Bush knowingly misled us
By Paul Campos*
Rocky Mountain News
November 8, 2005
rockymountainnews.com
The Bush administration justified the invasion of Iraq to the American people by claiming that Iraq was training al-Qaida terrorists to use weapons of mass destruction, and that there was a serious risk Saddam Hussein would give these terrorists such weapons. This was always the key argument for invading Iraq, since it was by far the most compelling reason for doing so.
Anyone who bothers to look back at the speeches President Bush gave just before the invasion, or at Colin Powell's speech to the United Nations, or at Vice President Cheney's many statements on the matter, will see that the administration invariably put this claim front and center. For example, a month before the war began President Bush asserted twice in the space of three days that "Iraq has provided al-Qaida with chemical and biological weapons training." It now turns out President Bush and his subordinates were aware at the time they were making them that there was no solid basis for these claims. In other words, they persuaded the American people to go to war by saying things they knew were probably false.
Here's what happened: In November of 2001, a senior al-Qaida operative named Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi was captured in Pakistan. After a furious turf battle between the FBI and the CIA for the right to interrogate Libi was won by the latter agency, the CIA turned him over to Egyptian "specialists," who apparently tortured him. Libi's statements during these interrogations appear to have been the sole basis for the administration's claims that Iraq was training al-Qaida terrorists.
Leaving aside ethical objections, one reason why torture had been largely abandoned as an interrogation technique is because the information torturing people produces tends to be of dubious value. This turned out to be the case with Libi. By February of 2002, the Defense Intelligence Agency, which oversees and evaluates the flow of intelligence to high government officials, had concluded that Libi was probably lying.
In a newly declassified document, the agency informed the White House that Libi's claims included no details about which Iraqis were involved in the supposed training, where the training took place, and what weapons were used. "It is possible he does not know any further details; it is more likely this individual is intentionally misleading the debriefers," the February 2002 report concluded.
Why would Libi lie? After several weeks in the hands of the Egyptians, the agency noted, Libi "may be describing scenarios to the debriefers that he knows will retain their interest." (We can only imagine).
As Jonathan Chait points out in a recent Los Angeles Times column, the Bush administration is now laboring mightily to confuse two separate issues: the question of what mistakes our intelligence agencies made, and the question of the extent to which the administration intentionally distorted the information it was given by those agencies.
The distinction is crucial. Everyone was wrong about whether Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. Yet the long-standing assumption that Hussein had WMD was never considered a good enough reason to take the enormous risk of invading and occupying a large Middle Eastern country. But 9/11 supposedly changed all that. Iraq, the president and all his men told us, had to be invaded because Hussein was training al-Qaida terrorists - a "fact" which supplied the crucial missing link between the proposed invasion and the war on terror.
George W. Bush took the country to war on the basis of an argument he himself didn't really believe. In the annals of presidential dishonesty, this isn't quite as unambiguous as lying about an extra-marital affair. But it will be what he is best remembered for.
*Paul Campos is a professor of law at the University of Colorado. |
