| Author | Message | | Alpha | |  | | Alpha | | Posted: Tue Jun 15, 2004 1:51 am Post subject: 9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse of America's Intelligence Agencies |
| http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A14202-2004Jun3.html
washingtonpost.com > Nation > National Security > Espionage
A critic of Washington's intelligence world turns his sights on the Iraq invasion. Reviewed by Douglas Farah
Sunday, June 6, 2004; Page BW03 A PRETEXT FOR WAR
9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse of America's Intelligence Agencies
By James Bamford
Doubleday. 420 pp. $26.95
As debate continues to rage about the flaws in the American occupation of Iraq, James Bamford takes a fresh look at the run-up to the 2003 conflict, to examine how pre-war intelligence spurred the onset of war. Bamford, author of two earlier investigative studies of the National Security Agency, The Puzzle Palace and Body of Secrets, sets out in A Pretext for War to show that key figures in the Bush administration -- national security adviser Richard Perle, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas J. Feith -- locked in a plan to wage war in Iraq well before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. He charges that these four leading hawks manipulated the CIA, Defense Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency in a desperate attempt to justify a regime change in Iraq that they had been strategizing to bring about for years. He suggests further that the administration's rush to war grew out of a key and chronic blind spot in American policy circles: the failure to recognize the central role of the Palestinian cause in igniting Arab rage against the United States.
Bamford makes this case largely in the last third of his book. He uses the first two-thirds to meticulously lay out how the Sept. 11 aircraft were hijacked, the numerous intelligence and logistical failures that led to al Qaeda's successful strike and the reaction to the attacks in official Washington. Highly readable and well-researched, this account offers new insights into how the Sept. 11 hijackings occurred, while also showing how terribly ill-equipped and unprepared our defense systems were to deal with these kinds of attacks.
Other writers have also chronicled the overall failures and some of the panic, but Bamford found much new information that underscores just how chaotic and dangerous things really were in Sept. 11's immediate aftermath. For example, Bamford notes that two Air National Guard jets were scramble-ready and perhaps could have intercepted at least one of the suicide airliners, yet were assigned that day to unarmed bomb practice. Even if they had scrambled earlier, however, the fighter jets had no weapons to shoot down the hijacked jets. In fact, Bamford says, "on September 11, 2001, the entire United States mainland was protected by just fourteen planes spread out over seven bases."
Bamford goes on to track the reactions to the attack inside the NSA and CIA and supplies a chronology detailing when various senior administration officials were notified. For example, CIA director George Tenet received no word until well after the second aircraft had crashed into the south tower of the World Trade Center. The top military commanders were just as out of touch. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Henry Shelton, was en route to Europe, and his deputy, Gen. Richard Myers, was on Capitol Hill. "Through it all, the general in charge of the country's military was completely ignorant of the fact that the United States was under its worst attack in nearly two centuries," Bamford writes. "Nor did he know that about forty minutes earlier, the President had decided to declare war."
Bamford dislikes President Bush intensely and makes little effort to hide it. He re-examines the president's actions on Sept. 11, from when he heard of the attacks to his flight across the country before finally returning to Washington, and concludes that "disturbingly, the story George W. Bush often tells of his learning of the attacks cannot possibly be true." He reaches this conclusion by chronicling the appearance of the first video snippets of the crashes on television and determining that the president could not have seen the footage at the time he claimed he did. He also strongly implies Bush was a coward for not returning immediately to Washington, D.C., contrasting his actions to those of Lyndon Johnson after the Kennedy assassination. (While Bush's decision not to return to Washington is debatable, to assume that it arose out of cowardice -- without any confirming testimony from people who would know -- seems overly harsh. The early moments of the attacks were chaotic -- and Washington itself was a target.) Bamford treads less familiar and more interesting ground when he describes the secret sites to which Bush, senior cabinet members and congressional leaders were taken, and the atmosphere inside. Again, others (notably Sen. Tom Daschle) have provided similar accounts, but by skillfully integrating these scenes with his own interviews, Bamford paints a vivid picture of the leadership of the free world bracing for an apocalypse.
In reviewing America's intelligence breakdowns, Bamford focuses mainly on material familiar to most readers from the Sept. 11 hearings: the lack of coordination among intelligence agencies, the lack of human intelligence on al Qaeda and a casual inattention to the al Qaeda threat despite CIA Director George Tenet's 1999 declaration of war on Osama bin Laden. But here, too, Bamford uncovers fresh material, in his scathing report on the workings of the Alec Station, the secret CIA unit dedicated solely to tracking bin Laden and al Qaeda. Bamford effectively makes the case that the group, constantly underfunded and understaffed, made little difference: "After four years and hundreds of millions of dollars, Alec Station had yet to recruit a single source within bin Laden's growing Afghanistan operation. It was more than embarrassing -- it was a scandal."
For Bamford, though, the crowning scandal was the long-incubating plan to force Saddam Hussein out of power by military force. Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Feith and other key members of this war faction -- nicknamed the Vulcans -- had long been laying the groundwork for an invasion of Iraq. Administration insiders such as Richard Clarke and Paul O'Neill have already made influential versions of this case in their recently published books, and Bamford relies on Clarke's own account of the immediate post-Sept. 11 security meetings to underline the depth of the administration's Iraq fixation.
Bamford traces the personal relations among the key players spanning several decades. Again he adds some interesting bits to the existing record: e.g., the Pentagon's distrust of the CIA's intelligence; internal turf wars among the CIA, the Pentagon, the State Department and the office of Vice President Dick Cheney over what kind of intelligence was used in planning for Iraq; and the Pentagon's establishment of separate intelligence shops to counter the CIA and DIA. Bamford also notes that it was the Vulcans Perle and Feith, together with senior State Department adviser David Wormser, who drafted the basic outlines of Bush's plan to oust Saddam, including the doctrine of preemption, back in the mid-1990s, when they were advising Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Netanyahu rejected the plan, which gathered dust until Bush's election, when the group returned to the corridors of power. Bamford says that the new fortunes of Perle, Feith and Wormser, together with Bush's personal determination to repay Saddam for his attempt to kill Bush's father, were instrumental in America's decision to go to war.
A Pretext for War suffers from some factual slips -- at one point, for instance, identifying Abram N. Shulsky as head of the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans rather than William Luti. There are several repeated paragraphs and a frustratingly incomplete index -- all indications of a too hasty rush to publish.
However, Bamford does add to the public record in significant ways. His deconstruction of the role played by Ahmed Chalabi in feeding false information on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction to U.S. intelligence agencies and reporters, especially Judith Miller at the New York Times, is especially timely. Chalabi has recently fallen from grace, and the New York Times is reviewing its reporting on WMD, publicly admitting it should have been more skeptical of some of its sources. The story of "Curveball," an Iraqi defector who provided information that was given great credence by both Pentagon intelligence and the national news media only to be debunked, is also instructive.
On balance, Bamford does a superb job of laying out and tying together threads of the Sept. 11 intelligence failures and their ongoing aftermath, using original research, the public record and a light, fast-paced writing touch. We have of course heard the brunt of Bamford's polemic indictment of Bush and the Vulcans before: that the United States invaded Iraq as the result of a "massive disinformation campaign, abetted by a lazy and timid press." Readers may find such claims a bit sweeping, but A Pretext for War nonetheless provides a useful, new and sobering stream of information -- especially as the fallout from the Vulcans' crusade looms as a potentially decisive issue in a crucial election year. ?
Douglas Farah, on leave from The Washington Post, is consulting on intelligence reform and armed groups. He recently wrote "Blood From Stones: The Secret Financial Network of Terror." | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Wed Jun 16, 2004 10:25 am Post subject: Charleston paper weighs in with opinion: Hollings was right! |
| A Charleston paper weighs in with an opinion: Hollings was right!
Charleston (SC) Gazette
June 15, 2004
James Haught
# The ‘why’ for war remains unknown
MILLIONS of words are being written about the Iraq war, but hardly
anyone asks the fundamental, underlying, unanswered question: Why did
the Bush administration start it?
As Americans watch the sickening daily events, we really don’t know why
we got into this mess.
All the official reasons for the war turned out to be phony. Iraq didn’t
possess horror weapons, wasn’t in league with terrorists, wasn’t a
menace to America and wasn’t eager to welcome U.S. troops as liberators.
So why did President Bush order the attack? This should be the
number-one question of 2004, yet it isn’t heard in the election
campaign.
About half of Americans still support Bush’s war. Maybe they don’t even
wonder about the cause. If asked, many of them probably would say the
war was necessary because of the 9/11 suicide assault. But that’s
irrational. No Iraqis were among the self-destroying “holy warriors” of
Sept. 11, 2001. Nearly all of them were Saudis — yet the White House
wouldn’t have dreamed of attacking Saudi Arabia.
Early in the war, some cynical Americans speculated that Bush’s secret
motive was to gain control over Iraq’s oil — or to finish his father’s
old vendetta against Saddam Hussein — or to establish U.S. global
military sway, as advocated by far-right hawks in the Project for a New
American Century. But those allegations seem largely forgotten now.
Nobody seriously thinks it was started to give fat contracts to
Halliburton.
A couple of weeks ago, longtime Sen. Ernest “Fritz” Hollings, D-S.C.,
challenged his colleagues to explain why America is at war — but he got
no comprehensible answer.
Hollings had stirred up a hornets’ nest by contending that Bush ordered
the invasion partly to serve interests of Israel and “to take the Jewish
vote from the Democrats.” In a commentary published by several Southern
newspapers last month, Hollings noted that all of Bush’s purported
reasons for the war were false.
“With Iraq no threat, why invade a sovereign country?” the senator
wrote. “The answer: President Bush’s policy to secure Israel.”
Hollings pointed out that Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Charles
Krauthammer and other key hawks in Bush’s clique spent many years
demanding a U.S. attack on Iraq, partly “to guarantee Israel’s
security.” Because of their influence, he said, Bush came into office
looking for an excuse to invade — and the 9/11 tragedy provided it.
“You don’t come to town and announce your Israel policy is to invade
Iraq,” the senator said, so other pretexts were given for the war.
Ironically, he said, Bush’s war actually is creating more terrorism,
thus worsening danger to Israel.
Immediately after the commentary was published, Hollings was denounced
as anti-Semitic, even by fellow senators. In response, he gave a long,
extemporaneous, May 20 floor speech denying any prejudice, and asking:
“I challenge any one of the other 99 senators to tell us why we are in
Iraq? ... Everybody knows it is because we want to secure our friend,
Israel.”
Hollings said he mistakenly supported the 2002 resolution authorizing an
attack on Iraq. When Bush began talking about Iraq’s secret nuclear
program, he said, he assumed that Israeli agents had detected evidence
of such weaponry and had asked the White House to “knock it out for
them. That is why I voted for it. I got misled.”
Last month, retired Marine Gen. Anthony Zinni made similar allegations
on “60 Minutes.” He said “everybody I talk to in Washington” knows that
Bush’s far-right advisers wanted to invade Iraq to strengthen Israel’s
position in the Mideast. Zinni said that, likewise, “I was called
anti-Semitic.”
The Village Voice says White House aides meet with leaders of a
Pentecostal (talking in tongues) lobby that wants Israel to reign over
biblical territory, to fulfill prophecies for the return of Jesus.
Meanwhile, some observers think Bush’s simplistic religion, which brands
opponents as “evil,” was a factor in his war. In his news conference
last month, he declared that “freedom is the Almighty’s gift to every
man and woman in the world, and as the greatest power on the face of the
Earth, we have an obligation to help spread that freedom.” In other
words, he thinks he carried out God’s will by ending dictatorship in
Iraq.
Earlier, Bush told biographer Bob Woodward that he didn’t consult his
earthly father about launching the war — “there’s a higher father that I
appeal to.” Fringe candidate Ralph Nader calls Bush a “Messianic
militarist” — a holy warrior.
Last year, Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas met with Bush, and
said afterward that the American president told him: “God told me to
strike at al-Qaida, and I struck them, and then He instructed me to
strike at Saddam, which I did.” The White House later denied this
statement. Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen feigned
disappointment about the denial, saying “the purported instructions from
God remain about the only explanation for some of what Bush has done.”
From all of this, can anyone fathom the real reason why 826 young
Americans and thousands of Iraqis have been killed, and a chaotic mess
has been created? If you can see a logical explanation, I wish you’d
spell it out for me.
Haught is the Gazette’s editor. | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Thu Jun 17, 2004 5:01 am Post subject: One Expert's Verdict: The CIA Caved Under Pressure |
| http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1101040614-646366,00.html
Monday, Jun. 14, 2004
One Expert's Verdict: The CIA Caved Under Pressure
By MICHAEL DUFFY/WASHINGTON
The CIA that George Tenet leaves behind next month is a shadow of its imaginary self, a butt of jokes rather than the envy of the world. It is an agency that has become self-protective and bureaucratic; it is too reliant on gadgets rather than spies to steal secrets. Sometimes the CIA has simply been too blind to see what is hiding in plain sight. Tenet restored the agency's morale, but he leaves behind a string of spectacular intelligence failures. And that may not be the worst of it. In his new book A Pretext for War, intelligence expert James Bamford alleges that the CIA not only failed to detect and deter the secret army of Muslim extremists gathering over the horizon in the late 1990s but also failed to take action when a group of Administration hard-liners, backed by the Pentagon chief and Vice President Dick Cheney, began to advance the case for war with Iraq in secret using data the CIA widely believed weren't supportable or were just plain false. Instead of fighting back, Bamford argues, the CIA for the most part rolled over and went along. The result was a war sold largely on a fiction, confected from unchecked rumor and biased informants.A Pretext for War is probably the best one-volume companion to the harrowing events in the war on terrorism since 1996, chiefly because it focuses on the most difficult to pierce subject: the hidden machinery of U.S. intelligence. Bamford is a veteran chronicler of the spy world whose The Puzzle Palace, published in 1982, is still considered the classic account of the mysterious National Security Agency (NSA), which electronically snoops on friends and enemies overseas. His account of 9/11 and its aftermath is studded with new details, including some about the undisclosed location known as Site R, an underground bunker on the Maryland-Pennsylvania border where the Vice President spent much of his time in 2001. Deep under Raven Rock Mountain, Site R "is a secret world of five buildings, each three stories tall, computer filled caverns and a subterranean water reservoir." It is just 7 miles from Camp David. Bamford maintains that before 9/11, the U.S.'s entire spook network was pretty much out to lunch. It was a community that had done its job well in the cold war and was looking for a reason to exist. By the late 1990s the NSA was becoming obsolete, unable to keep up with the pace of technological change. The NSA netted millions more conversations at its worldwide listening posts than it could translate or interpret. The agency spent billions to eavesdrop on chatter overseas that moved by satellite — only to see the world move to harder-to-steal digitized cellular, e-mail and instant-messaging communications. Meanwhile, at the NSA's sprawling Fort Meade, Md., campus, the agency's director could not send an email to all the NSA's 38,000 employees. Why? The NSA had 68 separate e-mail systems. Things were not much better at the CIA. In a devastating chronology, Bamford reports that even as late as 2000, the agency was stuck in an old cold war way of doing things — training its agents, recruiting spies overseas and keeping headquarters happy. One agent explains that CIA recruiting overseas was about as rigorous as going to an opening-night mixer at a Las Vegas convention: American agents overseas sometimes competed with one another to see who could collect the most business cards at official receptions in foreign capitals. Then they would return to their embassy to determine the night's winner. Each card, the agents told themselves, represented a potential spy for the U.S. In fact, the agent said, "none of these people had anything useful ... It was just numbers. It's all quantity."With tradecraft like that, it is little wonder the CIA "never once even tried to infiltrate" al-Qaeda, according to Bamford. He says agents working at the CIA's vaunted Alec station, the shop inside the agency responsible for tracking and killing Osama bin Laden, seemed more interested in flying to Afghanistan and Paris to meet with various Afghan warlords who promised to provide details of bin Laden's whereabouts in exchange for bags full of cash. Bamford asserts that the CIA's Afghan assets never came through with very much on the Saudi terrorist, but the CIA kept them on the dole anyway. About the only thing going well was the 50-year war between the CIA and the FBI. Alec station's chiefs were so turf conscious about which agency had "the lead" in the hunt for bin Laden that they routinely left their FBI counterparts in the dark about what they were learning from overseas — a habit that turned out to be a fatal error. Sloppy surveillance permitted two of the hijackers to elude the CIA as early as January 2000, but then the agency repeatedly failed to inform the FBI or half a dozen other government officers who could have assisted in the hunt. Indeed, at the CIA, keister covering was in full swing long before the attacks of 9/11. In January 2000 the head of Alec station told his bosses he still had the two men under surveillance when in fact he had lost them in Bangkok. That bureaucratic chore completed, Alec station then dropped its chase altogether. It would be more than a year before a conscientious FBI agent assigned to the CIA re-examined the evidence and realized how badly the agency had blundered. The two names were finally given to the State Department on Aug. 23, 2001.But the intelligence community's shaky performance also made the agency vulnerable to another kind of attack: the one mounted by a group of hard-line neoconservatives who took over at the Pentagon and in the Vice President's office when Bush became President. Long suspicious of the CIA if not openly hostile to it, the neocons came into power asserting internally that the agency couldn't shoot straight and therefore its judgments couldn't be trusted. The Bush hard-liners had long believed that stability could come to the Middle Eastand Israel — only if Saddam Hussein was overthrown and Iraq converted into a stable democracy. Led by Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, they were installed at various national-security choke points in the government, and nothing moved without their O.K. Bamford comes very close to stating that the hard-liners were wittingly or unwittingly acting as agents of Israel's hard-line Likud Party, which believed Israel should operate with impunity in the region and dictate terms to its neighbors. Such a world view, Bamford argues, was simply repotted by the hard-liners into U.S. foreign policy in the early Bush years, with the war in Iraq as its ultimate goal. Bamford asserts that the backgrounds, political philosophies and experiences of many of the hard-liners helped to hardwire the pro-Israel mind-set in the Bush inner circle and suggests that Washington mistook Israel's interests for its own when it pre-emptively invaded Iraq last year. The result was a war built on sand — and a CIA that lacked the will to take on its masters. Douglas Feith, a senior Pentagon official, set up several secret offices in the Pentagon that received data from Israel's own intelligence teams and coordinated its findings with them, partly as a way to get around CIA caution in the region. Bamford reveals that the original source of the spurious allegation that Saddam harbored "mobile biological-weapons labs" did not come from the brother of a top aide to Ahmad Chalabi whose code name was Curveball, but from an Israeli tip going back to 1994. Bamford quotes anonymous CIA agents who say that they suspected that much of the hard-liners' intelligence on weapons of mass destruction (WMD) was bogus but there was pressure from within and without to shut up about it. Bamford implies that Tenet, the ultimate staff guy, is partly to blame for this failure of nerve. When Secretary of State Colin Powell was putting together his now discredited speech to the U.N. last year about Saddam's WMD program, he stood virtually alone against the hard-liners, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and her deputy Stephen Hadley, all of whom seemed keen to pump up the Secretary's talking points. Cheney's staff handed Powell a 50-page draft of allegations; the Secretary rejected most of them as unsupportable, with the hard-liners, Rice and even Tenet fighting him every step of the way during run-through sessions at CIA headquarters. And as it turned out, Powell didn't fight hard enough. Could Tenet have stopped the rush to war? Bamford suggests he could have. "Off on the sidelines, George Tenet was one of the few who knew the truth," he writes, adding that Tenet preferred to work behind the scenes on minor disagreements about the data "instead of speaking out" against the grand scheme. That's a harsh indictment of the man who kept America's secrets under two Presidents. But one of Tenet's colleagues was even less generous, saying simply, "We caved." | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Thu Jun 17, 2004 5:28 am Post subject: Billmon re Time on Israeli Connection |
| Subj: Billmon re Time on Israeli connection
Date: 6/16/04 9:53:30 PM Pacific Daylight Time
From: jblankfort@earthlink.net
Sent from the Internet (Details)
June 14, 2004 http://billmon.org/
Time to Slime Time?
I'm guessing Time magazine is going to get a white-hot blast from the right-wing wind tunnel just about any, well, time now. Here's a paragraph from Michael Duffy's review of James Bamford's new book, A Pretext for War, that's just about guaranteed to put the National Review and the Anti-Defamation League on the warpath:
The Bush hard-liners had long believed that stability could come to the Middle East and Israel — only if Saddam Hussein was overthrown and Iraq converted into a stable democracy. Led by Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, they were installed at various national-security choke points in the government, and nothing moved without their O.K. Bamford comes very close to stating that the hard-liners were wittingly or unwittingly acting as agents of Israel's hard-line Likud Party, which believed Israel should operate with impunity in the region and dictate terms to its neighbors. Such a world view, Bamford argues, was simply repotted by the hard-liners into U.S. foreign policy in the early Bush years, with the war in Iraq as its ultimate goal. Bamford asserts that the backgrounds, political philosophies and experiences of many of the hard-liners helped to hardwire the pro-Israel mind-set in the Bush inner circle and suggests that Washington mistook Israel's interests for its own when it pre-emptively invaded Iraq last year. This isn't going to be pretty - even if Time was only reporting what Bamford wrote, and even though truth is an absolute defense, even in blood libel cases. A free cyberdrink to the first Whiskey Bar patron who produces a link to an article or press release claiming that Duffy and/or Time is anti-Semitic. | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Thu Jun 17, 2004 4:40 pm Post subject: Consequential Lies |
| TomPaine.com
June 16, 2004
Consequential Lies
By Ray McGovern
The 9/11 commission has found "no credible evidence" of an Iraq/Al Qaeda link. But that doesn't mean Bush's spin machine will be put out to pasture. In fact, Bush and Cheney gave speeches earlier this week timed to drive the connections story home once again. But beyond perpetuating election-boosting misinformation among the American people, such creativity with the truth has much more frightening consequences. Former CIA analyst Ray McGovern explains.
As the notion evaporates that the United States could implant democracy in Iraq at gunpoint or that “weapons of mass destruction” will ever be found, the Bush administration has resurrected the argument that Saddam Hussein had longstanding ties to Al Qaeda.
Speeches by President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney earlier this week were timed to pre-empt and cast doubt on a 9/11 commission finding released on Wednesday that there is “no credible evidence that Iraq and Al Qaeda cooperated on attacks against the United States.”
The all-too-familiar notion fostered by Bush and Cheney, however, is that Iraq was indeed involved in the attacks of 9/11, even though this is as spurious as the claim about WMD. Spurious or not, it has been extremely effective in playing on the trauma of 9/11 to whip up support for war on Iraq. A year ago 69 percent of Americans believed that Iraq was largely responsible for 9/11, and polls this spring show that a majority still believe this to be the case.
Successful as its PR approach on this key issue has been in rallying support for the war, the administration is not about to cede the field to the commission. A “senior administration official” has already reacted to the commission report, insisting, “We stand by what (Secretary of State) Powell and (CIA Director) Tenet have said" on links between Iraq and Al Qaeda.
With violence steadily increasing in Iraq and the 9/11 commission hearings about to resume, the White House spin machine shifted into a tried and tested gear—a technique described as “most brilliant” by Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels: “It must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over.”
The refrain struck up again on Monday with Cheney claiming that Saddam Hussein had “long established ties” with Al Qaeda. Cheney offered no details, but the president elaborated the following day, citing “evidence” on ties between Iraq and “Al Qaeda operative” Abu Musab al-Zarqawi—evidence the CIA considers inconclusive at best. George Tenet told the Senate in February that, although Zarqawi had had contacts with Al Qaeda, he appeared to be “autonomous,” and U.S. officials now say it has become increasingly clear that Zarqawi was operating independently.
As for 9/11, never mind the admission the president tucked into an impromptu interview on Sept. 17, 2003: “We’ve had no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with September 11th.” That admission received little play in the mainstream press, and it will be interesting to see if anyone remembers it this time around. If need be, it can be dusted off as proof that the president never held Saddam Hussein directly responsible for 9/11, just as the administration has argued (erroneously) that it never said an attack from Iraq was “imminent.”
Consequential Lies...
The continual spinning—not only about cosmic issues like Iraqi ties to Al Qaeda and WMD but also more limited episodes like the “Jessica Lynch Story”—constitutes what might be called consequential lies, not only for what they do to U.S. credibility, but also for the effect that have day to day on the ground in Iraq.
Consider the explanation offered, with no hint of shame, by U.S. Army Corporal Michael Richardson in Iraq to the London Evening Standard in June 2003:
“There was no dilemma when it came to shooting people…I just pulled the trigger…If they were there, they were enemy, whether in uniform or not…There’s a picture of the World Trade Center hanging up by my bed and I keep one in my flak jacket. Every time I feel sorry for these people I look at that. I think, they hit us at home and now it’s our turn. I don’t want to say it’s payback but, you know, it’s pretty much payback.”
The lies about WMD have been no less consequential. Consider Iraqi Gen. Amir Saadi, a British-educated chemist and erstwhile liaison between the Iraqi government and UN weapons inspectors. He was the first of the 55 “most wanted” senior officials to surrender. He did so on April 12, 2003, and took pains to ensure that German TV filmed his surrender lest he disappear down the memory hole. Yet he has been in solitary confinement ever since.
According to Pentagon and intelligence officials, Charles Duelfer, who took over from David Kay as head of the group still searching for WMD believes that Saadi “has not fully answered questions.” Rather, it seems to be a case of coming up with the “wrong” answer.
Saadi has been consistent in telling UN and U.S. inspectors that Iraq’s WMD were destroyed in 1991. David Albright, president of the DC-based Institute for Science and International Security—which has longstanding relationships with Iraqi scientists—suggests that Saadi has not been released because his release would provide further acknowledgment that Iraq did not have such weapons after 1991.
Half-Truths…
What Saadi has been saying is what Saddam’s son-in-law, Hussein Kamel, told us when he defected in 1995. Everyone from Bush and Cheney on down gave Kamel—who spent 10 years running Iraq’s nuclear, chemical, biological, and missile development programs—fulsome praise for the intelligence windfall he provided about previously unknown weaponry. But no U.S. official told the rest of the story—i. e., that Kamel said that at his order all such weapons were destroyed in 1991, a claim now confirmed by documentary evidence (not to mention the conspicuous absence of WMD).
Benjamin Franklin said, “Half a truth is often a great lie.”
Just ask 19-year-old Abdullah Mohammed Abdulrazzaq, captured by U.S. troops at 2:30 one morning last September in the Baghdad apartment he shared with his widowed mother. Abdulrazzaq was hooded, handcuffed, tortured with electricity and shuttled back and forth among several prisons in Iraq, including Abu Graib. What were his interrogators most interested in learning from this 19-year-old? What he could tell them about the weapons of mass destruction. And as we know, Abdulazzaq’s case is far from unusual.
…and Little Lies
These too have consequences. Remember the unproven allegation about Jessica Lynch being raped? Around midnight on May 12, 2003, Master Sgt. Lisa Girman and three other Army MPs decided to retaliate by abusing Iraqi prisoners at Camp Bucca in southern Iraq, according to a report by Lt. Col. Jerry Phillabaum, commander of her MP battalion. Phillabaum wrote that Girman got it into her head that the rapist might be among the prisoners she was guarding, and decided to exact what he termed “vigilante justice.”
The inference from the disclosures of the past few weeks that the Bush administration apparently paged through the telephone books to find lawyers willing to justify torture and abuse is outrageous enough. It is equally sobering to reflect on the fact that meretricious rhetoric from our highest officials can produce the same effect.
Ray McGovern is co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity. He had a 27-year career as a CIA analyst from 1964 to 1990.
Miami Herald
June 7, 2004
Taking the fall for the disaster in Iraq
BY RAY McGOVERN
You could see what was in the works for CIA Director George Tenet by the way Bush administration officials promoted Bob Woodward's Plan of Attack. Woodward, playing the role of court historian, portrays President Bush as dissatisfied after a briefing by Tenet and his deputy on weapons of mass destruction in late 2002.
''This is the best we've got?'' asks Bush.
Tenet reportedly assured Bush that it was ''a slam-dunk case'' that Iraq had such weapons, and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, who was present, has confirmed Woodward's account. This provides useful yarn for White House spinners attributing the debacle in Iraq to faulty intelligence and absolving Bush. The slam-dunker is left hanging on the rim of the basket twisting in the wind, so to speak, until he falls of his own weight.
You would not know from Woodward's book that the Oct. 1, 2002, National Intelligence Estimate on Iraqi WMD -- used with Congress to hype the threat -- was written several months after the administration decided to make war on Iraq.
That decision had little to do with such weapons. It had very much to do with the imperative seen by Bush's neoconservative advisors to use military force to gain dominant influence over oil-rich Iraq and to eliminate any possible threat to Israel's security.
Secretary of State Colin Powell has admitted that the target audience for the hyped-up NIE was Congress. That estimate and its various drafts formed the centerpiece of the successful campaign to persuade our elected representatives to relinquish to the executive the war-making power vested solely in them by the framers of the Constitution.
Always eager to please, Tenet put the intelligence community to work in support of his masters' effort to play fast and loose with the Constitution. Virtually all of the NIE's conclusions have since been proven wrong. But no matter; it achieved its primary purpose.
Sadly, this is what happens when a CIA director lets himself become ''part of the team'' in the way that the president's political advisors are part of the team. Such behavior is antithetical to the director's statutory duty to tell the emperor when he is wearing no clothes. In an unguarded moment a few months ago, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich -- like Vice President Dick Cheney a frequent visitor to CIA headquarters -- told the press, ``George Tenet is so grateful to the president (presumably for not firing him on Sept. 12, 2001) that he will do anything for him.''
''Anything'' now includes taking the fall for the policy and human disaster of Iraq. As things there go from worse to worse, even some Republican leaders are saying that those responsible must be held to account.
Tenet is the first sacrificial lamb because -- team player that he is -- he can be counted upon to set a good example by taking his ''superb'' performance appraisal and leaving quietly -- burning no bridges. And when in the coming weeks the Senate Intelligence Committee and the 9/11 Commission issue reports strongly critical of the performance of U.S. intelligence, administration spokespersons will stop the buck at Tenet's desk, saying, ``Yes, it was a bad show, but now he's gone.''
This will blow convenient smoke over the actual reasons for the war and protect its neoconservative authors.
For Tenet, though, it renders a certain poetic justice, because the unforgivable sin in intelligence analysis is telling policymakers what you think they want to hear -- in the case of Iraq, justifying with cooked ''intelligence'' what they have already decided to do.
Sycophancy has no place in intelligence work -- and especially not on issues of war and peace.
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Ray McGovern was a CIA analyst for 27 years and is the author of “A Compromised CIA: What Can Be Done?” in Patriotism, Democracy and Common Sense, to be published this summer by the Eisenhower Foundation. | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Sun Jun 20, 2004 11:15 am Post subject: THE ROAD TO WAR |
| http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/ae/books/reviews/2632805
June 18, 2004, 10:36AM
THE ROAD TO WAR
James Bamford aims big guns at Bush administration over U.S. role in Iraq
By JAMES D. FAIRBANKS
A PRETEXT FOR WAR:
9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse
of America's Intelligence Agencies.
By James Bamford.
Doubleday, 420 pp. $26.95.
THIS book's title leaves no doubt as to its major thesis. Bamford is one of the growing number of critics who believe the Bush administration was determined to get rid of Saddam Hussein long before the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and that it used these attacks as a pretext for the war in Iraq.
He also agrees with those who charge that the invasion of Iraq diverted resources that should have been used in the pursuit of al-Qaida, inflamed Muslim anger against the United States and increased support for al-Qaida. Osama bin Laden's goal in attacking Americans, according to Bamford, was always to provoke us to strike back and "personally wage the battle against the Muslims."
The author's previous books, The Puzzle Palace and Body of Secrets, provided detailed examinations of the National Security Agency, the government's largest and most secretive spy agency. As a former Naval Security Group communications technician, Bamford apparently has good contacts within the intelligence community, though it is sometimes difficult to know how much weight to place on information that comes from unnamed intelligence officials.
Several of those interviewed by Bamford acknowledged that American defenses had never anticipated and were unprepared for the kind of attack launched Sept. 11, 2001. The first section of this book details the confusion that existed throughout the national government in the hours immediately after the first plane struck the World Trade Center.
Virtually the entire nuclear command structure would eventually be activated, but in the first several hours after the attack many of the nation's leaders knew less about what had happened than ordinary citizens watching television news. Bamford writes that the network news programs were the best source of information because the intelligence community was busy emptying its buildings and running for cover.
Bamford's portrait of the president is not flattering. He describes a befuddled chief executive "strangely uninterested in further information" when first told of the attack. He writes that in one of the most critical moments in American history the country had essentially become leaderless.
Bamford notes, perhaps a bit unfairly, the stark contrast between the actions of George W. Bush after 9/11 and Lyndon Johnson after the assassination of President Kennedy. Despite concerns that the assassination might be part of a larger conspiracy to topple the American government, Johnson insisted on flying straight back to Washington to reassure the nation and calm its fears. Bush made a secret flight to an underground bunker at Offutt Air Force Base near Omaha, Neb., and remained hidden from the American public for most of the day.
Part two of the book is a critique of the many intelligence failings that allowed the 9/11 attacks to occur. Departmental jealousies may have kept the CIA from passing on intelligence when one of the hijackers, a known al-Qaida operative, arrived in New York. Bamford quotes an unnamed FBI official as charging that the CIA officials responsible have "blood on their hands ... three thousand deaths on their hands."
As testimony before the Sept. 11 Commission later revealed, al-Qaida had never tried to hide the fact that it was at war with America. Bamford gives a detailed account of the 1996 Israeli attack on a refugee camp at Qana in southern Lebanon, an event little noted in the American press but denounced by the rest of world and described here as the "match lighting the fuse that would eventually lead to the World Trade Center."
In the third and most controversial section of the book (titled "Deception"), Bamford argues that the Bush administration engaged in a systematic effort to mislead both Congress and the public regarding the threat posed by Iraq and its relationship to al-Qaida.
His most startling charge is not that the administration misled the nation regarding the threat posed by Iraq but that the administration's grand design for the Middle East was based on a plan originally prepared for the Israeli government.
According to Bamford, the basic blueprint for the administration's Middle East policy had been drawn up in the mid-1990s by Richard Perle, Douglas Feith and David Wurmser, three neoconservatives who would be named to influential positions in the Bush administration.
Described as a kind of "American privy council" to former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the three proposed what they called a "Clean Break" plan, which involved getting the United States to pull out of the peace negotiations in order to let "Israel take care of the Palestinians as it saw fit." Under the "Clean Break" plan, Israel would launch pre-emptive attacks against its major Arab enemies and replace Saddam Hussein with a puppet leader friendly to Israel.
Bamford records that Netanyahu wisely rejected the plan but that the Perle group found a more receptive audience for their recommendations inside the Bush administration. The fact that several of the key players most aggressively pushing the Iraqi war had originally outlined it for the benefit of another country raises "the most troubling conflict of interest questions," he writes.
A possible conflict of interest is but one of many troubling questions raised in A Pretext for War. Many of these questions are currently being pursued in Senate hearings and through other inquiries, so the final chapter in the story of America's first pre-emptive war is still to be written.
James D. Fairbanks teaches political science at the University of Houston-Downtown. | | | | Alpha | | | | Alpha | | | | Alpha | | | | | ©2002-2009 WarWithoutEnd.co.uk |
