Bush's Deceptions on Iraq Intelligence
by Derrick Z. Jackson
Published on Friday, June 6, 2003 by the Boston Globe
WITH SUCH empty hands after the battle, President Bush is losing the war for his honor. The primary pretext for his unprecedented first-strike war was that Iraq's Saddam Hussein had the most horrifying arsenal of weapons of mass destruction on earth.
Last summer, Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said ''there is no doubt'' and ''there's just no question'' that Hussein had the weapons. Bush turned up the rhetoric in September. ''For the sake of your children's future,'' Bush said, ''we must make sure this madman never has the capacity to hurt us with a nuclear weapon, or to use the stockpiles of anthrax that we know he has, or VX, the biological weapons which he possesses.''
In his fateful 48-hour warning to Saddam to leave Iraq, Bush said, ''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.''
With about 180 American soldiers sacrificed and thousands of Iraqi soldiers and citizens killed, the unprecedented war is unraveling into a scandal that dwarfs President Clinton's Thong-gate and threatens to surpass the violation of national trust symbolized by Watergate. Bill and Monica was about lying about sex. Watergate was about President Nixon lying about a break-in.
Iraq is about Bush sending Americans to die for what may have been a lie.
Despite 160,000 American and British troops and the world's greatest technology, no weapons of mass destruction have been found. The commander of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, Lieutenant General James Conway, said whatever intelligence he was given on WMD, ''We were simply wrong.'' Conway said, ''We've been to virtually every ammunition supply point between the Kuwaiti border and Baghdad, but they're simply not there.''
Many current and former intelligence officers are now saying that the White House either ignored intelligence reports that failed to confirm weapons of mass destruction or trumped up skimpy or lame reports. A claim by Bush that Saddam was buying uranium from Africa for nuclear weapons turned out to be a forged document on the letterhead of a minister of foreign affairs in Niger who had been out of office for a decade.
Greg Thielmann, a recently retired State Department analyst who could not believe that Bush would use ''that stupid piece of garbage'' to make his case, told Newsweek, ''There is a lot of sorrow and anger at the way intelligence was misused.''
A Central Command planner told Newsweek that the CIA's information on the sites where weapons of mass destruction were stored was ''crap.'' An intelligence official told US News and World Report that ''the policy decisions weren't matching the reports we were reading every day.'' In a 2002 document, the Defense Intelligence Agency concluded, ''There is no reliable information on whether Iraq is producing and stockpiling chemical weapons.''
Time quoted a senior military official who helped plan the war in Iraq but quit after seeing the White House exaggerate bad intelligence. Time also quoted an Army intelligence officer who said Rumsfeld ''was deeply, almost pathologically distorting the intelligence.''
US News and World Report detailed how Cheney's staff fed Secretary of State Colin Powell reams of ''evidence'' that could not be confirmed on the eve of Powell's testimony to the United Nations. David Albright, a former Atomic Energy Agency arms inspector, said the White House ''deliberately selected information that would increase the perception that Iraq was a serious threat'' and ''made a decision to turn a blind eye'' to the evidence that ''the large number of deployed chemical weapons the administration said that Iraq had are not there.''
Patrick Lang, a former CIA analyst on Iraq, has said intelligence was ''exploited and abused and bypassed'' by the White House. Vincent Cannistraro, a former head of CIA counter-terrorism operations, said many intelligence officials ''believe it is a scandal.'' Cannistraro said Bush had a ''moral obligation to use the best information available, not just information that fits your preconceived ideas.''
Ignoring that moral obligation may have needlessly wasted thousands of lives and lowered the United States onto the shelf of rogue states we claim to be saving the world from. Before the war, Bush said Saddam used ''denial and deception'' on weapons of mass destruction. Bush must now tell Americans to what level he deceived us.
If Bush cannot shoulder the burden of truth, his disgrace should be one that makes Bill Clinton's lust a footnote in history and Richard Nixon's tapes a petty larceny of democracy. The denial and deception of President Bush ended in debauchery and death.
© Copyright 2003 Globe Newspaper Company
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