Hoodwinked
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By John Prados
[John Prados is a senior analyst with the National Security Archive in Washington, DC. His current book is Lost Crusader: The Secret Wars of CIA Director William Colby.]
Published: Jun 10 2003
tompaine.com
Like a band of street hustlers hawking their three-card monte, Bush officials have been changing their reasoning for going to war with Iraq. As the days pass, and U.S. occupation forces continue to turn up little evidence of the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, Americans are beginning to realize they have been duped by a president in whom they have instilled immense trust.
The administration's cleverness would be fascinating were it not so insidious, not so destructive of America's position in the world. In rapid succession we were told that: U.S. inspectors cannot find the weapons because looters carried away the evidence; Saddam had too long to hide them; that we never expected to find evidence; that the administration never claimed Iraq actually had such weapons. First it was supposed to be just a matter of time, then it was maybe because Saddam destroyed them.
Most recently, President Bush told us they had found the weapons after all! End of story? Is this the smoking gun the administration so desperately needs? Nope. Bush was referring to several trailers found in different parts of Iraq. Before the war, officials filled the airwaves with lurid claims of fleets of Winnebagos cruising Iraq's superhighways spewing out toxic chemicals or biological toxins. Colin Powell described such a trailer-based system in his February 2003 speech to the U.N. Security Council.
A couple of the trailers seemed identical to the units Powell described, and indeed the CIA issued a May 28 report on "Iraqi Mobile Biological Warfare Agent Production Plants" that served as the basis for the latest assertions.
Now it appears those claims too are unraveling. The CIA report found that the trailers were second- or possibly third-generation designs and that biological weapons production "is the only consistent, logical purpose for these vehicles."
U.S. officials rejected Iraqi descriptions of the trailers as labs for producing hydrogen gas for weather balloons or as mobile units used to produce pesticides. Yet the captured trailers contained features suited to extracting gas (as in the balloon theory) and lacked equipment necessary for biological fermentation. Other technologies -- which have yet to be found -- would be necessary to convert the low-grade sludge obtained from some of these trailers into lethal toxins. Such facilities do exist elsewhere -- including in the United States and Poland -- and are marketed commercially. These facts have, as The New York Times reported on June 7, led some intelligence analysts to dispute the conclusions in the CIA report.
While analysis of old trailers may be tedious, it's what's necessary to figure out if the war was justified. When a coalition of nations claims a country must be invaded because it is a threat to humanity, that coalition must prove its claim.
Yet, the opposite is happening. In the most recent chapter of this unraveling, a leaked passage of a September 2002 report from the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) -- the kind of report used to plan military operations -- conceded that there was "no reliable information" on either the location of Iraqi chemical and biological weapons facilities or "on whether Iraq is producing and stockpiling chemical weapons" at all.
The DIA, which works for the Pentagon, usually takes a more extreme view of foreign military threats than CIA. So, if there was evidence of an Iraqi weapons infrastructure it would certainly have been articulated in a DIA document.
This is especially true since Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld were -- by the time the report came out -- already making claims about Iraqi weapons. Cheney declared, "There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction" on Aug. 26, 2002 and Bush made claims regarding expansion of Iraqi weapons labs on Sept. 12, 2002.
Instead, the DIA information is consistent with the CIA's reports to Congress (up until September of 2001) which outlined Iraq's desire to reconstitute a weapons infrastructure but did not declare there was a clear and present threat.
The extensive record of declassified CIA reports from the '90s portrays a decayed and destroyed Iraqi weapons-production infrastructure. So does the account Iraqi weapons manager Hussein Kamel issued to U.N. inspectors (his CIA debriefings have also been declassified), as do U.N. and media reports.
Yet none of this information stopped the administration from hyping its crusade. Remember when Condoleezza Rice scared Americans by invoking an Iraqi mushroom cloud (where there was even less evidence for an active nuclear weapons program)? Or when Ari Fleischer confidently asserted, "We know for a fact that there are weapons in there?" Or how President Bush made the Iraqi threat the centerpiece of his 2003 State of the Union address? By the way, in that address Bush relied on specific evidence about an Iraqi uranium ore deal with Niger that has now been proven to be fabricated -- and Rice has since conceded that "somebody" in the Bush administration may have known of the fabrication before the speech. Then there was Colin Powell's extensive bill of particulars before the United Nations n Feb. 5, 2003.
Intelligence analysts, whether at CIA, DIA or elsewhere, were certainly aware of what the Bush White House wanted to hear on these matters. In private, Cheney or members of his staff visited the CIA a half-dozen times or more to demand additional intelligence. At the Pentagon, Rumsfeld created a special staff to tease out the kind of intelligence he needed on alleged Iraqi links with Al Qaeda (it now appears that two of the most senior Al Qaeda figures captured since 9/11 have told their CIA interrogators there were no such links). Their testimony, though, is reflected nowhere in what the American people were told before the war, because it was important to the Bush administration that it not be. Arm-twisting efforts like these have prompted the CIA ombudsman to investigate several formal complaints from analysts.
By contrast, U.N. weapons inspectors on the ground in Iraq for four months prior to the start of the war found no evidence of an Iraqi nuclear program and refused to certify U.S. claims that Iraq had other kinds of weapons of mass destruction underway. This was not sufficient for Bush, who actually sent Condoleezza Rice to New York to pressure U.N. chief inspector Hans Blix (unsuccessfully) into making his report conform to the White House.
This nasty mess of hyped claims was recently described by German U.N. Inspector Peter Franck as "a big bluff." The White House is obviously sensing the onslaught. Bush officials have gone into full damage control to muzzle the charges that Bush was hoodwinking the public.
On May 30, CIA Director George J. Tenet issued a public statement which insisted, "The integrity of our process was maintained throughout and any suggestion to the contrary is simply wrong." One June 4 Department of Defense policy chief Douglas J. Feith held a news conference. "I know nobody who pressured anybody," he said. And both Condi Rice and Colin Powell went on the Sunday morning news shows on June 8 to make similar denials, even as the administration is said to be considering declassifying more of the suddenly-notorious DIA report to demonstrate it did not mean what the leak seemed to indicate. Rice called the charges of intelligence manipulations "revisionist history." True enough, history is being revised before our eyes -- to reflect the facts.
The wise old Arkansas senator J. William Fulbright, during the bad old days of the Vietnam War, once tried to warn President Lyndon B. Johnson that a colleague was about to come out against the war. Fulbright said, through a Johnson aide, "I don't know anyone who can turn on a dime quicker" than the senator in question. Government lying was a major issue during the Vietnam era and a big reason why that senator changed his stance on the war. The Bush people are trying to turn just as quickly. Trouble is, they're turning on themselves and are bound to slip.
The Senate intelligence and armed services committees, the House intelligence committee and a special panel of retired CIA officers are all now set to investigate the Iraq intelligence question.
It's getting hot in Washington. |
