and security services who went underground and formed a ???resistance.???
I don???t know if Lapham actually believes the ???resistance??? in Iraq is just. But he is certainly appealing to the cretins who do with this sloppy slogan talk: ???Thief,??? ???televangelist,??? ???liar.??? But in part, for all of his grandstanding, he is projecting. He slyly implies that all of these alleged lies served Bush???s ???private interest.??? Does he even consider that the evidence compiled in Conyers report largely stems from those CIA mandcarins dedicated to preserving the sovereign equality and diplomatic immunity of Saddam???s prison state. Lapham and Conyers??? erstwhile allies in their war on the neocons are the very scoundrels who they rightly chided in the 1980s as propping up dictators, and creating the conditions for jihad today.
None of this is to say that Iraq is working well. I???m not sure it can be won. Nor is to say that Bush is a great president. He has done some dangerous and stupid things. He has declared war on journalism by allowing his attorneys to prosecute intelligence leakers, he empowered a secret club of lawyers to draft interrogation rules that have led to widespread torture, and he allowed ethnic parties to maintain militias in Iraq while failing to still the insurgency in its early months.
But all of that said, Lapham is not making that case, or the eminently moral case that the elected government and its flawed constitution must prevail over these seeking to sabotage it. He???s pretending that Iraq was fine before we got there. And of all of his lies, this is the most revolting.
I will gladly wave the Hamerican flag when World War 4 rolls around and by then I would have owned a nuclear bomb shelter so I could survive. Let freedumb ring
Please explain why Cheney (the Vice President of all people) felt it necessary to make the unprecedented move of having the unfiltered intel directed to his office? It's my understanding that the CIA gets paid to analyze and advise on these reports.
A) that's not unprecedented. Al Gore asked for and received plenty of unfiltered intel for his staff on Russia. B) Cheney did not exactly ask for unfiltered intelligence. He asked for a second opinion. The counterterrorism sub group in the department of defense analyzed information relating to al qaeda and known state sponsors of terror and concluded that Saddam had dealings with the organization. This incidentally has not been entirely disproven, but was later found to not be that significant. He asked to see this second opinion. C) One factor leading the vice president to second guess the CIA was this intelligence failure called 9-11, maybe you've heard of it. D) The CIA's own analysis aty Weapons Nonproliferation and Arms Control, all concluded that Saddam had active nukes, bio and chem programs--something the duelfer report half concedes anyway.
But isn't the President ultimately responsible? I mean, it's all well and good to just blame your employees, but isn't the buck supposed to stop somewhere? With this administration it seems like no one is willing to take any responsibilty - from the WMD intel failure to the "few bad apples" at Abu Ghraib, they just move down the totem pole until they find someone to take the fall.
He said war was too important to be left to the generals. When he said that, 50 years ago, he might have been right. But today, war is too important to be left to politicians. They have neither the time, the training, nor the inclination for strategic thought. I can no longer sit back and allow Communist infiltration, Communist indoctrination, Communist subversion and the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.
I see nobody caught my reference here. You guys are sleeping, you fucks.
Look at those ladies and their face things. Those angry muslims might chill out if they had some tit-tays slappin in their fucking face.
He said war was too important to be left to the generals. When he said that, 50 years ago, he might have been right. But today, war is too important to be left to politicians. They have neither the time, the training, nor the inclination for strategic thought. I can no longer sit back and allow Communist infiltration, Communist indoctrination, Communist subversion and the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.
I see nobody caught my reference here. You guys are sleeping, you fucks.
Look at those ladies and their face things. Those angry muslims might chill out if they had some tit-tays slappin in their fucking face.
jesus, i should be president.
Dude.....I wanna be Vice Pres and here's what I'll bring to the table....
As soon as Anna Nicole Smith loses her lawsuit and is flat(no pun intended) broke we'll take her over to Iraq........we'll tell her that there are about 10,000 Al Qaeda and that ONE of them is worth 10 Billion Dollars and has a deadly disease with only one year to live.....all she has to do is fuck each one of them and when she finds the billionaire she'll get to marry him......we put each "loser" in jail until we have them all....by the time she gets to #9,999 the war should be over.
And seriously.....you may be on to something....I've read the 9/11 dudes spent one of their last nights in a Topless Bar!!!
Here's where Bush runs into problems with his justification for war:
1: Iraq was a threat because it possessed WMD and had a nuclear program that they could give to terrorists to attack the U.S.[/b]
First, U.S. intelligence told the administration several times that it was unlikely that Iraq would use terrorists against the U.S. because it would lead to U.S. retaliation.
Second, intelligence said that it was also unlikely that Iraq would give WMD to a terrorist group that it did not control. If it wanted to attack the U.S. or others it would use its own intelligence organization like it had done in the past.
Third, the only confirmed links Iraq had with terrorists were to two notorious Palestinian groups that had been inactive since the mid-1990s and attacks on Iraqi exiles. Iraq also gave millions to families of Palestinian suicide bombers and supported the Intifadah, but every Arab country supports the Palestinians. Iraq had not participated in any anti-Western terrorism since 1993.
Fourth, Iraq only had battlefield WMD that required hundreds of rockets and artillery shells to be fired to blanket an area to kill. Iraq never had the sophistication to make WMD small enough to be used by an individual or terrorist group.
Fifth, Iraq only had two plans for nuclear bombs. They were so heavy that they could never be used. Again, not only did Iraq not have nuclear weapons, they didn???t even have plans for bombs that they could use themselves, let alone give to a terrorist group.
2: Iraq was connected to Al Qaeda and 9/11[/b]
First, from the beginning of the administration Bush was told that Iraq and Al Qaeda were not connected. When 9/11 happened Bush and others told officials to look into such a collaboration but were told there was none over and over.
Second, Cheney and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz came to claim that 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta met with Iraqi intelligence in the Spring of 2001 as proof that Iraq was behind 9/11. They were told again and again that this did not happen, but continued to say it was true.
Third, the administration claimed that Iraq had a long standing relationship with Al Qaeda, was hiding Al Qaeda operatives after the Afghan war, and gave Al Qaeda training. While there were Al Qaeda fighters in Iraq, U.S. intelligence said that they were in northern Iraq where the government had no control because of the U.S. enforced no fly zone.
Fourth, the only group saying that Iraq was connected to Al Qaeda was an organization within the Pentagon called the Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group, staffed by two neoconservatives with no background in intelligence. They said that Iraq had been connected with Al Qaeda since the mid-1990s and had met and worked together over 50 times. U.S. intelligence said this was not true.
3: Iraq was working on building an atomic bomb that could threaten the U.S.[/b]
First, as stated above, Iraq never had plans for a workable nuclear bomb.
Second, U.S. intelligence said that Iraq could have a bomb within a year if it got enriched uranium from abroad and received foreign help to process it. There were faked reports that Iraq was trying to buy uranium from abroad, but they were not receiving any foreign help.
4: Iraq was trying to buy uranium from Niger[/b]
First, the claim that Iraq was trying to buy uranium from Niger was the reason why administration officials said that Iraq could have a nuclear bomb within a year.
Second, the administration was told again and again not to use the story in its public speeches because the intelligence community was not sure that the story was true. In the end, it proved to be based upon forged documents.
Third, the administration ended up using it in a 2003 State of the Union speech by Bush. The CIA didn???t want them to use the claim, so they changed it from Iraq was looking to buy uranium from Niger, to buying it from Africa. The speech also said that they got the report from England rather than U.S. intelligence. The president???s own Foreign Intelligence Board did an internal review of how this claim ended up in the State of the Union address and found that the administration was so desperate to find evidence of Iraq???s wrong doing and WMD program that it used the Niger story even though the CIA told them not to.
5: Iraq was not cooperating with U.N. weapons inspectors[/b]
First, like all weapons inspections, the Iraqis tried to limit their activities when they first arrived. However by the beginning of 2003 the inspectors had got almost all of their demands met for interrogation of scientists, access to sites, use of planes and helicopters for surveillance, etc. U.N. and International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors in their last reports before the war began said that Iraq was finally cooperating and that no evidence had been found of a WMD or nuclear program.
Second, the U.S. claimed that Iraq was hiding a stockpile of WMD from inspectors. The U.N. never found this stockpile and the amounts were based upon a faulty equation based upon what Iraq originally had before the Iran-Iraq war. The problem was, the U.S. never knew what this amount was so depending on the speech, U.S. officials were likely to say different amounts of Iraq WMD themselves.
Third, all the sites the U.S. told U.N. inspectors to look at nothing was found, yet the U.S. continued to say they knew Iraq had stockpiles of WMD, an active program, and knew where they were.
6: War was the last resort against Iraq[/b]
First, Bush claimed that the U.S. only went to war because Iraq failed to comply with the last U.N. resolution 1441 in March 2003, in fact, he had decided on war long before that.
Second, the neoconservative elements in his administration had been advocating attacking Iraq militarily since the very first meetings of his national security team in early 2001.
Third, when 9/11 happened Bush believed that Iraq had something to do with it and said that Iraq would be next after Afghanistan.
Fourth, on 9/21/01, just ten days after the 9/11 attacks, Bush told British Prime Minister Tony Blair that he wanted to invade Iraq after Afghanistan.
Fifth, the British Downing Street memo from 7/23/02 about a meeting of England???s top foreign policy advisors says that Bush had decided upon military action against Iraq. , ???There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime???s record.??? The memo also said that England should go to the U.N. to get new inspectors, not to disarm Iraq but to create a controversy that would help justify a war.
Sixth, on 1/31/03 when Bush and Blair met in Washington, Blair told Bush that he was conmpletley behind an invasion of Iraq. Bush told Blair he wasn't going to wait for a 2nd U.N. resolution on the matter and Blair confirmed that he wouldn't wait either. Bush also told Blair that he was worried that the U.N. inspectors wouldn't find any WMD, therefore they needed to find a way to justify the war. Bush even sugested that U.S. warplanes escort U-2 spy planes to try to provoke an Iraqi attack.
B) Cheney did not exactly ask for unfiltered intelligence. He asked for a second opinion. The counterterrorism sub group in the department of defense analyzed information relating to al qaeda and known state sponsors of terror and concluded that Saddam had dealings with the organization. This incidentally has not been entirely disproven, but was later found to not be that significant. He asked to see this second opinion. C) One factor leading the vice president to second guess the CIA was this intelligence failure called 9-11, maybe you've heard of it.
Cheney and the neoconservatives in the Pentagon and Vice President's office did not just second guess the CIA because of 9-11. They had a long running atagonism against them dating back to the Cold War. Basically, they didn't believe anything the CIA said.
People like Richard Perle claimed that the CIA underestimated the threat posed by the Russians during Reagan's administration, said they underestimated the links between Saddam and Al Qaeda before and right after the war, and have continued to blame the CIA among others for the problems in Iraq after the war.
And Cheney was receiving raw unprocessed intelligence not only from the Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group in the Pentagon, which is now being investigated for setting up an illegal intelligence organization by the way, but he was also receiving direct reports from Chalabi and other Iraqi exiles his office and the Pentagon had been cultivating since their war plans began.
Overall, when it came to WMD the CIA and U.S. intelligence had their heads up their ass and basically guessed on almost everything.
When it came to terrorism however, the CIA, DIA, State Department, etc. never filed a single major report saying that Iraq was connected to Al Qaeda or anti-Western terrorism. Yet that was a major claim of the administration. If the administration didn't get a single report from the U.S. intelligence community, what was their basis for their continuous claim of Iraq-Al Qaeda connections?
A) that's not unprecedented. Al Gore asked for and received plenty of unfiltered intel for his staff on Russia. B) Cheney did not exactly ask for unfiltered intelligence. He asked for a second opinion. The counterterrorism sub group in the department of defense analyzed information relating to al qaeda and known state sponsors of terror and concluded that Saddam had dealings with the organization. This incidentally has not been entirely disproven, but was later found to not be that significant. He asked to see this second opinion. C) One factor leading the vice president to second guess the CIA was this intelligence failure called 9-11, maybe you've heard of it. D) The CIA's own analysis aty Weapons Nonproliferation and Arms Control, all concluded that Saddam had active nukes, bio and chem programs--something the duelfer report half concedes anyway.
A) it is unprecedented for the intel to be used in the manner that it was, making it's way into the state of union for example. Gore asking questions about an ally is not an oranges to oranges comparison. The only corollary I can think of would be the Gulf of Tonkin nightmare which of course led to the deepening of the Vietnam conflict, one of our nations least proud moments.
B)Wrong. Cheney got raw unfiltered field reports which became part of his and other white offices pre-war planning.
C) This is the strangest assertion of all. First off the Cheney started stovepiping reports pre-9/11 (read sy hearsh's book chain of command or his new yorker article) If Bush and crew didn't trust the CIA post 9/11 why no move to put one of their guys in charge? Why did they rely on CIA reports about WMD? The fact is that only one explanation of this ordeal make sense; the neo-cons didn't care what the CIA had to say, they were determined to make the world in their image. Unfortunately, for everyone they got it wrong. And we are left to deal with the fall out.
Below is an interview of Sy Hersh who wrote the initial "stovepipe" (ie bypass the pro intel community) piece in the NEW YORKER exposing Cheney's radical intelligence analysis scheme at the white house. He explains better than I ever could why this process failed us, why it may still fail us and speculates quite accurately about what would happen in Iraq. The interview took place in 2003 and he got Iraq pretty much dead on.
For those more hardcore strutters I have also included sy hersh's article. It is an incredible read. He wrote a book called "chain of command" which also covers much of this mess.
Behind the ???Mushroom Cloud??? Posted 2003-10-21 This week in the magazine and here online (see Fact), in ???The Stovepipe,??? Seymour M. Hersh reports on how the Bush Administration led the intelligence community on a chase for weapons of mass destruction. Here Hersh discusses his article and the current state of the Bush Administration.
AMY DAVIDSON: Your story in the magazine this week is called ???The Stovepipe.??? Why?
SEYMOUR M. HERSH: Well, inside the military, ???stovepiping??? is slang for the practice of taking a piece of intelligence or a request that should be pushed through the chain of command???checked at levels and sent from one level to another???and bringing it straight to the highest authority. One of the things that people in the intelligence community have learned over the years is that early reports are often wrong. And so, before you respond to the first piece of information you have, you analyze it, you vet it, you study it, and then you make a decision about what you???re going to do with it. Stovepiping allows them to cheat the process. When you stovepipe stuff, you leave yourself open to the worst kinds of results.
Is that what happened when the Bush Administration was building its case against Iraq?
One basic problem is that the Bush Administration changed the process in a very dramatic way. They worked it so that the raw intelligence, the reports that they wanted to hear, got to the top right away. The pro-war hawks rigged the system so that negative information about Iraq, no matter where it came from???and in many cases, we now know, much of it came from defectors who were relayed through the Iraqi National Congress, the group run by Ahmad Chalabi???was stovepiped directly to the leadership without any assessment. And so you had a situation in the Pentagon, and in the State Department, in the office of Under-Secretary John Bolton, and in the Vice-President???s office, too, in which the professionals were cut out of the process. That???s how you get to a position where Secretary of State Colin Powell can show up at the United Nations, as he did in February, and make a series of very boisterous claims about Iraq, most of which now appear to be wrong.[/b] Was this, then, a matter of the Administration lying to itself as much as to anyone else?
One of the great questions is ???Were they lying? Did they know the truth???? And the answer, I think, to a large degree, is that, whatever they may have suspected, they didn???t know the truth, because the truth was simply impossible for them to see. The system had been set up so that they saw only what they wanted. And, you know, these people, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz in particular, came to the office openly suspicious of the intelligence community and the bureaucracy. [/b] They thought they were too soft on Iraq, not tough enough with Saddam, not able to make the decisive choices. So what you have is a bunch of people who weren???t lying; they simply had fixed the system so it couldn???t give them information they didn???t want to hear. One of the intelligence guys I talked to used a wonderful analogy. He said, ???It???s as if you all had gone into a planetarium and the software for the sky show had gone bad and you were seeing the wrong sky, and you walked outside, and you looked up and you said, ???Hey, what???s going on. This isn???t right.??? ??? And that???s what they had done: they had gone into the planetarium, they set themselves up with the wrong software, and then they were surprised to find that the rest of the world didn???t conform???the war began, and there were no W.M.D.s.
In your article, you quote an Administration official who said that the C.I.A. was beaten down by requests for a certain kind of intelligence. But isn???t it the C.I.A.???s job to resist that kind of pressure? Does the C.I.A. do enough to stand up for itself?
It turns out that it really doesn???t. One official I talked to reminded me what happened in the mid-nineteen-eighties, when Ronald Reagan was convinced that Cuba was behind everything going on in Central America???that all of the aspiration for freedom in Central America, the unrest there, was the work of Communist outside agitators. The community fought them for a long time, but they eventually gave up, and the analysts began to write it the way they wanted. The fact of the matter is that unless there???s very strong independent leadership on top the analysts will break and fold. In this case, George Tenet simply wasn???t strong enough. He???s a decent man, a kind man, and a perfectly honorable man, but after 9/11 he was in trouble, and the way he held on to his job was by going along and not telling the White House anything they didn???t want to hear.
In your story, you look into the origins of the so-called Niger documents, which purported to reveal an attempted purchase of uranium by Iraq but turned out to be forgeries. It becomes clear in your story that these papers, illegitimate as they were, didn???t even appear until months after the Administration began talking about African uranium. What evidence did they have earlier?
The initial report about Iraq buying uranium ore from Niger surfaced only after September 11, 2001, and even that was an old report. We had a
pparently asked other allied intelligence services to look for any information they might have related to terrorism, and out of Italy came a report of a visit to Niger by an Iraqi diplomat in February of 1999. It was seemingly a pretty benign visit, but the Italian service picked up some gossip that maybe they wanted to talk about uranium. And so this information got into the White House, and it was stovepiped, as I write, to Vice-President Dick Cheney, who asked the C.I.A. about it. They came back and said, ???We don???t think it???s much,??? and what seems to have happened is that Cheney kept on pushing. It was, as I say in the story, the freshest piece of meat they had to bolster what was going to be their mantra in 2002.[/b] After all, the prospect of Saddam with a nuclear weapon is scary to anyone. But, ironically, even more than was the case with chemical or biological weapons, the U.N. had been able to say, as strongly as the U.N. ever says anything, ???They don???t have it.??? They were bombed; they???ve had nothing since ???91 and haven???t been able to reconstitute. That???s the big word. If Iraq was attempting to get uranium in Niger in 1999, it would indicate that it was reconstituting its system.
The Italian report appeared in late 2001, and then there was a decision to send retired Ambassador Joseph Wilson to Niger in early 2002. And that was still before any of those papers came to light?
Yes, the forgeries came later. Wilson went in February and checked out the Italian report, talked to people, looked into it, and discovered that there was nothing to it. He came back and reported that. And what happened was that it didn???t matter what he said. Because President Bush and the Vice-President and the Secretary of Defense, Mr. Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz???they still began to talk about Iraq as if they were in the process of buying and establishing a nuclear facility. Then, when the papers finally appeared, in October, 2002, they seized on them???they were just what they were waiting for. That was just the evidence they needed to make their case. And it didn???t matter what the truth was.
You looked into the question of who actually fabricated the papers. What did you find out?
Different people have different theories. When I was in Italy, there were people who thought that the documents might have been written by the Italian military intelligence service, whose acronym is sismi. There have been other suspects, too. But one of the most compelling theories was relayed to me by a former senior C.I.A. official, a very high-level guy. And it goes back to the issue of how broken the intelligence system was, so much so that you couldn???t get at the truth. What he said represented the frustration and rage felt by many in the intelligence community, the notion that a group of retired officers actually got together and drafted the Niger papers.
Why would anybody who had worked for the C.I.A., no matter how disgruntled, forge documents?
First, you have to understand that C.I.A. stations around the world, not so much now but during the Cold War, falsified documents all the time. That???s what they did for a living. That???s part of the tradecraft. Second, if you???re in the C.I.A. and it???s last fall, you???re almost frozen, you???re powerless. By March, 2002, the people on the inside knew that the President had decided to go to war in Iraq, and by the summer C.I.A. operations against terrorism around the world???in Central Asia particularly???were shut off because of lack of funds and because any personnel who had good language skills were shoved into the Gulf to get ready for the war. So there was a tremendous sense of frustration.
But wouldn???t these documents have helped the Administration?
No, the documents were written to be exposed. The papers are hopeless, and even the Italian reporter who looked at them, Elisabetta Burba, was able very quickly to determine that they were false. They???re bad forgeries. And I think the idea was simply to embarrass the government internally. Don???t forget, Niger had already been a source of great dispute between the C.I.A. and the Pentagon and the Vice-President???s office. There was this tension. And so the thought was that somebody like Cheney or Rumsfeld and their aides would flash them at a meeting, and then the other side could counterattack. It would be an embarrassment, because the papers were such obvious fakes. Or Rumsfeld or somebody would go public with the papers, not vet them, not analyze them, and the press would go after them. But that didn???t happen. Instead, lo and behold, the President used the Niger story to make the case against Iraq in his State of the Union speech in January.
Less than two months after that speech, in March, the Niger papers were revealed to have been forged. The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency exposed them as fakes, and you and a few other journalists wrote in-depth articles on them that month???before the war. But the story really took off only in July. Why was there such a delay?
I don???t know. I was surprised that there weren???t more questions raised about it, because it seemed very clear that the I.A.E.A. said publicly that the documents weren???t worth the paper they were written on. And that???s what drove Joe Wilson finally, sixteen months after he made his report, to go public in a New York Times Op-Ed piece. Wilson personalized it by saying, ???I went there, and it???s not good, and they???re not telling the truth.??? In a way, we needed an American to tell us that. We didn???t want some international U.N. guy saying it. Also, what happened between March and July is that we didn???t find weapons. When I wrote about it, the war had just started, but by July the bloom was off, everybody knew we were in trouble. So I think those factors combined to make Wilson???s story combustible. And then, of course, the White House responded by leaking to Robert Novak the fact that Wilson???s wife is in the C.I.A. So they retaliated against him, and that triggered more of an outcry.
Let???s talk about that Novak column. You, too, have often received classified information from anonymous sources. How do you feel about the search that???s under way now for the person who leaked?
It???s obviously a very tough question, because I???m a Jeffersonian, a First Amendment man. The real problem is the people who told Novak that story. I don???t think Novak realized that she was as sensitive as she was. She was an employee undercover. I???d like to think that he didn???t know that. I just don???t know the facts. But publishing the name of somebody who???s undercover in the C.I.A., if the person hasn???t done anything wrong???none of us do that. It???s a tradition; it???s one of the things we don???t do. You constantly see newspaper stories saying, ???We know the identity of this person, but we???re not going to mention it.??? The only explanation I have is that Bob Novak, who is a very excellent reporter, didn???t know how sensitive her job was. Nobody communicated that to him. Whether he should have checked or not, it???s awfully hard to check, because the C.I.A. does not tell you anything about its employees.
We???ve been talking about how the case for the war was made. Why does that matter now, now that we???re in there?
Well, for one thing, it matters because we have a system set up, a stovepipe system, that???s still in place. We???re still in a situation in which intelligence that doesn???t meet political criteria doesn???t get to the President, and in which people in high positions will take any intelligence that makes their case and move it directly to the President. It???s not a straight system. There???s still this incredible impasse.
Is the problem confined to Iraq? Or does this affect, say, our Russian or our North Korean intelligence as well?
That???s the most frightening thing about this story, in a way. You???ve got a system set up so that if some
defector comes out of North Korea with the right kind of information it would get directly to the President. And that???s very scary. You know, one of the things about vetting an agent report is that you don???t simply take it at face value. You really have to put it through a grinder, which is what skeptical intelligence professionals do. What???s the guy like? Is the information he???s giving you the kind of information he has access to? Because most of these people get paid, and the better the story the more they get paid. So you really have to check out what defectors tell you. And so, yes, I think we???re open to a lot of manipulation???internal manipulation, by people with a political agenda???to mislead the President and the Vice-President.[/b]
How do the people you speak to think we???re doing in Iraq right now?
Much worse than the picture given to the public suggests, almost across the board; there???s very little good that I???m hearing. The morale of the officer corps, the lieutenant colonels and the colonels and others, is still high; after all, it???s a war, and it???s what they???ve spent their life doing, or getting ready to do. They think that the military is not broken, even though it???s under tremendous strain. But after that there???s nothing good to be said. Somebody said to me that it???s like the children???s game where you hit a mole, and when you knock it down another one comes up. That???s exactly where we are now. We have a problem, we knock that one problem down, another one comes up. We???re now getting into a serious shoot-up with the Shiites. The enmity is spreading. But I???m sure the President has a different position. It???s very unnerving.[/b] Last week, the President said that the press was being too negative about Iraq.
Well, that???s because the stovepiped reports he gets are generally much more upbeat.
A lot of media organizations have pulled back reporters in Iraq. Do you think that makes it harder for them, or for us, to get a good picture of what???s happening there?
I don???t think it???s very hard to get a good picture of what???s happening there. The number of incidents against us has gone up. I can tell you right now that I know from classified sources inside the government that as of two weeks ago the level of incidents was???this is a number that was reported in a highly classified document inside the government???twenty-three a day. I venture to say that we???re not hearing everything. One of the problems we have is that the basic source of information, whether you have a lot of reporters there or a few, is still the Army command. They???re the ones who get all of the pre-collated reports. We???re not getting the whole story.[/b]
How much of an issue do you think Iraq will be in the 2004 election?
Huge. Iraq is incredibly important to this President in terms of his political future. And the ideological goals???the goal of reshaping the Middle East, the goal of bringing democracy to the Middle East, the goal of changing Syria and Lebanon???are all still issues for this Administration. The thing that frightens me the most is that the Administration may feel compelled to seriously escalate what we do there???not so much in terms of troops but in terms of bombing. It???s like that line out of the Vietnam War that haunts me, about the major who ordered his troops to bomb a village, as he said, in order to save it.
Speaking of Vietnam, Howard Dean???s campaign has been built largely around opposition to the war. Some commentators say that he???s doomed to be another Eugene McCarthy. You worked for McCarthy???
I was his press secretary and speechwriter.
Do you think it???s an apt comparison?
I don???t know Howard Dean personally. The only thing I can say is that, out of all the candidates, he was the first to speak most clearly about the problems with Iraq. And as far as I???m concerned that gives him a huge head start. There???s also Dennis Kucinich, but Dean, like McCarthy, has clearly taken a moral stand and a political stand against something that he sees as wrong. You have to remember what McCarthy did, challenging a sitting Democratic President, Lyndon Johnson. He got almost forty-two per cent of the vote against Johnson. And Johnson quit a couple of weeks after that vote, because he knew he couldn???t win. We???re not in the same situation now, obviously???Bush is much stronger, raising a lot of money, and is certainly going to be a formidable candidate. But I think this is going to be a very riotous year. It???s going to be the most interesting political year since Hoover vs. Roosevelt. Remember that the Administration, no matter how they twist the words or spin the words, told us we???d find weapons in Iraq. They believed it. That was the intelligence they got. And, to me, the fact that they weren???t lying and really believed it is as alarming as if they had been lying. It???s very, very troubling.
Can Bush turn it all around by finding Saddam?
In the long run, no. But that isn???t the issue that???s going to change the election. We didn???t go into the war on the basis that we were going to kill Saddam. We went to war on the basis that there were weapons that made him an imminent threat. And that???s not true. That???s the critical issue, and there???s no getting around that. The fact of the matter is the weapons aren???t there.
Do you think that, in November, 2004, American soldiers will be dying at the same rate they are now in Iraq?
Obviously, nobody can predict that. It depends on what we do. It seems like there is a pretty steady rate now. I keep on remembering that horrible line from Joseph Stalin. He once said that one death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic. And it seems clear that there are some very bright???evilly so???people on the other side in Iraq, making sure that every day or every other day an American dies. It???s cumulative, in a way. Sort of like nerve-gas poisoning???just a drop at a time.
So what???s the endgame there, or is there one?
Well, you know, in a perfect world we???d be doing everything we could with the U.N., with nato, with anybody, to try to get some sort of settlement between Israel and Palestine that doesn???t involve a big fence. We???d be doing everything to put tremendous pressure on both sides. And this Administration simply doesn???t have the stomach to do it. It doesn???t seem to be willing to do it.
Do you think that the world is a safer place than it was a year ago?
No. It???s much more dangerous. There???s no question now. We???ve now drawn a line in the sand, no pun intended, with 1.2 billion Muslims. We???re really disliked. Americans have always been liked, whether or not the country has been. But now there???s really an animosity toward Americans, and we???re going to have to go a long way to correct it.
THE STOVEPIPE How conflicts between the Bush Administration and the intelligence community marred the reporting on Iraq???s weapons. by SEYMOUR M. HERSH Issue of 2003-10-27 Posted 2003-10-20
Since midsummer, the Senate Intelligence Committee has been attempting to solve the biggest mystery of the Iraq war: the disparity between the Bush Administration???s prewar assessment of Iraq???s weapons of mass destruction and what has actually been discovered.
The committee is concentrating on the last ten years??? worth of reports by the C.I.A. Preliminary findings, one intelligence official told me, are disquieting. ???The intelligence community made all kinds of errors and handled things sloppily,??? he said. The problems range from a lack of quality control to different agencies??? reporting contradictory assessments at the same time. One finding, the official went on, was that the intelligence reports about Iraq provided by the United Nations inspection teams and the International Atomic Energy Agency, which m
onitored Iraq???s nuclear-weapons programs, were far more accurate than the C.I.A. estimates. ???Some of the old-timers in the community are appalled by how bad the analysis was,??? the official said. ???If you look at them side by side, C.I.A. versus United Nations, the U.N. agencies come out ahead across the board.???
There were, of course, good reasons to worry about Saddam Hussein???s possession of W.M.D.s. He had manufactured and used chemical weapons in the past, and had experimented with biological weapons; before the first Gulf War, he maintained a multibillion-dollar nuclear-weapons program. In addition, there were widespread doubts about the efficacy of the U.N. inspection teams, whose operations in Iraq were repeatedly challenged and disrupted by Saddam Hussein. Iraq was thought to have manufactured at least six thousand more chemical weapons than the U.N. could account for. And yet, as some former U.N. inspectors often predicted, the tons of chemical and biological weapons that the American public was led to expect have thus far proved illusory. As long as that remains the case, one question will be asked more and more insistently: How did the American intelligence community get it so wrong?
Part of the answer lies in decisions made early in the Bush Administration, before the events of September 11, 2001. In interviews with present and former intelligence officials, I was told that some senior Administration people, soon after coming to power, had bypassed the government???s customary procedures for vetting intelligence.
A retired C.I.A. officer described for me some of the questions that would normally arise in vetting: ???Does dramatic information turned up by an overseas spy square with his access, or does it exceed his plausible reach? How does the agent behave? Is he on time for meetings???? The vetting process is especially important when one is dealing with foreign-agent reports???sensitive intelligence that can trigger profound policy decisions. In theory, no request for action should be taken directly to higher authorities???a process known as ???stovepiping??????without the information on which it is based having been subjected to rigorous scrutiny.
The point is not that the President and his senior aides were consciously lying. What was taking place was much more systematic???and potentially just as troublesome. Kenneth Pollack, a former National Security Council expert on Iraq, whose book ???The Threatening Storm??? generally supported the use of force to remove Saddam Hussein, told me that what the Bush people did was ???dismantle the existing filtering process that for fifty years had been preventing the policymakers from getting bad information. They created stovepipes to get the information they wanted directly to the top leadership. Their position is that the professional bureaucracy is deliberately and maliciously keeping information from them.
???They always had information to back up their public claims, but it was often very bad information,??? Pollack continued. ???They were forcing the intelligence community to defend its good information and good analysis so aggressively that the intelligence analysts didn???t have the time or the energy to go after the bad information.???
The Administration eventually got its way, a former C.I.A. official said. ???The analysts at the C.I.A. were beaten down defending their assessments. And they blame George Tenet??????the C.I.A. director??????for not protecting them. I???ve never seen a government like this.???
A few months after George Bush took office, Greg Thielmann, an expert on disarmament with the State Department???s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, or INR, was assigned to be the daily intelligence liaison to John Bolton, the Under-Secretary of State for Arms Control, who is a prominent conservative. Thielmann understood that his posting had been mandated by Secretary of State Colin Powell, who thought that every important State Department bureau should be assigned a daily intelligence officer. ???Bolton was the guy with whom I had to do business,??? Thielmann said. ???We were going to provide him with all the information he was entitled to see. That???s what being a professional intelligence officer is all about.???
But, Thielmann told me, ???Bolton seemed to be troubled because INR was not telling him what he wanted to hear.??? Thielmann soon found himself shut out of Bolton???s early-morning staff meetings. ???I was intercepted at the door of his office and told, ???The Under-Secretary doesn???t need you to attend this meeting anymore.??? ??? When Thielmann protested that he was there to provide intelligence input, the aide said, ???The Under-Secretary wants to keep this in the family.???
Eventually, Thielmann said, Bolton demanded that he and his staff have direct electronic access to sensitive intelligence, such as foreign-agent reports and electronic intercepts. In previous Administrations, such data had been made available to under-secretaries only after it was analyzed, usually in the specially secured offices of INR. The whole point of the intelligence system in place, according to Thielmann, was ???to prevent raw intelligence from getting to people who would be misled.??? Bolton, however, wanted his aides to receive and assign intelligence analyses and assessments using the raw data. In essence, the under-secretary would be running his own intelligence operation, without any guidance or support. ???He surrounded himself with a hand-chosen group of loyalists, and found a way to get C.I.A. information directly,??? Thielmann said.
In a subsequent interview, Bolton acknowledged that he had changed the procedures for handling intelligence, in an effort to extend the scope of the classified materials available to his office. ???I found that there was lots of stuff that I wasn???t getting and that the INR analysts weren???t including,??? he told me. ???I didn???t want it filtered. I wanted to see everything???to be fully informed. If that puts someone???s nose out of joint, sorry about that.??? Bolton told me that he wanted to reach out to the intelligence community but that Thielmann had ???invited himself??? to his daily staff meetings. ???This was my meeting with the four assistant secretaries who report to me, in preparation for the Secretary???s 8:30 a.m. staff meeting,??? Bolton said. ???This was within my family of bureaus. There was no place for INR or anyone else???the Human Resources Bureau or the Office of Foreign Buildings.???
There was also a change in procedure at the Pentagon under Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, and Douglas Feith, the Under-Secretary for Policy. In the early summer of 2001, a career official assigned to a Pentagon planning office undertook a routine evaluation of the assumption, adopted by Wolfowitz and Feith, that the Iraqi National Congress, an exile group headed by Ahmad Chalabi, could play a major role in a coup d?????tat to oust Saddam Hussein. They also assumed that Chalabi, after the coup, would be welcomed by Iraqis as a hero.
An official familiar with the evaluation described how it subjected that scenario to the principle of what planners call ???branches and sequels??????that is, ???plan for what you expect not to happen.??? The official said, ???It was a ???what could go wrong??? study. What if it turns out that Ahmad Chalabi is not so popular? What???s Plan B if you discover that Chalabi and his boys don???t have it in them to accomplish the overthrow????
The people in the policy offices didn???t seem to care. When the official asked about the analysis, he was told by a colleague that the new Pentagon leadership wanted to focus not on what could go wrong but on what would go right. He was told that the study???s exploration of options amounted to planning for failure. ???Their methodology was analogous to tossing a coin five times and assuming that it would always come up heads,??? the official told me. ???You need to think about what
would happen if it comes up tails.???
Getting rid of Saddam Hussein and his regime had been a priority for Wolfowitz and others in and around the Administration since the end of the first Gulf War. For years, Iraq hawks had seen a coup led by Chalabi as the best means of achieving that goal. After September 11th, however, and the military???s quick victory in Afghanistan, the notion of a coup gave way to the idea of an American invasion.
In a speech on November 14, 2001, as the Taliban were being routed in Afghanistan, Richard Perle, a Pentagon consultant with long-standing ties to Wolfowitz, Feith, and Chalabi, articulated what would become the Bush Administration???s most compelling argument for going to war with Iraq: the possibility that, with enough time, Saddam Hussein would be capable of attacking the United States with a nuclear weapon. Perle cited testimony from Dr. Khidhir Hamza, an Iraqi defector, who declared that Saddam Hussein, in response to the 1981 Israeli bombing of the Osiraq nuclear reactor, near Baghdad, had ordered future nuclear facilities to be dispersed at four hundred sites across the nation. ???Every day,??? Perle said, these sites ???turn out a little bit of nuclear materials.??? He told his audience, ???Do we wait for Saddam and hope for the best, do we wait and hope he doesn???t do what we know he is capable of . . . or do we take some preemptive action????
In fact, the best case for the success of the U.N. inspection process in Iraq was in the area of nuclear arms. In October, 1997, the International Atomic Energy Agency issued a definitive report declaring Iraq to be essentially free of nuclear weapons. The I.A.E.A.???s inspectors said, ???There are no indications that there remains in Iraq any physical capability for the production of amounts of weapon-usable nuclear material of any practical significance.??? The report noted that Iraq???s nuclear facilities had been destroyed by American bombs in the 1991 Gulf War.
The study???s main author, Garry Dillon, a British nuclear-safety engineer who spent twenty-three years working for the I.A.E.A. and retired as its chief of inspection, told me that it was ???highly unlikely??? that Iraq had been able to maintain a secret or hidden program to produce significant amounts of weapons-usable material, given the enormous progress in the past decade in the technical ability of I.A.E.A. inspectors to detect radioactivity in ground locations and in waterways. ???This is not kitchen chemistry,??? Dillon said. ???You???re talking factory scale, and in any operation there are leaks.???
The Administration could offer little or no recent firsthand intelligence to contradict the I.A.E.A.???s 1997 conclusions. During the Clinton years, there had been a constant flow of troubling intelligence reports on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, but most were in the context of worst-case analyses???what Iraq could do without adequate United Nations inspections???and included few, if any, reliable reports from agents inside the country. The inspectors left in 1998. Many of the new reports that the Bush people were receiving came from defectors who had managed to flee Iraq with help from the Iraqi National Congress. The defectors gave dramatic accounts of Iraq???s efforts to reconstituteits nuclear-weapons program, and of its alleged production of chemical and biological weapons???but the accounts could not be corroborated by the available intelligence.
Greg Thielmann, after being turned away from Bolton???s office, worked with the INR staff on a major review of Iraq???s progress in developing W.M.D.s. The review, presented to Secretary of State Powell in December, 2001, echoed the earlier I.A.E.A. findings. According to Thielmann, ???It basically said that there is no persuasive evidence that the Iraqi nuclear program is being reconstituted.???
The defectors, however, had an audience prepared to believe the worst. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had long complained about the limits of American intelligence. In the late nineteen-nineties, for example, he had chaired a commission on ballistic-missile programs that criticized the unwillingness of intelligence analysts ???to make estimates that extended beyond the hard evidence they had in hand.??? After he became Secretary of Defense, a separate intelligence unit was set up in the Pentagon???s policy office, under the control of William Luti, a senior aide to Feith. This office, which circumvented the usual procedures of vetting and transparency, stovepiped many of its findings to the highest-ranking officials.
In the fall of 2001, soon after the September 11th attacks, the C.I.A. received an intelligence report from Italy???s Military Intelligence and Security Service, or sismi, about a public visit that Wissam al-Zahawie, then the Iraqi Ambassador to the Vatican, had made to Niger and three other African nations two and a half years earlier, in February, 1999. The visit had been covered at the time by the local press in Niger and by a French press agency. The American Ambassador, Charles O. Cecil, filed a routine report to Washington on the visit, as did British intelligence. There was nothing untoward about the Zahawie visit. ???We reported it because his picture appeared in the paper with the President,??? Cecil, who is now retired, told me. There was no article accompanying the photograph, only the caption, and nothing significant to report. At the time, Niger, which had sent hundreds of troops in support of the American-led Gulf War in 1991, was actively seeking economic assistance from the United States.
None of the contemporaneous reports, as far as is known, made any mention of uranium. But now, apparently as part of a larger search for any pertinent information about terrorism, sismi dug the Zahawie-trip report out of its files and passed it along, with a suggestion that Zahawie???s real mission was to arrange the purchase of a form of uranium ore known as ???yellowcake.??? (Yellowcake, which has been a major Niger export for decades, can be used to make fuel for nuclear reactors. It can also be converted, if processed differently, into weapons-grade uranium.)
What made the two-and-a-half-year-old report stand out in Washington was its relative freshness. A 1999 attempt by Iraq to buy uranium ore, if verified, would seem to prove that Saddam had been working to reconstitute his nuclear program???and give the lie to the I.A.E.A. and to intelligence reports inside the American government that claimed otherwise.
The sismi report, however, was unpersuasive. Inside the American intelligence community, it was dismissed as amateurish and unsubstantiated. One former senior C.I.A. official told me that the initial report from Italy contained no documents but only a written summary of allegations. ???I can fully believe that sismi would put out a piece of intelligence like that,??? a C.I.A. consultant told me, ???but why anybody would put credibility in it is beyond me.??? No credible documents have emerged since to corroborate it.
The intelligence report was quickly stovepiped to those officials who had an intense interest in building the case against Iraq, including Vice-President Dick Cheney. ???The Vice-President saw a piece of intelligence reporting that Niger was attempting to buy uranium,??? Cathie Martin, the spokeswoman for Cheney, told me. Sometime after he first saw it, Cheney brought it up at his regularly scheduled daily briefing from the C.I.A., Martin said. ???He asked the briefer a question. The briefer came back a day or two later and said, ???We do have a report, but there???s a lack of details.??? ??? The Vice-President was further told that it was known that Iraq had acquired uranium ore from Niger in the early nineteen-eighties but that that material had been placed in secure storage by the I.A.E.A., which was monitoring it. ???End of story,??? Martin added. ???That???s all we know.??? According to a former high-level C.I.A. official, however, Che
ney was dissatisfied with the initial response, and asked the agency to review the matter once again. It was the beginning of what turned out to be a year-long tug-of-war between the C.I.A. and the Vice-President???s office.
As the campaign against Iraq intensified, a former aide to Cheney told me, the Vice-President???s office, run by his chief of staff, Lewis (Scooter) Libby, became increasingly secretive when it came to intelligence about Iraq???s W.M.D.s. As with Wolfowitz and Bolton, there was a reluctance to let the military and civilian analysts on the staff vet intelligence.
???It was an unbelievably closed and small group,??? the former aide told me. Intelligence procedures were far more open during the Clinton Administration, he said, and professional staff members had been far more involved in assessing and evaluating the most sensitive data. ???There???s so much intelligence out there that it???s easy to pick and choose your case,??? the former aide told me. ???It opens things up to cherry-picking.??? (???Some reporting is sufficiently sensitive that it is restricted only to the very top officials of the government???as it should be,??? Cathie Martin said. And any restrictions, she added, emanate from C.I.A. security requirements.)
By early 2002, the sismi intelligence???still unverified???had begun to play a role in the Administration???s warnings about the Iraqi nuclear threat. On January 30th, the C.I.A. published an unclassified report to Congress that stated, ???Baghdad may be attempting to acquire materials that could aid in reconstituting its nuclear-weapons program.??? A week later, Colin Powell told the House International Relations Committee, ???With respect to the nuclear program, there is no doubt that the Iraqis are pursuing it.???
The C.I.A. assessment reflected both deep divisions within the agency and the position of its director, George Tenet, which was far from secure. (The agency had been sharply criticized, after all, for failing to provide any effective warning of the September 11th attacks.) In the view of many C.I.A. analysts and operatives, the director was too eager to endear himself to the Administration hawks and improve his standing with the President and the Vice-President. Senior C.I.A. analysts dealing with Iraq were constantly being urged by the Vice-President???s office to provide worst-case assessments on Iraqi weapons issues. ???They got pounded on, day after day,??? one senior Bush Administration official told me, and received no consistent backup from Tenet and his senior staff. ???Pretty soon you say ???Fuck it.??? ??? And they began to provide the intelligence that was wanted.
In late February, the C.I.A. persuaded retired Ambassador Joseph Wilson to fly to Niger to discreetly check out the story of the uranium sale. Wilson, who is now a business consultant, had excellent credentials: he had been deputy chief of mission in Baghdad, had served as a diplomat in Africa, and had worked in the White House for the National Security Council. He was known as an independent diplomat who had put himself in harm???s way to help American citizens abroad.
Wilson told me he was informed at the time that the mission had come about because the Vice-President???s office was interested in the Italian intelligence report. Before his departure, he was summoned to a meeting at the C.I.A. with a group of government experts on Iraq, Niger, and uranium. He was shown no documents but was told, he said, that the C.I.A. ???was responding to a report that was recently received of a purported memorandum of agreement??????between Iraq and Niger??????that our boys had gotten.??? He added, ???It was never clear to me, or to the people who were briefing me, whether our guys had actually seen the agreement, or the purported text of an agreement.??? Wilson???s trip to Niger, which lasted eight days, produced nothing. He learned that any memorandum of understanding to sell yellowcake would have required the signatures of Niger???s Prime Minister, Foreign Minister, and Minister of Mines. ???I saw everybody out there,??? Wilson said, and no one had signed such a document. ???If a document purporting to be about the sale contained those signatures, it would not be authentic.??? Wilson also learned that there was no uranium available to sell: it had all been pre-sold to Niger???s Japanese and European consortium partners.
Wilson returned to Washington and made his report. It was circulated, he said, but ???I heard nothing about what the Vice-President???s office thought about it.??? (In response, Cathie Martin said, ???The Vice-President doesn???t know Joe Wilson and did not know about his trip until he read about it in the press.??? The first press accounts appeared fifteen months after Wilson???s trip.)
By early March, 2002, a former White House official told me, it was understood by many in the White House that the President had decided, in his own mind, to go to war. The undeclared decision had a devastating impact on the continuing struggle against terrorism. The Bush Administration took many intelligence operations that had been aimed at Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups around the world and redirected them to the Persian Gulf. Linguists and special operatives were abruptly reassigned, and several ongoing anti-terrorism intelligence programs were curtailed.
Chalabi???s defector reports were now flowing from the Pentagon directly to the Vice-President???s office, and then on to the President, with little prior evaluation by intelligence professionals. When INR analysts did get a look at the reports, they were troubled by what they found. ???They???d pick apart a report and find out that the source had been wrong before, or had no access to the information provided,??? Greg Thielmann told me. ???There was considerable skepticism throughout the intelligence community about the reliability of Chalabi???s sources, but the defector reports were coming all the time. Knock one down and another comes along. Meanwhile, the garbage was being shoved straight to the President.???
A routine settled in: the Pentagon???s defector reports, classified ???secret,??? would be funnelled to newspapers, but subsequent C.I.A. and INR analyses of the reports???invariably scathing but also classified???would remain secret.
???It became a personality issue,??? a Pentagon consultant said of the Bush Administration???s handling of intelligence. ???My fact is better than your fact. The whole thing is a failure of process. Nobody goes to primary sources.??? The intelligence community was in full retreat.
In the spring of 2002, the former White House official told me, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz began urging the President to release more than ninety million dollars in federal funds to Chalabi. The 1998 Iraq Liberation Act had authorized ninety-seven million dollars for the Iraqi opposition, but most of the funds had not been expended. The State Department opposed releasing the rest of the money, arguing that Chalabi had failed to account properly for the funds he had already received. ???The Vice-President came into a meeting furious that we hadn???t given the money to Chalabi,??? the former official recalled. Cheney said, ???Here we are, denying him money, when they??????the Iraqi National Congress??????are providing us with unique intelligence on Iraqi W.M.D.s.???
In late summer, the White House sharply escalated the nuclear rhetoric. There were at least two immediate targets: the midterm congressional elections and the pending vote on a congressional resolution authorizing the President to take any action he deemed necessary in Iraq, to protect America???s national security.
On August 7th, Vice-President Cheney, speaking in California, said of Saddam Hussein, ???What we know now, from various sources, is that he . . . continues to pursue a nuclear weapon.??? On August 26th, Cheney suggested that Saddam had a nuclear capability that could directly threaten ???anyone he
chooses, in his own region or beyond.??? He added that the Iraqis were continuing ???to pursue the nuclear program they began so many years ago.??? On September 8th, he told a television interviewer, ???We do know, with absolute certainty, that he is using his procurement system to acquire the equipment he needs in order to enrich uranium to build a nuclear weapon.??? The President himself, in his weekly radio address on September 14th, stated, ???Saddam Hussein has the scientists and infrastructure for a nuclear-weapons program, and has illicitly sought to purchase the equipment needed to enrich uranium for a nuclear weapon.??? There was no confirmed intelligence for the President???s assertion.
The government of the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, President Bush???s closest ally, was also brought in. As Blair later told a British government inquiry, he and Bush had talked by telephone that summer about the need ???to disclose what we knew or as much as we could of what we knew.??? Blair loyally took the lead: on September 24th, the British government issued a dossier dramatizing the W.M.D. threat posed by Iraq. In a foreword, Blair proclaimed that ???the assessed intelligence has established beyond doubt that Saddam . . . continues in his efforts to develop nuclear weapons.??? The dossier noted that intelligence???based, again, largely on the sismi report???showed that Iraq had ???sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.??? A subsequent parliamentary inquiry determined that the published statement had been significantly toned down after the C.I.A. warned its British counterpart not to include the claim in the dossier, and in the final version Niger was not named, nor was sismi.
The White House, meanwhile, had been escalating its rhetoric. In a television interview on September 8th, Condoleezza Rice, the national-security adviser, addressing questions about the strength of the Administration???s case against Iraq, said, ???We don???t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud??????a formulation that was taken up by hawks in the Administration. And, in a speech on October 7th, President Bush said, ???Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof???the smoking gun???that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.???
At that moment, in early October, 2002, a set of documents suddenly appeared that promised to provide solid evidence that Iraq was attempting to reconstitute its nuclear program. The first notice of the documents??? existence came when Elisabetta Burba, a reporter for Panorama, a glossy Italian weekly owned by the publishing empire of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, received a telephone call from an Italian businessman and security consultant whom she believed to have once been connected to Italian intelligence. He told her that he had information connecting Saddam Hussein to the purchase of uranium in Africa. She considered the informant credible. In 1995, when she worked for the magazine Epoca, he had provided her with detailed information, apparently from Western intelligence sources, for articles she published dealing with the peace process in Bosnia and with an Islamic charity that was linked to international terrorism. The information, some of it in English, proved to be accurate. Epoca had authorized her to pay around four thousand dollars for the documents???a common journalistic practice in Italy.
Now, years later, ???he comes to me again,??? Burba told me. ???I knew he was an informed person, and that he had contacts all over the world, including in the Middle East. He deals with investment and security issues.??? When Burba met with the man, he showed her the Niger documents and offered to sell them to her for about ten thousand dollars.
The documents he gave her were photocopies. There were twenty-two pages, mostly in French, some with the letterhead of the Niger government or Embassy, and two on the stationery of the Iraqi Embassy to the Holy See. There were also telexes. When Burba asked how the documents could be authenticated, the man produced what appeared to be a photocopy of the codebook from the Niger Embassy, along with other items. ???What I was sure of was that he had access,??? Burba said. ???He didn???t receive the documents from the moon.???
The documents dealt primarily with the alleged sale of uranium, Burba said. She informed her editors, and shared the photocopies with them. She wanted to arrange a visit to Niger to verify what seemed to be an astonishing story. At that point, however, Panorama???s editor-in-chief, Carlo Rossella, who is known for his ties to the Berlusconi government, told Burba to turn the documents over to the American Embassy for authentication. Burba dutifully took a copy of the papers to the Embassy on October 9th.
A week later, Burba travelled to Niger. She visited mines and the ports that any exports would pass through, spoke to European businessmen and officials informed about Niger???s uranium industry, and found no trace of a sale. She also learned that the transport company and the bank mentioned in the papers were too small and too ill-equipped to handle such a transaction. As Ambassador Wilson had done eight months earlier, she concluded that there was no evidence of a recent sale of yellowcake to Iraq. The Panorama story was dead, and Burba and her editors said that no money was paid. The documents, however, were now in American hands.
Two former C.I.A. officials provided slightly different accounts of what happened next. ???The Embassy was alerted that the papers were coming,??? the first former official told me, ???and it passed them directly to Washington without even vetting them inside the Embassy.??? Once the documents were in Washington, they were forwarded by the C.I.A. to the Pentagon, he said. ???Everybody knew at every step of the way that they were false???until they got to the Pentagon, where they were believed.???
The documents were just what Administration hawks had been waiting for. The second former official, Vincent Cannistraro, who served as chief of counter-terrorism operations and analysis, told me that copies of the Burba documents were given to the American Embassy, which passed them on to the C.I.A.???s chief of station in Rome, who forwarded them to Washington. Months later, he said, he telephoned a contact at C.I.A. headquarters and was told that ???the jury was still out on this??????that is, on the authenticity of the documents.
George Tenet clearly was ambivalent about the information: in early October, he intervened to prevent the President from referring to Niger in a speech in Cincinnati. But Tenet then seemed to give up the fight, and Saddam???s desire for uranium from Niger soon became part of the Administration???s public case for going to war.
On December 7th, the Iraqi regime provided the U.N. Security Council with a twelve-thousand-page series of documents in which it denied having a W.M.D. arsenal. Very few in the press, the public, or the White House believed it, and a State Department rebuttal, on December 19th, asked, ???Why is the Iraqi regime hiding their Niger procurement???? It was the first time that Niger had been publicly identified. In a January 23rd Op-Ed column in the Times, entitled ???Why We Know Iraq Is Lying,??? Condoleezza Rice wrote that the ???false declaration . . . fails to account for or explain Iraq???s efforts to get uranium from abroad.??? On January 26th, Secretary Powell, speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, asked, ???Why is Iraq still trying to procure uranium???? Two days later, President Bush described the alleged sale in his State of the Union address, saying, ???The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.???
Who produced the fake Niger papers? There is nothing approaching a consensus on this question within the intelligence community. There has been published speculation about the intelligence s
ervices of several different countries. One theory, favored by some journalists in Rome, is that sismi produced the false documents and passed them to Panorama for publication.
Another explanation was provided by a former senior C.I.A. officer. He had begun talking to me about the Niger papers in March, when I first wrote about the forgery, and said, ???Somebody deliberately let something false get in there.??? He became more forthcoming in subsequent months, eventually saying that a small group of disgruntled retired C.I.A. clandestine operators had banded together in the late summer of last year and drafted the fraudulent documents themselves.
???The agency guys were so pissed at Cheney,??? the former officer said. ???They said, ???O.K, we???re going to put the bite on these guys.??? ??? My source said that he was first told of the fabrication late last year, at one of the many holiday gatherings in the Washington area of past and present C.I.A. officials. ???Everyone was bragging about it??????Here???s what we did. It was cool, cool, cool.??? ??? These retirees, he said, had superb contacts among current officers in the agency and were informed in detail of the sismi intelligence.
???They thought that, with this crowd, it was the only way to go???to nail these guys who were not practicing good tradecraft and vetting intelligence,??? my source said. ???They thought it???d be bought at lower levels???a big bluff.??? The thinking, he said, was that the documents would be endorsed by Iraq hawks at the top of the Bush Administration, who would be unable to resist flaunting them at a press conference or an interagency government meeting. They would then look foolish when intelligence officials pointed out that they were obvious fakes. But the tactic backfired, he said, when the papers won widespread acceptance within the Administration. ???It got out of control.???
Like all large institutions, C.I.A. headquarters, in Langley, Virginia, is full of water-cooler gossip, and a retired clandestine officer told me this summer that the story about a former operations officer faking the documents is making the rounds. ???What???s telling,??? he added, ???is that the story, whether it???s true or not, is believed??????an extraordinary commentary on the level of mistrust, bitterness, and demoralization within the C.I.A. under the Bush Administration. (William Harlow, the C.I.A. spokesman, said that the agency had no more evidence that former members of the C.I.A. had forged the documents ???than we have that they were forged by Mr. Hersh.???)
The F.B.I. has been investigating the forgery at the request of the Senate Intelligence Committee. A senior F.B.I. official told me that the possibility that the documents were falsified by someone inside the American intelligence community had not been ruled out. ???This story could go several directions,??? he said. ???We haven???t gotten anything solid, and we???ve looked.??? He said that the F.B.I. agents assigned to the case are putting a great deal of effort into the investigation. But ???somebody???s hiding something, and they???re hiding it pretty well.???
President Bush???s State of the Union speech had startled Elisabetta Burba, the Italian reporter. She had been handed documents and had personally taken them to the American Embassy, and she now knew from her trip to Niger that they were false. Later, Burba revisited her source. ???I wanted to know what happened,??? she said. ???He told me that he didn???t know the documents were false, and said he???d also been fooled. ???
Burba, convinced that she had the story of the year, wanted to publish her account immediately after the President???s speech, but Carlo Rossella, Panorama???s editor-in-chief, decided against it. Rossella explained to me, ???When I heard the State of the Union statement, I thought to myself that perhaps the United States government has other information. I didn???t think the documents were that important???they weren???t trustable.??? Eventually, in July, after her name appeared in the press, Burba published an account of her role. She told me that she was interviewed at the American consulate in Milan by three agents for the F.B.I. in early September.
The State of the Union speech was confounding to many members of the intelligence community, who could not understand how such intelligence could have got to the President without vetting. The former intelligence official who gave me the account of the forging of the documents told me that his colleagues were also startled by the speech. ???They said, ???Holy shit, all of a sudden the President is talking about it in the State of the Union address!??? They began to panic. Who the hell was going to expose it? They had to build a backfire. The solution was to leak the documents to the I.A.E.A.???
I subsequently met with a group of senior I.A.E.A. officials in Vienna, where the organization has its headquarters. In an interview over dinner, they told me that they did not even know the papers existed until early February of this year, a few days after the President???s speech. The I.A.E.A. had been asking Washington and London for their evidence of Iraq???s pursuit of African uranium, without receiving any response, ever since the previous September, when word of it turned up in the British dossier. After Niger was specified in the State Department???s fact sheet of December 19, 2002, the I.A.E.A. became more insistent. ???I started to harass the United States,??? recalled Jacques Baute, a Frenchman who, as director of the I.A.E.A.???s Iraq Nuclear Verification Office, often harassed Washington. Mark Gwozdecky, the I.A.E.A.???s spokesman, added, ???We were asking for actionable evidence, and Jacques was getting almost nothing. ???
On February 4, 2003, while Baute was on a plane bound for New York to attend a United Nations Security Council meeting on the Iraqi weapons dispute, the U.S. Mission in Vienna suddenly briefed members of Baute???s team on the Niger papers, but still declined to hand over the documents. ???I insisted on seeing the documents myself,??? Baute said, ???and was provided with them upon my arrival in New York.??? The next day, Secretary Powell made his case for going to war against Iraq before the U.N. Security Council. The presentation did not mention Niger???a fact that did not escape Baute. I.A.E.A. officials told me that they were puzzled by the timing of the American decision to provide the documents. Baute quickly concluded that they were fake.
Over the next few weeks, I.A.E.A. officials conducted further investigations, which confirmed the fraud. They also got in touch with American and British officials to inform them of the findings, and give them a chance to respond. Nothing was forthcoming, and so the I.A.E.A.???s director-general, Mohamed ElBaradei, publicly described the fraud at his next scheduled briefing to the U.N. Security Council, in New York on March 7th. The story slowly began to unravel.
Vice-President Cheney responded to ElBaradei???s report mainly by attacking the messenger. On March 16th, Cheney, appearing on ???Meet the Press,??? stated emphatically that the United States had reason to believe that Saddam Hussein had reconstituted his nuclear-weapons program. He went on, ???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.??? Three days later, the war in Iraq got under way, and the tale of the African-uranium-connection forgery sank from view.
Joseph Wilson, the diplomat who had travelled to Africa to investigate the allegation more than a year earlier, revived the Niger story. He was angered
You are saying that specific dissent on pieces of intelligence among some members of the intelligence community is evidence of widespread pressure on the analysts and deception from the administration before the war. I will even grant for now that the White House had a keener interest in drawing different conclusions on Saddam and al Qaeda, though that's murkier than you let on. But on the question of biological and chemical weapons every major intelligence office, bureau and agency in the US intelligence community believed Saddam was concealing active programs and likely possessed stockpiles. The stovepipe article by Hersch, who has on many occassions reported ground breaking stories accurately, is a load of crap. It has since been debunked by Silbermann Robb; the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee investigation, not to mention the Butler report in the UK and the Israeli investigation by the Knesset's National Security and Foreign Affairs committee. In order to believe Greg Thielmann (whose own supervisor at State has told me on the record that Intelligence and Research believed there were chemical and bio programs), you would have to believe that the intelligence provided to President Clinton in the 1990s radically changed in 2001 after the UN Sanctions were effectively busted with regular civilian aircraft leaving Baghdad international, with Lloyds of London no longer monitoring imports at the Port of Aqaba. You would have to disbelieve the intelligence estimates of all your allies at the time, including Saudi Arabia, not to mention you would have to assume that all prior UN reports on this were just wrong. The view that neocons or the president or whatever bogeyman invented the weapons issue as a pretext for war is a fairytale told to willing and gullible Americans by the likes of Sy Hersch, Lewis Lapham and Dennis Kucinich.
Wu, as for your specific objection to my argument about the CIA, I don't see your point. After the worst sneak attack on the country since the war of 1812 I can understand why the president would not fire Tenet and at the same time not trust him or his agency. As it turns out, the president did trust the bureaucratic enemies of the neoconservatives with the most important presentation on Saddam's WMDs and links to al-Qaeda. I was in the State Department press corps, and I can tell you we were all assured that the presentation Powell gave to the UN was free of any and all neoconservative influence. Woodward's book has a passage quoting a senior official who is presumably powell talking about sending back a White House draft to Steve Hadley. Briefly a few CIA anonymous sources told some journalists that Powell's mention of Curveball's information came from Ahmad Chalabi. Well that was entirely wrong, as we now know from Silbermann Robb. In other words the stovepipers were cut out of the loop when preparing the most important and incidentally wrong presentation to the UN Security Council.
What about the 16 words and the brave Joe Wilson. But the president did not say the CIA has learned, he said british intelligence has learned, about Saddam's attempts to procure uranium from Africa. Again, they would have been better off listening to Wilson, but he was one of many sources on this question. And by the way the Butler report, which reviewed the British intelligence in question, found that MI6 was correct to presume Saddam had tried to buy uranium from Africa. As a result of the whole fiasco numerous liberals championed the dubious and dangerous prospect that reporters ought to--had an obligation to--appear before grand juries as witnesses against their sources. We are about to learn how terrible this precedent is because the Justice Department will no doubt call reporters as witnesses in the NSA leak prosecution.
But here's the better question. Why would any self respecting liberal democrat be against pressuring the secret bureaucracy entrusted throughout the cold war with fomenting coups, funneling cash and arms to tyrants, teaching death squads torture and bribing third world diplomats to betray their young countries? Political pressure against the CIA is the best guarantee (along with a free press) that we have not spawned a nomenklatura, a KGB, a secret government unaccountable to us. It's like every democrat forgot about the Church and Pike oversight commissions, forgot about the secret LSD tests, Greece, Iran and Guatemala. Is this the fault of 24 and alias?
Go back and read what I posted. I said that the CIA had their heads up their asses when it came to WMD. I do not dispute that U.S. intelligence claimed Iraq had restarted its program and that's what the Bush administration claimed. You spent a whole paragph arguing something I did not claim.
What I do dispute is that Bush was never given a SINGLE major intelligence report that Iraq was linked to Al Qaeda yet made it a major part of the justification for war.
You can go into specifici charges as well such as Mohammad Atta met with Iraqi intelligence in Prague and that Iraq was behind the earlier bombing of the WTC, which proved to be completley baseless, yet Cheney and Wolfowitz continued to claim that it was true way after the invasion in fact.
I will also argue that the administraiton went out of its way to include the Niger claim in a 2003 State of the Union speech when they were repeatedly told NOT TO. The change in language in the State of the Union speech to claim that they learned that England had found that Iraq was trying to buy uranium from Africa was done SPECIFICALLY to get around the CIA's objections. They couldn't say "we" = U.S. has found because the CIA told them no, we hadn't. They couldn't say Iraq tried to buy uranium from Niger, because the CIA told them, no, we hadn't confirmed it. So the White House went through all kinds of loops to change the language to make a statement about something they KNEW they weren't suppose to use.
The President's OWN Foreign Intelligence Board found that Bush was so desperate to find anything netative about Iraq that they included the Niger claim in the speech even though they were told not to.
As for Powell's U.N. speech, that was entirely based upon U.S. intelligence report. Scooter Libby repeatedly tried to include some of the neocons and the Pentagon's Counterterrorism group's claims in the speech only to be rebuffed.
There is more and more evidence coming out all the time that Bush was set on war with Iraq from very early on, and that all the talk of WMD, terrorism, etc. was simply a way to justify it. War was NOT the last resort, it was the first option.
The White House received 34 briefings and reports saying that there was no connection between Iraq, Al Qaeda and anti-Western terrorism.
Wolfowitz read a book by an author from the American Enterprise Institute saying that Iraq was behind the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Wolfowitz was given several reports and briefings by U.S. intelligence and FBI saying that Iraq was not behind the bombing. Wolfowitz asked former CIA chief James Woosely and a neconservative to look into the claim and he found nothing. Wolfowitz asked the British Ambassador to the U.S. if England could find anything on the report. Everyone told Wolfowitz, Iraq wasn't behind the bombing. Despite all that, on November 2004 Wolfowitz told the New Yorker that Iraq was behind the bombing however. That's an individual example of how the war supporters within the administration were set in their views.
This whole debate gets down to one simple question "Did the Bushies rush into the war with alterior motives or were they acting in the best interst of the coutry's national security?" Ask yourself, why North Korea and Iran, who clearly pose(d) far greater threats to us, were not the first targets of an invasion (or being seriously considered to be invaded today)? That answer has to do with politics. It is not poltically feasible to invade either of those places. China would have become involved if we crossed the DMZ and certainly Russia and others would be very troubled by a march toward Tehran. So why Iraq? The logical response is because we could. "Well that sounds awfully cynical, like you think we were looking for some sort of imperialist opportunity in the Middle East" you say. My response is "Yes, Dorothy, we were looking for a chance to push a new 'democratic agenda' in the region and we used 9/11 as the excuse".
Raise your hand if you sincerely believe that President Gore would have invaded Iraq based upon the same faulty intelligence. Raise your hand if you trust a single word that comes out of these clowns mouths about any policy regarding the war on terror.
Comments
dark ages? Isnt that women in muslim garb or something?
HOw is that the dark ages?
some of the muslim policies of covering the women up is the dark ages, ie taliban etc.
I dunno, i used to think like that, but anymore i just think its how they get down and mabye we should respect it a bit more.
Lapham like many other war critics have settled on the following evidence of deception. In some cases segments of the intelligence community doubted the pre-war intelligence in speeches, estimates and what not. Why didn???t Bush listen to the Energy Department on the aluminum tubes, or Joe Wilson on the Niger documents, or any number of specific pieces of information that later proved wrong? This is as good as it goes, but rarely do the proponents of this theory ask the next logical question. If so and so said this was wrong, who said it was correct? The Bush Cheney junta, office of special plans, the neocons, Chalabi, they squeal. Anyway, just to harp on the tubes, it was the CIA???s own division dealing with WMD that approved the intel about the aluminum tubes. DOE believed Saddam had an active nuke program as he was importing specialized magnets for centrifuges. Even the State Department???s Department of Intelligence and Research believed Saddam had active biological and chemical weapons. And the report that everyone sites as proof positive that Iraq had no WMD, the Duelfer report, says Saddam had semi dormant programs he intended to restart when sanctions were lifted.
Lapham makes a rather big deal, along with Conyers, on the fact that the Bush administration planned the invasion all along. And this is barely true. Neoconservatives favored what was spelled out in the Iraq Liberation Act, which was to train and support an all Iraqi army to foment an open rebellion. This plan only changed after Powell and the joint chiefs persuaded Cheney to support an invasion as the contra strategy was too risky and Saddam was too much a threat. The numerous arms depots and mass graves discovered in Iraq since the invasion put the lie to this piffle: ???the regime destined to be changed poses no imminent threat, certainly not to the United States, probably not to any country defended by more than four batteries of light artillery.??? America to this day is still sifting through the massive stocks of Saddam???s conventional arms stockpile. A large part of the resistance it???s facing is comprised of former officers in his military and security services who went underground and formed a ???resistance.???
I don???t know if Lapham actually believes the ???resistance??? in Iraq is just. But he is certainly appealing to the cretins who do with this sloppy slogan talk: ???Thief,??? ???televangelist,??? ???liar.??? But in part, for all of his grandstanding, he is projecting. He slyly implies that all of these alleged lies served Bush???s ???private interest.??? Does he even consider that the evidence compiled in Conyers report largely stems from those CIA mandcarins dedicated to preserving the sovereign equality and diplomatic immunity of Saddam???s prison state. Lapham and Conyers??? erstwhile allies in their war on the neocons are the very scoundrels who they rightly chided in the 1980s as propping up dictators, and creating the conditions for jihad today.
None of this is to say that Iraq is working well. I???m not sure it can be won. Nor is to say that Bush is a great president. He has done some dangerous and stupid things. He has declared war on journalism by allowing his attorneys to prosecute intelligence leakers, he empowered a secret club of lawyers to draft interrogation rules that have led to widespread torture, and he allowed ethnic parties to maintain militias in Iraq while failing to still the insurgency in its early months.
But all of that said, Lapham is not making that case, or the eminently moral case that the elected government and its flawed constitution must prevail over these seeking to sabotage it. He???s pretending that Iraq was fine before we got there. And of all of his lies, this is the most revolting.
A) that's not unprecedented. Al Gore asked for and received plenty of unfiltered intel for his staff on Russia.
B) Cheney did not exactly ask for unfiltered intelligence. He asked for a second opinion. The counterterrorism sub group in the department of defense analyzed information relating to al qaeda and known state sponsors of terror and concluded that Saddam had dealings with the organization. This incidentally has not been entirely disproven, but was later found to not be that significant. He asked to see this second opinion.
C) One factor leading the vice president to second guess the CIA was this intelligence failure called 9-11, maybe you've heard of it.
D) The CIA's own analysis aty Weapons Nonproliferation and Arms Control, all concluded that Saddam had active nukes, bio and chem programs--something the duelfer report half concedes anyway.
I see nobody caught my reference here. You guys are sleeping, you fucks.
Look at those ladies and their face things. Those angry muslims might chill out if they had some tit-tays slappin in their fucking face.
jesus, i should be president.
Dude.....I wanna be Vice Pres and here's what I'll bring to the table....
As soon as Anna Nicole Smith loses her lawsuit and is flat(no pun intended) broke we'll take her over to Iraq........we'll tell her that there are about 10,000 Al Qaeda and that ONE of them is worth 10 Billion Dollars and has a deadly disease with only one year to live.....all she has to do is fuck each one of them and when she finds the billionaire she'll get to marry him......we put each "loser" in jail until we have them all....by the time she gets to #9,999 the war should be over.
And seriously.....you may be on to something....I've read the 9/11 dudes spent one of their last nights in a Topless Bar!!!
1: Iraq was a threat because it possessed WMD and had a nuclear program that they could give to terrorists to attack the U.S.[/b]
First, U.S. intelligence told the administration several times that it was unlikely that Iraq would use terrorists against the U.S. because it would lead to U.S. retaliation.
Second, intelligence said that it was also unlikely that Iraq would give WMD to a terrorist group that it did not control. If it wanted to attack the U.S. or others it would use its own intelligence organization like it had done in the past.
Third, the only confirmed links Iraq had with terrorists were to two notorious Palestinian groups that had been inactive since the mid-1990s and attacks on Iraqi exiles. Iraq also gave millions to families of Palestinian suicide bombers and supported the Intifadah, but every Arab country supports the Palestinians. Iraq had not participated in any anti-Western terrorism since 1993.
Fourth, Iraq only had battlefield WMD that required hundreds of rockets and artillery shells to be fired to blanket an area to kill. Iraq never had the sophistication to make WMD small enough to be used by an individual or terrorist group.
Fifth, Iraq only had two plans for nuclear bombs. They were so heavy that they could never be used. Again, not only did Iraq not have nuclear weapons, they didn???t even have plans for bombs that they could use themselves, let alone give to a terrorist group.
2: Iraq was connected to Al Qaeda and 9/11[/b]
First, from the beginning of the administration Bush was told that Iraq and Al Qaeda were not connected. When 9/11 happened Bush and others told officials to look into such a collaboration but were told there was none over and over.
Second, Cheney and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz came to claim that 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta met with Iraqi intelligence in the Spring of 2001 as proof that Iraq was behind 9/11. They were told again and again that this did not happen, but continued to say it was true.
Third, the administration claimed that Iraq had a long standing relationship with Al Qaeda, was hiding Al Qaeda operatives after the Afghan war, and gave Al Qaeda training. While there were Al Qaeda fighters in Iraq, U.S. intelligence said that they were in northern Iraq where the government had no control because of the U.S. enforced no fly zone.
Fourth, the only group saying that Iraq was connected to Al Qaeda was an organization within the Pentagon called the Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group, staffed by two neoconservatives with no background in intelligence. They said that Iraq had been connected with Al Qaeda since the mid-1990s and had met and worked together over 50 times. U.S. intelligence said this was not true.
3: Iraq was working on building an atomic bomb that could threaten the U.S.[/b]
First, as stated above, Iraq never had plans for a workable nuclear bomb.
Second, U.S. intelligence said that Iraq could have a bomb within a year if it got enriched uranium from abroad and received foreign help to process it. There were faked reports that Iraq was trying to buy uranium from abroad, but they were not receiving any foreign help.
4: Iraq was trying to buy uranium from Niger[/b]
First, the claim that Iraq was trying to buy uranium from Niger was the reason why administration officials said that Iraq could have a nuclear bomb within a year.
Second, the administration was told again and again not to use the story in its public speeches because the intelligence community was not sure that the story was true. In the end, it proved to be based upon forged documents.
Third, the administration ended up using it in a 2003 State of the Union speech by Bush. The CIA didn???t want them to use the claim, so they changed it from Iraq was looking to buy uranium from Niger, to buying it from Africa. The speech also said that they got the report from England rather than U.S. intelligence. The president???s own Foreign Intelligence Board did an internal review of how this claim ended up in the State of the Union address and found that the administration was so desperate to find evidence of Iraq???s wrong doing and WMD program that it used the Niger story even though the CIA told them not to.
5: Iraq was not cooperating with U.N. weapons inspectors[/b]
First, like all weapons inspections, the Iraqis tried to limit their activities when they first arrived. However by the beginning of 2003 the inspectors had got almost all of their demands met for interrogation of scientists, access to sites, use of planes and helicopters for surveillance, etc. U.N. and International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors in their last reports before the war began said that Iraq was finally cooperating and that no evidence had been found of a WMD or nuclear program.
Second, the U.S. claimed that Iraq was hiding a stockpile of WMD from inspectors. The U.N. never found this stockpile and the amounts were based upon a faulty equation based upon what Iraq originally had before the Iran-Iraq war. The problem was, the U.S. never knew what this amount was so depending on the speech, U.S. officials were likely to say different amounts of Iraq WMD themselves.
Third, all the sites the U.S. told U.N. inspectors to look at nothing was found, yet the U.S. continued to say they knew Iraq had stockpiles of WMD, an active program, and knew where they were.
6: War was the last resort against Iraq[/b]
First, Bush claimed that the U.S. only went to war because Iraq failed to comply with the last U.N. resolution 1441 in March 2003, in fact, he had decided on war long before that.
Second, the neoconservative elements in his administration had been advocating attacking Iraq militarily since the very first meetings of his national security team in early 2001.
Third, when 9/11 happened Bush believed that Iraq had something to do with it and said that Iraq would be next after Afghanistan.
Fourth, on 9/21/01, just ten days after the 9/11 attacks, Bush told British Prime Minister Tony Blair that he wanted to invade Iraq after Afghanistan.
Fifth, the British Downing Street memo from 7/23/02 about a meeting of England???s top foreign policy advisors says that Bush had decided upon military action against Iraq. , ???There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime???s record.??? The memo also said that England should go to the U.N. to get new inspectors, not to disarm Iraq but to create a controversy that would help justify a war.
Sixth, on 1/31/03 when Bush and Blair met in Washington, Blair told Bush that he was conmpletley behind an invasion of Iraq. Bush told Blair he wasn't going to wait for a 2nd U.N. resolution on the matter and Blair confirmed that he wouldn't wait either. Bush also told Blair that he was worried that the U.N. inspectors wouldn't find any WMD, therefore they needed to find a way to justify the war. Bush even sugested that U.S. warplanes escort U-2 spy planes to try to provoke an Iraqi attack.
Cheney and the neoconservatives in the Pentagon and Vice President's office did not just second guess the CIA because of 9-11. They had a long running atagonism against them dating back to the Cold War. Basically, they didn't believe anything the CIA said.
People like Richard Perle claimed that the CIA underestimated the threat posed by the Russians during Reagan's administration, said they underestimated the links between Saddam and Al Qaeda before and right after the war, and have continued to blame the CIA among others for the problems in Iraq after the war.
And Cheney was receiving raw unprocessed intelligence not only from the Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group in the Pentagon, which is now being investigated for setting up an illegal intelligence organization by the way, but he was also receiving direct reports from Chalabi and other Iraqi exiles his office and the Pentagon had been cultivating since their war plans began.
Overall, when it came to WMD the CIA and U.S. intelligence had their heads up their ass and basically guessed on almost everything.
When it came to terrorism however, the CIA, DIA, State Department, etc. never filed a single major report saying that Iraq was connected to Al Qaeda or anti-Western terrorism. Yet that was a major claim of the administration. If the administration didn't get a single report from the U.S. intelligence community, what was their basis for their continuous claim of Iraq-Al Qaeda connections?
A) it is unprecedented for the intel to be used in the manner that it was, making it's way into the state of union for example. Gore asking questions about an ally is not an oranges to oranges comparison. The only corollary I can think of would be the Gulf of Tonkin nightmare which of course led to the deepening of the Vietnam conflict, one of our nations least proud moments.
B)Wrong. Cheney got raw unfiltered field reports which became part of his and other white offices pre-war planning.
C) This is the strangest assertion of all. First off the Cheney started stovepiping reports pre-9/11 (read sy hearsh's book chain of command or his new yorker article) If Bush and crew didn't trust the CIA post 9/11 why no move to put one of their guys in charge? Why did they rely on CIA reports about WMD? The fact is that only one explanation of this ordeal make sense; the neo-cons didn't care what the CIA had to say, they were determined to make the world in their image. Unfortunately, for everyone they got it wrong. And we are left to deal with the fall out.
Below is an interview of Sy Hersh who wrote the initial "stovepipe" (ie bypass the pro intel community) piece in the NEW YORKER exposing Cheney's radical intelligence analysis scheme at the white house. He explains better than I ever could why this process failed us, why it may still fail us and speculates quite accurately about what would happen in Iraq. The interview took place in 2003 and he got Iraq pretty much dead on.
For those more hardcore strutters I have also included sy hersh's article. It is an incredible read. He wrote a book called "chain of command" which also covers much of this mess.
Behind the ???Mushroom Cloud???
Posted 2003-10-21
This week in the magazine and here online (see Fact), in ???The Stovepipe,??? Seymour M. Hersh reports on how the Bush Administration led the intelligence community on a chase for weapons of mass destruction. Here Hersh discusses his article and the current state of the Bush Administration.
AMY DAVIDSON: Your story in the magazine this week is called ???The Stovepipe.??? Why?
SEYMOUR M. HERSH: Well, inside the military, ???stovepiping??? is slang for the practice of taking a piece of intelligence or a request that should be pushed through the chain of command???checked at levels and sent from one level to another???and bringing it straight to the highest authority. One of the things that people in the intelligence community have learned over the years is that early reports are often wrong. And so, before you respond to the first piece of information you have, you analyze it, you vet it, you study it, and then you make a decision about what you???re going to do with it. Stovepiping allows them to cheat the process. When you stovepipe stuff, you leave yourself open to the worst kinds of results.
Is that what happened when the Bush Administration was building its case against Iraq?
One basic problem is that the Bush Administration changed the process in a very dramatic way. They worked it so that the raw intelligence, the reports that they wanted to hear, got to the top right away. The pro-war hawks rigged the system so that negative information about Iraq, no matter where it came from???and in many cases, we now know, much of it came from defectors who were relayed through the Iraqi National Congress, the group run by Ahmad Chalabi???was stovepiped directly to the leadership without any assessment. And so you had a situation in the Pentagon, and in the State Department, in the office of Under-Secretary John Bolton, and in the Vice-President???s office, too, in which the professionals were cut out of the process. That???s how you get to a position where Secretary of State Colin Powell can show up at the United Nations, as he did in February, and make a series of very boisterous claims about Iraq, most of which now appear to be wrong.[/b]
Was this, then, a matter of the Administration lying to itself as much as to anyone else?
One of the great questions is ???Were they lying? Did they know the truth???? And the answer, I think, to a large degree, is that, whatever they may have suspected, they didn???t know the truth, because the truth was simply impossible for them to see. The system had been set up so that they saw only what they wanted. And, you know, these people, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz in particular, came to the office openly suspicious of the intelligence community and the bureaucracy. [/b] They thought they were too soft on Iraq, not tough enough with Saddam, not able to make the decisive choices. So what you have is a bunch of people who weren???t lying; they simply had fixed the system so it couldn???t give them information they didn???t want to hear. One of the intelligence guys I talked to used a wonderful analogy. He said, ???It???s as if you all had gone into a planetarium and the software for the sky show had gone bad and you were seeing the wrong sky, and you walked outside, and you looked up and you said, ???Hey, what???s going on. This isn???t right.??? ??? And that???s what they had done: they had gone into the planetarium, they set themselves up with the wrong software, and then they were surprised to find that the rest of the world didn???t conform???the war began, and there were no W.M.D.s.
In your article, you quote an Administration official who said that the C.I.A. was beaten down by requests for a certain kind of intelligence. But isn???t it the C.I.A.???s job to resist that kind of pressure? Does the C.I.A. do enough to stand up for itself?
It turns out that it really doesn???t. One official I talked to reminded me what happened in the mid-nineteen-eighties, when Ronald Reagan was convinced that Cuba was behind everything going on in Central America???that all of the aspiration for freedom in Central America, the unrest there, was the work of Communist outside agitators. The community fought them for a long time, but they eventually gave up, and the analysts began to write it the way they wanted. The fact of the matter is that unless there???s very strong independent leadership on top the analysts will break and fold. In this case, George Tenet simply wasn???t strong enough. He???s a decent man, a kind man, and a perfectly honorable man, but after 9/11 he was in trouble, and the way he held on to his job was by going along and not telling the White House anything they didn???t want to hear.
In your story, you look into the origins of the so-called Niger documents, which purported to reveal an attempted purchase of uranium by Iraq but turned out to be forgeries. It becomes clear in your story that these papers, illegitimate as they were, didn???t even appear until months after the Administration began talking about African uranium. What evidence did they have earlier?
The initial report about Iraq buying uranium ore from Niger surfaced only after September 11, 2001, and even that was an old report. We had a pparently asked other allied intelligence services to look for any information they might have related to terrorism, and out of Italy came a report of a visit to Niger by an Iraqi diplomat in February of 1999. It was seemingly a pretty benign visit, but the Italian service picked up some gossip that maybe they wanted to talk about uranium. And so this information got into the White House, and it was stovepiped, as I write, to Vice-President Dick Cheney, who asked the C.I.A. about it. They came back and said, ???We don???t think it???s much,??? and what seems to have happened is that Cheney kept on pushing. It was, as I say in the story, the freshest piece of meat they had to bolster what was going to be their mantra in 2002.[/b] After all, the prospect of Saddam with a nuclear weapon is scary to anyone. But, ironically, even more than was the case with chemical or biological weapons, the U.N. had been able to say, as strongly as the U.N. ever says anything, ???They don???t have it.??? They were bombed; they???ve had nothing since ???91 and haven???t been able to reconstitute. That???s the big word. If Iraq was attempting to get uranium in Niger in 1999, it would indicate that it was reconstituting its system.
The Italian report appeared in late 2001, and then there was a decision to send retired Ambassador Joseph Wilson to Niger in early 2002. And that was still before any of those papers came to light?
Yes, the forgeries came later. Wilson went in February and checked out the Italian report, talked to people, looked into it, and discovered that there was nothing to it. He came back and reported that. And what happened was that it didn???t matter what he said. Because President Bush and the Vice-President and the Secretary of Defense, Mr. Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz???they still began to talk about Iraq as if they were in the process of buying and establishing a nuclear facility. Then, when the papers finally appeared, in October, 2002, they seized on them???they were just what they were waiting for. That was just the evidence they needed to make their case. And it didn???t matter what the truth was.
You looked into the question of who actually fabricated the papers. What did you find out?
Different people have different theories. When I was in Italy, there were people who thought that the documents might have been written by the Italian military intelligence service, whose acronym is sismi. There have been other suspects, too. But one of the most compelling theories was relayed to me by a former senior C.I.A. official, a very high-level guy. And it goes back to the issue of how broken the intelligence system was, so much so that you couldn???t get at the truth. What he said represented the frustration and rage felt by many in the intelligence community, the notion that a group of retired officers actually got together and drafted the Niger papers.
Why would anybody who had worked for the C.I.A., no matter how disgruntled, forge documents?
First, you have to understand that C.I.A. stations around the world, not so much now but during the Cold War, falsified documents all the time. That???s what they did for a living. That???s part of the tradecraft. Second, if you???re in the C.I.A. and it???s last fall, you???re almost frozen, you???re powerless. By March, 2002, the people on the inside knew that the President had decided to go to war in Iraq, and by the summer C.I.A. operations against terrorism around the world???in Central Asia particularly???were shut off because of lack of funds and because any personnel who had good language skills were shoved into the Gulf to get ready for the war. So there was a tremendous sense of frustration.
But wouldn???t these documents have helped the Administration?
No, the documents were written to be exposed. The papers are hopeless, and even the Italian reporter who looked at them, Elisabetta Burba, was able very quickly to determine that they were false. They???re bad forgeries. And I think the idea was simply to embarrass the government internally. Don???t forget, Niger had already been a source of great dispute between the C.I.A. and the Pentagon and the Vice-President???s office. There was this tension. And so the thought was that somebody like Cheney or Rumsfeld and their aides would flash them at a meeting, and then the other side could counterattack. It would be an embarrassment, because the papers were such obvious fakes. Or Rumsfeld or somebody would go public with the papers, not vet them, not analyze them, and the press would go after them. But that didn???t happen. Instead, lo and behold, the President used the Niger story to make the case against Iraq in his State of the Union speech in January.
Less than two months after that speech, in March, the Niger papers were revealed to have been forged. The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency exposed them as fakes, and you and a few other journalists wrote in-depth articles on them that month???before the war. But the story really took off only in July. Why was there such a delay?
I don???t know. I was surprised that there weren???t more questions raised about it, because it seemed very clear that the I.A.E.A. said publicly that the documents weren???t worth the paper they were written on. And that???s what drove Joe Wilson finally, sixteen months after he made his report, to go public in a New York Times Op-Ed piece. Wilson personalized it by saying, ???I went there, and it???s not good, and they???re not telling the truth.??? In a way, we needed an American to tell us that. We didn???t want some international U.N. guy saying it. Also, what happened between March and July is that we didn???t find weapons. When I wrote about it, the war had just started, but by July the bloom was off, everybody knew we were in trouble. So I think those factors combined to make Wilson???s story combustible. And then, of course, the White House responded by leaking to Robert Novak the fact that Wilson???s wife is in the C.I.A. So they retaliated against him, and that triggered more of an outcry.
Let???s talk about that Novak column. You, too, have often received classified information from anonymous sources. How do you feel about the search that???s under way now for the person who leaked?
It???s obviously a very tough question, because I???m a Jeffersonian, a First Amendment man. The real problem is the people who told Novak that story. I don???t think Novak realized that she was as sensitive as she was. She was an employee undercover. I???d like to think that he didn???t know that. I just don???t know the facts. But publishing the name of somebody who???s undercover in the C.I.A., if the person hasn???t done anything wrong???none of us do that. It???s a tradition; it???s one of the things we don???t do. You constantly see newspaper stories saying, ???We know the identity of this person, but we???re not going to mention it.??? The only explanation I have is that Bob Novak, who is a very excellent reporter, didn???t know how sensitive her job was. Nobody communicated that to him. Whether he should have checked or not, it???s awfully hard to check, because the C.I.A. does not tell you anything about its employees.
We???ve been talking about how the case for the war was made. Why does that matter now, now that we???re in there?
Well, for one thing, it matters because we have a system set up, a stovepipe system, that???s still in place. We???re still in a situation in which intelligence that doesn???t meet political criteria doesn???t get to the President, and in which people in high positions will take any intelligence that makes their case and move it directly to the President. It???s not a straight system. There???s still this incredible impasse.
Is the problem confined to Iraq? Or does this affect, say, our Russian or our North Korean intelligence as well?
That???s the most frightening thing about this story, in a way. You???ve got a system set up so that if some defector comes out of North Korea with the right kind of information it would get directly to the President. And that???s very scary. You know, one of the things about vetting an agent report is that you don???t simply take it at face value. You really have to put it through a grinder, which is what skeptical intelligence professionals do. What???s the guy like? Is the information he???s giving you the kind of information he has access to? Because most of these people get paid, and the better the story the more they get paid. So you really have to check out what defectors tell you. And so, yes, I think we???re open to a lot of manipulation???internal manipulation, by people with a political agenda???to mislead the President and the Vice-President.[/b]
How do the people you speak to think we???re doing in Iraq right now?
Much worse than the picture given to the public suggests, almost across the board; there???s very little good that I???m hearing. The morale of the officer corps, the lieutenant colonels and the colonels and others, is still high; after all, it???s a war, and it???s what they???ve spent their life doing, or getting ready to do. They think that the military is not broken, even though it???s under tremendous strain. But after that there???s nothing good to be said. Somebody said to me that it???s like the children???s game where you hit a mole, and when you knock it down another one comes up. That???s exactly where we are now. We have a problem, we knock that one problem down, another one comes up. We???re now getting into a serious shoot-up with the Shiites. The enmity is spreading. But I???m sure the President has a different position. It???s very unnerving.[/b]
Last week, the President said that the press was being too negative about Iraq.
Well, that???s because the stovepiped reports he gets are generally much more upbeat.
A lot of media organizations have pulled back reporters in Iraq. Do you think that makes it harder for them, or for us, to get a good picture of what???s happening there?
I don???t think it???s very hard to get a good picture of what???s happening there. The number of incidents against us has gone up. I can tell you right now that I know from classified sources inside the government that as of two weeks ago the level of incidents was???this is a number that was reported in a highly classified document inside the government???twenty-three a day. I venture to say that we???re not hearing everything. One of the problems we have is that the basic source of information, whether you have a lot of reporters there or a few, is still the Army command. They???re the ones who get all of the pre-collated reports. We???re not getting the whole story.[/b]
How much of an issue do you think Iraq will be in the 2004 election?
Huge. Iraq is incredibly important to this President in terms of his political future. And the ideological goals???the goal of reshaping the Middle East, the goal of bringing democracy to the Middle East, the goal of changing Syria and Lebanon???are all still issues for this Administration. The thing that frightens me the most is that the Administration may feel compelled to seriously escalate what we do there???not so much in terms of troops but in terms of bombing. It???s like that line out of the Vietnam War that haunts me, about the major who ordered his troops to bomb a village, as he said, in order to save it.
Speaking of Vietnam, Howard Dean???s campaign has been built largely around opposition to the war. Some commentators say that he???s doomed to be another Eugene McCarthy. You worked for McCarthy???
I was his press secretary and speechwriter.
Do you think it???s an apt comparison?
I don???t know Howard Dean personally. The only thing I can say is that, out of all the candidates, he was the first to speak most clearly about the problems with Iraq. And as far as I???m concerned that gives him a huge head start. There???s also Dennis Kucinich, but Dean, like McCarthy, has clearly taken a moral stand and a political stand against something that he sees as wrong. You have to remember what McCarthy did, challenging a sitting Democratic President, Lyndon Johnson. He got almost forty-two per cent of the vote against Johnson. And Johnson quit a couple of weeks after that vote, because he knew he couldn???t win. We???re not in the same situation now, obviously???Bush is much stronger, raising a lot of money, and is certainly going to be a formidable candidate. But I think this is going to be a very riotous year. It???s going to be the most interesting political year since Hoover vs. Roosevelt. Remember that the Administration, no matter how they twist the words or spin the words, told us we???d find weapons in Iraq. They believed it. That was the intelligence they got. And, to me, the fact that they weren???t lying and really believed it is as alarming as if they had been lying. It???s very, very troubling.
Can Bush turn it all around by finding Saddam?
In the long run, no. But that isn???t the issue that???s going to change the election. We didn???t go into the war on the basis that we were going to kill Saddam. We went to war on the basis that there were weapons that made him an imminent threat. And that???s not true. That???s the critical issue, and there???s no getting around that. The fact of the matter is the weapons aren???t there.
Do you think that, in November, 2004, American soldiers will be dying at the same rate they are now in Iraq?
Obviously, nobody can predict that. It depends on what we do. It seems like there is a pretty steady rate now. I keep on remembering that horrible line from Joseph Stalin. He once said that one death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic. And it seems clear that there are some very bright???evilly so???people on the other side in Iraq, making sure that every day or every other day an American dies. It???s cumulative, in a way. Sort of like nerve-gas poisoning???just a drop at a time.
So what???s the endgame there, or is there one?
Well, you know, in a perfect world we???d be doing everything we could with the U.N., with nato, with anybody, to try to get some sort of settlement between Israel and Palestine that doesn???t involve a big fence. We???d be doing everything to put tremendous pressure on both sides. And this Administration simply doesn???t have the stomach to do it. It doesn???t seem to be willing to do it.
Do you think that the world is a safer place than it was a year ago?
No. It???s much more dangerous. There???s no question now. We???ve now drawn a line in the sand, no pun intended, with 1.2 billion Muslims. We???re really disliked. Americans have always been liked, whether or not the country has been. But now there???s really an animosity toward Americans, and we???re going to have to go a long way to correct it.
THE STOVEPIPE
How conflicts between the Bush Administration and the intelligence community marred the reporting on Iraq???s weapons.
by SEYMOUR M. HERSH
Issue of 2003-10-27
Posted 2003-10-20
Since midsummer, the Senate Intelligence Committee has been attempting to solve the biggest mystery of the Iraq war: the disparity between the Bush Administration???s prewar assessment of Iraq???s weapons of mass destruction and what has actually been discovered.
The committee is concentrating on the last ten years??? worth of reports by the C.I.A. Preliminary findings, one intelligence official told me, are disquieting. ???The intelligence community made all kinds of errors and handled things sloppily,??? he said. The problems range from a lack of quality control to different agencies??? reporting contradictory assessments at the same time. One finding, the official went on, was that the intelligence reports about Iraq provided by the United Nations inspection teams and the International Atomic Energy Agency, which m onitored Iraq???s nuclear-weapons programs, were far more accurate than the C.I.A. estimates. ???Some of the old-timers in the community are appalled by how bad the analysis was,??? the official said. ???If you look at them side by side, C.I.A. versus United Nations, the U.N. agencies come out ahead across the board.???
There were, of course, good reasons to worry about Saddam Hussein???s possession of W.M.D.s. He had manufactured and used chemical weapons in the past, and had experimented with biological weapons; before the first Gulf War, he maintained a multibillion-dollar nuclear-weapons program. In addition, there were widespread doubts about the efficacy of the U.N. inspection teams, whose operations in Iraq were repeatedly challenged and disrupted by Saddam Hussein. Iraq was thought to have manufactured at least six thousand more chemical weapons than the U.N. could account for. And yet, as some former U.N. inspectors often predicted, the tons of chemical and biological weapons that the American public was led to expect have thus far proved illusory. As long as that remains the case, one question will be asked more and more insistently: How did the American intelligence community get it so wrong?
Part of the answer lies in decisions made early in the Bush Administration, before the events of September 11, 2001. In interviews with present and former intelligence officials, I was told that some senior Administration people, soon after coming to power, had bypassed the government???s customary procedures for vetting intelligence.
A retired C.I.A. officer described for me some of the questions that would normally arise in vetting: ???Does dramatic information turned up by an overseas spy square with his access, or does it exceed his plausible reach? How does the agent behave? Is he on time for meetings???? The vetting process is especially important when one is dealing with foreign-agent reports???sensitive intelligence that can trigger profound policy decisions. In theory, no request for action should be taken directly to higher authorities???a process known as ???stovepiping??????without the information on which it is based having been subjected to rigorous scrutiny.
The point is not that the President and his senior aides were consciously lying. What was taking place was much more systematic???and potentially just as troublesome. Kenneth Pollack, a former National Security Council expert on Iraq, whose book ???The Threatening Storm??? generally supported the use of force to remove Saddam Hussein, told me that what the Bush people did was ???dismantle the existing filtering process that for fifty years had been preventing the policymakers from getting bad information. They created stovepipes to get the information they wanted directly to the top leadership. Their position is that the professional bureaucracy is deliberately and maliciously keeping information from them.
???They always had information to back up their public claims, but it was often very bad information,??? Pollack continued. ???They were forcing the intelligence community to defend its good information and good analysis so aggressively that the intelligence analysts didn???t have the time or the energy to go after the bad information.???
The Administration eventually got its way, a former C.I.A. official said. ???The analysts at the C.I.A. were beaten down defending their assessments. And they blame George Tenet??????the C.I.A. director??????for not protecting them. I???ve never seen a government like this.???
A few months after George Bush took office, Greg Thielmann, an expert on disarmament with the State Department???s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, or INR, was assigned to be the daily intelligence liaison to John Bolton, the Under-Secretary of State for Arms Control, who is a prominent conservative. Thielmann understood that his posting had been mandated by Secretary of State Colin Powell, who thought that every important State Department bureau should be assigned a daily intelligence officer. ???Bolton was the guy with whom I had to do business,??? Thielmann said. ???We were going to provide him with all the information he was entitled to see. That???s what being a professional intelligence officer is all about.???
But, Thielmann told me, ???Bolton seemed to be troubled because INR was not telling him what he wanted to hear.??? Thielmann soon found himself shut out of Bolton???s early-morning staff meetings. ???I was intercepted at the door of his office and told, ???The Under-Secretary doesn???t need you to attend this meeting anymore.??? ??? When Thielmann protested that he was there to provide intelligence input, the aide said, ???The Under-Secretary wants to keep this in the family.???
Eventually, Thielmann said, Bolton demanded that he and his staff have direct electronic access to sensitive intelligence, such as foreign-agent reports and electronic intercepts. In previous Administrations, such data had been made available to under-secretaries only after it was analyzed, usually in the specially secured offices of INR. The whole point of the intelligence system in place, according to Thielmann, was ???to prevent raw intelligence from getting to people who would be misled.??? Bolton, however, wanted his aides to receive and assign intelligence analyses and assessments using the raw data. In essence, the under-secretary would be running his own intelligence operation, without any guidance or support. ???He surrounded himself with a hand-chosen group of loyalists, and found a way to get C.I.A. information directly,??? Thielmann said.
In a subsequent interview, Bolton acknowledged that he had changed the procedures for handling intelligence, in an effort to extend the scope of the classified materials available to his office. ???I found that there was lots of stuff that I wasn???t getting and that the INR analysts weren???t including,??? he told me. ???I didn???t want it filtered. I wanted to see everything???to be fully informed. If that puts someone???s nose out of joint, sorry about that.??? Bolton told me that he wanted to reach out to the intelligence community but that Thielmann had ???invited himself??? to his daily staff meetings. ???This was my meeting with the four assistant secretaries who report to me, in preparation for the Secretary???s 8:30 a.m. staff meeting,??? Bolton said. ???This was within my family of bureaus. There was no place for INR or anyone else???the Human Resources Bureau or the Office of Foreign Buildings.???
There was also a change in procedure at the Pentagon under Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, and Douglas Feith, the Under-Secretary for Policy. In the early summer of 2001, a career official assigned to a Pentagon planning office undertook a routine evaluation of the assumption, adopted by Wolfowitz and Feith, that the Iraqi National Congress, an exile group headed by Ahmad Chalabi, could play a major role in a coup d?????tat to oust Saddam Hussein. They also assumed that Chalabi, after the coup, would be welcomed by Iraqis as a hero.
An official familiar with the evaluation described how it subjected that scenario to the principle of what planners call ???branches and sequels??????that is, ???plan for what you expect not to happen.??? The official said, ???It was a ???what could go wrong??? study. What if it turns out that Ahmad Chalabi is not so popular? What???s Plan B if you discover that Chalabi and his boys don???t have it in them to accomplish the overthrow????
The people in the policy offices didn???t seem to care. When the official asked about the analysis, he was told by a colleague that the new Pentagon leadership wanted to focus not on what could go wrong but on what would go right. He was told that the study???s exploration of options amounted to planning for failure. ???Their methodology was analogous to tossing a coin five times and assuming that it would always come up heads,??? the official told me. ???You need to think about what would happen if it comes up tails.???
Getting rid of Saddam Hussein and his regime had been a priority for Wolfowitz and others in and around the Administration since the end of the first Gulf War. For years, Iraq hawks had seen a coup led by Chalabi as the best means of achieving that goal. After September 11th, however, and the military???s quick victory in Afghanistan, the notion of a coup gave way to the idea of an American invasion.
In a speech on November 14, 2001, as the Taliban were being routed in Afghanistan, Richard Perle, a Pentagon consultant with long-standing ties to Wolfowitz, Feith, and Chalabi, articulated what would become the Bush Administration???s most compelling argument for going to war with Iraq: the possibility that, with enough time, Saddam Hussein would be capable of attacking the United States with a nuclear weapon. Perle cited testimony from Dr. Khidhir Hamza, an Iraqi defector, who declared that Saddam Hussein, in response to the 1981 Israeli bombing of the Osiraq nuclear reactor, near Baghdad, had ordered future nuclear facilities to be dispersed at four hundred sites across the nation. ???Every day,??? Perle said, these sites ???turn out a little bit of nuclear materials.??? He told his audience, ???Do we wait for Saddam and hope for the best, do we wait and hope he doesn???t do what we know he is capable of . . . or do we take some preemptive action????
In fact, the best case for the success of the U.N. inspection process in Iraq was in the area of nuclear arms. In October, 1997, the International Atomic Energy Agency issued a definitive report declaring Iraq to be essentially free of nuclear weapons. The I.A.E.A.???s inspectors said, ???There are no indications that there remains in Iraq any physical capability for the production of amounts of weapon-usable nuclear material of any practical significance.??? The report noted that Iraq???s nuclear facilities had been destroyed by American bombs in the 1991 Gulf War.
The study???s main author, Garry Dillon, a British nuclear-safety engineer who spent twenty-three years working for the I.A.E.A. and retired as its chief of inspection, told me that it was ???highly unlikely??? that Iraq had been able to maintain a secret or hidden program to produce significant amounts of weapons-usable material, given the enormous progress in the past decade in the technical ability of I.A.E.A. inspectors to detect radioactivity in ground locations and in waterways. ???This is not kitchen chemistry,??? Dillon said. ???You???re talking factory scale, and in any operation there are leaks.???
The Administration could offer little or no recent firsthand intelligence to contradict the I.A.E.A.???s 1997 conclusions. During the Clinton years, there had been a constant flow of troubling intelligence reports on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, but most were in the context of worst-case analyses???what Iraq could do without adequate United Nations inspections???and included few, if any, reliable reports from agents inside the country. The inspectors left in 1998. Many of the new reports that the Bush people were receiving came from defectors who had managed to flee Iraq with help from the Iraqi National Congress. The defectors gave dramatic accounts of Iraq???s efforts to reconstituteits nuclear-weapons program, and of its alleged production of chemical and biological weapons???but the accounts could not be corroborated by the available intelligence.
Greg Thielmann, after being turned away from Bolton???s office, worked with the INR staff on a major review of Iraq???s progress in developing W.M.D.s. The review, presented to Secretary of State Powell in December, 2001, echoed the earlier I.A.E.A. findings. According to Thielmann, ???It basically said that there is no persuasive evidence that the Iraqi nuclear program is being reconstituted.???
The defectors, however, had an audience prepared to believe the worst. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had long complained about the limits of American intelligence. In the late nineteen-nineties, for example, he had chaired a commission on ballistic-missile programs that criticized the unwillingness of intelligence analysts ???to make estimates that extended beyond the hard evidence they had in hand.??? After he became Secretary of Defense, a separate intelligence unit was set up in the Pentagon???s policy office, under the control of William Luti, a senior aide to Feith. This office, which circumvented the usual procedures of vetting and transparency, stovepiped many of its findings to the highest-ranking officials.
In the fall of 2001, soon after the September 11th attacks, the C.I.A. received an intelligence report from Italy???s Military Intelligence and Security Service, or sismi, about a public visit that Wissam al-Zahawie, then the Iraqi Ambassador to the Vatican, had made to Niger and three other African nations two and a half years earlier, in February, 1999. The visit had been covered at the time by the local press in Niger and by a French press agency. The American Ambassador, Charles O. Cecil, filed a routine report to Washington on the visit, as did British intelligence. There was nothing untoward about the Zahawie visit. ???We reported it because his picture appeared in the paper with the President,??? Cecil, who is now retired, told me. There was no article accompanying the photograph, only the caption, and nothing significant to report. At the time, Niger, which had sent hundreds of troops in support of the American-led Gulf War in 1991, was actively seeking economic assistance from the United States.
None of the contemporaneous reports, as far as is known, made any mention of uranium. But now, apparently as part of a larger search for any pertinent information about terrorism, sismi dug the Zahawie-trip report out of its files and passed it along, with a suggestion that Zahawie???s real mission was to arrange the purchase of a form of uranium ore known as ???yellowcake.??? (Yellowcake, which has been a major Niger export for decades, can be used to make fuel for nuclear reactors. It can also be converted, if processed differently, into weapons-grade uranium.)
What made the two-and-a-half-year-old report stand out in Washington was its relative freshness. A 1999 attempt by Iraq to buy uranium ore, if verified, would seem to prove that Saddam had been working to reconstitute his nuclear program???and give the lie to the I.A.E.A. and to intelligence reports inside the American government that claimed otherwise.
The sismi report, however, was unpersuasive. Inside the American intelligence community, it was dismissed as amateurish and unsubstantiated. One former senior C.I.A. official told me that the initial report from Italy contained no documents but only a written summary of allegations. ???I can fully believe that sismi would put out a piece of intelligence like that,??? a C.I.A. consultant told me, ???but why anybody would put credibility in it is beyond me.??? No credible documents have emerged since to corroborate it.
The intelligence report was quickly stovepiped to those officials who had an intense interest in building the case against Iraq, including Vice-President Dick Cheney. ???The Vice-President saw a piece of intelligence reporting that Niger was attempting to buy uranium,??? Cathie Martin, the spokeswoman for Cheney, told me. Sometime after he first saw it, Cheney brought it up at his regularly scheduled daily briefing from the C.I.A., Martin said. ???He asked the briefer a question. The briefer came back a day or two later and said, ???We do have a report, but there???s a lack of details.??? ??? The Vice-President was further told that it was known that Iraq had acquired uranium ore from Niger in the early nineteen-eighties but that that material had been placed in secure storage by the I.A.E.A., which was monitoring it. ???End of story,??? Martin added. ???That???s all we know.??? According to a former high-level C.I.A. official, however, Che ney was dissatisfied with the initial response, and asked the agency to review the matter once again. It was the beginning of what turned out to be a year-long tug-of-war between the C.I.A. and the Vice-President???s office.
As the campaign against Iraq intensified, a former aide to Cheney told me, the Vice-President???s office, run by his chief of staff, Lewis (Scooter) Libby, became increasingly secretive when it came to intelligence about Iraq???s W.M.D.s. As with Wolfowitz and Bolton, there was a reluctance to let the military and civilian analysts on the staff vet intelligence.
???It was an unbelievably closed and small group,??? the former aide told me. Intelligence procedures were far more open during the Clinton Administration, he said, and professional staff members had been far more involved in assessing and evaluating the most sensitive data. ???There???s so much intelligence out there that it???s easy to pick and choose your case,??? the former aide told me. ???It opens things up to cherry-picking.??? (???Some reporting is sufficiently sensitive that it is restricted only to the very top officials of the government???as it should be,??? Cathie Martin said. And any restrictions, she added, emanate from C.I.A. security requirements.)
By early 2002, the sismi intelligence???still unverified???had begun to play a role in the Administration???s warnings about the Iraqi nuclear threat. On January 30th, the C.I.A. published an unclassified report to Congress that stated, ???Baghdad may be attempting to acquire materials that could aid in reconstituting its nuclear-weapons program.??? A week later, Colin Powell told the House International Relations Committee, ???With respect to the nuclear program, there is no doubt that the Iraqis are pursuing it.???
The C.I.A. assessment reflected both deep divisions within the agency and the position of its director, George Tenet, which was far from secure. (The agency had been sharply criticized, after all, for failing to provide any effective warning of the September 11th attacks.) In the view of many C.I.A. analysts and operatives, the director was too eager to endear himself to the Administration hawks and improve his standing with the President and the Vice-President. Senior C.I.A. analysts dealing with Iraq were constantly being urged by the Vice-President???s office to provide worst-case assessments on Iraqi weapons issues. ???They got pounded on, day after day,??? one senior Bush Administration official told me, and received no consistent backup from Tenet and his senior staff. ???Pretty soon you say ???Fuck it.??? ??? And they began to provide the intelligence that was wanted.
In late February, the C.I.A. persuaded retired Ambassador Joseph Wilson to fly to Niger to discreetly check out the story of the uranium sale. Wilson, who is now a business consultant, had excellent credentials: he had been deputy chief of mission in Baghdad, had served as a diplomat in Africa, and had worked in the White House for the National Security Council. He was known as an independent diplomat who had put himself in harm???s way to help American citizens abroad.
Wilson told me he was informed at the time that the mission had come about because the Vice-President???s office was interested in the Italian intelligence report. Before his departure, he was summoned to a meeting at the C.I.A. with a group of government experts on Iraq, Niger, and uranium. He was shown no documents but was told, he said, that the C.I.A. ???was responding to a report that was recently received of a purported memorandum of agreement??????between Iraq and Niger??????that our boys had gotten.??? He added, ???It was never clear to me, or to the people who were briefing me, whether our guys had actually seen the agreement, or the purported text of an agreement.??? Wilson???s trip to Niger, which lasted eight days, produced nothing. He learned that any memorandum of understanding to sell yellowcake would have required the signatures of Niger???s Prime Minister, Foreign Minister, and Minister of Mines. ???I saw everybody out there,??? Wilson said, and no one had signed such a document. ???If a document purporting to be about the sale contained those signatures, it would not be authentic.??? Wilson also learned that there was no uranium available to sell: it had all been pre-sold to Niger???s Japanese and European consortium partners.
Wilson returned to Washington and made his report. It was circulated, he said, but ???I heard nothing about what the Vice-President???s office thought about it.??? (In response, Cathie Martin said, ???The Vice-President doesn???t know Joe Wilson and did not know about his trip until he read about it in the press.??? The first press accounts appeared fifteen months after Wilson???s trip.)
By early March, 2002, a former White House official told me, it was understood by many in the White House that the President had decided, in his own mind, to go to war. The undeclared decision had a devastating impact on the continuing struggle against terrorism. The Bush Administration took many intelligence operations that had been aimed at Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups around the world and redirected them to the Persian Gulf. Linguists and special operatives were abruptly reassigned, and several ongoing anti-terrorism intelligence programs were curtailed.
Chalabi???s defector reports were now flowing from the Pentagon directly to the Vice-President???s office, and then on to the President, with little prior evaluation by intelligence professionals. When INR analysts did get a look at the reports, they were troubled by what they found. ???They???d pick apart a report and find out that the source had been wrong before, or had no access to the information provided,??? Greg Thielmann told me. ???There was considerable skepticism throughout the intelligence community about the reliability of Chalabi???s sources, but the defector reports were coming all the time. Knock one down and another comes along. Meanwhile, the garbage was being shoved straight to the President.???
A routine settled in: the Pentagon???s defector reports, classified ???secret,??? would be funnelled to newspapers, but subsequent C.I.A. and INR analyses of the reports???invariably scathing but also classified???would remain secret.
???It became a personality issue,??? a Pentagon consultant said of the Bush Administration???s handling of intelligence. ???My fact is better than your fact. The whole thing is a failure of process. Nobody goes to primary sources.??? The intelligence community was in full retreat.
In the spring of 2002, the former White House official told me, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz began urging the President to release more than ninety million dollars in federal funds to Chalabi. The 1998 Iraq Liberation Act had authorized ninety-seven million dollars for the Iraqi opposition, but most of the funds had not been expended. The State Department opposed releasing the rest of the money, arguing that Chalabi had failed to account properly for the funds he had already received. ???The Vice-President came into a meeting furious that we hadn???t given the money to Chalabi,??? the former official recalled. Cheney said, ???Here we are, denying him money, when they??????the Iraqi National Congress??????are providing us with unique intelligence on Iraqi W.M.D.s.???
In late summer, the White House sharply escalated the nuclear rhetoric. There were at least two immediate targets: the midterm congressional elections and the pending vote on a congressional resolution authorizing the President to take any action he deemed necessary in Iraq, to protect America???s national security.
On August 7th, Vice-President Cheney, speaking in California, said of Saddam Hussein, ???What we know now, from various sources, is that he . . . continues to pursue a nuclear weapon.??? On August 26th, Cheney suggested that Saddam had a nuclear capability that could directly threaten ???anyone he chooses, in his own region or beyond.??? He added that the Iraqis were continuing ???to pursue the nuclear program they began so many years ago.??? On September 8th, he told a television interviewer, ???We do know, with absolute certainty, that he is using his procurement system to acquire the equipment he needs in order to enrich uranium to build a nuclear weapon.??? The President himself, in his weekly radio address on September 14th, stated, ???Saddam Hussein has the scientists and infrastructure for a nuclear-weapons program, and has illicitly sought to purchase the equipment needed to enrich uranium for a nuclear weapon.??? There was no confirmed intelligence for the President???s assertion.
The government of the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, President Bush???s closest ally, was also brought in. As Blair later told a British government inquiry, he and Bush had talked by telephone that summer about the need ???to disclose what we knew or as much as we could of what we knew.??? Blair loyally took the lead: on September 24th, the British government issued a dossier dramatizing the W.M.D. threat posed by Iraq. In a foreword, Blair proclaimed that ???the assessed intelligence has established beyond doubt that Saddam . . . continues in his efforts to develop nuclear weapons.??? The dossier noted that intelligence???based, again, largely on the sismi report???showed that Iraq had ???sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.??? A subsequent parliamentary inquiry determined that the published statement had been significantly toned down after the C.I.A. warned its British counterpart not to include the claim in the dossier, and in the final version Niger was not named, nor was sismi.
The White House, meanwhile, had been escalating its rhetoric. In a television interview on September 8th, Condoleezza Rice, the national-security adviser, addressing questions about the strength of the Administration???s case against Iraq, said, ???We don???t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud??????a formulation that was taken up by hawks in the Administration. And, in a speech on October 7th, President Bush said, ???Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof???the smoking gun???that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.???
At that moment, in early October, 2002, a set of documents suddenly appeared that promised to provide solid evidence that Iraq was attempting to reconstitute its nuclear program. The first notice of the documents??? existence came when Elisabetta Burba, a reporter for Panorama, a glossy Italian weekly owned by the publishing empire of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, received a telephone call from an Italian businessman and security consultant whom she believed to have once been connected to Italian intelligence. He told her that he had information connecting Saddam Hussein to the purchase of uranium in Africa. She considered the informant credible. In 1995, when she worked for the magazine Epoca, he had provided her with detailed information, apparently from Western intelligence sources, for articles she published dealing with the peace process in Bosnia and with an Islamic charity that was linked to international terrorism. The information, some of it in English, proved to be accurate. Epoca had authorized her to pay around four thousand dollars for the documents???a common journalistic practice in Italy.
Now, years later, ???he comes to me again,??? Burba told me. ???I knew he was an informed person, and that he had contacts all over the world, including in the Middle East. He deals with investment and security issues.??? When Burba met with the man, he showed her the Niger documents and offered to sell them to her for about ten thousand dollars.
The documents he gave her were photocopies. There were twenty-two pages, mostly in French, some with the letterhead of the Niger government or Embassy, and two on the stationery of the Iraqi Embassy to the Holy See. There were also telexes. When Burba asked how the documents could be authenticated, the man produced what appeared to be a photocopy of the codebook from the Niger Embassy, along with other items. ???What I was sure of was that he had access,??? Burba said. ???He didn???t receive the documents from the moon.???
The documents dealt primarily with the alleged sale of uranium, Burba said. She informed her editors, and shared the photocopies with them. She wanted to arrange a visit to Niger to verify what seemed to be an astonishing story. At that point, however, Panorama???s editor-in-chief, Carlo Rossella, who is known for his ties to the Berlusconi government, told Burba to turn the documents over to the American Embassy for authentication. Burba dutifully took a copy of the papers to the Embassy on October 9th.
A week later, Burba travelled to Niger. She visited mines and the ports that any exports would pass through, spoke to European businessmen and officials informed about Niger???s uranium industry, and found no trace of a sale. She also learned that the transport company and the bank mentioned in the papers were too small and too ill-equipped to handle such a transaction. As Ambassador Wilson had done eight months earlier, she concluded that there was no evidence of a recent sale of yellowcake to Iraq. The Panorama story was dead, and Burba and her editors said that no money was paid. The documents, however, were now in American hands.
Two former C.I.A. officials provided slightly different accounts of what happened next. ???The Embassy was alerted that the papers were coming,??? the first former official told me, ???and it passed them directly to Washington without even vetting them inside the Embassy.??? Once the documents were in Washington, they were forwarded by the C.I.A. to the Pentagon, he said. ???Everybody knew at every step of the way that they were false???until they got to the Pentagon, where they were believed.???
The documents were just what Administration hawks had been waiting for. The second former official, Vincent Cannistraro, who served as chief of counter-terrorism operations and analysis, told me that copies of the Burba documents were given to the American Embassy, which passed them on to the C.I.A.???s chief of station in Rome, who forwarded them to Washington. Months later, he said, he telephoned a contact at C.I.A. headquarters and was told that ???the jury was still out on this??????that is, on the authenticity of the documents.
George Tenet clearly was ambivalent about the information: in early October, he intervened to prevent the President from referring to Niger in a speech in Cincinnati. But Tenet then seemed to give up the fight, and Saddam???s desire for uranium from Niger soon became part of the Administration???s public case for going to war.
On December 7th, the Iraqi regime provided the U.N. Security Council with a twelve-thousand-page series of documents in which it denied having a W.M.D. arsenal. Very few in the press, the public, or the White House believed it, and a State Department rebuttal, on December 19th, asked, ???Why is the Iraqi regime hiding their Niger procurement???? It was the first time that Niger had been publicly identified. In a January 23rd Op-Ed column in the Times, entitled ???Why We Know Iraq Is Lying,??? Condoleezza Rice wrote that the ???false declaration . . . fails to account for or explain Iraq???s efforts to get uranium from abroad.??? On January 26th, Secretary Powell, speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, asked, ???Why is Iraq still trying to procure uranium???? Two days later, President Bush described the alleged sale in his State of the Union address, saying, ???The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.???
Who produced the fake Niger papers? There is nothing approaching a consensus on this question within the intelligence community. There has been published speculation about the intelligence s ervices of several different countries. One theory, favored by some journalists in Rome, is that sismi produced the false documents and passed them to Panorama for publication.
Another explanation was provided by a former senior C.I.A. officer. He had begun talking to me about the Niger papers in March, when I first wrote about the forgery, and said, ???Somebody deliberately let something false get in there.??? He became more forthcoming in subsequent months, eventually saying that a small group of disgruntled retired C.I.A. clandestine operators had banded together in the late summer of last year and drafted the fraudulent documents themselves.
???The agency guys were so pissed at Cheney,??? the former officer said. ???They said, ???O.K, we???re going to put the bite on these guys.??? ??? My source said that he was first told of the fabrication late last year, at one of the many holiday gatherings in the Washington area of past and present C.I.A. officials. ???Everyone was bragging about it??????Here???s what we did. It was cool, cool, cool.??? ??? These retirees, he said, had superb contacts among current officers in the agency and were informed in detail of the sismi intelligence.
???They thought that, with this crowd, it was the only way to go???to nail these guys who were not practicing good tradecraft and vetting intelligence,??? my source said. ???They thought it???d be bought at lower levels???a big bluff.??? The thinking, he said, was that the documents would be endorsed by Iraq hawks at the top of the Bush Administration, who would be unable to resist flaunting them at a press conference or an interagency government meeting. They would then look foolish when intelligence officials pointed out that they were obvious fakes. But the tactic backfired, he said, when the papers won widespread acceptance within the Administration. ???It got out of control.???
Like all large institutions, C.I.A. headquarters, in Langley, Virginia, is full of water-cooler gossip, and a retired clandestine officer told me this summer that the story about a former operations officer faking the documents is making the rounds. ???What???s telling,??? he added, ???is that the story, whether it???s true or not, is believed??????an extraordinary commentary on the level of mistrust, bitterness, and demoralization within the C.I.A. under the Bush Administration. (William Harlow, the C.I.A. spokesman, said that the agency had no more evidence that former members of the C.I.A. had forged the documents ???than we have that they were forged by Mr. Hersh.???)
The F.B.I. has been investigating the forgery at the request of the Senate Intelligence Committee. A senior F.B.I. official told me that the possibility that the documents were falsified by someone inside the American intelligence community had not been ruled out. ???This story could go several directions,??? he said. ???We haven???t gotten anything solid, and we???ve looked.??? He said that the F.B.I. agents assigned to the case are putting a great deal of effort into the investigation. But ???somebody???s hiding something, and they???re hiding it pretty well.???
President Bush???s State of the Union speech had startled Elisabetta Burba, the Italian reporter. She had been handed documents and had personally taken them to the American Embassy, and she now knew from her trip to Niger that they were false. Later, Burba revisited her source. ???I wanted to know what happened,??? she said. ???He told me that he didn???t know the documents were false, and said he???d also been fooled. ???
Burba, convinced that she had the story of the year, wanted to publish her account immediately after the President???s speech, but Carlo Rossella, Panorama???s editor-in-chief, decided against it. Rossella explained to me, ???When I heard the State of the Union statement, I thought to myself that perhaps the United States government has other information. I didn???t think the documents were that important???they weren???t trustable.??? Eventually, in July, after her name appeared in the press, Burba published an account of her role. She told me that she was interviewed at the American consulate in Milan by three agents for the F.B.I. in early September.
The State of the Union speech was confounding to many members of the intelligence community, who could not understand how such intelligence could have got to the President without vetting. The former intelligence official who gave me the account of the forging of the documents told me that his colleagues were also startled by the speech. ???They said, ???Holy shit, all of a sudden the President is talking about it in the State of the Union address!??? They began to panic. Who the hell was going to expose it? They had to build a backfire. The solution was to leak the documents to the I.A.E.A.???
I subsequently met with a group of senior I.A.E.A. officials in Vienna, where the organization has its headquarters. In an interview over dinner, they told me that they did not even know the papers existed until early February of this year, a few days after the President???s speech. The I.A.E.A. had been asking Washington and London for their evidence of Iraq???s pursuit of African uranium, without receiving any response, ever since the previous September, when word of it turned up in the British dossier. After Niger was specified in the State Department???s fact sheet of December 19, 2002, the I.A.E.A. became more insistent. ???I started to harass the United States,??? recalled Jacques Baute, a Frenchman who, as director of the I.A.E.A.???s Iraq Nuclear Verification Office, often harassed Washington. Mark Gwozdecky, the I.A.E.A.???s spokesman, added, ???We were asking for actionable evidence, and Jacques was getting almost nothing. ???
On February 4, 2003, while Baute was on a plane bound for New York to attend a United Nations Security Council meeting on the Iraqi weapons dispute, the U.S. Mission in Vienna suddenly briefed members of Baute???s team on the Niger papers, but still declined to hand over the documents. ???I insisted on seeing the documents myself,??? Baute said, ???and was provided with them upon my arrival in New York.??? The next day, Secretary Powell made his case for going to war against Iraq before the U.N. Security Council. The presentation did not mention Niger???a fact that did not escape Baute. I.A.E.A. officials told me that they were puzzled by the timing of the American decision to provide the documents. Baute quickly concluded that they were fake.
Over the next few weeks, I.A.E.A. officials conducted further investigations, which confirmed the fraud. They also got in touch with American and British officials to inform them of the findings, and give them a chance to respond. Nothing was forthcoming, and so the I.A.E.A.???s director-general, Mohamed ElBaradei, publicly described the fraud at his next scheduled briefing to the U.N. Security Council, in New York on March 7th. The story slowly began to unravel.
Vice-President Cheney responded to ElBaradei???s report mainly by attacking the messenger. On March 16th, Cheney, appearing on ???Meet the Press,??? stated emphatically that the United States had reason to believe that Saddam Hussein had reconstituted his nuclear-weapons program. He went on, ???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.??? Three days later, the war in Iraq got under way, and the tale of the African-uranium-connection forgery sank from view.
Joseph Wilson, the diplomat who had travelled to Africa to investigate the allegation more than a year earlier, revived the Niger story. He was angered
You are saying that specific dissent on pieces of intelligence among some members of the intelligence community is evidence of widespread pressure on the analysts and deception from the administration before the war. I will even grant for now that the White House had a keener interest in drawing different conclusions on Saddam and al Qaeda, though that's murkier than you let on. But on the question of biological and chemical weapons every major intelligence office, bureau and agency in the US intelligence community believed Saddam was concealing active programs and likely possessed stockpiles. The stovepipe article by Hersch, who has on many occassions reported ground breaking stories accurately, is a load of crap. It has since been debunked by Silbermann Robb; the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee investigation, not to mention the Butler report in the UK and the Israeli investigation by the Knesset's National Security and Foreign Affairs committee. In order to believe Greg Thielmann (whose own supervisor at State has told me on the record that Intelligence and Research believed there were chemical and bio programs), you would have to believe that the intelligence provided to President Clinton in the 1990s radically changed in 2001 after the UN Sanctions were effectively busted with regular civilian aircraft leaving Baghdad international, with Lloyds of London no longer monitoring imports at the Port of Aqaba. You would have to disbelieve the intelligence estimates of all your allies at the time, including Saudi Arabia, not to mention you would have to assume that all prior UN reports on this were just wrong. The view that neocons or the president or whatever bogeyman invented the weapons issue as a pretext for war is a fairytale told to willing and gullible Americans by the likes of Sy Hersch, Lewis Lapham and Dennis Kucinich.
Wu, as for your specific objection to my argument about the CIA, I don't see your point. After the worst sneak attack on the country since the war of 1812 I can understand why the president would not fire Tenet and at the same time not trust him or his agency. As it turns out, the president did trust the bureaucratic enemies of the neoconservatives with the most important presentation on Saddam's WMDs and links to al-Qaeda. I was in the State Department press corps, and I can tell you we were all assured that the presentation Powell gave to the UN was free of any and all neoconservative influence. Woodward's book has a passage quoting a senior official who is presumably powell talking about sending back a White House draft to Steve Hadley. Briefly a few CIA anonymous sources told some journalists that Powell's mention of Curveball's information came from Ahmad Chalabi. Well that was entirely wrong, as we now know from Silbermann Robb. In other words the stovepipers were cut out of the loop when preparing the most important and incidentally wrong presentation to the UN Security Council.
What about the 16 words and the brave Joe Wilson. But the president did not say the CIA has learned, he said british intelligence has learned, about Saddam's attempts to procure uranium from Africa. Again, they would have been better off listening to Wilson, but he was one of many sources on this question. And by the way the Butler report, which reviewed the British intelligence in question, found that MI6 was correct to presume Saddam had tried to buy uranium from Africa. As a result of the whole fiasco numerous liberals championed the dubious and dangerous prospect that reporters ought to--had an obligation to--appear before grand juries as witnesses against their sources. We are about to learn how terrible this precedent is because the Justice Department will no doubt call reporters as witnesses in the NSA leak prosecution.
But here's the better question. Why would any self respecting liberal democrat be against pressuring the secret bureaucracy entrusted throughout the cold war with fomenting coups, funneling cash and arms to tyrants, teaching death squads torture and bribing third world diplomats to betray their young countries? Political pressure against the CIA is the best guarantee (along with a free press) that we have not spawned a nomenklatura, a KGB, a secret government unaccountable to us. It's like every democrat forgot about the Church and Pike oversight commissions, forgot about the secret LSD tests, Greece, Iran and Guatemala. Is this the fault of 24 and alias?
Go back and read what I posted. I said that the CIA had their heads up their asses when it came to WMD. I do not dispute that U.S. intelligence claimed Iraq had restarted its program and that's what the Bush administration claimed. You spent a whole paragph arguing something I did not claim.
What I do dispute is that Bush was never given a SINGLE major intelligence report that Iraq was linked to Al Qaeda yet made it a major part of the justification for war.
You can go into specifici charges as well such as Mohammad Atta met with Iraqi intelligence in Prague and that Iraq was behind the earlier bombing of the WTC, which proved to be completley baseless, yet Cheney and Wolfowitz continued to claim that it was true way after the invasion in fact.
I will also argue that the administraiton went out of its way to include the Niger claim in a 2003 State of the Union speech when they were repeatedly told NOT TO. The change in language in the State of the Union speech to claim that they learned that England had found that Iraq was trying to buy uranium from Africa was done SPECIFICALLY to get around the CIA's objections. They couldn't say "we" = U.S. has found because the CIA told them no, we hadn't. They couldn't say Iraq tried to buy uranium from Niger, because the CIA told them, no, we hadn't confirmed it. So the White House went through all kinds of loops to change the language to make a statement about something they KNEW they weren't suppose to use.
The President's OWN Foreign Intelligence Board found that Bush was so desperate to find anything netative about Iraq that they included the Niger claim in the speech even though they were told not to.
As for Powell's U.N. speech, that was entirely based upon U.S. intelligence report. Scooter Libby repeatedly tried to include some of the neocons and the Pentagon's Counterterrorism group's claims in the speech only to be rebuffed.
There is more and more evidence coming out all the time that Bush was set on war with Iraq from very early on, and that all the talk of WMD, terrorism, etc. was simply a way to justify it. War was NOT the last resort, it was the first option.
Wolfowitz read a book by an author from the American Enterprise Institute saying that Iraq was behind the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Wolfowitz was given several reports and briefings by U.S. intelligence and FBI saying that Iraq was not behind the bombing. Wolfowitz asked former CIA chief James Woosely and a neconservative to look into the claim and he found nothing. Wolfowitz asked the British Ambassador to the U.S. if England could find anything on the report. Everyone told Wolfowitz, Iraq wasn't behind the bombing. Despite all that, on November 2004 Wolfowitz told the New Yorker that Iraq was behind the bombing however. That's an individual example of how the war supporters within the administration were set in their views.
Raise your hand if you sincerely believe that President Gore would have invaded Iraq based upon the same faulty intelligence. Raise your hand if you trust a single word that comes out of these clowns mouths about any policy regarding the war on terror.
I figured as much.