'Five Lies' Lives On
By Christopher Scheer, Robert Scheer and Lakshmi Chaudhry, AlterNet
February 22, 2004
Editor's Note: This is a modified excerpt from the new edition of "The
Five Biggest Lies Bush Told Us About Iraq" by Robert Scheer,
Christopher Scheer, and Lakshmi Chaudhry. The new edition
includes an up-to-the-minute epilogue analyzing the series of
important developments that have shaped the debate over post-war
Iraq, and more importantly, the missing weapons of mass destruction.
To buy the book, visit FiveLies.com.
On February 17, President Bush sought once again to extricate himself
from the scandal that simply won't go away: the missing Iraqi WMD.
"My administration looked at the intelligence and we saw a danger," he
told thousands of U.S. soldiers at Fort Polk, Louisiana. "Members of
Congress looked at the same intelligence, and they saw a danger. The
United Nations Security Council looked at the intelligence and it saw a
danger. We reached a reasonable conclusion that Saddam Hussein was
a danger."
It's no surprise that the independent commission appointed by the
president has been carefully instructed to only look into lapses in
intelligence-gathering, and not at the ways in which the administration
may have exaggerated or misused intelligence. Now that it has become
clear that Saddam Hussein's fabled weapons programs simply "did not
exist," as the outgoing chief weapons inspector David Kay put it, the
White House is scrambling to cast its now exposed lies as the inevitable
consequence of a massive intelligence failure. In other words, the flaw
lay not in the "reasonable conclusion" of the administration, but the
evidence it was based on.
Whatever the state of U.S. intelligence gathering, the Bush
administration's sales pitch for the Iraq War relied on public displays of
classified data to an unprecedented degree, a practice that has now
come to haunt the White House. Scrutiny of the record since Bush
assumed office shows a clear and disturbing pattern: the manipulation of
intelligence data to fit the administration's preconceived theories to
support a policy based on a political agenda rather than the facts at
hand.
The practice, which far surpasses the usual political sleight-of-hand
employed by previous administrations, was so pervasive as to alarm
career intelligence analysts. "I believe the Bush administration did not
provide an accurate picture to the American people of the military threat
posed by Iraq. Most of it lies with the way senior officials misused the
information they were provided," said Gregory Thielmann, a key
whistleblower who was the former director of the State Departments
Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) until September 2002. "This
administration has had a faith-based intelligence attitude: 'We know the
answers – give us the intelligence to support those answers, '" he said.
Remember the OSP?
Where Donald Rumsfeld went for his Iraq intelligence was to something
called the Office of Special Plans that he himself had formed as a sort of
personal intelligence agency. The day-to-day intelligence operations
were run by ex-Cheney aide and former Navy officer William Luti,
reporting to Defense Undersecretary Douglas Feith, a former Reagan
official. According to the Guardian, "The ideologically driven network
functioned like a shadow government, much of it off the official payroll
and beyond congressional oversight. But it proved powerful enough to
prevail in a struggle with the State Department and the CIA by
establishing a justification for war."
The OSP amassed huge amounts of raw intelligence from "report
officers" in the CIA's directorate of operations whose job it is to cull
credible information from reports filed by agents around the world.
Under pressure from Pentagon hawks, the officers became reluctant to
discard any report, however farfetched, if it bolstered the
administrations case for war.
John B. Judis and Spencer Ackerman revealed in a New Republic
article published in June 2003 that there was "no consensus" within the
U.S. intelligence community on the level of threat posed by Saddam.
Judis and Ackerman reported, "The administration ignored, and even
suppressed, disagreement within the intelligence agencies and pressured
the CIA to reaffirm its preferred version of the Iraqi threat." Bush then
would repeatedly deploy this misleading data to sell the war in his
speeches.
A Pattern of Deception
There is no better example of the pattern of deception that has defined
the administration's case for the war than its claim that Saddam Hussein
possessed a well-established nuclear weapons program.
On Sept. 8, 2002, in a classic example of how easy it is for the White
House to manipulate the media, and thus the public, the New York
Times ran a story planted by the Bush administration. The front-page
article, written by Judith Miller and Michael Gordon and headlined
"U.S. Says Hussein Intensifies Quest for A-Bomb Parts," informed
Americans that, according to unnamed Bush officials, Iraq had
repeatedly attempted to secretly purchase aluminum tubes "specially
designed" for enriching uranium as part of a nuclear weapons program
based on their "diameter, thickness, and other technical properties."
It was the ultimate advertorial: great placement, perfect message,
excellent timing – all basically controlled by the advertiser but looking as
if it came from "neutral" sources. From its August launch through its
acceptance by Congress in October, the Bush marketing campaign for
the war was perfectly executed, and the tubes revelation was a classic
example.
By the time the truth that the attempted purchases were neither secret
nor likely intended for nuclear uses was tracked down and exposed by
whistle-blowers, journalists, and the International Atomic Energy
Agency, it wouldn't matter, having already served dutifully as a scary
totem in Bush speech after Bush speech. When its power did flag, it
would simply be replaced by another shaky fact put into the rotation and
foisted upon a compliant media. This leak-and-retreat tactic proved
astonishingly effective up to and through the war.
One key to a president exploiting shaky yet convenient intelligence data
is to always maintain deniability. Aiding and abetting this is the array of
different intelligence agencies that the president has reporting to him –
CIA, NSA, FBI, and sub-agencies of State, Defense, and so on – not
to mention the information generated by allied nations' intelligence
agencies that are passed along (more on that later). Combined, these
agencies, each with its own strong institutional biases and rivalries,
generates so much data that it is child's play for politicians (or reporters
with good sources) to cherry-pick opinions that fit their policy platform
(or story angle).
The Real Intelligence Failure
In an effort to control this kind of chicanery, the intelligence agencies are
often required to pool their insights and evidence into overview
documents to see whether or not there is a consensus as to their
reliability. Relevant experts may also be called in, especially in a case
like this where highly technical expertise was essential to separating fact
from fiction.
When the experts looked at the tubes later cited by the White House,
however, questions immediately arose over whether they were
appropriate for centrifuges used in a nuclear reactor. Working under a
blanket of enormous pressure coming from the White House, and
especially the vice president, to find damning things regarding Iraq and
nuclear weapons, a full-blown row soon broke out within the alphabet
soup of U.S. intelligence agencies over this obscure issue.
For their part, CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency believed the
tubes were similar to those used in Iraq's previous attempt to build
nukes, while the State Department's INR and the Department of Energy
were adamant that they were in fact much more appropriate for artillery
shells. The division was made explicit in the 2002 National Intelligence
Estimate report on Saddam's pursuit of WMD, as the State Department
experts insisted a sharply worded dissent be included in the overall
report, controlled by the top dog in the intelligence "community," the
CIA.
While the NIE cited "compelling evidence that Saddam is reconstituting
a uranium enrichment effort for Baghdad's nuclear weapons program,"
the INR dissent (which was later dismissed by the White House as a
footnote), stated explicitly "the tubes are not intended for use in Iraq's
nuclear weapons program."
Meanwhile, British experts weighed in against the White House's
interpretation and some CIA analysts also expressed doubts. The longer
the tubes bounced around the intelligence community, the iffier it got as a
piece of evidence affirming Iraq's threat to the world. Ultimately,
however, the CIA, as the top intelligence agency, won out, forcing their
analysis into the NIE, leading inevitably to the New York Times
front-page headline trumpeting its scoop.
Role of the CIA
The CIA's complicity in this prototypical Bush bait and switch tactic can
be clearly seen when looking back at the annual reports the agency
delivered to Congress on the global proliferation of weapons of mass
destruction.
In its 1997 report, Iraq only warranted three paragraphs, to the effect
that Baghdad possessed dual-use equipment that could be used for
biological or chemical programs. There was no mention of a nuclear
weapons program. By 2002, however, the Iraq section was seven times
as long, and warned that "all intelligence experts agree that Iraq is
seeking nuclear weapons" and the country could produce a nuclear
bomb "within a year" if it got its hands on weapons-grade material. The
CIA also reported as late as 2001 that enforcement of the UN arms
embargo on Iraq was "generally successful" – but this reference was
dropped in the 2002 report sent to a White House that claimed the
embargo wasn't working.
Why, then, had the reports become so shrill on the topic after Bush's
inauguration, presenting the same intelligence with a completely different
interpretation? After all, the CIA even had the same director under both
Clinton and Bush.
"I'm afraid that the U.S. intelligence community, particularly the CIA . . .
is sometimes quite sensitive to the political winds," Thielmann, formerly a
senior intelligence official at the State Department, told Newsday.
Despite what David Kay may claim, a number of CIA officers clearly
felt the brunt of the administration's desire for the "right" kind of
intelligence. Vice President Cheney, in particular, made a number of
personal trips to the agency's headquarters in Langley, Virginia, to meet
with low-level analysts who were reviewing the raw intelligence on Iraq.
As one CIA official told the South African Mail and Guardian, "[He]
sent signals, intended or otherwise, that a certain output was desired
from here."
Other visitors to CIA headquarters representing the White House
included Cheney's chief of staff, Scooter Libby, and ex-Speaker of the
House Newt Gingrich, who joined the Pentagon as a "consultant" after
9/11. "That would freak people out," a former CIA official told the New
Republic.
The Mythic Consensus
While the Bush administration now claims otherwise, there was no
consensus whatsoever over Saddam's weapons capabilities. The New
Republic's investigation revealed many of the tube skeptics still hopping
mad, incited by the continued use of the centrifuge claim. One
intelligence analyst, who was part of the internal multi-agency tubes
investigation, angrily – though anonymously – told the magazine known
for its hawkish stances, "You had senior American officials like
Condoleezza Rice saying the only use of this aluminum really is uranium
centrifuges. She said that on television. And that's just a lie."
And Rice hadn't stopped there. After saying on the Sept. 8, 2002 Late
Edition that the tubes "are only really suited for nuclear weapons
programs, centrifuge programs," she then went on to brandish the
ultimate image of twentieth century terror: "The problem here is that
there will always be some uncertainty about how quickly [Hussein] can
acquire nuclear weapons, but we don't want the smoking gun to be a
mushroom cloud."
And contrary to the president's claims that the UN shared his
interpretation of Saddam's capabilities, the International Atomic Energy
Agency was blunt in its assessment of the tubes. On Jan. 24, ElBaradei
told the Washington Post, "It may be technically possible that the tubes
could be used to enrich uranium, but you'd have to believe that Iraq
deliberately ordered the wrong stock and intended to spend a great deal
of time and money reworking each piece." And on Mar. 7, the IAEA
stated its analysis quite clearly in its formal report to the United Nations,
just two weeks before the war to "disarm Saddam Hussein" began.
The truth is that the White House continued to be hell-bent on
supersizing our fear in the lead up to the war, turning an admittedly scary
world into a chamber of horrors. And it used every weapon in its
arsenal – from outright intimidation to skilful media manipulation – to
achieve its goal. Claiming that this well-oiled campaign was instead a
well-intentioned error is just the latest in a very long list of Bush lies.
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