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June
9, 2003
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Ashcroft is Coming!
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June
10, 2003
Why the Lies About
WMD Matter
A
Crime Against American Values
By RAY CLOSE
former
CIA analyst
It seems to me that the public controversy over
the WMD issue has gotten considerably off track --- in a way
that diminishes its overall importance to the country and,
incidentally, depreciates our contribution to the debate.
This became clear to me the other evening
when I watched a discussion between Senators Richard Lugar and
Joseph Biden, senior Republican and Democratic members of the
Foreign Relations Committee, respectively. They both agreed
that the task of collecting and evaluating intelligence about
a subject like WMD was very difficult, but that in the case
of Iraq, it really didn't matter very much whether prohibited
weaponry was ever discovered. After all, it was clear that Saddam
Hussein was a monster, and that a commendable service was performed
by the United States in eliminating him. The rest of the world
seems to be concerned that America's declared reasons for launching
a war are turning out to be somewhat dubious, observed both
Lugar and Biden, but the important thing is that the American
people don't seem to care very much about that; the great majority
feel that the outcome has been a resounding national triumph.
That attitude has contributed to what
I see today as a real diversion from the important central issue.
The debate has indeed now degenerated almost entirely into a
mean-spirited squabble between various bureaucratic elements
in Washington over how certain intelligence about Iraq was evaluated,
and whether partisan elements might have manipulated the raw
intelligence data to support particular policy objectives.
On a certain level these are still very legitimate issues that
deserve to be investigated with great care. The debate surrounding
them has not been irrelevant or without purpose. But that's
not really my point.
Rather, I think the time has come to
try to lift the substance of the dialogue to a much higher level.
We need to leave behind the haggling over methods and procedures
and get back to some very important principles that have been
violated.
We might start by reminding our audience
that there are several subjects that are NOT germane to the
current debate, because they are not questioned by anyone. These
include the following:
1. That Saddam Hussein was a vile despot
who terrified and enslaved the population of Iraq;
2. That Saddam possessed weapons of mass
destruction, that he used them against his own people, and that
he probably would not have hesitated to reconstitute his WMD
program at some future date if given the opportunity.
Those subjects should be excluded from
the debate entirely.
The issues that are critically important,
on the other hand, are these:
1. The Bush Administration declared that
it had irrefutable, ironclad proof that Saddam possessed weapons
of mass destruction that posed an imminent threat to the safety
and security of the United States, and this claim was used as
the justification for launching a preemptive war.
The whole question of whether initiating
preemptive military action is appropriate at all for a democracy
like ours, under any circumstances, is a subject that deserves
much more careful debate on the national level here in the United
States than it has received --- in terms of its moral justification,
its constitutional legitimacy and its practical utility as an
instrument of national policy. But on one vital point EVERYONE
is already in complete agreement --- that preemptive war cannot
possibly be considered unless there is compelling evidence of
an imminent threat to our national security. Not an unprovoked
attack against a POTENTIAL FUTURE threat; not a war based on
an intellectual conviction that harm COULD be done to us someday
by a particular foreign enemy. Those are ideas that are new
and unique to the self-proclaimed "Bush Doctrine".
We are, by our own established moral and legal constraints,
limited to launching military attacks ONLY against an enemy
who poses an IMMINENT threat to our physical safety and our
vital national interests, or who has already committed an act
of war against the United States. There has been no national
debate in which a change in those long-accepted and time-honored
criteria has even been proposed for consideration, much less
approved.
Today, it is very clear that no legitimate
casus belli existed. In fact, many of the intelligence reports
on which this momentous decision was based, and which were used
to give that decision a patina of moral justification, were
largely unsubstantiated. Some of the intelligence was even
based on documentation that was known at the time to have been
forged. In other words, it should be acknowledged beyond any
question that the claimed "imminent threat to the safety
of America" was a complete myth.
2. The main issue, we must conclude,
goes far beyond the question of how available information was
evaluated and used in making policy decisions. We are not talking
just about errors of judgment on the part of earnest and conscientious
analysts in Washington, and we are not denigrating the quality
of U.S. surveillance technology or challenging the probity of
our human intelligence sources. Nor are we limiting our concern
to the question of whether or not certain individual officials
in the Administration tinkered with the intelligence process
to please their bosses or to support partisan political agendas
--- serious as such corruption would certainly be.
What emerges as beyond dispute is the
simple and straightforward reality that a preemptive war was
launched on the basis of intelligence information that was
represented to the American people and to the world by our leadership
as incontrovertible proof of conditions that they must have
known perfectly well did not really exist. Thousands died in
that war. Immeasurable physical damage was done to an entire
nation. A critically important principle of international law
was violated and mocked. That was not only dishonest and immoral.
It was a crime against those values for which America stands
most proud.
Ray Close
was a CIA analyst in the Near East division. He is a member of
Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) and can
be reached at: close@counterpunch.org.
Weekend
Edition Features
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Cockburn
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Jeffrey
St. Clair
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Sherman
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Ron Jacobs
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M.
Shahid Alam
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Amelia
Peltz
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Shelton
Hull
Another Powell, Another Capitulation
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Ben
Tripp
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Sen. Robert
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Robin
Philpot
Congo Distortions
Julie Hilden
Murder and the Matrix
Laura
Flanders
An Interview with Isabel Allende
David Lindorff
The Last Byline
Adam
Engel
Talk Dirty Scary Monsters
Poets'
Basement
Kearney, Reiss, Guthrie, Albert and Hamod
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