Articles on WMD deception
*****************
Published on Thursday, June 5, 2003 by the Boulder Daily Camera
Among The Deceivers
Does It Matter If We Were Misled On Iraq? Hell, Yes
Editorial
Dictators and democrats alike love to clothe their policies in the language of altruism. But once shorn of rhetorical raiment, naked realpolitik often lies beneath. Now, amid rising doubts about the Bush and Blair administrations' case for attacking Iraq, they are trying to wrap a towel around the nakedness of their misdirections.
George Bush and Tony Blair told us that Iraq posed an imminent threat to our security. Saddam supported the al-Qaida network that attacked America on Sept. 11, 2001, they warned. With great specificity, they described putative stocks of weapons of mass destruction, asserting that Iraq might have a nuke within six months and missiles capable of delivering WMD.
The war mostly went well. Major fighting was over quickly, and while thousands of Iraqis were killed, fewer than 200 British and American troops died (though more go down each week). The ruthless Saddam is gone.
But then things got tricky. Promises of quick transition to Iraqi control have been chucked, efforts to rebuild a destroyed nation are foundering and unrest among the masses rises daily.
And the rationales for a hurry-up war aren't holding up well at all. There was no Saddam-al-Qaida axis. And despite a concerted effort to find them, no WMD have been found. The best evidence so far, two trailers that might have been used to make bio-weapons, hardly constitute a serious threat.
Increasingly, it's clear that pre-war "evidence" of WMD was exaggerated, questioned by intelligence experts and even some of Bush and Blair's top deputies. Some "intelligence" proved to be crude forgeries, or plagiarized from decade-old graduate-student work. A transcript of a meeting between Secretary of State Colin Powell and his British counterpart, Jack Straw, reveals that both men fretted over trumped-up WMD claims. U.S. News and World Report revealed that during a Feb. 1 rehearsal of his U.N. speech urging war, a frustrated Powell threw his script in the air and said "I'm not reading this. This is bull----." (He read the "bull----," anyway.) Intelligence grunts angry that their work was spun, edited and politicized are quietly leaking the truth.
To all this, the Bush and Blair administrations and their media attack dogs respond: It doesn't matter. The point is, they bark, we got rid of a monster, as the discovery of mass graves proves (conveniently ignoring the fact that most of the dead are Shiites slaughtered by Saddam because Bush the first abandoned them following the 1991 Gulf War).
So now they want us to believe the real mission in Iraq was humanitarian. But that's just a tattered cloak tossed over the nakedness of deception.
If America were bent on ridding the world of murderous regimes, there are plenty of candidates — including many U.S. allies: five former Soviet Central Asian republics, where torture, repression and dictators run rampant, terrorist-coddling Saudi Arabia, African thugs ... the list is long.
Had Bush told the American people, "we need to take out Saddam because he's a brute," they might even have said "go for it." Or maybe not.
But before we applaud Republican humanitarian impulses, recall 1998, when President Clinton bombed Kosovo — a primarily humanitarian mission to halt the slaughter of Muslim Albanians. GOP leaders howled in protest. "I don't think we should be bombing in the Balkans," said GOP House whip Tom DeLay, a shrill Iraq hawk. "I don't think NATO should be destroyed (it wasn't, by the way) because we changed its mission to a humanitarian one."
Bush and Blair did not tell us they were going to war in Iraq for humanitarian purposes. They told us it was about al-Qaida and WMD. And if their purpose is to spread true democracy to the world — including its core values of openness, justice and honesty — then it absolutely does matter if they misled us through fear into supporting their war of choice.
Copyright 2002, The Daily Camera and the E.W. Scripps Company
**********************
Published on Thursday, June 5, 2003 by CommonDreams.org
Iraq's WMD Intelligence: Where is the Outrage?
by US
Senator Robert Byrd
Senate Floor Remarks - June 5, 2003
With each passing day, the questions surrounding Iraq's missing weapons of mass destruction take on added urgency. Where are the massive stockpiles of VX, mustard, and other nerve agents that we were told Iraq was hoarding? Where are the thousands of liters of botulinim toxin? Wasn't it the looming threat to America posed by these weapons that propelled the United States into war with Iraq? Isn't this the reason American military personnel were called upon to risk their lives in combat?
On March 17, in his final speech to the American people before ordering the invasion of Iraq, President Bush took one last opportunity to bolster his case for war. The centerpiece of his argument was the same message he brought to the United Nations months before, and the same message he hammered home at every opportunity in the intervening months, namely that Saddam Hussein had failed to destroy Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and thus presented an imminent danger to the American people. "Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised," the President said.
Now, nearly two months after the fall of Baghdad, the United States has yet to find any physical evidence of those lethal weapons. Could they be buried underground or are they somehow camouflaged in plain sight? Were they destroyed before the war? Have they been shipped out of the country? Do they actually exist? The questions are mounting. What started weeks ago as a restless murmur throughout Iraq has intensified into a worldwide cacophony of confusion.
The fundamental question that is nagging at many is this: How reliable were the claims of this President and key members of his Administration that Iraq's weapons of mass destruction posed a clear and imminent threat to the United States, such a grave threat that immediate war was the only recourse?
Lawmakers, who were assured before the war that weapons of mass destruction would be found in Iraq, and many of whom voted to give this Administration a sweeping grant of authority to wage war based upon those assurances, have been placed in the uncomfortable position of wondering if they were misled. The media is ratcheting up the demand for answers: Could it be that the intelligence was wrong, or could it be that the facts were manipulated? These are very serious and grave questions, and they require immediate answers. We cannot - - and must not - - brush such questions aside. We owe the people of this country an answer. Every member of this body ought to be demanding answers.
I am encouraged that the Senate Armed Services and Intelligence Committees are planning to investigate the credibility of the intelligence that was used to build the case for war against Iraq. We need a thorough, open, gloves-off investigation of this matter and we need it quickly. The credibility of the President and his Administration hangs in the balance. We must not trifle with the people's trust by foot-dragging.
What amazes me is that the President himself is not clamoring for an investigation. It is his integrity that is on the line. It is his truthfulness that is being questioned. It is his leadership that has come under scrutiny. And yet he has raised no question, expressed no curiosity about the strange turn of events in Iraq, expressed no anger at the possibility that he might have been misled. How is it that the President, who was so adamant about the dangers of WMD, has expressed no concern over the where-abouts of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq?
Indeed, instead of leading the charge to uncover the discrepancy between what we were told before the war and what we have found - or failed to find - since the war, the White House is circling the wagons and scoffing at the notion that anyone in the Administration exaggerated the threat from Iraq.
In an interview with Polish television last week, President Bush noted that two trailers were found in Iraq that U.S. intelligence officials believe are mobile biological weapons production labs, although no trace of chemical or biological material was found in the trailers. "We found the weapons of mass destruction," the President was quoted as saying. Certainly he cannot be satisfied with such meager evidence.
At the CIA, Director George Tenet released a terse statement the other day defending the intelligence his agency provided on Iraq. "The integrity of our process was maintained throughout and any suggestion to the contrary is simply wrong," he said. How can he be so absolutely sure?
At the Pentagon, Doug Feith (FITHE), the Under Secretary of Defense for policy, held a rare press conference this week to deny reports that a high level intelligence cell in the Defense Department doctored data and pressured the CIA to strengthen the case for war. "I know of no pressure. I can't rule out what other people may have perceived. Who knows what people perceive," he said. Is this Administration not at all concerned about the perception of deception?
And Secretary of State Powell, who presented the U.S. case against Iraq to the United Nations last February, strenuously defended his presentation in an interview this week and denied any erosion in the Administration's credibility. "Everybody knows that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction," he said. Should he not be more concerned than that about U.S. claims before the United Nations?
And yet...and yet...the questions continue to grow, and the doubts are beginning to drown out the assurances. For every insistence from Washington that the weapons of mass destruction case against Iraq is sound comes a counterpoint from the field - another dry hole, another dead end.
As the top Marine general in Iraq was recently quoted as saying, "It was a surprise to me then, it remains a surprise to me now, that we have not uncovered weapons, as you say, in some of the forward dispersal sites. Again, believe me, it's not for lack of trying. We've been to virtually every ammunition supply point between the Kuwaiti border and Baghdad, but they're simply not there."
Who are the American people to believe? What are we to think? Even though I opposed the war against Iraq because I believe that the doctrine of preemption is a flawed and dangerous instrument of foreign policy, I did believe that Saddam Hussein possessed some chemical and biological weapons capability. But I did not believe that he presented an imminent threat to the United States - as indeed he did not.
Such weapons may eventually turn up. But my greater fear is that the belligerent stance of the United States may have convinced Saddam Hussein to sell or disperse his weapons to dark forces outside of Iraq. Shouldn't this Administration be equally alarmed if they really believed that Saddam had such dangerous capabilities?
Saddam Hussein is missing. Osama bin Laden is missing. Iraq's weapons of mass destruction are missing. And the President's mild claims that we are "on the look" do not comfort me. There ought to be an army of UN inspectors combing the countryside in Iraq or searching for evidence of disbursement of these weapons right now. Why are we waiting? Is there fear of the unknown? Or fear of the truth?
This nation and, indeed, the world were led into war with Iraq on the grounds that Iraq, possessed weapons of mass destruction, and posed an imminent threat to the United States and to the global community. As the President said in his March 17 address to the nation, "The danger is clear: using chemical, biological or, one day, nuclear weapons, obtained with the help of Iraq, the terrorists could fulfill their stated ambitions and kill thousands or hundreds of thousands of innocent people in our country, or any other."
That fear may still be valid, but I wonder how the war with Iraq has really mitigated the threat from terrorists. As the recent attack in Saudi Arabia proved, terrorism is alive and well and unaffected by the situation in Iraq.
Meanwhile, the President seems oblivious to the controversy swirling about the justification for the invasion of Iraq. Our nation's credibility before the world is at stake. While his Administration digs in to defend the status quo, Members of Congress are questioning the credibility of the intelligence and the public case made by this Administration on which the war with Iraq was based. Members of the media are openly challenging whether America's intelligence agencies were simply wrong or were callously manipulated. Vice President Cheney's numerous visits to the CIA are being portrayed by some intelligence professionals as "pressure." And the American people are wondering, once again, what is going on in the dark shadows of Washington.
It is time that we had some answers. It is time that the Administration stepped up its acts to reassure the American people that the horrific weapons that they told us threatened the world's safety have not fallen into terrorist hands. It is time that the President leveled with the American people. It is time that we got to the bottom of this matter.
We have waged a costly war against Iraq. We have prevailed. But, we are still losing American lives in that nation. And the troubled situation there is far from settled. American troops will likely be needed there for years. Billions of American tax dollars will continue to be needed to rebuild. I only hope that we have not won the war only to lose the peace. Until we have determined the fate of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, or determined that they, in fact, did not exist, we cannot rest, we cannot claim victory.
Iraq's weapons of mass destruction remain a mystery and a conundrum. What are they, where are they, how dangerous are they? Or were they a manufactured excuse by an Administration eager to seize a country? It is time to answer these questions. It is time- past time - for the Administration to level with the American people, and it is time for the President to demand an accounting from his own Administration as to exactly how our nation was led down such a twisted path to war.
************************
Published in the May/June issue of the Columbia Journalism Review
The Lies We Bought
The Unchallenged "Evidence" For War
by
John R. MacArthur
Shortly before American military forces invaded Iraq, a troubled Ellen Goodman raised a singularly important question about the Bush administration’s propaganda campaign for war — “How we got from there to here.”
There, according to Goodman, was innocent 9/11 victimhood at the hands of religious fanatics; here, was bullying superpower bent on destroying a secular dictator. I assumed that someone as astute as Goodman would reveal at least part of the answer — that the American media provided free transportation to get the White House from there to here. But nowhere in her nationally syndicated column did she state the obvious — that the success of “Bush’s PR War” (the headline on the piece) was largely dependent on a compliant press that uncritically repeated almost every fraudulent administration claim about the threat posed to America by Saddam Hussein.
Late as she was, Goodman was better than most in even recognizing that there was a disinformation campaign aimed at the people and Congress. Just a few columnists seriously challenged the White House advertising assault. Looking back over the debris of half-truths and lies, I can’t help but ask my own question of Goodman: Where was she — indeed, where was the American press — on September 7, 2002, a day when we were sorely in need of reporters?
It was then that the White House propaganda drive began in earnest, with the appearance before television cameras of George Bush and Tony Blair at Camp David. Between them, the two politicians cited a “new” report from the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency that allegedly stated that Iraq was “six months away” from building a nuclear weapon. “I don’t know what more evidence we need,” declared the president.
For public relations purposes, it hardly mattered that no such IAEA report existed, because almost no one in the media bothered to check out the story. (In the twenty-first paragraph of her story on the press conference, The Washington Post’s Karen DeYoung did quote an IAEA spokesman saying, in DeYoung’s words, “that the agency has issued no new report,” but she didn’t confront the White House with this terribly interesting fact.) What mattered was the unencumbered rollout of a commercial for war — the one that the White House chief of staff and former General Motors executive Andrew Card had famously withheld earlier in the summer: “From a marketing point of view, you don’t introduce new products in August.”
Millions of people saw Bush tieless, casually inarticulate, but determined-looking and self-confident, making a completely uncorroborated (and, at that point, uncontradicted) case for preemptive war. While we contemplate the irony of Bush quoting a UN weapons inspection agency that he would later dismiss, we might ask ourselves why no more evidence was needed than the president’s say-so — and why no reporters asked for any.
But the next day, more “evidence” suddenly appeared, on the front page of the Sunday New York Times. In a disgraceful piece of stenography, Michael Gordon and Judith Miller inflated an administration leak into something resembling imminent Armageddon: “More than a decade after Saddam Hussein agreed to give up weapons of mass destruction, Iraq has stepped up its quest for nuclear weapons and has embarked on a worldwide hunt for materials to make an atomic bomb, Bush administration officials said today.”
The key to this A-bomb program was the attempted purchase of “specially designed aluminum tubes, which American officials believe were intended as components of centrifuges to enrich uranium.” Mysteriously, none of those tubes had reached Iraq, but “American officials” wouldn’t say why, “citing the sensitivity of the intelligence.”
Gordon and Miller were mostly careful to attribute their information to anonymous “administration officials,” but at one point they couldn’t restrain themselves and crossed the line into commentary. After nodding to administration “critics” who favored containment of Hussein, they wrote this astonishing paragraph:
“Still, Mr. Hussein’s dogged insistence on pursuing his nuclear ambitions, along with what defectors described in interviews as Iraq’s push to improve and expand Baghdad’s chemical and biological arsenals, have brought Iraq and the United States to the brink of war.”
That Sunday, Card’s new-product introduction moved into high gear when Vice President Dick Cheney appeared on NBC’s Meet the Press to brandish Saddam’s supposed nuclear threat. Prompted by a helpful Tim Russert, Cheney cited the aluminum tubes story in that morning’s New York Times — a story leaked by Cheney’s White House colleagues. Russert: “Aluminum tubes.” Cheney: “Specifically aluminum tubes.” This gave the “six months away” canard a certain ring of independent confirmation: “There’s a story in The New York Times this morning,” said Cheney. “And I want to attribute the Times.”
Does it matter that, in the months that followed, aluminum tubes as weapons of mass destruction were discredited time and again? Does it matter that the former U.S. weapons inspector David Albright (not the usual suspect Scott Ritter) told 60 Minutes, in an interview broadcast on December 8 (a program in which I participated) that “people who understood gas centrifuges almost uniformly felt that these tubes were not specific to gas centrifuge” for production of enriched uranium — that the administration was “selectively picking information to bolster a case that the Iraqi nuclear threat was more imminent than it is, and in essence, scare people”? Will the Times ever publish a clarification (à la Wen Ho Lee) based on IAEA chief Mohammed el-Baradei’s January 9 and March 7 reports insisting that there was “no evidence” that the 81 mm tubes were intended for anything other than conventional rocket production?
As for the “defectors” with special knowledge of Saddam’s elusive chemical weapons stockpile, did Miller and Gordon — did anyone in the mainstream U.S. press — take proper note of Newsweek’s exclusive on March 3? In it, John Barry reported that Iraq’s most important defector, Hussein Kamel, who had run Saddam’s nuclear and biological weapons program, told the CIA and UN weapons inspectors in the summer of 1995 “that after the gulf war, Iraq destroyed all its chemical and biological weapons stocks and the missiles to deliver them.”
And what of Saddam’s overall nuclear procurement program? When el-Baradei told the UN Security Council on March 7 that supporting documents of alleged attempts to buy uranium from Niger were forged, no clarification of the Gordon-Miller report appeared in the Grey Lady. Perhaps Times people still believed their own scare story from all those months before: “Hard-liners are alarmed that American intelligence underestimated the pace and scale of Iraq’s nuclear program before Baghdad’s defeat in the gulf war,” the September 8 piece reported. “The first sign of a ‘smoking gun,’ they argue, may be a mushroom cloud.”
The few corrections and refutations of the White House line were too little and too late for American democracy. Enterprising reporting was needed from the moment of the Bush-Blair p.r. gambit to October 10, the day Congress abdicated its war-making power to the president. During that crucial period, I was able to find only one newspaper story that straightforwardly countered the White House nuclear threat propaganda; it appeared, of all places, in the right-wing, Sun Myung Moon-owned Washington Times. On September 27, a very competent piece by Joseph Curl (unfortunately buried on page 16) pointed out not only that there was no “new report” by the IAEA saying Saddam was six months away from the A-bomb, but also that the agency had never issued a report predicting any time frame. Indeed, when IAEA inspectors pulled out of Iraq in December 1998, spokesman Mark Gwozdecky told Curl, “We had concluded that we had neutralized their nuclear-weapons program. We had confiscated their fissile material. We had destroyed all their key buildings and equipment.”
The American media failed the country badly these past eight months. As journalists, what can we do about it? Perhaps we need to adopt the rapid-response techniques used in public relations, something akin to James Carville’s and George Stephanopoulos’s famous “War Room” ethos: never leave an accusation unanswered before the end of a news cycle.
Unfortunately, the politicians and their p.r. people know all too well the propaganda dictum related nearly twenty years ago by Peter Teeley, press secretary to then Vice President George H.W. Bush. Teeley was responding to complaints that the elder Bush, during a televised debate, had grossly distorted the words of his and Ronald Reagan’s opponents, the Democratic candidates Walter Mondale and Geraldine Ferraro. As Teeley explained it to The New York Times in October 1984, “You can say anything you want during a debate, and 80 million people hear it.” If “anything” turns out to be false and journalists correct it, “So what. Maybe 200 people read it, or 2,000 or 20,000.”
John MacArthur is publisher of Harper’s Magazine and author of 'Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the Gulf War'.
***********************
Published on Thursday, June 5, 2003 by the San Francisco Chronicle
Weapons of Mass Deception
by
Ruth Rosen
THE BUSH administration faces a growing credibility gap that may turn into one of the most serious political scandals in our nation's history. Watergate may one day seem minor-league by comparison.
What I'm about to describe is not a conspiracy. It is the story of a group of men determined to implement a long-held vision.
In 1997, years before George W. Bush entered office, Donald H. Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz founded the Project for the New American Century, a neo- conservative think tank. As part of their larger published vision for "Rebuilding America's Defenses," they repeatedly lobbied for "regime change" in Iraq in order to extend America's influence in the Middle East.
Shortly after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, they began to build a case for invading Iraq. Many people, puzzled and confused, asked: What on earth does Iraq have to do with al Qaeda?
Since the CIA didn't provide evidence for any connection, the answers would have to come from a new intelligence agency established by Rumsfeld, now secretary of defense, in the fall of 2001. Called the Office of Special Plans, it would be independent of both the CIA and Pentagon and headed by his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz.
The selling of the war turned out to be a huge success. The vast majority of Americans believed Iraq had stockpiled weapons of mass destruction and harbored nests of al Qaeda terrorists. Many Americans also believed that the Sept. 11 terrorists had included Iraqi men.
By now, many Americans probably also believe that U.S. forces have found WMDs in Iraq. President Bush declared as much when he described two trailers that "were probably used as mobile biological weapons labs."
But none of the above is true. So far, no WMDs have been found. No Iraqis were involved in Sept. 11. No outposts of al Qaeda terrorists have been uncovered in Iraq. No traces of chemical or biological weapons have been detected in the two trailers.
In an interview with the magazine Vanity Fair, Wolfowitz now admits that the Bush administration focused on WMDs because it was politically expedient. "The truth," he says, "is that for reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S. government bureaucracy, we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on, which was weapons of mass destruction. . . ." He also discloses another justification that was "almost unnoticed but huge"-- the prospect of withdrawing American forces from Saudi Arabia once Saddam Hussein had been removed.
In other words, WMDs were the one argument that could convince a public traumatized by terrorism that a pre-emptive war would save American lives.
And, it worked. The war in Iraq, therefore, was not the result of some colossal intelligence failure. It happened because our leaders were given tainted evidence to convince a skeptical public that an immediate invasion of Iraq was necessary:
When he addressed the U.N. Security Council, Sec. of State Colin Powell offered "updated" information on Iraq plagiarized from a 10-year-old paper posted on the Internet.
In his State of the Union Address, President Bush claimed that Iraq had imported enriched uranium from Nigeria. The document proved to be a clumsy forgery.
According to intelligence sources cited in the British Sunday Herald, just one Iraqi defector claimed that Iraq had huge stocks of WMDs ready for activation on 45-minutes notice. Tony Blair publicized this information, but not the disclaimer and doubts he also received from British intelligence.
The foreign press has accused the Bush administration of having lied to the world. In the United States, however, people have been reluctant to ask: What did the president and other officials know, and when did they know it?
"Truth has a way of asserting itself despite all attempts to obscure it," Sen. Robert W. Byrd, D-W.V., said in a recent speech. Let's hope so. The House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and the Senate Armed Services Committee will conduct a joint re-evaluation of prewar intelligence.
It's a good start. Rep. Jane Harman of Rancho Palos Verdes, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, has warned that "This could conceivably be the greatest intelligence hoax of all time. I doubt it, but we have to ask."
We also need to do more. Intelligence cannot always be examined in public. Congress must now hold the kind of public hearings that unmasked the secrets in the Watergate scandal.
At issue is not whether the war was right or wrong. The question Congress must answer is whether our leaders abused their political power and knowingly deceived the American people.
Articles on WMD deception
*****************
Published on Thursday, June 5, 2003 by the Boulder Daily Camera
Among The Deceivers
Does It Matter If We Were Misled On Iraq? Hell, Yes
Editorial
Dictators and democrats alike love to clothe their policies in the language of altruism. But once shorn of rhetorical raiment, naked realpolitik often lies beneath. Now, amid rising doubts about the Bush and Blair administrations' case for attacking Iraq, they are trying to wrap a towel around the nakedness of their misdirections.
George Bush and Tony Blair told us that Iraq posed an imminent threat to our security. Saddam supported the al-Qaida network that attacked America on Sept. 11, 2001, they warned. With great specificity, they described putative stocks of weapons of mass destruction, asserting that Iraq might have a nuke within six months and missiles capable of delivering WMD.
The war mostly went well. Major fighting was over quickly, and while thousands of Iraqis were killed, fewer than 200 British and American troops died (though more go down each week). The ruthless Saddam is gone.
But then things got tricky. Promises of quick transition to Iraqi control have been chucked, efforts to rebuild a destroyed nation are foundering and unrest among the masses rises daily.
And the rationales for a hurry-up war aren't holding up well at all. There was no Saddam-al-Qaida axis. And despite a concerted effort to find them, no WMD have been found. The best evidence so far, two trailers that might have been used to make bio-weapons, hardly constitute a serious threat.
Increasingly, it's clear that pre-war "evidence" of WMD was exaggerated, questioned by intelligence experts and even some of Bush and Blair's top deputies. Some "intelligence" proved to be crude forgeries, or plagiarized from decade-old graduate-student work. A transcript of a meeting between Secretary of State Colin Powell and his British counterpart, Jack Straw, reveals that both men fretted over trumped-up WMD claims. U.S. News and World Report revealed that during a Feb. 1 rehearsal of his U.N. speech urging war, a frustrated Powell threw his script in the air and said "I'm not reading this. This is bull----." (He read the "bull----," anyway.) Intelligence grunts angry that their work was spun, edited and politicized are quietly leaking the truth.
To all this, the Bush and Blair administrations and their media attack dogs respond: It doesn't matter. The point is, they bark, we got rid of a monster, as the discovery of mass graves proves (conveniently ignoring the fact that most of the dead are Shiites slaughtered by Saddam because Bush the first abandoned them following the 1991 Gulf War).
So now they want us to believe the real mission in Iraq was humanitarian. But that's just a tattered cloak tossed over the nakedness of deception.
If America were bent on ridding the world of murderous regimes, there are plenty of candidates — including many U.S. allies: five former Soviet Central Asian republics, where torture, repression and dictators run rampant, terrorist-coddling Saudi Arabia, African thugs ... the list is long.
Had Bush told the American people, "we need to take out Saddam because he's a brute," they might even have said "go for it." Or maybe not.
But before we applaud Republican humanitarian impulses, recall 1998, when President Clinton bombed Kosovo — a primarily humanitarian mission to halt the slaughter of Muslim Albanians. GOP leaders howled in protest. "I don't think we should be bombing in the Balkans," said GOP House whip Tom DeLay, a shrill Iraq hawk. "I don't think NATO should be destroyed (it wasn't, by the way) because we changed its mission to a humanitarian one."
Bush and Blair did not tell us they were going to war in Iraq for humanitarian purposes. They told us it was about al-Qaida and WMD. And if their purpose is to spread true democracy to the world — including its core values of openness, justice and honesty — then it absolutely does matter if they misled us through fear into supporting their war of choice.
Copyright 2002, The Daily Camera and the E.W. Scripps Company
**********************
Published on Thursday, June 5, 2003 by CommonDreams.org
Iraq's WMD Intelligence: Where is the Outrage?
by US
Senator Robert Byrd
Senate Floor Remarks - June 5, 2003
With each passing day, the questions surrounding Iraq's missing weapons of mass destruction take on added urgency. Where are the massive stockpiles of VX, mustard, and other nerve agents that we were told Iraq was hoarding? Where are the thousands of liters of botulinim toxin? Wasn't it the looming threat to America posed by these weapons that propelled the United States into war with Iraq? Isn't this the reason American military personnel were called upon to risk their lives in combat?
On March 17, in his final speech to the American people before ordering the invasion of Iraq, President Bush took one last opportunity to bolster his case for war. The centerpiece of his argument was the same message he brought to the United Nations months before, and the same message he hammered home at every opportunity in the intervening months, namely that Saddam Hussein had failed to destroy Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and thus presented an imminent danger to the American people. "Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised," the President said.
Now, nearly two months after the fall of Baghdad, the United States has yet to find any physical evidence of those lethal weapons. Could they be buried underground or are they somehow camouflaged in plain sight? Were they destroyed before the war? Have they been shipped out of the country? Do they actually exist? The questions are mounting. What started weeks ago as a restless murmur throughout Iraq has intensified into a worldwide cacophony of confusion.
The fundamental question that is nagging at many is this: How reliable were the claims of this President and key members of his Administration that Iraq's weapons of mass destruction posed a clear and imminent threat to the United States, such a grave threat that immediate war was the only recourse?
Lawmakers, who were assured before the war that weapons of mass destruction would be found in Iraq, and many of whom voted to give this Administration a sweeping grant of authority to wage war based upon those assurances, have been placed in the uncomfortable position of wondering if they were misled. The media is ratcheting up the demand for answers: Could it be that the intelligence was wrong, or could it be that the facts were manipulated? These are very serious and grave questions, and they require immediate answers. We cannot - - and must not - - brush such questions aside. We owe the people of this country an answer. Every member of this body ought to be demanding answers.
I am encouraged that the Senate Armed Services and Intelligence Committees are planning to investigate the credibility of the intelligence that was used to build the case for war against Iraq. We need a thorough, open, gloves-off investigation of this matter and we need it quickly. The credibility of the President and his Administration hangs in the balance. We must not trifle with the people's trust by foot-dragging.
What amazes me is that the President himself is not clamoring for an investigation. It is his integrity that is on the line. It is his truthfulness that is being questioned. It is his leadership that has come under scrutiny. And yet he has raised no question, expressed no curiosity about the strange turn of events in Iraq, expressed no anger at the possibility that he might have been misled. How is it that the President, who was so adamant about the dangers of WMD, has expressed no concern over the where-abouts of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq?
Indeed, instead of leading the charge to uncover the discrepancy between what we were told before the war and what we have found - or failed to find - since the war, the White House is circling the wagons and scoffing at the notion that anyone in the Administration exaggerated the threat from Iraq.
In an interview with Polish television last week, President Bush noted that two trailers were found in Iraq that U.S. intelligence officials believe are mobile biological weapons production labs, although no trace of chemical or biological material was found in the trailers. "We found the weapons of mass destruction," the President was quoted as saying. Certainly he cannot be satisfied with such meager evidence.
At the CIA, Director George Tenet released a terse statement the other day defending the intelligence his agency provided on Iraq. "The integrity of our process was maintained throughout and any suggestion to the contrary is simply wrong," he said. How can he be so absolutely sure?
At the Pentagon, Doug Feith (FITHE), the Under Secretary of Defense for policy, held a rare press conference this week to deny reports that a high level intelligence cell in the Defense Department doctored data and pressured the CIA to strengthen the case for war. "I know of no pressure. I can't rule out what other people may have perceived. Who knows what people perceive," he said. Is this Administration not at all concerned about the perception of deception?
And Secretary of State Powell, who presented the U.S. case against Iraq to the United Nations last February, strenuously defended his presentation in an interview this week and denied any erosion in the Administration's credibility. "Everybody knows that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction," he said. Should he not be more concerned than that about U.S. claims before the United Nations?
And yet...and yet...the questions continue to grow, and the doubts are beginning to drown out the assurances. For every insistence from Washington that the weapons of mass destruction case against Iraq is sound comes a counterpoint from the field - another dry hole, another dead end.
As the top Marine general in Iraq was recently quoted as saying, "It was a surprise to me then, it remains a surprise to me now, that we have not uncovered weapons, as you say, in some of the forward dispersal sites. Again, believe me, it's not for lack of trying. We've been to virtually every ammunition supply point between the Kuwaiti border and Baghdad, but they're simply not there."
Who are the American people to believe? What are we to think? Even though I opposed the war against Iraq because I believe that the doctrine of preemption is a flawed and dangerous instrument of foreign policy, I did believe that Saddam Hussein possessed some chemical and biological weapons capability. But I did not believe that he presented an imminent threat to the United States - as indeed he did not.
Such weapons may eventually turn up. But my greater fear is that the belligerent stance of the United States may have convinced Saddam Hussein to sell or disperse his weapons to dark forces outside of Iraq. Shouldn't this Administration be equally alarmed if they really believed that Saddam had such dangerous capabilities?
Saddam Hussein is missing. Osama bin Laden is missing. Iraq's weapons of mass destruction are missing. And the President's mild claims that we are "on the look" do not comfort me. There ought to be an army of UN inspectors combing the countryside in Iraq or searching for evidence of disbursement of these weapons right now. Why are we waiting? Is there fear of the unknown? Or fear of the truth?
This nation and, indeed, the world were led into war with Iraq on the grounds that Iraq, possessed weapons of mass destruction, and posed an imminent threat to the United States and to the global community. As the President said in his March 17 address to the nation, "The danger is clear: using chemical, biological or, one day, nuclear weapons, obtained with the help of Iraq, the terrorists could fulfill their stated ambitions and kill thousands or hundreds of thousands of innocent people in our country, or any other."
That fear may still be valid, but I wonder how the war with Iraq has really mitigated the threat from terrorists. As the recent attack in Saudi Arabia proved, terrorism is alive and well and unaffected by the situation in Iraq.
Meanwhile, the President seems oblivious to the controversy swirling about the justification for the invasion of Iraq. Our nation's credibility before the world is at stake. While his Administration digs in to defend the status quo, Members of Congress are questioning the credibility of the intelligence and the public case made by this Administration on which the war with Iraq was based. Members of the media are openly challenging whether America's intelligence agencies were simply wrong or were callously manipulated. Vice President Cheney's numerous visits to the CIA are being portrayed by some intelligence professionals as "pressure." And the American people are wondering, once again, what is going on in the dark shadows of Washington.
It is time that we had some answers. It is time that the Administration stepped up its acts to reassure the American people that the horrific weapons that they told us threatened the world's safety have not fallen into terrorist hands. It is time that the President leveled with the American people. It is time that we got to the bottom of this matter.
We have waged a costly war against Iraq. We have prevailed. But, we are still losing American lives in that nation. And the troubled situation there is far from settled. American troops will likely be needed there for years. Billions of American tax dollars will continue to be needed to rebuild. I only hope that we have not won the war only to lose the peace. Until we have determined the fate of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, or determined that they, in fact, did not exist, we cannot rest, we cannot claim victory.
Iraq's weapons of mass destruction remain a mystery and a conundrum. What are they, where are they, how dangerous are they? Or were they a manufactured excuse by an Administration eager to seize a country? It is time to answer these questions. It is time- past time - for the Administration to level with the American people, and it is time for the President to demand an accounting from his own Administration as to exactly how our nation was led down such a twisted path to war.
************************
Published in the May/June issue of the Columbia Journalism Review
The Lies We Bought
The Unchallenged "Evidence" For War
by
John R. MacArthur
Shortly before American military forces invaded Iraq, a troubled Ellen Goodman raised a singularly important question about the Bush administration’s propaganda campaign for war — “How we got from there to here.”
There, according to Goodman, was innocent 9/11 victimhood at the hands of religious fanatics; here, was bullying superpower bent on destroying a secular dictator. I assumed that someone as astute as Goodman would reveal at least part of the answer — that the American media provided free transportation to get the White House from there to here. But nowhere in her nationally syndicated column did she state the obvious — that the success of “Bush’s PR War” (the headline on the piece) was largely dependent on a compliant press that uncritically repeated almost every fraudulent administration claim about the threat posed to America by Saddam Hussein.
Late as she was, Goodman was better than most in even recognizing that there was a disinformation campaign aimed at the people and Congress. Just a few columnists seriously challenged the White House advertising assault. Looking back over the debris of half-truths and lies, I can’t help but ask my own question of Goodman: Where was she — indeed, where was the American press — on September 7, 2002, a day when we were sorely in need of reporters?
It was then that the White House propaganda drive began in earnest, with the appearance before television cameras of George Bush and Tony Blair at Camp David. Between them, the two politicians cited a “new” report from the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency that allegedly stated that Iraq was “six months away” from building a nuclear weapon. “I don’t know what more evidence we need,” declared the president.
For public relations purposes, it hardly mattered that no such IAEA report existed, because almost no one in the media bothered to check out the story. (In the twenty-first paragraph of her story on the press conference, The Washington Post’s Karen DeYoung did quote an IAEA spokesman saying, in DeYoung’s words, “that the agency has issued no new report,” but she didn’t confront the White House with this terribly interesting fact.) What mattered was the unencumbered rollout of a commercial for war — the one that the White House chief of staff and former General Motors executive Andrew Card had famously withheld earlier in the summer: “From a marketing point of view, you don’t introduce new products in August.”
Millions of people saw Bush tieless, casually inarticulate, but determined-looking and self-confident, making a completely uncorroborated (and, at that point, uncontradicted) case for preemptive war. While we contemplate the irony of Bush quoting a UN weapons inspection agency that he would later dismiss, we might ask ourselves why no more evidence was needed than the president’s say-so — and why no reporters asked for any.
But the next day, more “evidence” suddenly appeared, on the front page of the Sunday New York Times. In a disgraceful piece of stenography, Michael Gordon and Judith Miller inflated an administration leak into something resembling imminent Armageddon: “More than a decade after Saddam Hussein agreed to give up weapons of mass destruction, Iraq has stepped up its quest for nuclear weapons and has embarked on a worldwide hunt for materials to make an atomic bomb, Bush administration officials said today.”
The key to this A-bomb program was the attempted purchase of “specially designed aluminum tubes, which American officials believe were intended as components of centrifuges to enrich uranium.” Mysteriously, none of those tubes had reached Iraq, but “American officials” wouldn’t say why, “citing the sensitivity of the intelligence.”
Gordon and Miller were mostly careful to attribute their information to anonymous “administration officials,” but at one point they couldn’t restrain themselves and crossed the line into commentary. After nodding to administration “critics” who favored containment of Hussein, they wrote this astonishing paragraph:
“Still, Mr. Hussein’s dogged insistence on pursuing his nuclear ambitions, along with what defectors described in interviews as Iraq’s push to improve and expand Baghdad’s chemical and biological arsenals, have brought Iraq and the United States to the brink of war.”
That Sunday, Card’s new-product introduction moved into high gear when Vice President Dick Cheney appeared on NBC’s Meet the Press to brandish Saddam’s supposed nuclear threat. Prompted by a helpful Tim Russert, Cheney cited the aluminum tubes story in that morning’s New York Times — a story leaked by Cheney’s White House colleagues. Russert: “Aluminum tubes.” Cheney: “Specifically aluminum tubes.” This gave the “six months away” canard a certain ring of independent confirmation: “There’s a story in The New York Times this morning,” said Cheney. “And I want to attribute the Times.”
Does it matter that, in the months that followed, aluminum tubes as weapons of mass destruction were discredited time and again? Does it matter that the former U.S. weapons inspector David Albright (not the usual suspect Scott Ritter) told 60 Minutes, in an interview broadcast on December 8 (a program in which I participated) that “people who understood gas centrifuges almost uniformly felt that these tubes were not specific to gas centrifuge” for production of enriched uranium — that the administration was “selectively picking information to bolster a case that the Iraqi nuclear threat was more imminent than it is, and in essence, scare people”? Will the Times ever publish a clarification (à la Wen Ho Lee) based on IAEA chief Mohammed el-Baradei’s January 9 and March 7 reports insisting that there was “no evidence” that the 81 mm tubes were intended for anything other than conventional rocket production?
As for the “defectors” with special knowledge of Saddam’s elusive chemical weapons stockpile, did Miller and Gordon — did anyone in the mainstream U.S. press — take proper note of Newsweek’s exclusive on March 3? In it, John Barry reported that Iraq’s most important defector, Hussein Kamel, who had run Saddam’s nuclear and biological weapons program, told the CIA and UN weapons inspectors in the summer of 1995 “that after the gulf war, Iraq destroyed all its chemical and biological weapons stocks and the missiles to deliver them.”
And what of Saddam’s overall nuclear procurement program? When el-Baradei told the UN Security Council on March 7 that supporting documents of alleged attempts to buy uranium from Niger were forged, no clarification of the Gordon-Miller report appeared in the Grey Lady. Perhaps Times people still believed their own scare story from all those months before: “Hard-liners are alarmed that American intelligence underestimated the pace and scale of Iraq’s nuclear program before Baghdad’s defeat in the gulf war,” the September 8 piece reported. “The first sign of a ‘smoking gun,’ they argue, may be a mushroom cloud.”
The few corrections and refutations of the White House line were too little and too late for American democracy. Enterprising reporting was needed from the moment of the Bush-Blair p.r. gambit to October 10, the day Congress abdicated its war-making power to the president. During that crucial period, I was able to find only one newspaper story that straightforwardly countered the White House nuclear threat propaganda; it appeared, of all places, in the right-wing, Sun Myung Moon-owned Washington Times. On September 27, a very competent piece by Joseph Curl (unfortunately buried on page 16) pointed out not only that there was no “new report” by the IAEA saying Saddam was six months away from the A-bomb, but also that the agency had never issued a report predicting any time frame. Indeed, when IAEA inspectors pulled out of Iraq in December 1998, spokesman Mark Gwozdecky told Curl, “We had concluded that we had neutralized their nuclear-weapons program. We had confiscated their fissile material. We had destroyed all their key buildings and equipment.”
The American media failed the country badly these past eight months. As journalists, what can we do about it? Perhaps we need to adopt the rapid-response techniques used in public relations, something akin to James Carville’s and George Stephanopoulos’s famous “War Room” ethos: never leave an accusation unanswered before the end of a news cycle.
Unfortunately, the politicians and their p.r. people know all too well the propaganda dictum related nearly twenty years ago by Peter Teeley, press secretary to then Vice President George H.W. Bush. Teeley was responding to complaints that the elder Bush, during a televised debate, had grossly distorted the words of his and Ronald Reagan’s opponents, the Democratic candidates Walter Mondale and Geraldine Ferraro. As Teeley explained it to The New York Times in October 1984, “You can say anything you want during a debate, and 80 million people hear it.” If “anything” turns out to be false and journalists correct it, “So what. Maybe 200 people read it, or 2,000 or 20,000.”
John MacArthur is publisher of Harper’s Magazine and author of 'Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the Gulf War'.
***********************
Published on Thursday, June 5, 2003 by the San Francisco Chronicle
Weapons of Mass Deception
by
Ruth Rosen
THE BUSH administration faces a growing credibility gap that may turn into one of the most serious political scandals in our nation's history. Watergate may one day seem minor-league by comparison.
What I'm about to describe is not a conspiracy. It is the story of a group of men determined to implement a long-held vision.
In 1997, years before George W. Bush entered office, Donald H. Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz founded the Project for the New American Century, a neo- conservative think tank. As part of their larger published vision for "Rebuilding America's Defenses," they repeatedly lobbied for "regime change" in Iraq in order to extend America's influence in the Middle East.
Shortly after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, they began to build a case for invading Iraq. Many people, puzzled and confused, asked: What on earth does Iraq have to do with al Qaeda?
Since the CIA didn't provide evidence for any connection, the answers would have to come from a new intelligence agency established by Rumsfeld, now secretary of defense, in the fall of 2001. Called the Office of Special Plans, it would be independent of both the CIA and Pentagon and headed by his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz.
The selling of the war turned out to be a huge success. The vast majority of Americans believed Iraq had stockpiled weapons of mass destruction and harbored nests of al Qaeda terrorists. Many Americans also believed that the Sept. 11 terrorists had included Iraqi men.
By now, many Americans probably also believe that U.S. forces have found WMDs in Iraq. President Bush declared as much when he described two trailers that "were probably used as mobile biological weapons labs."
But none of the above is true. So far, no WMDs have been found. No Iraqis were involved in Sept. 11. No outposts of al Qaeda terrorists have been uncovered in Iraq. No traces of chemical or biological weapons have been detected in the two trailers.
In an interview with the magazine Vanity Fair, Wolfowitz now admits that the Bush administration focused on WMDs because it was politically expedient. "The truth," he says, "is that for reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S. government bureaucracy, we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on, which was weapons of mass destruction. . . ." He also discloses another justification that was "almost unnoticed but huge"-- the prospect of withdrawing American forces from Saudi Arabia once Saddam Hussein had been removed.
In other words, WMDs were the one argument that could convince a public traumatized by terrorism that a pre-emptive war would save American lives.
And, it worked. The war in Iraq, therefore, was not the result of some colossal intelligence failure. It happened because our leaders were given tainted evidence to convince a skeptical public that an immediate invasion of Iraq was necessary:
When he addressed the U.N. Security Council, Sec. of State Colin Powell offered "updated" information on Iraq plagiarized from a 10-year-old paper posted on the Internet.
In his State of the Union Address, President Bush claimed that Iraq had imported enriched uranium from Nigeria. The document proved to be a clumsy forgery.
According to intelligence sources cited in the British Sunday Herald, just one Iraqi defector claimed that Iraq had huge stocks of WMDs ready for activation on 45-minutes notice. Tony Blair publicized this information, but not the disclaimer and doubts he also received from British intelligence.
The foreign press has accused the Bush administration of having lied to the world. In the United States, however, people have been reluctant to ask: What did the president and other officials know, and when did they know it?
"Truth has a way of asserting itself despite all attempts to obscure it," Sen. Robert W. Byrd, D-W.V., said in a recent speech. Let's hope so. The House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and the Senate Armed Services Committee will conduct a joint re-evaluation of prewar intelligence.
It's a good start. Rep. Jane Harman of Rancho Palos Verdes, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, has warned that "This could conceivably be the greatest intelligence hoax of all time. I doubt it, but we have to ask."
We also need to do more. Intelligence cannot always be examined in public. Congress must now hold the kind of public hearings that unmasked the secrets in the Watergate scandal.
At issue is not whether the war was right or wrong. The question Congress must answer is whether our leaders abused their political power and knowingly deceived the American people.
