[W]hen it comes time for a new generation to ask their
elders what they did during the war to end the tyranny of
Saddam Hussein, what are the editors of the Times going
to have to say for themselves?
Frank Rich's War
New York Sun Editorial
November 28, 2005
Those who charge President Bush and Vice President Cheney with lying to get America involved in the war in Iraq, as the New York Times columnist Frank Rich did yesterday, have a special obligation to get the truth correct themselves. It's one thing for Mr. Rich to disagree with the decision to go to war in Iraq and to blame Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney for the decision. It's another for Mr. Rich to accuse our elected leaders of misleading the country while the columnist himself goes about misleading readers of The New York Times.
The Niger Uranium
Mr. Rich's New York Times column yesterday refers to Mr. Bush's 2003 State of the Union address with the "bogus 16 words about Saddam's fictitious African uranium." Those words were,
"The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein
recently sought significant quantities of uranium from
Africa."
But those 16 words are neither bogus nor fictitious. They were and are true. A July 2004 report of the bipartisan Senate Select Committee on Intelligence reported that an Iraqi delegation visited Niger in June of 1999 and met with Niger's then-prime minister, Ibrahim Mayaki. The committee relayed that Mr. Mayaki said the meeting was about "expanding commercial relations" between the two countries, which Mr. Mayaki interpreted to mean "that the delegation wanted to discuss uranium yellowcake sales."
A July 2004 report by the British government's Butler Commission found that Mr. Bush's State of the Union comment was "well-founded." As the Commission put it,
"It is accepted by all parties that Iraqi officials
visited Niger in 1999.The British Government had
intelligence from several different sources indicating
that this visit was for the purpose of acquiring uranium.
Since uranium constitutes almost three-quarters of
Niger's exports, the intelligence was credible. ... The
forged documents were not available to the British
Government at the time its assessment was made, and so
the fact of the forgery does not undermine it."
According to the Butler Commission, Saddam Hussein's government claimed that a 1999 mission to Niger by Iraq's ambassador to the Vatican was for the purpose of conveying an invitation to the Nigerian president to visit Iraq. Now, it's possible that, in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, if Frank Rich were president, he would have concluded that the Iraqi ambassador to the Vatican probably just had jetted down to Niger for the purpose of hand-delivering an invitation. But the British concluded otherwise, and it's hardly "bogus" or "fictitious" for Mr. Bush to have said so. Given Saddam's known nuclear ambitions - remember Osirak? - and Niger's main export, would it have been prudent for Mr. Bush to take the word of Saddam's envoy over that of the British?
Two Commissions
Mr. Rich's New York Times column yesterday accuses Messrs. Bush and Cheney of "falsely claiming they've been exonerated by two commissions that looked into prewar intelligence - neither of which addressed possible White House misuse and mischaracterization of that intelligence." Yet two major reports that looked into the matter of the administration and intelligence did exonerate the president. Here is a quote from the report of the bipartisan Robb-Silberman commission:
"The Commission found no evidence of political pressure
to influence the Intelligence Community's pre-war
assessments of Iraq's weapons programs. As we discuss in
detail in the body of our report, analysts universally
asserted that in no instance did political pressure cause
them to skew or alter any of their analytical judgments."
Here is a quote from the report of the bipartisan Senate Select Committee on Intelligence:
"The Committee did not find any evidence that Administration
officials attempted to coerce, influence, or pressure
analysts to change their judgments related to Iraq's
weapons of mass destruction capabilities."
Yet, in contravention of those conclusions - reached by groups that included Democrats such as Senators Edwards, Levin, Wyden, and Durbin and Clinton administration officials Lloyd Cutler, William Studeman, and Walter Slocombe - Mr. Rich speaks of
<<<
"the administration's deliberate efforts to suppress or ignore intelligence that contradicted its Iraq crusade."
>>>
September 11 and Iraq
Mr. Rich accuses Mr. Cheney of dissembling by conflating the terrorists of September 11, 2001, with those we are fighting in Iraq. As evidence that Mr. Cheney is lying he cites an American general who says the Iraqi insurgency is 90% homegrown. But it's undisputed that the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq is a Jordanian, Zarqawi, who shares with the rest of Al Qaeda, including the September 11 terrorists, the goal of re-establishing the caliphate. Certainly in their violent targeting of civilians and their jihadist rhetoric, those who attacked New York office buildings on September 11 and those who are blowing up restaurants and hospitals in Iraq have a lot in common. One may choose to emphasize or de-emphasize the similarities, but emphasizing the similarities as Mr. Cheney has done hardly amounts to dissembling.
The DIA Report and Senator Levin
Mr. Rich references a report of the Defense Intelligence Agency released by Senator Levin, a Democrat of Michigan, which Mr. Rich said demolished the credibility of a source the administration used "for its false claims about Iraq-Al Qaeda collaboration." Here's how Mr. Levin hyped the report in a press release.
<<<
"In February 2002, the DIA stated the following, which has remained classified until now: 'Saddam's regime is intensely secular and is wary of Islamic revolutionary movements. Moreover, Baghdad is unlikely to provide assistance to a group it cannot control.' That DIA finding is stunningly different from repeated Administration claims of a close relationship between Saddam and al-Qaeda. Just imagine the impact if that DIA conclusion had been disclosed at the time. It surely could have made a difference in the congressional vote authorizing the war."
>>>
The only stunning thing here is the disingenuousness of Messrs. Levin and Rich. First of all, the DIA report is not much different from what Bush administration officials were saying publicly at the time. On February 6, 2002, the director of Central Intelligence, George Tenet, made a similar argument in public testimony before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, saying,
"Baghdad has a long history of supporting terrorism,
altering its targets to reflect changing priorities and
goals. It has also had contacts with al-Qa'ida. Their
ties may be limited by divergent ideologies, but the two
sides' mutual antipathy toward the United States and the
Saudi royal family suggests that tactical cooperation
between them is possible - even though Saddam is well
aware that such activity would carry serious
consequences."
Moreover, the notion that the secular Baathists and the Islamic jihadists are so ideologically divergent that they will not work together has been disproven by what is going on now in Iraq, where they are cooperating against Iraqi moderates and American troops.
James Bamford
Mr. Rich cites the reporting in Rolling Stone of James Bamford. Yet even Mr. Rich's own newspaper, the Times, in reviewing Mr. Bamford's 2001 book, remarked on Mr. Bamford's "palpable distaste for the Israeli state." Said the Times review, "Rather too credulously, Bamford sides with the conspiracy theorists."
The Truth
Mr. Rich writes that the White House's record on the road to Iraq recalls the saying,
<<<
"Every word she writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the.'"
>>>
Here is what Mr. Bush said in his 2003 State of the Union address, the one whose 16 words about Uranium in Africa caused such a storm.
"The dictator who is assembling the world's most
dangerous weapons has already used them on whole
villages - leaving thousands of his own citizens dead,
blind, or disfigured. Iraqi refugees tell us how forced
confessions are obtained - by torturing children while
their parents are made to watch. International human
rights groups have catalogued other methods used in the
torture chambers of Iraq: electric shock, burning with
hot irons, dripping acid on the skin, mutilation with
electric drills, cutting out tongues, and rape. If this
is not evil, then evil has no meaning."
That the president spoke the truth has been sadly confirmed in free Iraq. The Associated Press's Nadia Abou El-Magd interviewed Firas Adnan, whose tongue had been cut off with a box cutter by a Saddam loyalist. Mr. Adnan, "his slurred words barely comprehensible," said of Saddam, "He is a despot, the biggest despot, Iraq will be much better without him."
Susan Sachs of Mr. Rich's own New York Times reported from the mass graves of Hilla:
"On April 11, 1991, a few weeks into the Shiite
rebellion, Iraqi helicopters dropped leaflets over
Karbala ordering everyone to leave or be attacked with
chemical weapons. Mr. Mohani piled his relatives into a
pickup truck and a car and fled. About four miles south
of the city, the escape route was blocked. There, he
said, he saw Mr. Hussein's son-in-law, Hussein Kamal,
executing people randomly at a checkpoint. 'He was
telling people to get out of their cars and then he would
shoot them, shoot them until his arm was too tired to do
it anymore.'"
Does Mr. Rich think his own colleague and the Associated Press are also part of what he derides as "propaganda" and "the disinformation assembly line"? And when it comes time for a new generation to ask their elders what they did during the war to end the tyranny of Saddam Hussein, what are the editors of the Times going to have to say for themselves?
nysun.com |
