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July
30, 2003
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July
30, 2003
Bring
'Em On!
The
Bush Administration's Top 40 Lies About War and Terrorism
By STEVE PERRY
Editors' note: In the interest of relative brevity we've stinted
on citing and quoting sources in some of the items below. You
can find links to news stories that elaborate on each of these
items at Perry's online Bush
Wars column.
1) The administration was not bent
on war with Iraq from 9/11 onward.
Throughout the year leading up to war,
the White House publicly maintained that the U.S. took weapons
inspections seriously, that diplomacy would get its chance,
that Saddam had the opportunity to prevent a U.S. invasion.
The most pungent and concise evidence to the contrary comes
from the president's own mouth. According to Time's March 31
road-to-war story, Bush popped in on national security adviser
Condi Rice one day in March 2002, interrupting a meeting on
UN sanctions against Iraq. Getting a whiff of the subject matter,
W peremptorily waved his hand and told her, "Fuck Saddam.
We're taking him out." Clare Short, Tony Blair's former
secretary for international development, recently lent further
credence to the anecdote. She told the London Guardian that
Bush and Blair made a secret pact a few months afterward, in
the summer of 2002, to invade Iraq in either February or March
of this year.
Last fall CBS News obtained meeting notes
taken by a Rumsfeld aide at 2:40 on the afternoon of September
11, 2001. The notes indicate that Rumsfeld wanted the "best
info fast. Judge whether good enough hit S.H. [Saddam Hussein]
at same time. Not only UBL [Usama bin Laden].... Go massive.
Sweep it all up. Things related and not."
Rumsfeld's deputy Paul Wolfowitz, the
Bushmen's leading intellectual light, has long been rabid on
the subject of Iraq. He reportedly told Vanity Fair writer Sam
Tanenhaus off the record that he believes Saddam was connected
not only to bin Laden and 9/11, but the 1995 Oklahoma City
bombing.
The Bush administration's foreign policy
plan was not based on September 11, or terrorism; those events
only brought to the forefront a radical plan for U.S. control
of the post-Cold War world that had been taking shape since
the closing days of the first Bush presidency. Back then a small
claque of planners, led by Wolfowitz, generated a draft document
known as Defense Planning Guidance, which envisioned a U.S.
that took advantage of its lone-superpower status to consolidate
American control of the world both militarily and economically,
to the point where no other nation could ever reasonably hope
to challenge the U.S. Toward that end it envisioned what we
now call "preemptive" wars waged to reset the geopolitical
table.
After a copy of DPG was leaked to the
New York Times, subsequent drafts were rendered a little less
frank, but the basic idea never changed. In 1997 Wolfowitz and
his true believers--Richard Perle, William Kristol, Dick Cheney,
Donald Rumsfeld--formed an organization called Project for
the New American Century to carry their cause forward. And though
they all flocked around the Bush administration from the start,
W never really embraced their plan until the events of September
11 left him casting around for a foreign policy plan.
2) The invasion of Iraq was based
on a reasonable belief that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction
that posed a threat to the U.S., a belief supported by available
intelligence evidence.
Paul Wolfowitz admitted to Vanity Fair
that weapons of mass destruction were not really the main reason
for invading Iraq: "The decision to highlight weapons of
mass destruction as the main justification for going to war
in Iraq was taken for bureaucratic reasons.... [T]here were
many other important factors as well." Right. But they
did not come under the heading of self-defense.
We now know how the Bushmen gathered
their prewar intelligence: They set out to patch together their
case for invading Iraq and ignored everything that contradicted
it. In the end, this required that Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, et al.
set aside the findings of analysts from the CIA and the Defense
Intelligence Agency (the Pentagon's own spy bureau) and stake
their claim largely on the basis of isolated, anecdotal testimony
from handpicked Iraqi defectors. (See #5, Ahmed Chalabi.) But
the administration did not just listen to the defectors; it
promoted their claims in the press as a means of enlisting public
opinion. The only reason so many Americans thought there was
a connection between Saddam and al Qaeda in the first place
was that the Bushmen trotted out Iraqi defectors making these
sorts of claims to every major media outlet that would listen.
Here is the verdict of Gregory Thielman,
the recently retired head of the State Department's intelligence
office: "I believe the Bush administration did not provide
an accurate picture to the American people of the military
threat posed by Iraq. This administration has had a faith-based
intelligence attitude--we know the answers, give us the intelligence
to support those answers." Elsewhere he has been quoted
as saying, "The principal reasons that Americans did not
understand the nature of the Iraqi threat in my view was the
failure of senior administration officials to speak honestly
about what the intelligence showed."
3) Saddam tried to buy uranium in Niger.
Lies and distortions tend to beget more
lies and distortions, and here is W's most notorious case in
point: Once the administration decided to issue a damage-controlling
(they hoped) mea culpa in the matter of African uranium, they
were obliged to couch it in another, more perilous lie: that
the administration, and quite likely Bush himself, thought the
uranium claim was true when he made it. But former acting ambassador
to Iraq Joseph Wilson wrote an op-ed in the New York Times on
July 6 that exploded the claim. Wilson, who traveled to Niger
in 2002 to investigate the uranium claims at the behest of the
CIA and Dick Cheney's office and found them to be groundless,
describes what followed this way: "Although I did not file
a written report, there should be at least four documents in
U.S. government archives confirming my mission. The documents
should include the ambassador's report of my debriefing in Niamey,
a separate report written by the embassy staff, a CIA report
summing up my trip, and a specific answer from the agency to
the office of the vice president (this may have been delivered
orally). While I have not seen any of these reports, I have
spent enough time in government to know that this is standard
operating procedure."
4) The aluminum tubes were proof of a nuclear program.
The very next sentence of Bush's State
of the Union address was just as egregious a lie as the uranium
claim, though a bit cagier in its formulation. "Our intelligence
sources tell us that [Saddam] has attempted to purchase high-strength
aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production."
This is altogether false in its implication (that this is the
likeliest use for these materials) and may be untrue in its
literal sense as well. As the London Independent summed it up
recently, "The U.S. persistently alleged that Baghdad tried
to buy high-strength aluminum tubes whose only use could be
in gas centrifuges, needed to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons.
Equally persistently, the International Atomic Energy Agency
said the tubes were being used for artillery rockets. The head
of the IAEA, Mohamed El Baradei, told the UN Security Council
in January that the tubes were not even suitable for centrifuges."
5) Iraq's WMDs were sent to Syria
for hiding.
Or Iran, or.... "They shipped them
out!" was a rallying cry for the administration in the
first few nervous weeks of finding no WMDs, but not a bit of
supporting evidence has emerged.
6) The CIA was primarily responsible for any prewar intelligence
errors or distortions regarding Iraq.
Don't be misled by the news that CIA
director George Tenet has taken the fall for Bush's falsehoods
in the State of the Uranium address. As the journalist Robert
Dreyfuss wrote shortly before the war, "Even as it prepares
for war against Iraq, the Pentagon is already engaged on a second
front: its war against the Central Intelligence Agency. The
Pentagon is bringing relentless pressure to bear on the agency
to produce intelligence reports more supportive of war with
Iraq. ... Morale inside the U.S. national-security apparatus
is said to be low, with career staffers feeling intimidated
and pressured to justify the push for war."
In short, Tenet fell on his sword when
he vetted Bush's State of the Union yarns. And now he has had
to get up and fall on it again.
7) An International Atomic Energy Agency report indicated
that Iraq could be as little as six months from making nuclear
weapons.
Alas: The claim had to be retracted when
the IAEA pointed out that no such report existed.
8) Saddam was involved with bin Laden and al Qaeda in the
plotting of 9/11.
One of the most audacious and well-traveled
of the Bushmen's fibs, this one hangs by two of the slenderest
evidentiary threads imaginable: first, anecdotal testimony by
isolated, handpicked Iraqi defectors that there was an al Qaeda
training camp in Iraq, a claim CIA analysts did not corroborate
and that postwar U.S. military inspectors conceded did not exist;
and second, old intelligence accounts of a 1991 meeting in Baghdad
between a bin Laden emissary and officers from Saddam's intelligence
service, which did not lead to any subsequent contact that U.S.
or UK spies have ever managed to turn up. According to former
State Department intelligence chief Gregory Thielman, the consensus
of U.S. intelligence agencies well in advance of the war was
that "there was no significant pattern of cooperation between
Iraq and the al Qaeda terrorist operation."
9) The U.S. wants democracy in Iraq and the Middle East.
Democracy is the last thing the U.S.
can afford in Iraq, as anyone who has paid attention to the
state of Arab popular sentiment already realizes. Representative
government in Iraq would mean the rapid expulsion of U.S. interests.
Rather, the U.S. wants westernized, secular leadership regimes
that will stay in pocket and work to neutralize the politically
ambitious anti-Western religious sects popping up everywhere.
If a little brutality and graft are required to do the job,
it has never troubled the U.S. in the past. Ironically, these
standards describe someone more or less like Saddam Hussein.
Judging from the state of civil affairs in Iraq now, the Bush
administration will no doubt be looking for a strongman again,
if and when they are finally compelled to install anyone at
all.
10) Ahmed Chalabi and the Iraqi National
Congress are a homegrown Iraqi political force, not a U.S.-sponsored
front.
Chalabi is a more important bit player
in the Iraq war than most people realize, and not because he
was the U.S.'s failed choice to lead a post-Saddam government.
It was Chalabi and his INC that funneled compliant defectors
to the Bush administration, where they attested to everything
the Bushmen wanted to believe about Saddam and Iraq (meaning,
mainly, al Qaeda connections and WMD programs). The administration
proceeded to take their dubious word over that of the combined
intelligence of the CIA and DIA, which indicated that Saddam
was not in the business of sponsoring foreign terrorism and
posed no imminent threat to anyone.
Naturally Chalabi is despised nowadays
round the halls of Langley, but it wasn't always so. The CIA
built the Iraqi National Congress and installed Chalabi at the
helm back in the days following Gulf War I, when the thought
was to topple Saddam by whipping up and sponsoring an internal
opposition. It didn't work; from the start Iraqis have disliked
and distrusted Chalabi. Moreover, his erratic and duplicitous
ways have alienated practically everyone in the U.S. foreign
policy establishment as well--except for Rumsfeld's Department
of Defense, and therefore the White House.
Click here
to read about the other 30 Bush lies on this list, with further
links.
Steve Perry is the editor of the excellent Minneapolis
weekly City Pages
and a regular contributor to CounterPunch. His Bush
War's column is one of the few blogs worth reading. He can
be reached at: sperry@citypages.com
Weekend Edition Features for July 26 / 28, 2003
Alexander
Cockburn
NYT's Screws Up Again; Uday and
Qusay Deaths Bad for Bush; Gen. Hitchens at the Front
Gary
Leupp
Faith-Based Intelligence
Saul Landau
A Report from Syria
Stan
Goff
Bring 'Em On Home, Now!
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Book Cooking at Boeing
Andrew
Cockburn
The Sons Are Dead; Now the Blood Feud
Begins
Jason Leopold
CIA Points the Finger at the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans
Robert
Fisk
The Power of Death
Joanne
Mariner
Monsieur Moussaoui
Standard
Schaefer
Joblessness and the Invisible Hand
M. Shahid
Alam
The Global Economy Since 1800: a Short History
Harry
Browne
Northern Ireland: the Other Faltering Peace Process
Fidel Castro
Moncada, 50 Years Later
Lula
Democracy Requires Social Justice
Edward
S. Herman
Refuting Brad DeLong's Smear Job on Noam Chomsky
Ron Jacobs
Guided by a Great Feeling of Love: a Review of Gordon's The Company
You Keep
Julie
Hilden
A Photographer, an Offer and Cameron Diaz's Topless Photos
Adam Engel
Man Talk
Poets'
Basement
Keeney, Witherup, Short, Nimba, Guthrie and Albert
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