ARTICLES ON WMD DECEPTION
************************
Published on Thursday, June 6, 2003 by the International Herald Tribune
White House War 'Spin' Entangles Downing Street
Blair In Trouble
by
William Pfaff
PARIS - From the start, it has been hard to understand Tony Blair's conduct concerning the war on Iraq.
Clearly, Britain's prime minister believed deeply in the moral case for unseating Saddam Hussein. He had nothing to gain politically from supporting President George W. Bush, since the British public was initially against the war. But he backed Bush so obsequiously that he actually forfeited the influence he might have had in Washington, Bush's pally treatment notwithstanding. He simultaneously reinforced Britain's reputation in Europe as incorrigibly Atlanticist and divisive.
Rodric Braithwaite, a former chairman of Britain's joint intelligence committee, said of the prime minister's performance that "a junior partner who is taken for granted is a junior partner with no influence."
To have influence, you must express opinions and national interests of your own, and indicate that on some issues you might break with the partner. It is no use playing Little Sir Echo.
Blair remained faithful even after Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told him the United States didn't really need British troops, and after the administration subverted his independent effort to work with the Palestinians.
Now Blair is in trouble. It has been charged that the decision to go to war was taken in Washington last autumn and that everything that followed was an expedient charade. London and Washington are accused of lying to get public support for the war and of faking evidence about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.
Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz has given a candid and convincing explanation of how it began to the magazine Vanity Fair. Implicit in his account is that the Bush administration last year wanted to go to war but had no excuse for doing so. The bureaucracies were called together and told to find an excuse. The "core" casus belli they could agree upon was Iraqi possession of weapons of mass destruction.
That settled, it became the government's virtual reality that the weapons existed, even if the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency and United Nations inspectors had not found them.
The mighty Wurlitzer of American policy, persuasion and press was put to work to convince the public and the world of the reality of this threat, so that America could go to war. Britain's modest harmonium joined in. The prime minister proudly furnished Washington with two dossiers of evidence on Iraqi weapons that subsequently proved very dodgy.
After the war, the coalition's failure to find the weapons had to be explained. First it was said that the weapons had been smuggled to Syria. Then Rumsfeld suggested last week that none exist, that they were destroyed before the war and all evidence buried. This week he reversed himself and said they do exist, still are there and will be found.
The U.S. military command in Iraq said the search may take several years since it is a big country. Bush went back into virtual reality mode last weekend and told Polish television: "We found the weapons of mass destruction." On Tuesday, Secretary of State Colin Powell expressed confidence that they will eventually be found.
Blair's contribution Friday was to say that the coalition has been too busy to look for the weapons.
In the United States, until now, few seemed to care, thinking that the war had been a splendid little affair. Now, however, Congress has interested itself in what the Senate and public had been told, and there is growing support for hearings to be held by the Senate's Armed Services Committee, as well as the intelligence committees in both the House and the Senate.
Britain used to have higher standards, and faces a much more aggressive press corps. His government has a reputation for "spinning" its public relations, but not for the bare-faced lie. Blair himself has the reputation of a decent man.
On Tuesday the House of Commons Foreign Relations Committee announced that it would hold an inquiry into Britain's decision. A final report is likely to be made to the prime minister's office rather than to Parliament.
Such discretion may not be possible, however, if the American hearings stir trouble in Washington (and on television). Blair may come to regret having been so reliable an American partner.
Copyright © 2003 the International Herald Tribune
*************************
Published on Wednesday, June 4, 2003 by USA Today
End the Deception
by
Robert Jensen and Rahul Majahan
Americans face an important question in the aftermath of the Iraq invasion: Does it matter that our government fudged facts to justify war? Should politicians face consequences when they mislead us, especially about the need for military force?
While British Prime Minister Tony Blair is facing increasing pressure because of his role in this debacle, the Bush administration is betting the American public will tire of the debate. Officials apparently think that if they constantly repeat the mantra — "We know for certain Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction" — and the news media faithfully relay that message, they will get away with their deception.
The problem isn't simply that no evidence of banned weapons programs has been found, but a broader pattern of deception:
• Allegations before the war that Iraq had tried to purchase uranium from Niger were based on crude forgeries that officials had been warned about, while claims about biological and chemical stockpiles were based on dubious methods and unsupported by the arms-control community.
• Secretary of State Colin Powell expressed concerns in private to his British counterpart, Jack Straw, that the claims might explode in their faces because they weren't backed by hard evidence.
• Professionals in the intelligence community are livid about how the administration politicized the analysis of information.
Most telling, Iraq didn't use weapons of mass destruction (WMD). At worst, Iraq is accused of surreptitiously destroying weapons on the eve of war — not exactly the stuff of which threats to the free world are made, but a convenient rationalization for the lack of evidence.
Meanwhile, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz is backpedaling from comments made last month that the administration settled on the WMD rationale out of bureaucratic convenience because it was "the one issue that everyone could agree on."
That remark, made without spin doctors present, shows the administration's cavalier attitude toward informed consent by the public. At every stage, the administration picked the most convenient rationale for war. First was the connection between Saddam and al-Qaeda; when that didn't pan out, it was the threat posed by Iraq's WMD. When they didn't turn up, it was liberating the Iraqi people.
While the public was distracted by this procession of justifications alternately taken up and conveniently abandoned, the real reasons never saw the light of day. Would Americans have supported a war for increased control of the Middle East and an American empire based on military domination? Bush administration officials who wanted war knew better than to ask.
Professor Robert Jensen of the University of Texas wrote 'Writing Dissent: Taking Radical Ideas from the Margins to the Mainstream'. Rahul Mahajan wrote 'Full Spectrum Dominance: U.S. Power in Iraq and Beyond'.
© Copyright 2003 USA TODAY
**********************
Published on Tuesday, June 3, 2003 by the New York Times
Standard Operating Procedure
by
Paul Krugman
The mystery of Iraq's missing weapons of mass destruction has become a lot less mysterious. Recent reports in major British newspapers and three major American news magazines, based on leaks from angry intelligence officials, back up the sources who told my colleague Nicholas Kristof that the Bush administration "grossly manipulated intelligence" about W.M.D.'s.
And anyone who talks about an "intelligence failure" is missing the point. The problem lay not with intelligence professionals, but with the Bush and Blair administrations. They wanted a war, so they demanded reports supporting their case, while dismissing contrary evidence.
In Britain, the news media have not been shy about drawing the obvious implications, and the outrage has not been limited to war opponents. The Times of London was ardently pro-war; nonetheless, it ran an analysis under the headline "Lie Another Day." The paper drew parallels between the selling of the war and other misleading claims: "The government is seen as having `spun' the threat from Saddam's weapons just as it spins everything else."
Yet few have made the same argument in this country, even though "spin" is far too mild a word for what the Bush administration does, all the time. Suggestions that the public was manipulated into supporting an Iraq war gain credibility from the fact that misrepresentation and deception are standard operating procedure for this administration, which — to an extent never before seen in U.S. history — systematically and brazenly distorts the facts.
Am I exaggerating? Even as George Bush stunned reporters by declaring that we have "found the weapons of mass destruction," the Republican National Committee declared that the latest tax cut benefits "everyone who pays taxes." That is simply a lie. You've heard about those eight million children denied any tax break by a last-minute switcheroo. In total, 50 million American households — including a majority of those with members over 65 — get nothing; another 20 million receive less than $100 each. And a great majority of those left behind do pay taxes.
And the bald-faced misrepresentation of an elitist tax cut offering little or nothing to most Americans is only the latest in a long string of blatant misstatements. Misleading the public has been a consistent strategy for the Bush team on issues ranging from tax policy and Social Security reform to energy and the environment. So why should we give the administration the benefit of the doubt on foreign policy?
It's long past time for this administration to be held accountable. Over the last two years we've become accustomed to the pattern. Each time the administration comes up with another whopper, partisan supporters — a group that includes a large segment of the news media — obediently insist that black is white and up is down. Meanwhile the "liberal" media report only that some people say that black is black and up is up. And some Democratic politicians offer the administration invaluable cover by making excuses and playing down the extent of the lies.
If this same lack of accountability extends to matters of war and peace, we're in very deep trouble. The British seem to understand this: Max Hastings, the veteran war correspondent — who supported Britain's participation in the war — writes that "the prime minister committed British troops and sacrificed British lives on the basis of a deceit, and it stinks."
It's no answer to say that Saddam was a murderous tyrant. I could point out that many of the neoconservatives who fomented this war were nonchalant, or worse, about mass murders by Central American death squads in the 1980's. But the important point is that this isn't about Saddam: it's about us. The public was told that Saddam posed an imminent threat. If that claim was fraudulent, the selling of the war is arguably the worst scandal in American political history — worse than Watergate, worse than Iran-contra. Indeed, the idea that we were deceived into war makes many commentators so uncomfortable that they refuse to admit the possibility.
But here's the thought that should make those commentators really uncomfortable. Suppose that this administration did con us into war. And suppose that it is not held accountable for its deceptions, so Mr. Bush can fight what Mr. Hastings calls a "khaki election" next year. In that case, our political system has become utterly, and perhaps irrevocably, corrupted.
*****************
Published on Tuesday, June 3, 2003 by the Inter Press Service
Credibility Gap, Anyone?
by
Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON - When all three major U.S. newsweeklies--Time, Newsweek and U.S. News & World Report--run major features on the same day on possible government lying, you can bet you have the makings of a major scandal.
And when the two most important outlets of neo-conservative opinion--The Weekly Standard and The Wall Street Journal--come out on the same day with lead editorials spluttering outrage about suggestions of government lying, you can bet that things are going to get very hot as summer approaches in Washington.
The controversy over whether the administration of President George W. Bush either exaggerated or lied about evidence that it said it had about the existence of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq before the U.S.-led invasion has mushroomed over the past week.
"This is potentially very serious," said one Congressional aide. "If it's shown we went to war because of intelligence that was 'cooked' by the administration, heads will have to roll--and not just little heads, big ones."
The administration was already on the defensive last week as the controversy took off in Europe, particularly in Britain where Prime Minister Tony Blair found himself assailed from all directions for either wilfully exaggerating the intelligence himself or being "suckered," as his former foreign minister Robin Cook called it this weekend, by Washington's neo-conservative hawks, who started agitating for war even before the dust settled in lower Manhattan after the Sep. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.
Matters took a turn for the worse when the London Guardian reported Saturday about the existence of a transcript, obviously leaked from a senior British official, of an exchange at the Waldorf Hotel in New York between U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell and British Foreign Minister Jack Straw just before Powell's presentation of the evidence against Iraq before the United Nations Security Council Feb. 5.
It quotes Powell, whose forceful case to the Council was decisive in persuading U.S. public opinion that Baghdad represented a serious threat, as being "apprehensive" about the evidence presented to him by the intelligence agencies. He reportedly expressed the hope that the actual facts, when they came out, would not "explode in their faces." (At a Rome press conference Monday, Powell insisted that he considered the evidence "overwhelming" when he spoke before the Council.)
But it appears that Powell's musing was accurate, as, after almost two months in uncontested control of Iraq, U.S. troops and investigators have failed to come up with concrete evidence of an Iraqi WMD program, let alone an actual weapon.
The scenario of an uneasy Powell received a major boost in the accounts of the three newsweeklies. U.S. News reported, for example, that, during a rehearsal of Powell's presentation at CIA headquarters Feb. 1, the normally mild-mannered retired general at one point ''tossed several pages in the air. 'I'm not reading this,' he declared. 'This is bull----'."
The same magazine also reported that the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) formally concluded that, "There is no reliable information on whether Iraq is producing and stockpiling chemical weapons" in September 2002, just as Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld was telling Congress that the Baghdad "regime has amassed large, clandestine stockpiles of chemical weapons, including VX, sarin, cyclosarin and mustard gas."
The accounts by Newsweek and Time were similarly damning. One "informed military source" told Newsweek that when the U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) asked the CIA for specific WMD targets that should be destroyed in the first stages of the invasion, the agency only complied reluctantly.
But what it provided "was crap," a CENTCOM planner told the magazine, consisting mainly of buildings that were bombed in the first Gulf War in 1991. And agency experts reportedly could not tell the war-planners what agents were located where.
If true, that contradicts a series of bald assertions by administration officials and their supporters over the last nine months. "Simply stated," Vice President Dick Cheney declared in the first call to arms last August, "there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction."
"We know where (the WMD) are," declared Rumsfeld in a television interview Mar. 30, well into the first week of the war. "They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat."
He has since retreated from that certainty, suggesting last week that the Iraqis "may have had time to destroy them, and I don't know the answer."
There is also growing doubt about the evidence that Bush himself touted this weekend as proof--two truck trailers described by officials as mobile weapons-productions labs.
According to a CIA report noted in the 'Slate' Internet magazine, key equipment for growing, sterilizing and drying bacteria was not present in either trailer. Iraqi officials have said the trailers were used to produce hydrogen for artillery weather balloons.
Matthew Meselson, a Harvard University expert on biological weapons who 20 years ago single-handedly debunked reports by senior Reagan administration officials--several of whom hold relevant positions in the Bush government--about the use by Soviet allies of mycotoxins against rebels in Laos and Afghanistan, has also expressed doubts about the trailers' purpose, and called for the CIA to hand over the evidence to independent scientists to make an assessment.
Retired intelligence officials from both the CIA and the DIA are also coming out with ever-stronger statements accusing the intelligence community of twisting and exaggerating the evidence to justify war.
They say both agencies were intimidated by the political pressure exerted in particular by neo-conservative hawks under Cheney and Rumsfeld, who even established a special unit in the defense secretary's office to determine what intelligence was "missing."
Much of the evidence on which the WMD case was based came from defectors supplied by the Iraqi National Congress (INC), an exile group headed by Ahmed Chalabi that has been championed by the neo-conservatives--including Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, Cheney chief of staff I. Lewis Libby and Defense Policy Board members Richard Perle, Kenneth Adelman, and James Woolsey--for more than a decade.
Retired senior CIA, DIA and State Department intelligence officers, including the CIA's former counter-terrorism chief Vince Cannistraro and the DIA's former chief of Middle East intelligence W. Patrick Lang, have also spoken bluntly to reporters about what they call the administration's corruption of the intelligence process to justify war.
Both the CIA and State have long distrusted the INC and Chalabi, in particular, although Chalabi remains the Pentagon's favorite for leading an interim government in Baghdad.
All of this has outraged the administration, which insists the intelligence community was united in its assessment about the existence of WMD, and its neo-conservative defenders. The Wall Street Journal on Monday accused the "French and the European left" of trying to tarnish the U.S. victory and charged that discontent among CIA analysts was spurred by resentment of Rumsfeld.
But even the Journal appeared to be moving away from its previous position that Iraq's alleged WMD constituted a threat to the United States and its allies. "Whether or not WMD is found takes nothing away from the Iraq war victory," it said, citing the gains made in human rights by Saddam Hussein's demise.
Nonetheless, what the administration knew about WMD and when it knew it --to paraphrase the famous Watergate questions--are now claiming the limelight, to the administration's clear discomfort.
On Sunday, the powerful chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee said he hoped to begin hearings--with the Select Committee on Intelligence--before the Jul. 4 recess, while the ranking member of the House of Representatives Intelligence Committee has asked the CIA to produce a report by Jul. 1 reconciling its pre-war assessments with actual findings on the ground.
Copyright 2003 Inter Press Service
Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company
*********************
ARTICLES ON WMD DECEPTION
************************
Published on Thursday, June 6, 2003 by the International Herald Tribune
White House War 'Spin' Entangles Downing Street
Blair In Trouble
by
William Pfaff
PARIS - From the start, it has been hard to understand Tony Blair's conduct concerning the war on Iraq.
Clearly, Britain's prime minister believed deeply in the moral case for unseating Saddam Hussein. He had nothing to gain politically from supporting President George W. Bush, since the British public was initially against the war. But he backed Bush so obsequiously that he actually forfeited the influence he might have had in Washington, Bush's pally treatment notwithstanding. He simultaneously reinforced Britain's reputation in Europe as incorrigibly Atlanticist and divisive.
Rodric Braithwaite, a former chairman of Britain's joint intelligence committee, said of the prime minister's performance that "a junior partner who is taken for granted is a junior partner with no influence."
To have influence, you must express opinions and national interests of your own, and indicate that on some issues you might break with the partner. It is no use playing Little Sir Echo.
Blair remained faithful even after Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told him the United States didn't really need British troops, and after the administration subverted his independent effort to work with the Palestinians.
Now Blair is in trouble. It has been charged that the decision to go to war was taken in Washington last autumn and that everything that followed was an expedient charade. London and Washington are accused of lying to get public support for the war and of faking evidence about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.
Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz has given a candid and convincing explanation of how it began to the magazine Vanity Fair. Implicit in his account is that the Bush administration last year wanted to go to war but had no excuse for doing so. The bureaucracies were called together and told to find an excuse. The "core" casus belli they could agree upon was Iraqi possession of weapons of mass destruction.
That settled, it became the government's virtual reality that the weapons existed, even if the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency and United Nations inspectors had not found them.
The mighty Wurlitzer of American policy, persuasion and press was put to work to convince the public and the world of the reality of this threat, so that America could go to war. Britain's modest harmonium joined in. The prime minister proudly furnished Washington with two dossiers of evidence on Iraqi weapons that subsequently proved very dodgy.
After the war, the coalition's failure to find the weapons had to be explained. First it was said that the weapons had been smuggled to Syria. Then Rumsfeld suggested last week that none exist, that they were destroyed before the war and all evidence buried. This week he reversed himself and said they do exist, still are there and will be found.
The U.S. military command in Iraq said the search may take several years since it is a big country. Bush went back into virtual reality mode last weekend and told Polish television: "We found the weapons of mass destruction." On Tuesday, Secretary of State Colin Powell expressed confidence that they will eventually be found.
Blair's contribution Friday was to say that the coalition has been too busy to look for the weapons.
In the United States, until now, few seemed to care, thinking that the war had been a splendid little affair. Now, however, Congress has interested itself in what the Senate and public had been told, and there is growing support for hearings to be held by the Senate's Armed Services Committee, as well as the intelligence committees in both the House and the Senate.
Britain used to have higher standards, and faces a much more aggressive press corps. His government has a reputation for "spinning" its public relations, but not for the bare-faced lie. Blair himself has the reputation of a decent man.
On Tuesday the House of Commons Foreign Relations Committee announced that it would hold an inquiry into Britain's decision. A final report is likely to be made to the prime minister's office rather than to Parliament.
Such discretion may not be possible, however, if the American hearings stir trouble in Washington (and on television). Blair may come to regret having been so reliable an American partner.
Copyright © 2003 the International Herald Tribune
*************************
Published on Wednesday, June 4, 2003 by USA Today
End the Deception
by
Robert Jensen and Rahul Majahan
Americans face an important question in the aftermath of the Iraq invasion: Does it matter that our government fudged facts to justify war? Should politicians face consequences when they mislead us, especially about the need for military force?
While British Prime Minister Tony Blair is facing increasing pressure because of his role in this debacle, the Bush administration is betting the American public will tire of the debate. Officials apparently think that if they constantly repeat the mantra — "We know for certain Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction" — and the news media faithfully relay that message, they will get away with their deception.
The problem isn't simply that no evidence of banned weapons programs has been found, but a broader pattern of deception:
• Allegations before the war that Iraq had tried to purchase uranium from Niger were based on crude forgeries that officials had been warned about, while claims about biological and chemical stockpiles were based on dubious methods and unsupported by the arms-control community.
• Secretary of State Colin Powell expressed concerns in private to his British counterpart, Jack Straw, that the claims might explode in their faces because they weren't backed by hard evidence.
• Professionals in the intelligence community are livid about how the administration politicized the analysis of information.
Most telling, Iraq didn't use weapons of mass destruction (WMD). At worst, Iraq is accused of surreptitiously destroying weapons on the eve of war — not exactly the stuff of which threats to the free world are made, but a convenient rationalization for the lack of evidence.
Meanwhile, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz is backpedaling from comments made last month that the administration settled on the WMD rationale out of bureaucratic convenience because it was "the one issue that everyone could agree on."
That remark, made without spin doctors present, shows the administration's cavalier attitude toward informed consent by the public. At every stage, the administration picked the most convenient rationale for war. First was the connection between Saddam and al-Qaeda; when that didn't pan out, it was the threat posed by Iraq's WMD. When they didn't turn up, it was liberating the Iraqi people.
While the public was distracted by this procession of justifications alternately taken up and conveniently abandoned, the real reasons never saw the light of day. Would Americans have supported a war for increased control of the Middle East and an American empire based on military domination? Bush administration officials who wanted war knew better than to ask.
Professor Robert Jensen of the University of Texas wrote 'Writing Dissent: Taking Radical Ideas from the Margins to the Mainstream'. Rahul Mahajan wrote 'Full Spectrum Dominance: U.S. Power in Iraq and Beyond'.
© Copyright 2003 USA TODAY
**********************
Published on Tuesday, June 3, 2003 by the New York Times
Standard Operating Procedure
by
Paul Krugman
The mystery of Iraq's missing weapons of mass destruction has become a lot less mysterious. Recent reports in major British newspapers and three major American news magazines, based on leaks from angry intelligence officials, back up the sources who told my colleague Nicholas Kristof that the Bush administration "grossly manipulated intelligence" about W.M.D.'s.
And anyone who talks about an "intelligence failure" is missing the point. The problem lay not with intelligence professionals, but with the Bush and Blair administrations. They wanted a war, so they demanded reports supporting their case, while dismissing contrary evidence.
In Britain, the news media have not been shy about drawing the obvious implications, and the outrage has not been limited to war opponents. The Times of London was ardently pro-war; nonetheless, it ran an analysis under the headline "Lie Another Day." The paper drew parallels between the selling of the war and other misleading claims: "The government is seen as having `spun' the threat from Saddam's weapons just as it spins everything else."
Yet few have made the same argument in this country, even though "spin" is far too mild a word for what the Bush administration does, all the time. Suggestions that the public was manipulated into supporting an Iraq war gain credibility from the fact that misrepresentation and deception are standard operating procedure for this administration, which — to an extent never before seen in U.S. history — systematically and brazenly distorts the facts.
Am I exaggerating? Even as George Bush stunned reporters by declaring that we have "found the weapons of mass destruction," the Republican National Committee declared that the latest tax cut benefits "everyone who pays taxes." That is simply a lie. You've heard about those eight million children denied any tax break by a last-minute switcheroo. In total, 50 million American households — including a majority of those with members over 65 — get nothing; another 20 million receive less than $100 each. And a great majority of those left behind do pay taxes.
And the bald-faced misrepresentation of an elitist tax cut offering little or nothing to most Americans is only the latest in a long string of blatant misstatements. Misleading the public has been a consistent strategy for the Bush team on issues ranging from tax policy and Social Security reform to energy and the environment. So why should we give the administration the benefit of the doubt on foreign policy?
It's long past time for this administration to be held accountable. Over the last two years we've become accustomed to the pattern. Each time the administration comes up with another whopper, partisan supporters — a group that includes a large segment of the news media — obediently insist that black is white and up is down. Meanwhile the "liberal" media report only that some people say that black is black and up is up. And some Democratic politicians offer the administration invaluable cover by making excuses and playing down the extent of the lies.
If this same lack of accountability extends to matters of war and peace, we're in very deep trouble. The British seem to understand this: Max Hastings, the veteran war correspondent — who supported Britain's participation in the war — writes that "the prime minister committed British troops and sacrificed British lives on the basis of a deceit, and it stinks."
It's no answer to say that Saddam was a murderous tyrant. I could point out that many of the neoconservatives who fomented this war were nonchalant, or worse, about mass murders by Central American death squads in the 1980's. But the important point is that this isn't about Saddam: it's about us. The public was told that Saddam posed an imminent threat. If that claim was fraudulent, the selling of the war is arguably the worst scandal in American political history — worse than Watergate, worse than Iran-contra. Indeed, the idea that we were deceived into war makes many commentators so uncomfortable that they refuse to admit the possibility.
But here's the thought that should make those commentators really uncomfortable. Suppose that this administration did con us into war. And suppose that it is not held accountable for its deceptions, so Mr. Bush can fight what Mr. Hastings calls a "khaki election" next year. In that case, our political system has become utterly, and perhaps irrevocably, corrupted.
*****************
Published on Tuesday, June 3, 2003 by the Inter Press Service
Credibility Gap, Anyone?
by
Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON - When all three major U.S. newsweeklies--Time, Newsweek and U.S. News & World Report--run major features on the same day on possible government lying, you can bet you have the makings of a major scandal.
And when the two most important outlets of neo-conservative opinion--The Weekly Standard and The Wall Street Journal--come out on the same day with lead editorials spluttering outrage about suggestions of government lying, you can bet that things are going to get very hot as summer approaches in Washington.
The controversy over whether the administration of President George W. Bush either exaggerated or lied about evidence that it said it had about the existence of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq before the U.S.-led invasion has mushroomed over the past week.
"This is potentially very serious," said one Congressional aide. "If it's shown we went to war because of intelligence that was 'cooked' by the administration, heads will have to roll--and not just little heads, big ones."
The administration was already on the defensive last week as the controversy took off in Europe, particularly in Britain where Prime Minister Tony Blair found himself assailed from all directions for either wilfully exaggerating the intelligence himself or being "suckered," as his former foreign minister Robin Cook called it this weekend, by Washington's neo-conservative hawks, who started agitating for war even before the dust settled in lower Manhattan after the Sep. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.
Matters took a turn for the worse when the London Guardian reported Saturday about the existence of a transcript, obviously leaked from a senior British official, of an exchange at the Waldorf Hotel in New York between U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell and British Foreign Minister Jack Straw just before Powell's presentation of the evidence against Iraq before the United Nations Security Council Feb. 5.
It quotes Powell, whose forceful case to the Council was decisive in persuading U.S. public opinion that Baghdad represented a serious threat, as being "apprehensive" about the evidence presented to him by the intelligence agencies. He reportedly expressed the hope that the actual facts, when they came out, would not "explode in their faces." (At a Rome press conference Monday, Powell insisted that he considered the evidence "overwhelming" when he spoke before the Council.)
But it appears that Powell's musing was accurate, as, after almost two months in uncontested control of Iraq, U.S. troops and investigators have failed to come up with concrete evidence of an Iraqi WMD program, let alone an actual weapon.
The scenario of an uneasy Powell received a major boost in the accounts of the three newsweeklies. U.S. News reported, for example, that, during a rehearsal of Powell's presentation at CIA headquarters Feb. 1, the normally mild-mannered retired general at one point ''tossed several pages in the air. 'I'm not reading this,' he declared. 'This is bull----'."
The same magazine also reported that the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) formally concluded that, "There is no reliable information on whether Iraq is producing and stockpiling chemical weapons" in September 2002, just as Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld was telling Congress that the Baghdad "regime has amassed large, clandestine stockpiles of chemical weapons, including VX, sarin, cyclosarin and mustard gas."
The accounts by Newsweek and Time were similarly damning. One "informed military source" told Newsweek that when the U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) asked the CIA for specific WMD targets that should be destroyed in the first stages of the invasion, the agency only complied reluctantly.
But what it provided "was crap," a CENTCOM planner told the magazine, consisting mainly of buildings that were bombed in the first Gulf War in 1991. And agency experts reportedly could not tell the war-planners what agents were located where.
If true, that contradicts a series of bald assertions by administration officials and their supporters over the last nine months. "Simply stated," Vice President Dick Cheney declared in the first call to arms last August, "there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction."
"We know where (the WMD) are," declared Rumsfeld in a television interview Mar. 30, well into the first week of the war. "They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat."
He has since retreated from that certainty, suggesting last week that the Iraqis "may have had time to destroy them, and I don't know the answer."
There is also growing doubt about the evidence that Bush himself touted this weekend as proof--two truck trailers described by officials as mobile weapons-productions labs.
According to a CIA report noted in the 'Slate' Internet magazine, key equipment for growing, sterilizing and drying bacteria was not present in either trailer. Iraqi officials have said the trailers were used to produce hydrogen for artillery weather balloons.
Matthew Meselson, a Harvard University expert on biological weapons who 20 years ago single-handedly debunked reports by senior Reagan administration officials--several of whom hold relevant positions in the Bush government--about the use by Soviet allies of mycotoxins against rebels in Laos and Afghanistan, has also expressed doubts about the trailers' purpose, and called for the CIA to hand over the evidence to independent scientists to make an assessment.
Retired intelligence officials from both the CIA and the DIA are also coming out with ever-stronger statements accusing the intelligence community of twisting and exaggerating the evidence to justify war.
They say both agencies were intimidated by the political pressure exerted in particular by neo-conservative hawks under Cheney and Rumsfeld, who even established a special unit in the defense secretary's office to determine what intelligence was "missing."
Much of the evidence on which the WMD case was based came from defectors supplied by the Iraqi National Congress (INC), an exile group headed by Ahmed Chalabi that has been championed by the neo-conservatives--including Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, Cheney chief of staff I. Lewis Libby and Defense Policy Board members Richard Perle, Kenneth Adelman, and James Woolsey--for more than a decade.
Retired senior CIA, DIA and State Department intelligence officers, including the CIA's former counter-terrorism chief Vince Cannistraro and the DIA's former chief of Middle East intelligence W. Patrick Lang, have also spoken bluntly to reporters about what they call the administration's corruption of the intelligence process to justify war.
Both the CIA and State have long distrusted the INC and Chalabi, in particular, although Chalabi remains the Pentagon's favorite for leading an interim government in Baghdad.
All of this has outraged the administration, which insists the intelligence community was united in its assessment about the existence of WMD, and its neo-conservative defenders. The Wall Street Journal on Monday accused the "French and the European left" of trying to tarnish the U.S. victory and charged that discontent among CIA analysts was spurred by resentment of Rumsfeld.
But even the Journal appeared to be moving away from its previous position that Iraq's alleged WMD constituted a threat to the United States and its allies. "Whether or not WMD is found takes nothing away from the Iraq war victory," it said, citing the gains made in human rights by Saddam Hussein's demise.
Nonetheless, what the administration knew about WMD and when it knew it --to paraphrase the famous Watergate questions--are now claiming the limelight, to the administration's clear discomfort.
On Sunday, the powerful chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee said he hoped to begin hearings--with the Select Committee on Intelligence--before the Jul. 4 recess, while the ranking member of the House of Representatives Intelligence Committee has asked the CIA to produce a report by Jul. 1 reconciling its pre-war assessments with actual findings on the ground.
Copyright 2003 Inter Press Service
Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company
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