| The Lies Exposed In September, 2002, Already
Everything you needed to know to see through the Iraq War lies was laid out on the table within the span of just a few days in early September, 2002. First, at a Camp David press conference, both Bush and Blair referred to a non-existent report by the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) to claim that Saddam posed an imminent WMD threat. There were other, earlier IAEA reports--from 1991 and 1998--but they made exactly the opposite points. The media burped briefly, and then swallowed the lies whole.
Clearly, if Bush and Blair had had good intelligence, they would have used it. In these circumstances, absence of evidence is indeed evidence of absence. Just like George Costanza, they had nothing.
Then, on the first anniversary of 9/11, USA Today published an astonishing account of how the Bush Administration had already decided to go to war within weeks of 9/11, "Iraq course set from tight White House circle". With the decision already made in advance, the Bush Administration really wasn't interested in what the intelligence said, in fact, it was more interested in making sure that the intelligence didn't raise any unwanted doubts:
President Bush's determination to oust Iraq's Saddam Hussein by military force if necessary was set last fall without a formal decision-making meeting or the intelligence assessment that customarily precedes such a momentous decision.
Before the United Nations General Assembly on Thursday, Bush will make his case for "regime change" in detail and in public for the first time. But he decided that Saddam must go more than 10 months ago; the debate within the administration since then has been about the means to accomplish that end....
"There wasn't a flash moment. There's no decision meeting," national security adviser Condoleezza Rice says. "But Iraq had been on the radar screen -- that it was a danger and that it was something you were going to have to deal with eventually ... before Sept. 11, because we knew that this was a problem."
Members of Congress weren't consulted. Nor were key allies. The concerns of senior military officers and intelligence analysts, some of whom remain skeptical, weren't fully aired until afterward.
The White House still has not requested that the CIA and other intelligence agencies produce a National Intelligence Estimate [NIE] on Iraq, a formal document that would compile all the intelligence data into a single analysis. An intelligence official says that's because the White House doesn't want to detail the uncertainties that persist about Iraq's arsenal and Saddam's intentions. A senior administration official says such an assessment simply wasn't seen as helpful.
Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, calls that "stunning."
"If we are about to make a decision that could risk American lives, we need full and accurate information on which to base that decision," he says in a letter sent Tuesday to leaders of the committee and CIA Director George Tenet.
Some of the factors that figured in the decision last October -- including fears that the al-Qaeda network might be close to obtaining nuclear weapons and that international terrorists might be behind the anthrax attacks -- now seem to have been overblown. But the decision wasn't revisited.
The revelations here are stunning, they were on the front page of largest-circulation national newspaper on the first anniversary of 9/11, and yet they've been entirely forgotten. Down the memory hole. Following this story, and Durbin's shocked surprise, the Bush Administration did put together an NIE, but it was done in extreme haste, and with a good deal of internal politicking to suppress the very "uncertainties that persist about Iraq's arsenal and Saddam's intentions" which the Bush Administration didn't want to draw attention to in the first place. If the Bush Administration really did trust the intelligence that Saddam had WMD's and that this posed a danger to the US, then they would have been eager to put together the NIE. But the exact opposite was the case: they only put together the NIE when it became obvious that this was necessary in order to get Congress to go along.
A Peek Behind The Scenes At 10 Downing Street
The above evidence shows that the Bush Administration itself did not believe the intelligence about Saddam's WMDs even before he surprised them, and agreed to the weapon's inspections. What's more, this evidence was openly known to anyone ahead of time who bothered to read USA Today. There was additional evidence not known the time which was even more damning. This came from the Downing Street Memo, recording a British War Cabinet conversation on July 23, 2002, contained Richard Dearlove's report that the Bush Administration was "fixing" the intelligence--another clear demonstration that the Bush Adminstration itself did not believe the intelligence it now claims that everyone else believe:
C reported on his recent talks in Washington. 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. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.
What's more, it was clearly recognized that even if there were WMDs, this alone couldn't justify an invasion and overthrow of Saddam's regime. A lot more extra maneuvering would be needed:
The Defence Secretary said that the US had already begun "spikes of activity" to put pressure on the regime. No decisions had been taken, but he thought the most likely timing in US minds for military action to begin was January, with the timeline beginning 30 days before the US Congressional elections.
The Foreign Secretary said he would discuss this with Colin Powell this week. It seemed clear that Bush had made up his mind to take military action, even if the timing was not yet decided. But the case was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbours, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran. We should work up a plan for an ultimatum to Saddam to allow back in the UN weapons inspectors. This would also help with the legal justification for the use of force.
The Attorney-General said that the desire for regime change was not a legal base for military action. There were three possible legal bases: self-defence, humanitarian intervention, or UNSC authorisation. The first and second could not be the base in this case. Relying on UNSCR 1205 of three years ago would be difficult. The situation might of course change.
The Prime Minister said that it would make a big difference politically and legally if Saddam refused to allow in the UN inspectors. Regime change and WMD were linked in the sense that it was the regime that was producing the WMD. There were different strategies for dealing with Libya and Iran. If the political context were right, people would support regime change. The two key issues were whether the military plan worked and whether we had the political strategy to give the military plan the space to work.
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Getting Saddam to refuse inspections--what the British came to call "wrongfooting Saddam"--came to be a pet scenario. By itself, this does not indicate a British lack of faith in intelligence about Saddam's WMDs. One could easily believe that Saddam was up to his eyeballs in WMDs, and didn't want anyone to know. This would make it perfectly logical to adopt the strategy of getting him to refuse inspections, and using this as a strategy to gain authorization for war.
The only problem is, there is absolutely no indication that this is what the British believed. The Downing Street Memo is actually just one of a whole series of documents, covering a period of several months, and there is never any indication contradicting the impression conveyed above--that the US doesn't have sound intelligence (and, by implication, neither do the British, who are eagerly trying to help and please), but is trying to find a way to build a case, anyway. The British are much more clear-eyed about this predicament, and are trying to develop a clever work-around. "Wrongfooting Saddam" is their best shot.
Implicit in the term is the fact that it's based on deception--the aim is not to get inspections, but to get him to refuse them. But there's a deeper deception as well. Inspections are not the aim, because there's nothing to find. Saddam knows it, and the British know it as well. Oh, maybe there are some puny stockpiles. Some outdated munitions whose effectiveness is iffy at best. But Saddam is bluffing, puffing up his apparent strength to intimidate his potential neighborhood enemies, and the British clearly realize this, if one reads between the lines. They know they don't have the sort of intel they'd have if Sadam had a seriously threatening WMD program, and they never really focus on that ought-to-be-worrying absence of evidence. It's simply taken for granted. And they seem to think their American cousins a bit dense for not simply realizing this and moving on to the task at hand: manufacturing a saleable case for war.
Deep Focus Interlude
All the above only addresses the most basic issue. As noted at the top of this diary, the purpose of hegemonic discourse is far more sweeping--it is to do away with all other considerations that might lead back towards sane and reasonable discussion. So we need to recall the other factors that were either ignored, lied about at the time, or sent down the memory hole afterwards. These include, for example:
(1) The lack of any credible delivery system to turn Iraq's supposed WMDs into a threat against the US. The Bush Administration seriously claimed that this was to be accomplished by means of drone aircraft, which raises the serious question: why not airborne bicycles? There is just as much evidence that airborne bicycles could deliver WMDs halfway around world as there is that drone aircraft could. (As a bonus point, if either drones or airborne bicycles could do the trick, then what was all that hundreds of billions of dollars spent on Star Wars missile defense all about, anyways? Had the Soviets, perhaps, not discovered the bicycle yet?)
(2) The alternative claim that Saddam Hussein would just give the WMDs away to his ideological arch-enemy, Osama bin Laden. Why? Because his political arch-enemy Iran didn't want them?
(3) Finally, it overlooks the fact that the delivery problem goes away if we send our soldiers over to invade, putting them so close to the WMDs that the delivery problem no longer exists. And, indeed, intelligence analysts actually did make this point.
These were all obvious objections to the official Bush line before Saddam surprised Bush, and agreed to the inspections--which was, according to Bush, originally, the whole purpose of getting the US Congress and the UN Security Council lined up in support. However, once Saddam did agree to inspections, it became necessary to come up with an entirely different rationale, as the inspections turned up nothing at all.
The "everybody believed the intelligence that Saddam had WMDs" narrative is designed to make us forget all about this development, but of course it is logically absolutely crucial. It doesn't matter what anyone thought about Saddam and WMDs before the UN inspections began. What mattered is what people thought once the inspections had begun, and failed to find any evidence of WMDs after months of searching. This is where things stood before the US decided to invade, and it was quite a different situation than that implicitly portrayed in the "everybody believed the intel" narrative.
By then we had had the months of comedy, as the UN inspectors traveled all over Iraq, checking out hot tips from the US and coming up empty. By this time, a lot of people who had started out thinking that Saddam surely had some WMDs (though not necessarily posing a threat to the US) were starting to have serious doubts. It would only seem logical to take account of such views, since they reflected attitudes prior to the invasion.
Bush had originally said that he would come back to the UN and get UN permission to invade Iraq--which, it so happens is the clear requirement under international law. However, once it became clear that he would not get permission, he decided not to seek permission, and just go ahead and invade anyway. But not without one more telling piece of evidence that it was all an incredible charade. I am referring, of course, to Colin Powell's dreadful performance before the UN General Assembly. The Versailles press corpse was, of course, swept off its feet. Liberal columnist Mary McGrory pronounced herself convinced. But on the internets, not so much, as British researcher Glen Rangwala posted an almost immediate and utterly devastating point-by-point critique of everything Powell alleged. A more refined version, finished 10 days later is still available here.
Yet, one did not really need Rangwala's brilliant analysis, intellectually spectacular as it was. All one needed was an un-drugged mind and a sense of humor, since Colin Powell actually had the unmitigated gall to present a satellite picture of a truck parked outside of a shed, which he then cited as a "signature" identification for a mobile WMD facility. Anyone the least bit familiar with the tedium of non-wartime military life would instantly come up with a much more credible explanation: it was the "signature" of a pinochle game going on inside the shed. Or perhaps it was poker. Perhaps the angle that the truck was parked at was a "signature" indicating which of the two games was being played.
The fact that Powell straight-facedly presented this gigantic leap of logic to the entire world as proof of WMDs worth going to war over was, rather, indisputable evidence that, in the immortal words of George Costanza, "I got nothing."
Indeed, by the time that it came down to brink of the invasion itself, the Bush Administration not only had no credible evidence that Iraq had WMDs, it had proven to the world that it had no credible evidence that Iraq had WMDs. All that it had was the naked desire to invade. And that was all that was needed.
With this big picture reminder firmly before us, let us now turn back to a further consideration of specific details, to wit, the role of CIA Director George Tenet in all this.
Tenet's Faithful Service In Spreading Lies
Former CIA Director George Tenet was yet another person who clearly knew how bogus the WMD intelligence was, and worked tirelessly to make sure that the use of apparent intelligence was calibrated with the greatest of care. This would never have been necessary, of course, if the intelligence had been solid, sound and robust.
In July, 2007-- occasioned by Tenet's self-serving, and ultimately discredited book--Thomas Powers published an excellent, highly detailed analysis in Salon, "What George Tenet really knew about Iraq", which also appeared in TomDispatch and the New York Review of Books. But before quoting a few key passages from this tour de force, I want to draw on a much more modest, yet searingly on target post from Mary at The Left Coaster, on Nov 5, "The Everyone Believed Saddam Had an Active WMD Program Canard".
In this short post, which also contains a reference to Downing Street Memo, Mary calls attention to Tenet's early 2002 testimony that Sadam is not a threat:
Feb 6, 2002: George Tenet testifies that Iraq is still a concern, but threat from North Korea or Iran is greater. He testifies that Saddam still wants to reconstitute its nuclear program, but there is no evidence that he is doing so right now.
Tenet testimony before Senate Intelligence Committee
And to Bob Graham's request for an NIE:
July 2002: Senator Bob Graham requests report from the intelligence community about the threat from Iraq because no official report had been created that validated the numerous charges seen in the news.
This American Life (audio clip), Dec 20, 2002
And to Graham's request that the NIE be declassified:
Late Sept 2002: Senator Bob Graham requests that the NIE report get declassified so it can be released to the public. He says that the report the committee saw made clear that Iraq was not an imminent threat based on all available evidence.
This American Life (audio clip), Dec 20, 2002
And to Tenet's production of a declassified NIE that excludes the warnings undercutting the bogus soundness of the intelligence presented:
Oct 1, 2002: Tenet produces a declassified National Intelligence Estimate which does not contain any of the nuances or caveats included in original report.
Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction Programs, CIA, October 2002
And to Tenet's continued refusal to come clean in public:
Oct 7, 2002: Tenet reports that the CIA can declassify further parts of the Iraq threat report but that still avoids providing the caveats or disputed points.
DCI Tenet Declassifies Further Information on the Iraq Threat
Letter from Tenet to questions from Bob Graham's committee, Oct 7, 2002
And then concludes:
So let's look at this again: George Tenet testifies in early Feb that Saddam is not worth worrying about. Senator Bob Graham who was the head of the Senate Intelligence Committee does not hear any secret evidence coming before his committee that indicts Saddam is actively reconstituting a Nuclear program (the newspapers are full of these reports) and asks that the CIA produce that NIE Kevin discussed to provide the evidence that Saddam really is rebuilding a nuclear program. The classified NIE was filled with all kinds of caveats and disputed points that indicated the evidence was very bad. Graham asks that the CIA provide a declassified version that shows how shaky the evidence really is and they don't.
This is prima facie evidence of bad intelligence, and Tenet's role in delivering it. You don't need to be an intelligence analyst to figure that one out. And you don't really need anything more to prove it.
But Thomas Powers goes far beyond proving Tenet's role as a deceiver. He explicates it in exquisite detail.
Early on he lays out the big picture:
Tenet's overriding goal in his carefully written book is to deny "that we somehow cooked the books" about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. If he says it once, he says it a dozen times. "We told the president what we did on Iraq WMD because we believed it."
But repetition is not enough. Tenet's problem is that the intelligence and the war proceeded in lockstep: no intelligence, no war. Since Tenet delivered the (shockingly exaggerated) intelligence, and the president used it to go to war, how is Tenet to convince the world that he wasn't simply giving the boss what he wanted? Tenet naturally dislikes this question, but it is evident that the American public and Congress dislike it just as much. Down that road lie painful truths about the character and motives of the president and the men and women around him. But getting out of Iraq will not be easy, and the necessary first step is to find the civic courage to insist on knowing how we got in. Tenet's memoir is an excellent place to begin; some of what he tells us and much that he leaves out point unmistakably to the genesis of the war in the White House -- the very last thing Tenet wants to address clearly.
Of course, much more is at stake than simply getting out of Iraq. Getting out of the entire neocon legacy is going to be much, much harder than that. Still, that's a minor quibble in the context of this incisive critique. Powers goes on to discuss some of the early post-9/11 pressures to target Iraq, for WMDs or whatever, "early" in the sense of "within days." For example, beginning with a meeting with Bush the Saturday after 9/11:
The vote against including Iraq "in our immediate response plans" was four to zero against, with Rumsfeld abstaining. Tenet adds, "I recall no mention of WMD."
Four days later, at a meeting in the White House, Bush made a request of Tenet. Through a video hookup Vice President Dick Cheney was in the room as well. "I want to know about links between Saddam and al-Qaida," said the president. "The vice president knows some things that might be helpful."
What the vice president thought he knew was that one of the Sept. 11 hijackers, Mohamed Atta, had met in Prague earlier in the year with an official of Iraqi intelligence. Tenet responded within days to say that evidence from phone calls and credit cards demonstrated that Atta was in the United States at the time of the alleged meeting, living in a Virginia apartment not far from the CIA. A proven link between Saddam and Sept. 11 would have ended the debate about "regime change" right there. None was ever established, then or later, but Cheney and his personal national security advisor, I. Lewis Libby, known by his nickname as Scooter, argued and reargued the case for the link until the eve of war. Often they went to the agency personally, bringing fresh allegations acquired from their own sources, and pressing CIA analysts to "re-look" the evidence.
Powers goes through an amazing amount of crucial material in a very compact way. He lays out how the pressure mounted on Tenet to deliver a rational for going after Iraq.
Only a few days after Sept. 11, Tenet writes, a CIA analyst attended a White House meeting where he was told that Bush wanted to remove Saddam. The analyst's response, according to Tenet: If you want to go after that son of a bitch to settle old scores, be my guest. But don't tell us he is connected to 9/11 or to terrorism because there is no evidence to support that. You will have to have a better reason. The better reason eventually settled on by President Bush was Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction. The evidence for WMD turned out to be even weaker than the evidence for "the link," but Cheney, with the full backing of the White House and the National Security Council, hammered without let-up on the horrific consequences of error -- discovering too late that Iraq had nuclear weapons meant that the smoking gun would be a mushroom cloud. It was vaguely believed at the time, by the public and foreign intelligence services alike, that the CIA must have learned something new; why else in early 2002 had Saddam Hussein suddenly become a threat to the world?
In fact only one thing had changed -- the American frame of mind, something clearly understood by advisors to Britain's Tony Blair, who had decided immediately after Sept. 11 that he was going to back the American response, whatever it was.
He goes through various aspects of British/American differences on how to make war happen. He goes through the British rationale for wrongfooting Sadam, and he goes through the collapse of the wrongfooting plan, and how this shifted the burden back to the WMD argument--a burden that the evidence simply could not bear.
The danger from Blair's point of view was a bull-headed American drive to war which the British would find it politically impossible to join. He told the Cabinet that "it would make a big difference politically and legally if Saddam refused to allow in the UN inspectors." The Cabinet agreed that a strategy to "wrongfoot" Saddam through the U.N. was crucial.
Eventually...
Thus the stage was set for a U.N. melodrama starring a defiant Saddam before armies crossed borders, but nothing worked as the British had imagined. Saddam accepted unconditionally the Security Council's demand on Nov. 8 for intrusive new inspections. While the report he submitted on Iraq's destruction of its WMD was rejected as obfuscating, the U.N. was able to resume inspections at the end of November. Hans Blix's inspectors scoured the country inspecting hundreds of sites but found nothing, and Blix infuriated the White House by refusing to declare Iraq in material breach of Resolution 1441 demanding that he disarm.
As a ploy for war, "wrongfooting" Saddam was a bust. With each passing week he seemed less of a threat. Cheney's clock was ticking; American military plans, hoping to avoid the brutal Iraqi summer, called for fighting to begin in March at the latest. Bush was determined and Blair was willing to go forward with war, but since the U.N. gambit had generated no just cause for war, the Americans were compelled to make the case before the U.N. themselves.
And, of course, every word that Colin Powell spoke before the UN was a lie. "Even 'and' and 'the'", as Dorothy Parker would say. Which brings it back to Tenet:
This is the whole of his defense: We were wrong, but it was an honest error.
This is not the place for an exhaustive reexamination of the agency's long-exploded claims, but no plea of honest error can survive even a quick look at the facts in three disputes -- what Iraq intended to do with aluminum tubes, how the agency knew about Iraq's mobile biological warfare labs, and why a report that Iraq was trying to buy uranium "yellowcake" in Niger made its way into one official speech after another until it finally appeared -- the infamous "16 words" -- in Bush's State of the Union speech in January 2003. None of these claims was robust when first encountered by the CIA. All were "processed" by CIA analysts in a manner intended to disguise shaky sources, minimize doubts, exclude alternative explanations, exaggerate their significance, and inflate the confidence level with which they were believed. None passes the "honest error" test.
While Powers is focused intensely on Tenet, it is nonetheless blindingly obvious that the pressures he exerted to rework the data were but a direct extension of the pressures brought to bear on him to produce a case for what--pressures also brought in sidestepping him as well. It wasn't so much that people from Bush on down didn't believe the intelligence--they didn't even believe it mattered, so why bother with whether it was true or not? Just help us sell it so we can get on to the good part, blowing shit up, capturing Sadam, and strutting around like the macho men we always knew ourselves to be.
Towards the very end of his piece, Powers writes:
That in outline is how we got into Iraq. When Tony Blair's U.N. gambit failed to provide an excuse for war, Colin Powell made the American case, putting in the scary stuff -- the "product" of Tenet's CIA -- which Hans Blix's inspectors had failed to find. No one paying serious attention was convinced. The French, German and Canadian intelligence services were appalled by the weakness of Powell's case -- what could the Americans be thinking? Periodically over the following year Powell would tell his assistant, Larry Wilkerson, that George Tenet had telephoned to say that the agency was formally withdrawing another pillar from his U.N. speech. "He took it like a soldier," said Wilkerson, "but it was a blow."
Conclusion
In short, Powell, like virtually every other actor in this vast charade, played within the narrowest of lines defining his role, and this "stay between the lines" mentality made it child's play for the neocons, playing outside the lines, to get everyone lined up just right to get them what they wanted. True, it might all be based on lies, but every lie was "true enough" for the purposes between the lines for the officials, journalists, and various Versailles hangers on who were needed to pull it all off.
And is there any evidence now under the new Administration, with the even more lopsided Democratic Congress, of a new desire to have done with such lies? Any evidence of a desire for truth? A desire to go outside the lines and track down the lying SOBs who did this all?
No, of course not. Because everyone who stayed between the lines played there part in helping these lies succeed. They're all morally responsible as well. And they know it, far far better than the sociopathic neocons do. The sociopaths are counting on it. And once again, the sociopaths are right.
This is the trap that the necons have set, and it is the trap that the Democrats find themselves in. The trap that Obama finds himself in. And the first step to escaping from the trap is what the first step always is: realizing that you're inside a trap.
How to get out once you realize that? How to combat terrorism on a completely different basis? One that actually has something to do with combating terrorism? That will be a subject for another diary later on today. |
