Iraq Update
from BASIC
On
January 26, BASIC released Unravelling
the Known Unknowns: Why no Weapons of Mass Destruction have been found in Iraq.
The report detailed the extensive distortions and
misrepresentations concerning Iraq’s unconventional weapons
programs, which were the putative basis for the U.S.-led invasion
of Iraq.
Though
the major media no longer focuses on the issue with the attention
it once did, information continues to be revealed about failures
of the intelligence community and pressure by the political
leadership in both the United States and United Kingdom.
Given
the importance of this issue, which is critical to any
consideration of arms control and non-proliferation efforts as
well as any decision to use military force, BASIC is monitoring
the media and open source information for relevant articles.
Summaries and links to such articles are posted below as they are
found.
For
previous months, see the Iraq
Update Archives
March
2004
| April 2004
_________________________________________________
Time
magazine reported in its May 31 issue that:
the
Senate Intelligence Committee is getting closer to delivering a
scathing report on the CIA's prewar intelligence on Iraq. Sources
tell Time that the assessment, which is nearing completion, is so
tough that it is sowing doubt even among longtime fans of CIA
Director George Tenet. One panel member dodged a question from Time
about whether the member still had full confidence in the
director, saying Tenet "has done incredible things" for
the CIA but adding, "This is not going to be a happy
report." Sources tell Time the committee's two ranking
members interviewed Tenet secretly earlier this month at CIA
headquarters. He submitted to the three-hour session willingly and
was cooperative, sources said. But Tenet wouldn't confirm whether he
told President Bush before the war that evidence of Saddam Hussein's
weapons-of-mass-destruction arsenal was a "slam dunk," as
reported in Bob Woodward's book Plan of Attack. The panel
last week sent Tenet the several-hundred-page report—minus its
conclusions—for a declassification review.
Give
credit where it is due, even if the action being credited is long
overdue. In a rather remarkable mea culpa the New York Times
on May 26 published an Editors
Note, “The Times and Iraq,” that reviewed its past coverage
on decisions that led the United States into Iraq. It found “a
number of instances of coverage that was not as rigorous as it
should have been. In some cases, information that was controversial
then, and seems questionable now, was insufficiently qualified or
allowed to stand unchallenged. Looking back, we wish we had been
more aggressive in re-examining the claims as new evidence emerged
or failed to emerge.
The problematic articles varied in authorship and subject matter,
but many shared a common feature. They depended at least in part on
information from a circle of Iraqi informants, defectors and exiles
bent on "regime change" in Iraq, people whose credibility
has come under increasing public debate in recent weeks. (The most
prominent of the anti-Saddam campaigners, Ahmad Chalabi, has been
named as an occasional source in Times articles since at least 1991,
and has introduced reporters to other exiles. He became a favorite
of hard-liners within the Bush administration and a paid broker of
information from Iraqi exiles, until his payments were cut off last
week.) Complicating matters for journalists, the accounts of these
exiles were often eagerly confirmed by United States officials
convinced of the need to intervene in Iraq. Administration officials
now acknowledge that they sometimes fell for misinformation from
these exile sources. So did many news organizations in
particular, this one."
You can
find a sampling of articles published by The Times about the
decisions that led the United States into the war in Iraq, and
especially the issue of Iraq's weapons here.
Editor
and Publisher had this
to say (May 27):
After months of criticism of the New
York Times' coverage of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq --
mainly directed at star reporter Judith Miller -- the paper's
editors, in an extraordinary note to readers this morning, finally
tackled the subject, acknowledging it was "past time"
they do so. Following the sudden fall last week of Ahmad Chalabi,
Miller's most famous source, they probably had no choice.
While it does not, in some ways, go nearly far enough, and is
buried on Page A10, this low-key but scathing self-rebuke is
nothing less than a primer on how not to do journalism,
particularly if you are an enormously influential newspaper with a
costly invasion of another nation at stake.
Today's critique is, in its own way, as devastating as last year's
front-page corrective on Jayson Blair, though not nearly as long.
Nowhere in it, however, does the name of Judith Miller appear. The
editors claim that the "problematic articles varied in
authorship" and point out that while critics have
"focused blame on individual reporters ... the problem was
more complicated."
Yet, clearly, even in the Times' own view, Miller was the main
culprit, though they seem reluctant, or ashamed, to say so. This
is clear in analyzing today's critique. The editors single out six
articles as being especially unfortunate, and Judith Miller had a
hand in four of them: writing two on her own, co-authoring the
other two with Michael Gordon. The only two non-Miller pieces were
the earliest in the chronology, and they barely receive mention.
Starting nearly a year ago, E&P called on the Times to
reassess Miller's work, and renewed the call more often than any
other publication.
While refusing to name Miller, the Times' critique plainly and
persistently finds fault. In referring to one of the bogus Miller
pieces, the editors explain, "it looks as if we, along with
the administration, were taken in." Then, just as tellingly,
they add: "And until now we have not reported that to our
readers."
The editors observe that Administration officials now acknowledge
"they sometimes fell for misinformation" from exile
sources, mentioning Chalabi as one. So, they note, did many news
organizations, adding, "in particular, this one," an
amazing admission.
Then consider this mea culpa: "Editors at several levels who
should have been challenging reporters and pressing for more
skepticism were perhaps too intent on rushing scoops into the
paper. Accounts of Iraqi defectors were not always weighed against
their strong desire to have Saddam Hussein ousted. Articles based
on dire claims about Iraq tended to get prominent display, while
follow-up articles that called the original ones into question
were sometimes buried. In some cases, there was no follow-up at
all."
Yet nowhere does the Times suggest that it is penalizing any
editors or reporters in any way.
One of the false Miller and Gordon stories (touting the now-famous
"aluminum tubes") did contain a few qualifiers, but they
were "buried deep." When the pair followed up five days
later they did report some misgivings by others, but these too
"appeared deep in the article." When the Times finally
gave "full voice" to skeptics the challenge was reported
on Page A 10, but "it might well have belonged on Page A
1."
Of course, the same could be said of their note today, which also
falls on Page A 10.
Another Miller article, from April 21, 2003, that featured an
Iraqi scientist (who later turned out to be an intelligence
officer), seemed to go out of its way to provide what the Times
calls "the justification the Americans had been seeking for
the invasion." But in hindsight there was just one problem:
"The Times never followed up on the veracity of this source
or the attempts to verify his claims."
Yet the critique ends on a hopeful note: "We consider the
story of Iraq's weapons, and of the pattern of misinformation, to
be unfinished business. And we fully intend to continue aggressive
reporting aimed at setting the record straight."
The Times also directs readers to its Web site, where a special
section carries links to some of the disputed stories. Public
Editor Daniel Okrent now promises his own critique this Sunday.
In a note to Okrent in March, New York Times Executive
Editor Keller said he "did not see a prima facie case for
recanting or repudiating the [WMD] stories." He called Miller
"a smart, well-sourced, industrious and fearless reporter
with a keen instinct for news, and an appetite for dauntingly hard
subjects."
See
here
for the Washington Post view. In a segment
on the "NewsHour" with Jim Lehrer had the following
exchange (May 26):
TOM
ROSENSTIEL: One of the most curious lines in the New York Times
editors' statement today is a reference to "when our view
changed, we ran a different story but it was buried inside." I
thought that was curious. The New York Times has a view in
its news stories? Many journalists would say your job is to sort of
verify facts and present them and let the public form its view. But
I think that they... the word choice belied something that was going
on there. They were adopting a point of view in the coverage.
What
was interesting was that these stories were controversial not only
outside the New York Times but they were controversial inside
the New York Times. Judy Miller was a favorite of the editor
of the paper at the time, Howell Raines. So one of the subtexts of
this note today was that here was yet another person from the Raines
era who was favored who was running stories that were controversial
and even were being criticized internally inside the paper and those
criticisms were falling on deaf ears.
So
today the Times -- the paper of record chose to correct the record
but also to tell the other people inside the Times were admitting
that you were right and that the paper has been wrong.
RAY
SUAREZ: Professor, in the note it said, "We've studied the
allegations of official gullibility and hype. It's past time we
turned the same light on ourselves." If you look at the note
that was in the paper today, was it an unsparing light -- were they
tough on themselves?
SUSAN
MOELLER: No, they weren't tough on themselves. It was…you asked
the top of this story about the difference between a correction box
and the editor's note. In many ways to me this was much too much of
a correction box. It was a real sort of ... I think it was more of a
micro look than a macro look. Okay, they did talk about editorial
responsibility, but they didn't name names, as you mentioned in your
story.
Of
the six most egregious stories that they mentioned by date, Judith
Miller had penned four of them or co-wrote four of them. In a sense
it was... they weren't taking... I didn't see the Times in this
editorial note taking individual responsibility for the problems. It
was more this is an endemic problem. We do what we can. We had some
really good reporting too. Let's not forget that. But not saying,
you know, we have real problems in our sourcing. We have real
problems in having various rogue reporters get too close and
effectively live with some of their sources.
A
piece from May 25 by Jack Shafer of Slate, a leading
critic of the New York Times' coverage in this area, is here.
A
new book has been published. For a change, it is not an insider,
tell all account of the doings of the Bush administration. Instead, Hoodwinked:
The Documents that Reveal How Bush Sold Us a War is a useful
compilation of the facts by veteran intelligence and national
security historian John Prados who has compiled and annotated the
key source documents behind the selling of the Iraq war to the
American public.
Writing
in the May/June issue of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists,
Prados writes in an article titled “U.S. Intelligence Reality
Check,” “More than a year and a half ago Bush administration
National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice warned Americans that the
“smoking gun” proving the danger posed by Iraq’s nuclear
weapons was likely to be a mushroom cloud rising over an American
city. Rice attained her goal—a green light for the invasion of
Iraq—that her boss wanted so much. But from then to now the only
thing that has mushroomed is the suspicion that Bush’s charges
against Iraq were contrived, wild exaggerations of
greater-than-expected and highly improbable threats postulated by
the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and other U.S. intelligence
organizations.”
CBS
News reported
on May 18 that Poland’s president, Aleksander Kwasniewski,
said that his nation was misled about information pertaining to
Saddam Hussein’s arsenal of weapons of mass destruction.
The
Philadelphia Inquirer
reported May 18 that the Bush administration helped rally public and
congressional support for a preemptive invasion of Iraq by
publicizing the claims of an Iraqi defector months after he showed
deception in a lie-detector test and had been rejected as unreliable
by U.S. intelligence agencies.
The defector, Adnan Ihsan Saeed al Haideri, claimed he had worked at
illegal chemical, biological and nuclear facilities around Baghdad.
But when members of the Iraq Survey Group, the CIA-run effort to
trace Saddam Hussein's illegal weapons, took Saeed back to Iraq
earlier this year, he pointed out facilities known to be associated
with the conventional Iraqi military. He could not identify a single
site associated with illegal weapons.
The
White House used Saeed's claims in a background paper nine months
after CIA and DIA officers had dismissed him as unreliable.
The White House paper gave prominent billing to Saeed's claims. It
was released Sept. 12, 2002, in conjunction with a speech Bush
delivered at the U.N. General Assembly.
The paper was the administration's first major compendium of
"specific examples of how Iraqi President Saddam Hussein has
systematically and continually violated 16 United Nations Security
Council resolutions over the past decade."
It is still available on the White House and State Department Web
sites.
Newsweek
reported in its May 17 issue that:
judging
from some of the evidence turned up by U.S. search teams in Iraq
after the war, even the CIA's more cautious prewar assessment may
have been overheated. According to an intelligence source, one of
the more significant files relating to Iraqi nuclear ambitions
found in the archives of the Baghdad headquarters of the
Mukhabarat, Saddam's intelligence service, included documents that
reported an approach Iraq received in 2000 from a middleman based
in Nairobi, Kenya. The file said that the middleman could supply
Iraq with quantities of diamonds, cobalt and uranium, all produced
in the mineral-rich Congo. But the file also included a note,
apparently made by a Mukhabarat officer, indicating that Iraq did
not take up the middleman's deal. The note indicated that the
offer should not be pursued because Iraq's alleged WMD programs
were under too much international scrutiny at the time. It added
that Iraqi intelligence should "maintain contact" with
the middleman in case it became easier for Baghdad to buy
sensitive commodities in the future.
Also
found in Iraqi government files after the war were what appeared
to be an offer from Pakistan made in 1993-1994 to supply Iraq with
what amounted to a whole nuclear-weapons program. Though his name
was not on the documents, some U.S. investigators suspect that the
man behind this offer was A. Q. Khan, the father of Pakistan's
"Islamic bomb" program, who earlier this year was
reprimanded—but not penalized—by his government for running
what probably was the world's most damaging
nuclear-weapons-proliferation ring. And U.S. intelligence officers
found several Iraqi-government file cabinets full of offers Saddam
had received for quantities of "red mercury," a
supposedly ultra powerful nuclear material that scientists say
does not really exist. U.S. intelligence sources say that what the
documentation really seems to show is that while Saddam never lost
his lust for nukes, over the last several years Iraq in effect had
become a favorite target of the world's nuclear scam artists. At
best, the evidence suggests, Iraq's A-bomb program was in
hibernation. A senior Defense official familiar with the work of
the Iraq Survey Group, the U.S. team that hunted Saddam's WMD,
said that evidence collected after the war indicated Saddam wanted
a nuclear program—but it probably "was not being
aggressively pursued."
On
NBC’s "Meet the Press" program on May 16, the
following, startling, exchange took place with Secretary of State
Colin Powell:
MR.
RUSSERT:
Finally, Mr. Secretary, in February of 2003 you placed your enormous
personal credibility before the United Nations and laid out a case
against Saddam Hussein citing --
SEC. POWELL: Tim, I'm sorry, I lost you.
MR. RUSSERT: I'm right here, Mr. Secretary. I would hope they
would put you back on camera. I don't know who did that. I think
that was one of your staff, Mr. Secretary. I don't think that's
appropriate.
SEC. POWELL: Bring the camera back, please. I think we're
back on, Tim. Go ahead with your last question.
MR. RUSSERT: Thank you very much, sir. In February of 2003
you put your enormous personal reputation on the line before the
United Nations and said that you had solid sources for the case
against Saddam Hussein. It now appears that an agent called
Curveball had mislead the CIA by suggesting that Saddam had trucks
and trains that were delivering biological and chemical weapons. How
concerned are you that some of the information you shared with the
world is now inaccurate and discredited?
SEC. POWELL: I'm very concerned. When I made that
presentation in February of 2003, it was based on the best
information that the Central Intelligence Agency made available to
me. We studied it carefully. We looked at the sourcing and the case
of the mobile trucks and trains.
There was multiple sourcing for that. Unfortunately, that multiple
sourcing over time has turned out to be not accurate. And so I'm
deeply disappointed. But I'm also comfortable that at the time that
I made the presentation it reflected the collect judgment, the sound
judgment of the intelligence community. But it turned out that the
sourcing was inaccurate and wrong, and in some cases deliberately
misleading. And for that I am disappointed, and I regret it.
Speaking
at a Republican National Committee Victory 2004 Fundraiser in
Bridgeton, Missouri on May 14 President Bush said:
In
Iraq, we looked at intelligence and saw a threat. The Congress
looked at the intelligence -- both Republicans and Democrats in
Congress looked at the intelligence -- they saw a threat. The
United Nations Security Council looked at the intelligence; it saw
a threat. And so in 2002, the U.N. Security Council said once
again to Saddam Hussein: a full accounting of your weapons
programs. The reason the world acted because not only did we look
at intelligence, we remembered the nature of the man. We knew that
he had attacked his neighborhood. We knew he'd paid suiciders to
go in and kill innocent Israelis. We knew he had terrorist ties.
The person responsible for the Berg death, Zarqawi, was in and out
of Baghdad prior to our arrival, for example. But we also
remembered vividly the fact that he used weapons of mass
destruction against his own people. We -- it was just not the
United States that remembered that, the United Nations Security
Council, in a 15 to nothing vote, remembered that. And so they
said to Saddam Hussein, you know, give us a full accounting of
what you've got. And he defied the world again. This wasn't the
first time that he defied the world, he had defied the world over
and over.
Gen.
Anthony Zinni, USMC (Ret.), former commander of the U.S. Central
Command, spoke
at the Center for Defense Information Board of Directors Dinner on May
12. His remarks deserve more attention than they have received
thus far. Among them are:
I
think the first mistake that was made was misjudging the success of
containment. I heard the president say, not too long ago, I
believe it was with the interview with Tim Russert that ... I'm not
sure ... but at some point I heard him say that "containment
did not work." That's not true.
I
was responsible, along with everybody from General Schwarzkopf to
his two successors, that were my predecessors, myself, and my
successor, General Franks, up until the war, we were responsible for
containment. And I would like to explain a little bit about
that containment, because I thought we did it pretty well, given the
circumstances. And it began with Bush 41 accepting the UN
resolution to conduct the war, staying within the framework of the
UN resolution, and not after the war, going to Baghdad, breaking the
coalition, ending up inheriting a country that I think he clearly
saw would be a burden on us, our military, our treasure, and would
break relations around the region, and would put him outside what he
considered his international legitimacy for doing this - the
resolution by which he operated and conducted the war, and the
resolution by which we established the sanctions.
Administering
those sanctions was done pretty effectively I thought. In the
entire U.S. Central Command, in my time there, on any given day we
had less troops in the entire region than show up to work at
the Pentagon any morning. Think about that. Soldiers,
sailors, airmen, marines, carriers, squadrons, battalions. On
any given day ... on an average day in CENTCOM, we had about 23,000
troops, soup to nuts. Logistics, fighters ... and we ran that
with these 23,000 troops, the whole region. To top it off,
those troops were not assigned to CENTCOM. In other words,
that structure wasn't created to be part of CENTCOM, like the troops
are in the Pacific Command or in the European Command, these were
troops that were on rotation. They came from other places,
from the United States, from Europe, from the Pacific region.
And they rotated through. Ships rotated through, battalions
came in and out, squadrons came in and out. So we never
created a structure. We did it with borrowed troops, so we
could up the rheostat or lower it when we needed to.
It
was in my view, what we would call in the military, an "economy
of force theatre" without these assigned forces. We had
no American bases out there. We were sharing bases with allies
in the region who provided for us. Any given year, those in
the region ponied up $300-500 million to support our presence out
there. What we called "assistance in-kind."
They provided the fuel, the food, the water, the things we needed.
The Saudis built a $240 million housing complex for our troops.
Never once when we decided to take action against Saddam, when he
violated the sanctions, or the rules by which the inspectors
operated under, never once were we denied permission to use bases,
or airspace, or to strike from those places. We built a
wonderful coalition, without any formal treaties, without any
particular arrangement.
During
that time, when we asked allies in that region to join us in other
conflicts, like Somalia, they came. Egyptians came.
Pakistanis came. The Saudis came. The Kuwaitis came.
The Emirates came and provided forces. They joined us in the
Balkans. They joined us elsewhere on operations when we needed
them. We ran the largest military exercises in the world ...
in this part of the world. In Egypt we did "Bright
Star." We built a magnificent coalition of forces,
without ever once signing a piece of paper. And we contained
Saddam. We watched his military shrink to less than half its
size from the beginning of the Gulf War until the time I left
command, not only shrinking in size, but dealing with obsolete
equipment, ill-trained troops, dissatisfaction in the ranks, a lot
of absenteeism. We didn't see the Iraqis as a formidable
force. We saw them as a decaying force.
We
couldn't account for all the weapons of mass destruction. The
inspectors that were in there had to assume that the weapons of mass
destruction that were in his original inventory that we could not
account for, might still be there. So that was always a
planning factor. But when you look hard at that, these were
artillery shells, rocket rounds, that he would have to be hiding
somewhere that were getting old. And if he had to bring them
out and use them, think about this, he's got to move them to
artillery positions, to battery positions, under total dominance of
the air by the United States. I sure as hell wouldn't have
been ... want to be that battery commander that said tomorrow you're
going to get five truckloads of chemical weapons to be stored in
your area to shoot. Not under the air power we brought down
and the ability to interdict them. And these were tactical
capabilities.
Much
has been made, which confuses me, about unmanned aerial vehicles.
We monitored the L-29 program ... a trainer that he was trying to
put tanks on. Never once in my experience did he ever fly it
unmanned. He usually crashed it even manned. And in
order to even hit Kuwait, he would have to bring it into the no-fly
zone and launch it from an air base where we didn't allow aircraft
to fly from, and we would have taken it out -- preemptively.
We
bombed him almost at will. No one in the region felt
threatened by Saddam. No one in the region denied us our
ability to conduct sanctions. Many countries joined us in
sanctions enforcement, in the no-fly zones, and in the maritime
intercept operations where we attempted to intercept his oil and gas
smuggling.
So
to say containment didn't work, I think is not only wrong from the
experiences we had then, but the proof is in the pudding, in what
kind of military our troops faced when we went in there. It
disintegrated in front of us. It didn't have the capabilities,
that were pumped up, that were supposedly possessed by this
military. And I think that will be the first mistake that will
be recorded in history, the belief that containment as a policy
doesn't work. It certainly worked against the Soviet Union,
has worked with North Korea and others. It's not a pleasant
thing to have to administer, it requires troops full-time, there are
moments when there ... there are periods of violence, but
containment is a lot cheaper than the alternative, as we're finding
out now. So I think that will be mistake number one:
discounting the effectiveness of the containment.
…
The
third mistake, I think was one we repeated from Vietnam, we had to
create a false rationale for going in to get public support.
The books were cooked, in my mind. The intelligence was not
there. I testified before the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee one month before the war, and Senator Lugar asked me:
"General Zinni, do you feel the threat from Saddam Hussein is
imminent?" I said: "No, not at all. It was not
an imminent threat. Not even close. Not grave,
gathering, imminent, serious, severe, mildly upsetting, none of
those."
I
predicted that the fighting would be over, the organized resistance
in three weeks. To Tommy Franks' credit, he did it in 19 days.
He beat my prediction. He did a magnificent job, as did our
troops. But the rationale that we faced an imminent threat, or
a serious threat, was ridiculous. Now, wherever history lays
that, whether the intelligence was flawed or it was exaggerated,
remains to be seen. I have my own opinions.
The
Washington Post reported
on May 9 that Denmark's coalition government has come
under sharp attack from opposition parties and the media over
allegations that political leaders exaggerated or misused
intelligence claims about Saddam Hussein's weapons programs to
justify joining the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq last year.
The
controversy began when a Danish military intelligence analyst leaked
classified documents that appeared to show that the country's
intelligence agency had doubts about Iraq's military power.
The
government denies it misled Parliament; the analyst, Frank Soholm
Grevil, 43, was fired for disclosing the information and now faces
legal charges.
In
an interview, Grevil said he and colleagues at the Danish Defense
Intelligence Service felt "indirect pressure" to submit
reports to the government that conformed to claims by U.S. and
British intelligence agencies that Hussein possessed banned weapons.
Adhering
to the maxim that if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again,
Prime Minister Tony Blair on May 6 risked reigniting
the political row surrounding the use
of intelligence material to justify the war in Iraq by appointing
John Scarlett, the chairman of the joint intelligence committee,
which sets goals for the U.K. intelligence services, and author of
Downing Street's Iraq dossier, as the new head of MI6.
The Tories pointed out that Lord
Butler's inquiry into the use of intelligence to justify the war in
Iraq is still scrutinizing the preparation of the Downing Street
dossier, and the failure to find weapons of mass destruction it
claimed Saddam Hussein possessed. The Conservatives accused Downing
Street of pre-empting the inquiry, which is not expected to report
until July.
The
Guardian reported
on May 5 that Amer al-Saadi, the British-educated
Iraqi scientist who was the Iraqi government's main link to the
United Nations inspectors before the US invasion and who has
repeatedly insisted that Iraq had destroyed its weapons of mass
destruction years earlier, is still being held in solitary
confinement in an American prison at Baghdad's international
airport, even though CIA interrogators have finished their work.
Dr. Saadi is described officially by
the Americans as an "enemy prisoner of war". This allows
them to detain him indefinitely without access to a lawyer or
visiting rights from his family until George Bush declares the war
to be over. Whether he is still held out of spite or to hide
Washington's embarrassment is not clear. He has already been in
custody for more than a year.
An
article
in Insight on the News claims that “that
the U.S. effort to track down Saddam Hussein's missing weapons of
mass destruction (WMD) is having better success than is being
reported. Key assertions by the intelligence community that were
widely judged in the media and by critics of President George W.
Bush as having been false are turning out to have been true after
all. But this stunning news has received little attention from the
major media, and the president's critics continue to insist that
"no weapons" have been found.”
Time
Magazine reported on May 3 that the commission
named by President Bush to investigate shortcomings in pre-war
intelligence on Iraq won't seek the power to subpoena evidence.
On
May 3, Sen.
Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), chairman of the Senate's Select Committee on
Intelligence, delivered the 132nd
Landon Lecture in Kansas State University's McCain
Auditorium. The following excerpt is particularly noteworthy, as
Sen. Roberts has often defended the intelligence community’s
performance in the past.
I
have the privilege of being the Chairman of the Senate Intelligence
Committee. We are continuing to spearhead the committee’s inquiry
into pre-war intelligence with reference to Iraq and in a larger
sense the global war against terrorism and our homeland security.
The
inquiry includes the following:
–First,
we are examining the quantity and quality of U.S. intelligence on
Iraqi weapons of mass destruction programs, ties to terrorist
groups, Saddam Hussein’s threat to stability and security in the
region and the brutal repression of his own people.
–Second,
we’re taking a hard look at the objectivity, independence and
accuracy of the judgments reached by the Intelligence community;
whether those judgments were properly disseminated to policy makers
in the Executive Branch and Congress; and whether any influence was
brought to bear on anyone to shape their analysis to support policy
changes.
–
Third, we are also investigating whether public statements, reports
and testimony regarding Iraq by U.S. government officials were
substantiated by intelligence information.
In
other words, how was the intelligence used. My committee has created
an intelligence matrix by which we can compare public statements
made in the Bush Administration, the Clinton Administration, and
yes, by members of Congress, as to any differences between the
intelligence and the public statements – we want to know whether
there was any misuse or manipulation. I mention members of Congress.
Just as the executive “used” the intelligence, the Congress made
use of the same information in voting for regime change and for the
war and to fund the war. And, it should be pointed out only months
ago, many of today’s most vocal critics in the Congress – and on
the campaign trail – made statements in their understanding of the
use of intelligence that were far more declarative and aggressive
than the President and the members of his Administration.
The
point is that I made the same statements. We all did. I did so as an
informed member of the Senate Intelligence Committee after many
briefings and hearings and by studying, as the Administration did,
the conclusions of the National Intelligence Estimate prior to going
to war.
The
problem is, the information was wrong. As Dr. David Kay, who led the
Iraqi Survey Group, put it:
“If
you read the total body of intelligence in the last 12 to 15 years
that flowed on Iraq, I quite frankly think it would be hard to come
to a conclusion other than Iraq was a gathering, serious threat to
the world with regard to WMD.”
Dr.
Kay also said that when we have the complete record, we will
discover that after 1988, it became a regime that was totally
corrupt. Individuals were out for their own protection. And, in a
world where we know others are seeking WMD at any cost, it’s
likely that at some point in time, a well-financed buyer would have
found a willing seller – making Iraq a far more dangerous country
than even we anticipated.
–
Finally, the committee’s inquiry will also look at the pre-war
intelligence assessments about post-war Iraq. And, you know the news
of the day.
You
know of the sacrifice of our young men and women in uniform. And you
know the situation in post-war Iraq is extremely serious and
dangerous. A final report from our committee is very near
completion. Our hope is to have it wrapped up by June with public
hearings.
While
I cannot say too much about the report’s findings in this forum
because it is still a highly classified document, I can tell you
that our report does not paint a flattering picture of the
performance of our Intelligence Community as they developed their
pre-war assessments.
In
a speech titled “DoD’s
Role in Pre-War Iraq Intelligence: Setting the Record Straight”
at the Center for Strategic and International Studies on May 3,
Sen. Jon Kyl defended the performance of the Pentagon’s Office of
Special Plans and the Policy Counter Terrorism Evaluation Group,
which had reviewed intelligence on Iraq prior to the war.
It is a new month and once again there is a new book to take
note of. It is The
Politics of Truth: Inside the Lies that Led to War and Betrayed My
Wife's CIA Identity by retired U.S. diplomat Joseph C. Wilson IV.
Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, had her identity as a CIA agent
revealed in a column by conservative columnist Robert Novak on July
14, 2003 after Wilson wrote an op-ed piece in the New York Times and
said: "I have little choice but to conclude that some of the
intelligence related to Iraq's nuclear weapons program was twisted
to exaggerate the Iraqi threat." Wilson wrote that because at
the request of the CIA he had traveled to Niger the previous year
and found no evidence to support the rumor of a uranium deal. When
President Bush claimed in the now notorious sixteen words in his
2003 State of the Union address that "Saddam Hussein recently
sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa," Wilson
could not stand by silently.
Speaking on "Larry King Live"
on May 3, the following exchange between Ambassador
Wilson and Larry King took place:
We
now welcome to LARRY KING LIVE, Joseph Wilson, the former United
States ambassador, senior U.S. diplomat in Baghdad during Operation
Desert Shield. In fact, he was the last American official to meet
with Saddam Hussein prior to the start of the first Gulf War. He's
the author of the new book, "The Politics of Truth: Inside the
Lies that Led to War and Betrayed My Wife's CIA Identity."
There you see his cover. He has, by the way, endorsed John Kerry,
working on behalf of his campaign as well.
In
February of 2002, they asked the then retired diplomat Joe Wilson to
travel to Niger to investigate claims of a connection between Niger
and Iraq on uranium. He went, he find no experience [sic] and then
the State of the Union address and I guess you know the rest. What
happened after that?
JOSEPH
WILSON, FORMER U.S. AMBASSADOR: Well, after the...
KING:
When you saw the address were you shocked?
WILSON:
The address, when the president gave the address. He talked only
about uranium from Africa and there were four countries in Africa
that produce uranium one of which is Niger, the other three are
Gabon, Namibia and South Africa. So long as he was talking about
Africa, it wasn't clear to me that he was talking about Niger. It
was really only in March when the forged documents came out and the
head of the International Atomic Agency Dr. ElBaradei said that
these documents were not authentic and the State Department
spokesman made it clear that it was those documents on which we
based the conclusion that Iraq was attempting to purchase uranium
from Niger.
KING:
So you then wrote an op-ed piece? Is that how you went public with
this?
WILSON:
I didn't go public initially. I spent three months really talking on
background to journalists as well as talking directly to officials
within the administration, close to the administration, urging them
to correct the record. At the end of the day, this was one of the
pillars that underpinned the case for war with Iraq particularly the
nuclear part and obviously the doomsday bomb, the atomic weapon is
what most Americans fear, that is, the threat coming out of Iraq.
KING:
And they refused to correct.
WILSON:
They didn't. As the story started circulating Dr. Condoleezza Rice,
national security adviser, was interviewed on "Meet the
Press" in June and she said that well, maybe someone in the
bowels of the agency, referring to the CIA, might have known
something about this but no one in my circle. That was simply not
true. As it turns out, not only by what I knew then, but as it turns
out in the aftermath of the article that I published.
KING:
But it was such a short brief little passage.
WILSON:
Indeed.
KING:
Almost overlooked. I mean, it was certainly covered, but it wasn't
the lead story.
WILSON:
Indeed, but nonetheless, if you take a look at the way the president
constructed the argument, one, first of all, nuclear weapons are
obviously the weapon of mass destruction that we feel. The president
said that we cannot wait for the smoking gun to become a mushroom
cloud. Then he said, Saddam is only the sort of softball size
fissile material away from having a nuclear weapon. We have these
aluminum tubes that could be used to make that fissile material, and
lo and behold he's attempting to purchase the raw material that
would go into the centrifuges that would then become the missile
material, and then become the nuclear weapon.
Now,
without that chain, you have no case for nuclear weapons.
KING:
So you go public by an op-ed piece, right?
WILSON:
Well, finally, after having encouraged the government to be truthful
about this, and as I've said in the book, I consider this to be a
civic duty. At the end of the day, that's what citizens do in our
democracy. You hold your government to account for what it says and
what it does.
KING:
And by the way, Joseph Wilson has had a long and distinguished
career. That button you wear, that little emblem, is for what award?
WILSON:
That's the Defense Distinguished Service Award, I got when I was
political adviser to the commander in chief U.S. armed forces
Europe, when we did the deployment to Bosnia.
KING:
How long did you serve the government?
WILSON:
I served the government 23 years.
KING:
Now, was it the government's response to that article, to leak about
your wife?
WILSON:
Well, initially, the administration acknowledged, within about 24
hours of the publication of the article that, yes, indeed, that
charge never should have been in the State of the Union address.
KING:
So they said it was wrong.
WILSON:
I said fine, that's good. My question has been answered. I called my
government to account. It took a long time, I had to go public with
it, but yes, the government has said so. So I backed off, and a week
later there's an article in the Washington Post, published by
journalist Bob Novak, in which he says -- he drops in the middle of
the article, Joe Wilson's wife is a CIA operative working on weapons
of mass destruction.
Speaking on NBC’s "MEET THE PRESS" on May 2 the
following exchange with Ambassador Wilson occurred:
MR.
RUSSERT:
I want to bring our viewers back to some recent history here and put
this all in context. This is what started this whole discussion with
you, the president's State of the Union message January 28th, 2003:
PRESIDENT BUSH (from videotape): The British government has
learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities
of uranium from Africa.
MR. RUSSERT: You saw the president say that and thought what?
MR. WILSON: I thought, well, he must not have been talking
about Niger, because he would know better if he was. I then called
the Department of State and talked to the Bureau of African Affairs,
who had not seen the State of the Union address, but their
interpretation was that he was probably speaking about another
African country, which was fine for me, so long as he wasn't talking
about Niger.
MR. RUSSERT: Then on June 8th, Dr. Rice, the national
security adviser, appeared on "Meet the Press," and I
asked her about how those words wound up in the president's State of
the Union address, and she said this:
MS. RICE (from videotape): Maybe someone knew down in the
bowels of the agency, but no one in our circles knew that there were
doubts and suspicions that this might be a forgery.
MR. RUSSERT: When you saw that?
MR. WILSON: Well, I knew that she had fundamentally misstated
the facts. In fact, she had lied about it. I had gone out and I had
undertaken this study. I had come back and said that this was not
feasible. There was already lots of suspicion about the
documentation. And, in fact, as it's been borne out, when the vice
president was on this show and you had asked him if he had asked the
question about going to Niger, he had said, "Well, I had asked
the CIA briefer about these reports, and he had come back and told
me within a couple of days that there was nothing to them."
That was a year before the State of the Union address. This
government knew that there was nothing to these allegations.
MR. RUSSERT: George Tenet in a statement said that a Niger
official did say to you there may have been discussions about
potential business dealings and maybe that could have been a
suggestion of uranium.
MR. WILSON: That's right. And, of course, as I put in the
book, there was a meeting on the margins of an OAU summit between a
senior Niger official and an Iraqi official who turns out to be the
former minister of information, Baghdad Bob. At that meeting,
uranium was not discussed. It would be a tragedy to think that we
went to war over a conversation in which uranium was not discussed
because the Niger official was prescient or was sufficiently
sophisticated to think that perhaps he might have wanted to discuss
uranium at some later date.
In an article in the
San Jose Mercury News on May 2, Wilson
writes:
According to numerous journalists who have looked into the
case, shortly after I made that statement, senior officials in the
vice president's office ordered a ``work-up'' on me, to collect
information that could be used in a smear campaign if it became
necessary. Those and other sources tell me the person who probably
directed that campaign is I. Lewis ``Scooter'' Libby, the vice
president's chief of staff and a leading neoconservative. I believe
he is also quite possibly the person responsible for exposing my
wife's identity. [The White House has denied this.]
What is most important about these revelations is that the
vice president's office would have had no reason to attack me unless
officials there knew I was telling the truth and could cast doubt on
an allegation that was key to their case for war. You don't need to
discredit someone whose story won't pan out.
It would not surprise me if Cheney's aides knew immediately
that my statement spelled trouble. The vice president, after all,
had been interested enough in the Niger claims a year earlier to ask
the CIA about them. An agent told him they had nothing to support
the claims. (We know this because Cheney has since said so to NBC's
Tim Russert.) Wouldn't the 16 words in the State of the Union
address have raised questions for him then?
You could argue, and some have, that the speech cited British
intelligence. But if the last report Cheney had from our own agents
was that there was no support for the claims, why would he blindly
accept conflicting information? Wouldn't he double-check with our
own intelligence agencies?
If he did, he would probably have discovered that the CIA had
insisted that similar words be removed from another presidential
speech four months earlier because it knew there was no intelligence
to back up the claim. In fact, the British intelligence was the same
that we had determined not to be true.
Quite simply, the
administration knew the Niger story was bogus. The inclusion of the
charge, and the reference to British intelligence to provide an
alibi if the truth came out, was the product of a concerted effort
to deceive Congress, the American people and the world.
The
May issue of Vanity Fair runs a not very convincing feature article
“Iraq's
Arsenal Of Terror” by David Rose, supposedly detailing
Iraq’s progress toward truly frightening
capabilities: "dirty" bombs that spew
radioactivity, mobile bio-weapons facilities, and a new long-range
ballistic missile.
Why
is the Vanity Fair piece unconvincing? Writing in Slate Magazine April
13 Jack Shafer notes that the “defector” who is the source
of Rose’s story is the same man that "60 Minutes" relied on in a
piece it previously did, which it subsequently repudiated (see
reference in April archive).
But
bear in mind that the British version of Vanity Fair ran a
different article by Rose. And in that he is right on the mark.
Consider the following:
The centerpiece of the Bush
administration’s case for an invasion of Iraq, the presentation
that laid out the key pieces of intelligence the U.S. government had
gathered about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction and
his purported links to al-Qaeda terrorists, was delivered by
Secretary of State Colin Powell at the United Nations on February 5,
2003. It was a historic speech, and yet it was one that Powell, who
had argued against the war for months, was probably far from
comfortable delivering.
On
Wednesday, January 29, a week earlier, Powell appeared in the
doorway between his seventh-floor office at the State Department and
that of his chief of staff, Larry Wilkerson, and handed Wilkerson a
48-page dossier that had been sent over by the White House.
The
document, which the White House intended that Powell use as the
basis of his speech, was a laundry list of intelligence gathered by
the government about Iraq’s weapons programs. It had been cobbled
together in Vice President Richard Cheney’s office by a team led
by Cheney’s chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby,
and John Hannah. the vice president’s deputy assistant for
national-security affairs— both well-known administration hawks. A
few days earlier, Libby had presided over a meeting in the White
House Situation Room in which he laid out the case against Iraq,
producing what one administration official called a "Chinese
menu" of material.
"Go
out to C.I.A.," Powell instructed his staff chief, take
whomever you need, and start work on the speech. By the next night
Wilkerson, along with several staffers and a revolving group of
C.I.A. analysts, was ensconced in a conference room down the hall
from Director of Central Intelligence (D.C.I.) George Tenet’s
office at C.I.A. headquarters, in Langley, Virginia. The White House
supplied 45 more pages on Iraq’s links to terrorism and its
human-rights violations. By the end of the first day, though,
Wilkerson and the others did something surprising: they threw out
the White House dossier, now grown to more than 90 pages. They
suspected much of it had originated with the Iraqi National Congress
(I.N.C.) and its chief, Ahmad Chalabi, a smooth-talking Iraqi former
banker, whose family had fled Iraq in 1958, when Chalabi was 13. The
I.N.C., an exile group based in London, had been supplying U.S.
intelligence with Iraqi defectors whose information had often proved
suspect or fabricated. The problem with the I.N.C. was that its
information came with an overt agenda. As the I.N.C.’s Washington
adviser, Francis Brooke, admits, he urged the exile group to do what
it could to make the case for war: "I told them, as their
campaign manager, ‘Go get me a terrorist and some W.M.D., because
that’s what the Bush administration is interested in.'" As
for Iraq’s links to al-Qaeda, Powell’s staff was convinced that
much of that material had been funneled directly to Cheney by a
tiny, separate intelligence unit set up by Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld. "We were so appalled at what had arrived from the
White House," says one official.
Instead,
the group turned to the C.I.A. analysts and started from scratch.
That night, and every night for the next several days, Powell went
to Langley to oversee the process. In Tenet’s conference room,
joined by the D.C.I. and at times by National-Security Adviser
Condoleezza Rice, Scooter Libby, and C.I.A. deputy director John
McLaughlin, the secretary of state demanded to know the sources and
reliability of the information he had been given. For everyone
involved, it was a tense and frustrating process. At one point,
according to several witnesses, Powell tossed several documents in
the air and snapped, "This is bullshit!"
The
meetings stretched on for four more days and nights. Cheney’s
staff constantly pushed for certain intelligence on Iraq’s alleged
ties to terrorists to be included—information that Powell and his
people angrily insisted was not reliable. Powell was keenly aware he
was staking his credibility on the speech, and he wanted to include
only solid information that could be verified. Cheney and his staff
had insisted that their intelligence was, in fact, well documented.
They told Powell not to worry. One morning a few days before the
speech, Powell encountered Cheney in the hallway outside the Oval
Office. "Your poll numbers are in the 70s," Cheney told
him. "You can afford to lose a few points."
At two
o’clock in the morning, hours before Powell was to give his
speech, a call came from the C.I.A. to the operations center of
Powell’s hotel suite at the Waldorf Astoria. Powell had already
turned in for the night, and Wilkerson picked up the phone. The
message was clear enough: George Tenet, who was staying at another
Manhattan hotel, wanted one last look at the text of the speech.
Tenet, the
caller made plain, was worried that Powell’s staff had cut too
much about Saddam’s supposed links to terrorists. Wilkerson was
annoyed and baffled. Only a few hours before, Phil Mudd, the
C.I.A.’s terrorism specialist, had come to the Waldorf bearing a
gift of Italian food. Then Barry Lowenkron, a senior Powell aide,
had informed Mudd that they had tightened the terrorism part. Mudd
read the section. "Looks fine," he said, and he left
around midnight.
Now the
director of central intelligence was fretting and asking to see the
speech in the middle of the night. It should not have been a
complete surprise; Tenet served at the pleasure of President George
W. Bush, and for days the White House, and Cheney’s staff in
particular, had been trying to persuade Powell to link Iraq directly
to the 9/11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. They had
pressed him repeatedly to include a widely discredited Czech
intelligence report that Mohamed Atta, the ringleader of the 9/11
al-Qaeda terrorists, had met in Prague with an Iraqi intelligence
officer. At the last rehearsal of the speech at C.I.A. headquarters,
Powell had thrown out the Prague material as suspect and unverified.
Lowenkron
tracked Mudd down, woke him up, and asked what the hell was going
on. Was there a problem? Mudd acknowledged he had reported to Tenet
that Powell’s staff had tightened the terrorism section. Now it
was clear why the C.I.A. chief was demanding to see the speech in
the pre-dawn hours, and it was dispatched to his hotel.
The next
morning at the U.N., Powell insisted that Tenet sit to his right and
just behind him. It was theater, a device to signal the world that
Powell was relying on the C.I.A. to make his case that Iraq had
weapons of mass destruction (W.M.D.), which were a threat to the
U.S. In the well of the Security Council, Tenet sought to make light
of the pre-dawn escapade. "I’m going to kill Phil Mudd for
getting me out of bed," he said.
Cheney’s
office made one last-ditch effort to persuade Powell to link Saddam
and al-Qaeda, and to slip the Prague story back into the speech.
Only moments before Powell began speaking, Scooter Libby tried
unsuccessfully to reach Wilkerson by phone. Powell’s staff chief,
by then inside the Security Council chamber, declined to take the
call. "Scooter," said one State Department aide,
"wasn’t happy."
Powell,
for all his carping, delivered a speech that was close to what the
White House wanted, describing mobile biological-weapons labs, ties
to al-Qaeda, and stockpiles of anthrax. Much of it later proved to
be untrue. His legacy and the Bush administration’s will be
forever tarnished as a result. Yet the speech was only one of many
low points in a series of historic blunders the U.S. made on its
path to war. In 18 short months, from the morning after the 9/11
attacks to the dropping of the first bombs on Baghdad, George W.
Bush presided over one of the most startling turnabouts in the
history of world opinion. His administration took the unprecedented
goodwill America enjoyed in September 2001 and squandered it by
invading a country to replace a dictator who today seems not to have
represented an imminent threat to the United States.
This
article is an attempt to trace how it happened. It is—to be
candid—incomplete. The White House and several key officials
involved in the diplomatic and military preparations, including
Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell, declined to be interviewed. But
many others agreed, including senior officials at the C.I.A., the
Pentagon, the State Department, and the White House. Some of the
keenest observations about the evolution of the war effort come from
top officials in the British government, whose pleas to stop a
unilateral American invasion led the Bush administration to take its
case for war to the United Nations.
When one
talks with those involved in the lead-up to the Iraq war, one theme
is repeated again and again. From the C.I.A. analysts who felt
pressure to tailor their intelligence to fit the Bush
administration’s aims to diplomats who felt steamrollered by the
White House’s blinkered view that Saddam was hiding W.M.D., many
officials felt nothing they said, no fact they could present, could
possibly dissuade Bush from war.
See
the Iraq
Update Archives
March
2004
| April 2004
___________________
Last
updated May 27, 2004
For
more information, contact:
David
Isenberg, Senior Analyst
BASIC
Tel: +1 202 546-8055, x103
disenberg@basicint.org
|
.