The interesting thing is that anyone with a brain predicted as much. Guess bush doesn't have one
Al
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Disinformation through the stovepipe
by our Middle East editor Bertus Hendriks, 31 October 2003
The US Senate Intelligence Committee has set a deadline for the White House, Defense Department and State Department. Today at 1700 UTC, they are to present documents and answer questions about the intelligence available to them prior to the war on Saddam Hussein. CIA Director George Tenet faces the same deadline.
The euphoria about the swift US military victory in Iraq is long over. This week's announcement that the total number of American servicemen killed by attacks in post-war Iraq surpasses the death toll of the war itself has given added ammunition to the growing chorus of criticism within Congress. Democrats, in particular, but also Republicans, are asking how things could have got this far.
The case against Saddam
After all, US intelligence said it had evidence that Saddam Hussein was pursuing a weapons of mass destruction programme and maintaining ties with al-Qaeda. The war was intended to put an end to this acute threat and, at the same time, free the Iraqi people from a cruel dictator. The US troops would be welcomed as liberators, according to US intelligence.
We know better by now. Not a trace of Saddam's notorious WMD machine has been found, President George Bush recently admitted there was no demonstrable link between the ousted Iraqi dictator and al-Qaeda, and US troops on the ground have been pelted with grenades instead of flowers.
So, has the White House been deliberately lying? As yet, there's no evidence to back up such a strong accusation. The question now is: what was the quality of the intelligence data that prompted the US president to go to war in Iraq? We already know that the claim that Saddam Hussein had tried to procure weapons-grade uranium from Africa was based on forged documents. The CIA knew that too. Nevertheless, the allegation was included in the President's State-of-the-Union address to Congress in January, fuelling doubts about the reliability of CIA intelligence.
CIA scapegoat
Is all this George Tenet's fault? The CIA boss is ultimately responsible for assessing the reliability of intelligence data presented to the White House, and so he presents an easy scapegoat. But Seymour Hersh and other critical investigative journalists of such leading magazines as the New Yorker and the the New Republic have come up with a more plausible explanation. They say an influential group of neoconservatives and other hardliners within the Bush administration, including Vice-President Dick Cheney and Defence Minister Donald Rumsfeld, had taken September 11 as a splendid opportunity to finally settle scores with Saddam, although the Iraqi leader had nothing to do with the suicide attacks on Washington and New York.
From the moment the closed-door decision had been taken to go to war, intelligence services came under mounting pressure to underpin it with data. Exiled Iraqi opposition leaders and dissidents produced ominous revelations about Saddam's secret chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programmes. They predicted that the Iraqi people would welcome the Americans as a liberating force. Any critical assessment of these types of claims was watered down under pressure from the Pentagon and the White House.
Shortcut to the top
When professional spies remained sceptical, customary procedures for vetting intelligence were conveniently set aside. Raw intelligence data were no longer filtered at lower levels; instead so-called stovepipes were created to channel the information they wanted directly to the top leadership.
Professionals within the CIA resisted this political pressure to re-interpret data to fit certain political objectives. They blame their boss, George Tenet, for not sufficiently acting against it. But Mr Tenet himself was under considerable pressure, too. The CIA's failure to prevent September 11 had put his position under threat, and this may have prompted the intelligence chief, appointed by President Clinton, to be more amenable to the neoconservatives.
And so, the Republicans in Congress have their scapegoat. The Democrats see it as a ploy to deflect attention away from the Bush administration. They will not be fobbed off that easily. After all, elections are due next year, and the Iraq question could well prove to be decisive. |
