Missing Weapons Of Mass Destruction:
Is Lying About The Reason For War An Impeachable
Offense?
____________________________________
By JOHN W. DEAN
Columnist
FindLaw
Friday, Jun. 06, 2003
writ.corporate.findlaw.com
President George W. Bush has got a very serious
problem. Before asking Congress for a Joint Resolution
authorizing the use of American military forces in
Iraq, he made a number of unequivocal statements about
the reason the United States needed to pursue the most
radical actions any nation can undertake - acts of war
against another nation.
Now it is clear that many of his statements appear to
be false. In the past, Bush's White House has been
very good at sweeping ugly issues like this under the
carpet, and out of sight. But it is not clear that
they will be able to make the question of what
happened to Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass
destruction (WMDs) go away - unless, perhaps, they
start another war.
That seems unlikely. Until the questions surrounding
the Iraqi war are answered, Congress and the public
may strongly resist more of President Bush's
warmaking.
Presidential statements, particularly on matters of
national security, are held to an expectation of the
highest standard of truthfulness. A president cannot
stretch, twist or distort facts and get away with it.
President Lyndon Johnson's distortions of the truth
about Vietnam forced him to stand down from
reelection. President Richard Nixon's false statements
about Watergate forced his resignation.
Frankly, I hope the WMDs are found, for it will end
the matter. Clearly, the story of the missing WMDs is
far from over. And it is too early, of course, to draw
conclusions. But it is not too early to explore the
relevant issues.
President Bush's Statements On Iraq's Weapons Of Mass
Destruction
Readers may not recall exactly what President Bush
said about weapons of mass destruction; I certainly
didn't. Thus, I have compiled these statements below.
In reviewing them, I saw that he had, indeed, been as
explicit and declarative as I had recalled.
Bush's statements, in chronological order, were:
"Right now, Iraq is expanding and improving facilities
that were used for the production of biological
weapons."
United Nations Address
September 12, 2002
"Iraq has stockpiled biological and chemical weapons,
and is rebuilding the facilities used to make more of
those weapons."
"We have sources that tell us that Saddam Hussein
recently authorized Iraqi field commanders to use
chemical weapons -- the very weapons the dictator
tells us he does not have."
Radio Address
October 5, 2002
"The Iraqi regime . . . possesses and produces
chemical and biological weapons. It is seeking nuclear
weapons."
"We know that the regime has produced thousands of
tons of chemical agents, including mustard gas, sarin
nerve gas, VX nerve gas."
"We've also discovered through intelligence that Iraq
has a growing fleet of manned and unmanned aerial
vehicles that could be used to disperse chemical or
biological weapons across broad areas. We're concerned
that Iraq is exploring ways of using these UAVS for
missions targeting the United States."
"The evidence indicates that Iraq is reconstituting
its nuclear weapons program. Saddam Hussein has held
numerous meetings with Iraqi nuclear scientists, a
group he calls his "nuclear mujahideen" - his nuclear
holy warriors. Satellite photographs reveal that Iraq
is rebuilding facilities at sites that have been part
of its nuclear program in the past. Iraq has attempted
to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes and other
equipment needed for gas centrifuges, which are used
to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons."
Cincinnati, Ohio Speech
October 7, 2002
"Our intelligence officials estimate that Saddam
Hussein had the materials to produce as much as 500
tons of sarin, mustard and VX nerve agent."
State of the Union Address
January 28, 2003
"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."
Address to the Nation
March 17, 2003
Should The President Get The Benefit Of The Doubt?
When these statements were made, Bush's
let-me-mince-no-words posture was convincing to many
Americans. Yet much of the rest of the world, and many
other Americans, doubted them.
As Bush's veracity was being debated at the United
Nations, it was also being debated on campuses -
including those where I happened to be lecturing at
the time.
On several occasions, students asked me the following
question: Should they believe the President of the
United States? My answer was that they should give the
President the benefit of the doubt, for several
reasons deriving from the usual procedures that have
operated in every modern White House and that, I
assumed, had to be operating in the Bush White House,
too.
First, I assured the students that these statements
had all been carefully considered and crafted.
Presidential statements are the result of a process,
not a moment's thought. White House speechwriters
process raw information, and their statements are
passed on to senior aides who have both substantive
knowledge and political insights. And this all occurs
before the statement ever reaches the President for
his own review and possible revision.
Second, I explained that - at least in every White
House and administration with which I was familiar,
from Truman to Clinton - statements with national
security implications were the most carefully
considered of all. The White House is aware that, in
making these statements, the President is speaking not
only to the nation, but also to the world.
Third, I pointed out to the students, these statements
are typically corrected rapidly if they are later
found to be false. And in this case, far from
backpedaling from the President's more extreme claims,
Bush's press secretary, Ari Fleischer had actually, at
times, been even more emphatic than the President had.
For example, on January 9, 2003, Fleischer stated,
during his press briefing, "We know for a fact that
there are weapons there."
In addition, others in the Administration were
similarly quick to back the President up, in some
cases with even more unequivocal statements. Secretary
of Defense Donald Rumsfeld repeatedly claimed that
Saddam had WMDs - and even went so far as to claim he
knew "where they are; they're in the area around
Tikrit and Baghdad."
Finally, I explained to the students that the
political risk was so great that, to me, it was
inconceivable that Bush would make these statements if
he didn't have damn solid intelligence to back him up.
Presidents do not stick their necks out only to have
them chopped off by political opponents on an issue as
important as this, and if there was any doubt, I
suggested, Bush's political advisers would be telling
him to hedge. Rather than stating a matter as fact, he
would be say: "I have been advised," or "Our
intelligence reports strongly suggest," or some such
similar hedge. But Bush had not done so.
So what are we now to conclude if Bush's statements
are found, indeed, to be as grossly inaccurate as they
currently appear to have been?
After all, no weapons of mass destruction have been
found, and given Bush's statements, they should not
have been very hard to find - for they existed in
large quantities, "thousands of tons" of chemical
weapons alone. Moreover, according to the statements,
telltale facilities, groups of scientists who could
testify, and production equipment also existed.
So where is all that? And how can we reconcile the
White House's unequivocal statements with the fact
that they may not exist?
There are two main possibilities. One that something
is seriously wrong within the Bush White House's
national security operations. That seems difficult to
believe. The other is that the President has
deliberately misled the nation, and the world.
A Desperate Search For WMDs Has So Far Yielded Little,
If Any, Fruit
Even before formally declaring war against Saddam
Hussein's Iraq, the President had dispatched American
military special forces into Iraq to search for
weapons of mass destruction, which he knew would
provide the primary justification for Operation
Freedom. None were found.
Throughout Operation Freedom's penetration of Iraq and
drive toward Baghdad, the search for WMDs continued.
None were found.
As the coalition forces gained control of Iraqi cities
and countryside, special search teams were dispatched
to look for WMDs. None were found.
During the past two and a half months, according to
reliable news reports, military patrols have visited
over 300 suspected WMD sites throughout Iraq. None of
the prohibited weapons were found there.
British and American Press Reaction to the Missing
WMDs
British Prime Minister Tony Blair is also under
serious attack in England, which he dragged into the
war unwillingly, based on the missing WMDs. In
Britain, the missing WMDs are being treated as
scandalous; so far, the reaction in the U.S. has been
milder.
New York Times columnist, Paul Krugman, has taken Bush
sharply to task, asserting that it is "long past time
for this administration to be held accountable." "The
public was told that Saddam posed an imminent threat,"
Krugman argued. "If that claim was fraudulent," he
continued, "the selling of the war is arguably the
worst scandal in American political history - worse
than Watergate, worse than Iran-contra." But most
media outlets have reserved judgment as the search for
WMDs in Iraq continues.
Still, signs do not look good. Last week, the Pentagon
announced it was shifting its search from looking for
WMD sites, to looking for people who can provide leads
as to where the missing WMDs might be.
Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and
International Security John Bolton, while offering no
new evidence, assured Congress that WMDs will indeed
be found. And he advised that a new unit called the
Iraq Survey Group, composed of some 1400 experts and
technicians from around the world, is being deployed
to assist in the searching.
But, as Time magazine reported, the leads are running
out. According to Time, the Marine general in charge
explained that "[w]e've been to virtually every
ammunition supply point between the Kuwaiti border and
Baghdad," and remarked flatly, "They're simply not
there."
Perhaps most troubling, the President has failed to
provide any explanation of how he could have made his
very specific statements, yet now be unable to back
them up with supporting evidence. Was there an Iraqi
informant thought to be reliable, who turned out not
to be? Were satellite photos innocently, if
negligently misinterpreted? Or was his evidence not as
solid as he led the world to believe?
The absence of any explanation for the gap between the
statements and reality only increases the sense that
the President's misstatements may actually have been
intentional lies.
Investigating The Iraqi War Intelligence Reports
Even now, while the jury is still out as to whether
intentional misconduct occurred, the President has a
serious credibility problem. Newsweek magazine posed
the key questions: "If America has entered a new age
of pre-emption --when it must strike first because it
cannot afford to find out later if terrorists possess
nuclear or biological weapons--exact intelligence is
critical. How will the United States take out a mad
despot or a nuclear bomb hidden in a cave if the CIA
can't say for sure where they are? And how will Bush
be able to maintain support at home and abroad?"
In an apparent attempt to bolster the President's
credibility, and his own, Secretary Rumsfeld himself
has now called for a Defense Department investigation
into what went wrong with the pre-war intelligence.
New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd finds this
effort about on par with O. J.'s looking for his
wife's killer. But there may be a difference: Unless
the members of Administration can find someone else to
blame - informants, surveillance technology,
lower-level personnel, you name it - they may not
escape fault themselves.
Congressional committees are also looking into the
pre-war intelligence collection and evaluation.
Senator John Warner (R-VA), chairman of the Senate
Armed Services Committee, said his committee and the
Senate Intelligence Committee would jointly
investigate the situation. And the House Permanent
Select Committee on Intelligence plans an
investigation.
These investigations are certainly appropriate, for
there is potent evidence of either a colossal
intelligence failure or misconduct - and either would
be a serious problem. When the best case scenario
seems to be mere incompetence, investigations
certainly need to be made.
Senator Bob Graham - a former chairman of the Senate
Intelligence Committee - told CNN's Aaron Brown, that
while he still hopes they find WMDs or at least
evidence thereof, he has also contemplated three other
possible alternative scenarios:
One is that [the WMDs] were spirited out of Iraq,
which maybe is the worst of all possibilities, because
now the very thing that we were trying to avoid,
proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, could be
in the hands of dozens of groups. Second, that we had
bad intelligence. Or third, that the intelligence was
satisfactory but that it was manipulated, so as just
to present to the American people and to the world
those things that made the case for the necessity of
war against Iraq.
Senator Graham seems to believe there is a serious
chance that it is the final scenario that reflects
reality. Indeed, Graham told CNN "there's been a
pattern of manipulation by this administration."
Graham has good reason to complain. According to the
New York Times, he was one of the few members of the
Senate who saw the national intelligence estimate that
was the basis for Bush's decisions. After reviewing
it, Senator Graham requested that the Bush
Administration declassify the information before the
Senate voted on the Administration's resolution
requesting use of the military in Iraq.
But rather than do so, CIA Director Tenet merely sent
Graham a letter discussing the findings. Graham then
complained that Tenet's letter only addressed
"findings that supported the administration's position
on Iraq," and ignored information that raised
questions about intelligence. In short, Graham
suggested that the Administration, by cherrypicking
only evidence to its own liking, had manipulated the
information to support its conclusion.
Recent statements by one of the high-level officials
privy to the decisionmaking process that lead to the
Iraqi war also strongly suggests manipulation, if not
misuse of the intelligence agencies. Deputy Secretary
of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, during an interview with
Sam Tannenhaus of Vanity Fair magazine, said: "The
truth 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 as the core reason." More
recently, Wolfowitz added what most have believed all
along, that the reason we went after Iraq is that
"[t]he country swims on a sea of oil."
Worse than Watergate? A Potential Huge Scandal If WMDs
Are Still Missing
Krugman is right to suggest a possible comparison to
Watergate. In the three decades since Watergate, this
is the first potential scandal I have seen that could
make Watergate pale by comparison. If the Bush
Administration intentionally manipulated or
misrepresented intelligence to get Congress to
authorize, and the public to support, military action
to take control of Iraq, then that would be a
monstrous misdeed.
As I remarked in an earlier column, this
Administration may be due for a scandal. While Bush
narrowly escaped being dragged into Enron, it was not,
in any event, his doing. But the war in Iraq is all
Bush's doing, and it is appropriate that he be held
accountable.
To put it bluntly, if Bush has taken Congress and the
nation into war based on bogus information, he is
cooked. Manipulation or deliberate misuse of national
security intelligence data, if proven, could be "a
high crime" under the Constitution's impeachment
clause. It would also be a violation of federal
criminal law, including the broad federal
anti-conspiracy statute, which renders it a felony "to
defraud the United States, or any agency thereof in
any manner or for any purpose."
It's important to recall that when Richard Nixon
resigned, he was about to be impeached by the House of
Representatives for misusing the CIA and FBI. After
Watergate, all presidents are on notice that
manipulating or misusing any agency of the executive
branch improperly is a serious abuse of presidential
power.
Nixon claimed that his misuses of the federal agencies
for his political purposes were in the interest of
national security. The same kind of thinking might
lead a President to manipulate and misuse national
security agencies or their intelligence to create a
phony reason to lead the nation into a politically
desirable war. Let us hope that is not the case.
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John Dean, a FindLaw columnist, is a former Counsel to
the President of the United States. |
