posted on February 3, 2004 09:34:51 AM new
"We were misled -- misled not only in the intelligence, but misled in the way that the president took us to war ... I think there's been an enormous amount of exaggeration, stretching, deception." -- John Kerry, the Democrat who came in first in the New Hampshire primary
"The administration did cook the books." -- Howard Dean, the Democrat who came in second in the New Hampshire primary
We were misled? The Bush administration cooked the books?
Welcome to the ugliest, nastiest policy scrum Americans have ever had to referee in a presidential election year. Rather than hearing a philosophical or strategic alternative to the Bush foreign policy, we are being asked to vote Democrat because leading Democrats charge that the incumbent Republican administration willfully "misled" the American people into war -- exaggerating, stretching, and deceiving -- with a scheme to "cook the books." Are these heinous accusations true?
To be sure, inspectors in Iraq haven't found the weapons of mass destruction (WMD) President Bush and Vice President Cheney warned against. This comes as a shock to us all, including Bill Clinton, Tom Daschle, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Ted Kennedy, Jacques Chirac, Al Gore, German intelligence, Bob Graham, the United Nations, Madeleine Albright, Hans Blix, even John Kerry -- just some of the subscribers to the old Saddam-equals-WMD theory that inspired former President Clinton to warn against "the threat posed by Iraq's weapons of mass destruction program" six years ago.
(As recently as last October, Clinton told the prime minister of Portugal he believed Saddam Hussein possessed WMD until the end of the dictator's regime.)
Think of it (thanks to columnist William Rusher, who compiled the following set of quotations): It was then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, not Condi Rice -- or even George W. Bush -- who in 1998 said, "The risk that the leaders (of Iraq) will use nuclear, chemical or biological weapons against us or our allies is the greatest security risk we face." That same year, Democratic senators including Tom Daschle, Carl Levin and current presidential front-runner John Kerry urged Clinton "to respond effectively to the threat posed by Iraq's refusal to end its weapons of mass destruction programs."
Even Kerry-boosting, Bush-bashing Ted Kennedy got on the record about Saddam Hussein and his WMD. And in fall of 2002, Al Gore said, "We know (Saddam Hussein) has stored secret supplies of biological and chemical weapons throughout his country."
Similar talk has come from the Bush administration, with one enormous difference. While George W. Bush recognized the same threat his predecessors recognized, he alone has been committed to acting against it. Others were content to describe the threat, to rail against it and do nothing. As Colin Powell said recently, "The president took the case to the international community and said: For 12 years, you have been defied. What are you going to do now? It's time for us to act."
It was 12 years of inaction, just as much as any illicit weapons programs, that challenged the rule of law and the peace of the world. During that same period, Islamic terrorists drew strength from perceived American weakness, planning and executing attacks that culminated in the cataclysm of Sept. 11. Not only is the world a safer place now without Saddam Hussein and his terrorist-haven nation, it is also a safer place because the Bush administration showed that the United States is as good as its word.
Former chief weapons inspector David Kay doesn't believe inspectors will ever find warehouses full of newly-minted WMD -- although he also says that because of the looting that took place during the invasion, and the Iraqi transfer of unspecified cargoes to Syria, any complete reckoning of Iraqi stockpiles is impossible.
Significant discoveries to date include an Iraqi effort circa 2003 to produce biological weaponry using the poison ricin, and evidence that Iraq tried to revive its nuclear weapons program in 2001 and 2002. According to Kay, Iraq's nuclear program never got as far as those of Libya or Iran.
Which is probably the biggest bombshell of all. Just as the CIA and other intelligence agencies were blind to Iraq's unraveling in the 1990s, when Kay believes that nation stopped trying to mass-produce WMD, Western intelligence also failed to recognize the advanced state of both Libya's and Iran's nuclear programs. "I think Baghdad was actually becoming more dangerous in the last two years than even we realized," Kay told NBC's Tom Brokaw. "Saddam was not controlling the society any longer. In the marketplace of terrorism and of WMD, Iraq could well have been that supplier if the war had not intervened."
"If you believe you can tell me what to think, I believe I can tell you where to go. Not all of us are sheep....."
[ edited by Bear1949 on Feb 3, 2004 09:37 AM ]
June 10, 2003
Why the Lies About WMD Matter
A Crime Against American Values
By RAY CLOSE
former CIA analyst
"....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: [email protected].
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Censorship, like charity, should begin at home; but unlike charity, it should end there --Clare Booth Luce
[ edited by bunnicula on Feb 3, 2004 12:50 PM ]
Editor's Note: This article was first published by TruthOut.org, and is reprinted with permission.
After several years teaching high school, I've heard all the excuses. I didn't get my homework done because my computer crashed, because my project partner didn't do their part, because I feel sick, because I left it on the bus, because I had a dance recital, because I was abducted by aliens and viciously probed. Houdini doesn't have as many tricks. No one on earth is more inventive than a high school sophomore backed into a corner and faced with a zero on an assignment.
No one, perhaps, except Bush administration officials forced now to account for their astounding claims made since September 2002 regarding Iraq's alleged weapons program.
After roughly 280 days worth of fearful descriptions of the formidable Iraqi arsenal, coming on the heels of seven years of UNSCOM weapons inspections, four years of surveillance, months of UNMOVIC weapons inspections, the investiture of an entire nation by American and British forces, after which said forces searched "everywhere" per the words of the Marine commander over there and "found nothing," after interrogating dozens of the scientists and officers who have nothing to hide anymore because Hussein is gone, after finding out that the dreaded "mobile labs" were weather balloon platforms sold to Iraq by the British, George W. Bush and his people suddenly have a few things to answer for.
You may recall this instance where a bombastic claim was made by Bush. During his constitutionally-mandated State of the Union address on Jan. 28, 2003, Mr. Bush said, "Our intelligence officials estimate that Saddam Hussein had the materials to produce as much as 500 tons of sarin, mustard and VX nerve agent." Nearly five months later, those 500 tons are nowhere to be found. A few seconds with a calculator can help us understand exactly what this means.
Five hundred tons of gas equals one million pounds. After UNSCOM, after UNMOVIC, after the war, after the U.S. Army inspectors, after all the satellite surveillance, it is difficult in the extreme to imagine how one million pounds of anything could refuse to be located. Bear in mind, also, that this one million pounds is but a part of the Iraqi weapons arsenal described by Bush and his administration.
Maybe the dog ate it. Or maybe it was never there to begin with, having been destroyed years ago by the first U.N. inspectors and by the Iraqis themselves. Maybe we went to war on a big lie, one that killed over 3,500 Iraqi civilians to date, one that killed some 170 American soldiers, one that has been costing us one American soldier's life per day thus far.
If you listen to the Republicans on Capitol Hill, however, this is all just about "politics." An in-depth investigation into how exactly we came to go to war on the WMD word of the Bush administration has been quashed by the Republican majority in the House of Representatives. Closed-door hearings by the Intelligence Committee are planned next week, but an open investigation has been shunted aside by Bush allies who control the gavel and the agenda. If there is nothing to hide, as the administration insists, if nothing was done wrong, one must wonder why they fear to have these questions asked in public.
The questions are being asked anyway. Thirty-five Representatives have signed H.R. 260, which demands with specificity that the administration back up it's oft-repeated claims about the Iraqi weapons arsenal with evidence and fact. The guts of the resolution are as follows:
Resolved, That the president is requested to transmit to the House of Representatives not later than four days after the date of the adoption of this resolution documents or other materials in the president's possession that provides specific evidence for the following claims relating to Iraq's weapons of mass destruction:
(1) On Aug. 26, 2002, the Vice President in a speech stated: "Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction.... What he wants is time, and more time to husband his resources to invest in his ongoing chemical and biological weapons program, and to gain possession of nuclear weapons."
(2) On Sept. 12, 2002, in a speech to the United Nations General Assembly, the president stated: "Right now, Iraq is expanding and improving facilities that were used for the production of biological weapons. Iraq has made several attempts to buy high-strength aluminum tubes used to enrich uranium for a nuclear weapon."
(3) On Oct. 7, 2002, in a speech in Cincinnati, Ohio, the president stated: "It possesses and produces chemical and biological weapons. It is seeking nuclear weapons. And surveillance photos reveal that the regime is rebuilding facilities that it had used to produce chemical and biological weapons."
(4) On Jan. 7, 2003, the secretary of defense at a press briefing stated: "There is no doubt in my mind but that they currently have chemical and biological weapons."
(5) On Jan. 9, 2003, in his daily press briefing, the White House spokesperson stated: "We know for a fact that there are weapons there Iraq."
(6) On March 16, 2003, in an appearance on NBC's Meet The Press, the vice president stated: "We believe he has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons. I think Mr. El Baradei frankly is wrong."
(7) On March 17, 2003, in an address to the nation, the President stated: "Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised."
(8) On March 21, 2003, in his daily press briefing the White House spokesperson stated: "Well, there is no question that we have evidence and information that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction, biological and chemical particularly. All this will be made clear in the course of the operation, for whatever duration it takes."
(9) On March 24, 2003, in an appearance on CBS's Face the Nation, the secretary of defense stated: "We have seen intelligence over many months that they have chemical and biological weapons, and that they have dispersed them and that they're weaponized and that, in one case at least, the command and control arrangements have been established."
(10) On March 30, 2003, in an appearance on ABC's This Week, the secretary of defense stated: "We know where they are, they are in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad."
On June 10, 2003, Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) transmitted a letter to Condoleezza Rice demanding answers to a specific area of concern in this whole mess. His letter goes on to repeat, in scathing detail, the multi-faceted claims made by the Bush administration regarding an Iraqi nuclear weapons program, and deconstructs those claims with a fine scalpel. "What I want to know is the answer to a simple question: Why did the president use forged evidence in the State of the Union address?" the letter concludes. "This is a question that bears directly on the credibility of the United States, and it should be answered in a prompt and forthright manner, with full disclosure of all the relevant facts."
It is this aspect, the nuclear claims, that has led the Bush administration to do what many observers expected them to do for a while now: They have blamed it all on the CIA. A report in the June 12, 2003 edition of The Washington Post cites an unnamed Bush administration official who claims that the CIA knew the evidence of Iraqi nuclear plans had been forged, but that CIA failed to give this information to Bush. The Post story states, "A senior intelligence official said the CIA's action was the result of 'extremely sloppy' handling of a central piece of evidence in the administration's case against then-Iraqi President Saddam Hussein."
Ergo, it wasn't the dog who ate the WMD. It was the CIA. Unfortunately for Bush and his people, this blame game will not hold water.
Early in October of 2002, Bush went before the American people and delivered yet another vat of nightmarish descriptions of what Saddam Hussein could do to America and the world with his vast array of weaponry. One week before this speech, however, the CIA had publicly stated that Hussein and Iraq were less of a threat than they had been for the last 10 years.
Columnist Robert Scheer reported on Oct. 9, 2002, that, "In its report, the CIA concludes that years of U.N. inspections combined with U.S. and British bombing of selected targets have left Iraq far weaker militarily than in the 1980s, when it was supported in its war against Iran by the United States. The CIA report also concedes that the agency has no evidence that Iraq possesses nuclear weapons."
Certainly, if citizen Scheer was able to read and understand the CIA report on Iraq's nuclear capabilities, the president of the United States could easily do so as well.
The scandal which laid Bill Clinton low centered around his lying under oath about sex. The scandal which took down Richard Nixon was certainly more profound, as he was accused of misusing the CIA and FBI to spy on political opponents while paying off people to lie about his actions. Lying under oath and misusing the intelligence community are both serious transgressions, to be sure. The matter of Iraq's weapons program, however, leaves both of these in deep shade.
George W. Bush and his people used the fear and terror that still roils within the American people in the aftermath of 9/11 to fob off an unnerving fiction about a faraway nation, and then used that fiction to justify a war that killed thousands and thousands of people.
Latter-day justifications about "liberating" the Iraqi people or demonstrating the strength of America to the world do not obscure this fact. They lied us into a war that, beyond the death toll, served as the greatest Al Qaeda recruiting drive in the history of the world. They lied about a war that cost billions of dollars which could have been better used to bolster America's amazingly substandard anti-terror defenses. They are attempting, in the aftermath, to misuse the CIA by blaming them for all of it.
Blaming the CIA will not solve this problem, for the CIA is well able to defend itself. Quashing investigations in the House will not stem the questions that come now at a fast and furious clip.
They lied. Period. Trust a teacher on this. We can spot liars who have not done their homework a mile away.
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Censorship, like charity, should begin at home; but unlike charity, it should end there --Clare Booth Luce
posted on February 3, 2004 01:12:07 PM new
So I wonder if the "investigation" Bush is planning now will be held behind closed doors like the last one...
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Censorship, like charity, should begin at home; but unlike charity, it should end there --Clare Booth Luce
