| Author | Message | | Alpha | | Posted: Mon Mar 15, 2004 5:59 am Post subject: Pentagon Shadow Loses Some Mystique |
| http://www.washingtonpost.com
Pentagon Shadow Loses Some Mystique (JINSA/PNAC Zionist extremist Feith mentioned):
By Dana Priest
In February 2002, Christina Shelton, a career Defense Intelligence Agency analyst, was combing through old intelligence on Iraq when she stumbled upon a small paragraph in a CIA report from the mid-1990s that stopped her.
It recounted a contact between some Iraqis and al Qaeda that she had not seen mentioned in current CIA analysis, according to three defense officials who work with her. She spent the next couple of months digging through 12 years of intelligence reports on Iraq and produced a briefing on alleged contacts Shelton felt had been overlooked or underplayed by the CIA.
Her boss, Douglas J. Feith, undersecretary of defense for policy and the point man on Iraq, was so impressed that he set up a briefing for Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, who was so impressed he asked her to brief CIA Director George J. Tenet in August 2002. By summer's end, Shelton had also briefed deputy national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley and Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby.
Shelton's analysis, and the White House briefings that resulted, are new details about a small group of Pentagon analysts whose work has cast a large shadow of suspicion and controversy as Congress investigates how the administration used intelligence before the Iraq war.
Congressional Democrats contend that two Pentagon shops -- the Office of Special Plans and the Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group -- were established by Rumsfeld, Feith and other defense hawks expressly to bypass the CIA and other intelligence agencies. They argue that the offices supplied the administration with information, most of it discredited by the regular intelligence community, that President Bush, Cheney and others used to exaggerate the Iraqi threat.
But interviews with senior defense officials, White House and CIA officials, congressional sources and others yield a different portrait of the work done by the two Pentagon offices.
Neither the House nor Senate intelligence committees, for example, which have been investigating prewar intelligence for eight months, have found support for allegations that Pentagon analysts went out and collected their own intelligence, congressional officials from both parties say. Nor have investigators found that the Pentagon analysis about Iraq significantly shaped the case the administration made for going to war.
At the same time, the Pentagon operation was created, at least in part, to provide a more hard-line alternative to the official intelligence, according to interviews with current and former defense and intelligence officials. The two offices, overseen by Feith, concluded that Saddam Hussein's Iraq and al Qaeda were much more closely and conclusively linked than the intelligence community believed.
In this sense, the offices functioned as a pale version of the secret "Team B" analysis done by administration conservatives in the mid-1970s, who concluded the intelligence community was underplaying the Soviet military threat. Rumsfeld, in particular, has a history of skepticism about the intelligence community's analysis, including assessments of the former Soviet Union's military ability and of threats posed by ballistic missiles from North Korea and other countries.
Rumsfeld's known views -- and his insistence before the war that overthrowing Hussein was part of the war on terrorism -- only enhanced suspicion about the aims and role played by Feith's offices.
Sen. Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.), a member of the intelligence panel, charged that Feith's work "reportedly involved the review, analysis and promulgation of intelligence outside of the U.S. intelligence community."
Levin pressed Tenet on Tuesday before the Senate Armed Services Committee: "Is it standard operating procedure for an intelligence analysis such as that to be presented at the NSC [National Security Council] and the office of the vice president without you being part of the presentation? Is that typical?"
"My experience is that people come in and may present those kinds of briefings on their views of intelligence," responded Tenet, who said he had not known about the briefings at the time. "But I have to tell you, senator, I'm the president's chief intelligence officer; I have the definitive view about these subjects. From my perspective, it is my view that prevails."
Hussein's Role
Feith, who worked on the NSC staff in the Reagan administration, is a well-known conservative voice on Israel policy who once urged the Israeli prime minister to repudiate the Oslo peace accords. His views are a source of tension between him and foreign policy officials at the State Department and elsewhere who advocate concessions be made by Palestinians and Israel to achieve a peace settlement.
No sooner had Bush announced that the United States was at war on terrorism than it became Feith's job to come up with a strategy for executing such a war.
"We said to ourselves, 'We are at war with an international terrorist network that includes organizations, state supporters and nonstate supporters. What does that mean to be at war with a network?' " Feith said in an interview.
But Feith felt he needed to bring on help in the Pentagon for another reason, too, said four other senior current and former Pentagon civilians: the belief that the CIA and other intelligence agencies dangerously undervalued threats to U.S. interests.
"The strategic thinking was the Middle East is going down the tubes. It's getting worse, not better," said one former senior Pentagon official who worked closely with Feith's offices. "I don't think we thought there was objective evidence that could be got from CIA, DIA, INR," he added, referring to the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon's main intelligence office, and the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research.
Feith's office worked not only on "how to fight Saddam Hussein but also how to fight the NSC, the State Department and the intelligence community," which were not convinced of Hussein's involvement in terrorism, said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
Feith set up the first of his two shops, the Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group, to "study al Qaeda worldwide suppliers, chokepoints, vulnerabilities and recommend strategies for rendering terrorist networks ineffective," according to a January 2002 document sent to DIA.
The group never grew larger than two people, said Feith and William J. Luti, who was director of the Office of Special Plans and deputy undersecretary of defense for Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs.
The evaluation group's largest project was what one participant called a "sociometric diagram" of links between terrorist organizations and their supporters around the world, mostly focused on al Qaeda, the Islamic Resistance Movement (or Hamas), Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad. It was meant to challenge the "conventional wisdom," said one senior defense official, that terrorist groups did not work together.
It looked "like a college term paper," said one senior Pentagon official who saw the analysis. It was hundreds of connecting lines and dots footnoted with binders filled with signals intelligence, human source reporting and even thirdhand intelligence accounts of personal meetings between terrorists.
One of its key and most controversial findings was that there was a connection between secular states and fundamentalist Islamic terrorist groups such as al Qaeda.
If anything, the analysis reinforced the view of top Pentagon officials, including Rumsfeld, Deputy Secretary Paul N. Wolfowitz and Feith, that Hussein's Iraq had worrisome contacts with al Qaeda over the last decade that could only be expected to grow.
The evaluation group's other job was to read through the huge, daily stream of intelligence reporting on terrorism and "highlight things of interest to Feith," said one official involved in the process. "We were looking for connections" between terrorist groups.
From time to time, senior defense officials called bits of intelligence to the attention of the White House, they said.
Feith said the worldwide threat study itself never left the Pentagon. It helped inform the military strategy on the war on terrorism, but it was only one small input into that process, he said.
Mainly, the work of the evaluation group, Luti said, "went into the corporate memory."
'Very Helpful'
In the summer of 2002, Shelton, who had been working virtually on her own, was joined by Christopher Carney, a naval reservist and associate professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania. Together they completed their study on the links between al Qaeda and Iraq.
"It was interesting enough that I brought it to Secretary Rumsfeld because Secretary Rumsfeld is well known for being a particularly intelligent reader of intelligence," Feith said.
Rumsfeld told Feith, " 'Call George and tell him we have something for him to see,' " Feith said. On Aug. 15, 2002, a delegation from Pentagon was buzzed through the guard station at CIA headquarters for the Tenet meeting. Shelton and Carney were the briefers; Feith and DIA Director Vice Adm. Lowell E. Jacoby accompanied them.
"The feedback that I got from George right after the briefing was, 'That was very helpful, thank you,' " Feith said.
CIA officials who sat in the briefing were nonplussed. The briefing was all "inductive analysis," according to one participant's notes from the meeting. The data pointed to "complicity and support," nothing more. "Much of it, we had discounted already," said another participant.
Tenet, according to agency officials, never incorporated any of the particulars from the briefing into his subsequent briefings to Congress. He asked some CIA analysts to get together with Shelton for further discussions.
Feith also arranged for Shelton to brief deputy national security adviser Hadley and Libby, Cheney's chief of staff.
"Her work did not change [Hadley's] thinking because his source for intelligence information are the products produced by the CIA," White House spokesman Sean McCormack said.
Nor did the briefing's content reach national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, Cheney or Bush, according to McCormack and Cheney spokesman Kevin Kellems. (In November 2003, a written version of her PowerPoint briefing, a version submitted to the intelligence committees investigating prewar intelligence, was published in the conservative Weekly Standard magazine.) The briefing openly challenged the prevailing CIA view that a religion-based terrorist, Osama bin Laden, would not seek to work with a secular state such as Iraq. "They were the ones who were intellectually unwilling to rethink this issue," one defense official said. "But they were not willing to shoot it down, either."
Whatever the agency really thought of Shelton's analysis, on Oct. 7, 2002, CIA Deputy Director John E. McLaughlin sent a letter to the Senate intelligence committee which, in a general sense, supported her conclusion: "We have solid evidence of senior level contacts between Iraq and al-Qa'ida going back a decade," it said. ". . . Growing indications of a relationship with al-Qa'ida, suggest that Baghdad's link to terrorists will increase, even absent U.S. military action."
A Nondescript Name
In August 2002, as the possibility of war with Iraq grew more likely, Luti's Office of Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs (NESA) was reorganized into the Office of Special Plans and NESA. Its job, according to Feith and Luti, was to propose strategies for the war on terrorism and Iraq.
It was given a nondescript name to purposefully hide the fact that, although the administration was publicly emphasizing diplomacy at the United Nations, the Pentagon was actively engaged in war planning and postwar planning.
The office staff never numbered more than 18, including reservists and people temporarily assigned. "There are stories that we had hundreds of people beavering away at this stuff," Feith said. ". . . They're just not true."
The office's job was to devise Pentagon policy recommendations for the larger interagency decision-making on every conceivable issue: troop deployment planning, coalition building, oil sector maintenance, war crimes prosecution, ministry organization, training an Iraqi police force, media strategy and "rewards, incentives and immunity" for former Baath Party supporters, according to a chart hanging in the special plans office, Room 1A939, several months ago.
The insular nature of Luti's office, and his outspoken personal conviction that the United States should remove Hussein, sparked rumors at the Pentagon that the office was collecting intelligence on its own, that it had hired its own intelligence agents. Even diehard Bush supporters, some of whom were critical of Feith's and Luti's management style, were repeating the rumors.
Yesterday, Rumsfeld addressed the controversy, saying critics of the Office of Special Plans had a "conspiratorial view of the world." Shelton's analysis, he emphasized, was shared with the CIA, and White House briefings were not unusual.
"We brief the president. We brief the vice president. We brief the [CIA director]. We brief the secretary of state. . . . That is not only not a bad thing, it's a good thing." | |  | | Alpha | | Posted: Thu Mar 18, 2004 7:45 am Post subject: The New Pentagon Papers and Carl Levin. |
| 'The Weekly Standard' is a neocon publication whose editior is PNAC Neocon Bill Kristol as the neocons must be getting nervous about Karen Kwiatkowski getting the truth out about their Israel Firster agenda:
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/003/849czxps.asp
From the Weekly Standard
The New Pentagon Papers and Carl Levin.
From the March 22, 2004 issue: Karen Kwiatkowski is Ted Kennedy's new expert.
03/22/2004, Volume 009, Issue 27
Teddy Kennedy's New Expert
The hottest foreign policy authority on the left is Karen Kwiatkowski, a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel who worked for several months in the Pentagon's Near East-South Asia office during the run-up to the war in Iraq. She was prominently cited by Senator Ted Kennedy in a March 5 address to the Council on Foreign Relations questioning the president's use of prewar intelligence on Iraq. Her work is getting the full promotional treatment from Salon and its new Washington Bureau chief Sidney Blumenthal, the former head conspiratorialist of the Clinton White House. Salon celebrated the opening of the new bureau by publishing a heavily hyped Kwiatkowski opus headlined "The new Pentagon papers."
Kwiatkowski claims she witnessed "neoconservative agenda bearers within [the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans] usurp measured and carefully considered assessment, and through suppression and distortion of intelligence analysis promulgate what were in fact falsehoods to both Congress and the executive office of the president."
Whether she's a reliable witness is something her new patrons may or may not have inquired into. But Kennedy staffers may want to Google her work for the antiwar libertarians at lewrockwell.com as well as the pseudonymous pieces she's acknowledged publishing on hackworth.com and Soldiers for the Truth when she was still in uniform and working at the Department of Defense. They will find no evidence of Kwiatkowski's reliability as a judge of "measured and carefully considered assessment." They will find plenty of evidence that their boss could use a new speechwriter.
Consider:
In her writings for Soldiers for the Truth , which ran under the heading "Deep Throat Returns," Kwiatkowski accused the Pentagon of planning to "build greater Zion" in the Middle East and decried the "Zionist political cult that has lassoed the E-Ring"--a reference to the Secretary of Defense and other high-ranking Pentagon officials.
In a later article on lewrockwell.com , written after she'd retired, Kwiatkowski conceded that these anonymous articles barely did justice to the frustration she'd experienced at the Pentagon: "Hard core anarchists and other purists might criticize me for not just throwing a few hand grenades over the office dividers and letting the chips fall where they may. But by this time I had already submitted my retirement request, and selfishly after my twenty [years of service], I wanted to spend the money, not time in Leavenworth."
Other gems from Kwiatkowski's oeuvre:
* "We went to war in Afghanistan--planned of course before 9/11/2001 due to some Taliban non-cooperation regarding a certain trans-Afghanistan oil pipeline, and the requisite security for said pipeline."
* "We once had something like a free market Republic, but all evidence now points to a maturing fascist state flexing its muscles."
* "Bush and his neoconservative foreign policy implementers believe they are today's men of destiny. But the claim of destiny for a whole nation or a constructed state has long been the ultimate tool of the fascist, the super-nationalist, the propagandist worthy of a Lenin or a Hitler or a Pol Pot."
* "Two invasions and occupations in two years to reshape the Islamic world in preparation for World War IV is anything but conservative. Fascist imperialism touched by Sparta revived can never, even with pretty please and sugar on top, be conservatism."
Normally a collegial sort, THE SCRAPBOOK can't bring itself to congratulate Salon on the opening of its new bureau.
Carl Levin's Faulty Memory
Carl Levin gave a typical performance during Senate Armed Services Committee hearings last week. With the exception of Ted Kennedy, Levin has been the most outspoken of the many Democrats who warned ominously about Iraq's WMD threat before the war and now accuse the Bush administration of making it all up.
Levin's thesis is simple: Warmongers in the Pentagon and the White House lied about intelligence to go to war. But Levin himself has been--there's no way to say it politely--less than honest about the same intelligence. At last week's hearing, he praised the "caution and the nuance" of the CIA's then-classified July 2002 assessment of the threat from Iraq and al Qaeda. Levin read it aloud:
Baghdad, for now, appears to be drawing a line short of conducting terrorist attacks with conventional or [chemical and biological weapons] against the United States. Fearing that exposure of Iraqi involvement would provide Washington a stronger cause for making war, Iraq probably would attempt clandestine attacks against the U.S. homeland if Baghdad feared an attack that threatened the survival of the regime were imminent or unavoidable, or possibly for revenge. Such attacks, more likely with biological than chemical agents, probably would be carried out by Iraq's special forces or intelligence operatives. Saddam, if sufficiently desperate, might decide that only an organization such as al Qaeda could perpetrate the type of terrorist attack that he
would hope to conduct. In such circumstances, he might decide that the extreme step of assisting the Islamic terrorists in conducting a CBW attack against the United States would be his last chance to exact vengeance by taking a large number of victims with him.
Most people might think this was good and sufficient reason to take out Saddam. Levin refers to it as "the CIA's doubts about Iraq's collaboration with al Qaeda," and he complains that the assessment was "buried in classification from the public eye on the eve of our going to war."
Was it, really? Well, no.
On October 7, 2002, CIA Director George Tenet sent an unclassified letter to the Senate Intelligence Committee that committee Democrats hyped to the media. Because war was being considered, he said, "We have made unclassified material available to further the Senate's forthcoming open debate on a Joint Resolution concerning Iraq." Then, in unclassified language that alert readers will remember from three paragraphs ago, Tenet lays out the alleged doubts:
Baghdad for now appears to be drawing a line short of conducting terrorist attacks with conventional or [chemical and biological weapons] against the United States. Should Saddam conclude that a U.S.-led attack could no longer be deterred, he probably would become much less constrained in adopting terrorist actions. Such terrorism might involve conventional means, as with Iraq's unsuccessful attempt at a terrorist offensive in 1991, or CBW. Saddam might decide that the extreme step of assisting Islamist terrorists in conducting a WMD attack against the United States would be his last chance to exact vengeance by taking a large number of victims with him.
As Tenet's letter makes clear, the CIA's "doubts" were not "buried in classification" before the war. They were publicly available some six months before the war. Is it possible that Levin was simply unaware the information had been declassified--making him less a political prevaricator and more a clueless congressman? Possible? Yes. Likely? No. Levin is cited by name in Tenet's declassification letter. Not to mention, Levin has repeatedly mischaracterized the relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda in his public statements. "The intel didn't say there was a direct relationship between al Qaeda and Iraq."
If "the intel" didn't make that claim, the Director of Intel came close. In the same Oct. 7 letter, Tenet wrote of "senior level contacts between Iraq and al Qaeda going back a decade." He wrote of "solid evidence of the presence in Iraq of al Qaeda members, including some that have been in Baghdad." The same "credible reporting" reveals that "Iraq has provided training to al Qaeda members in the areas of poisons and gases and making conventional bombs." Most striking, Tenet reported that "Baghdad's links to terrorists will increase, even absent U.S. military action."
Levin never mentions these assessments. He's right about one thing: Someone isn't being honest about pre-war intelligence. | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Thu Apr 01, 2004 10:57 pm Post subject: Ahmed Chalabi's Ties To Mossad and Neocons |
| http://www.nowarforisrael.com
http://www.nogw.com/warforisrael.html
Ahmed Chalabi's Ties To
Mossad And Neocons
By Christopher Bollyn
RumorMillNews.com
4-26-3
When Gen. Abdul Karim Qasim ousted the Iraqi monarchy of King Faisal II in
July 1958, many Iraqis, like the family of Ahmed Chalabi, which had enjoyed close ties with the monarchy, were forced to flee the country.
Today, Chalabi is the man behind the self-declared government that has come
to power in Baghdad.
Chalabi, a non-practising Shia, is reportedly a close friend of the late Shah of Iran, the former Crown Prince Hassan of Jordan and Col. Oliver North of the Reagan
Administration, according to a recent paper on Chalabi for the South Asia Analysis Group titled "Ahmed Chalabi: The Janos Kadar of Iraq" by B. Raman, a Indian intelligence expert.
The head of the Iraqi National Congress (INC), Chalabi comes from an
aristocratic Shiite family that was connected to the monarchy of Faisal. The
Iraqi monarchy had been installed by the British when they created the Iraqi
state after the first World War.
Chalabi's father was a member of the Faisal's Council of Ministers and
president of the senate nominated by Faisal and set up to provide the Iraqi monarchy with a democratic facade.
The Chalabi family fled to Jordan when King Faisal II was overthrown in 1958
by Qasim's group of army officers who had allegedly acted in collusion with the
Iraqi Communist Party.
Years later, Chalabi amassed a great deal of wealth as a banker in Jordan. However, in 1989, Chalabi was found guilty of embezzlement and fraud in a military court in Jordan and was sentenced to 22 years. Chalabi reportedly fled Jordan in the trunk of a car with over $20 million.
It was alleged that during his association with the bank Chalabi embezzled nearly $70 million and stashed it in secret Swiss bank accounts.
The financial improprieties that Chalabi was found to have been directly involved in led to the collapse the Jordanian bank he directed, Petra Bank.
At the time of its crash, Petra was the third-largest bank in Jordan, and the Jordanian government was forced to pay out $200 million to depositors who faced the loss of their savings.
In 1992, Mr Chalabi was tried in absentia and sentenced by a Jordanian court to 22 years jail on 31 charges of embezzlement, theft, misuse of depositor funds and currency speculation.
A report by Arthur Andersen subsequently found that Chalabi's Petra Bank's assets had been overstated by some $200 million. Many of the bank's bad loans were to Chalabi-linked companies in Switzerland and Lebanon.
A detailed 500-page Technical Committee Report was subsequently compiled for the Jordanian military attorney-general on June 10, 1990.
In the report Chalabi was named as being the man at Petra Bank who was directly responsible for "fictitious deposits and entries to make the income ... appear larger."
To this day, Chalabi insists that the charges were politically charged and the fact that there has never been formal extradition attempts prove the case was not genuine.
Chalabi is considered by experts to be a long-time collaborator with the CIA
and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) at the Pentagon.
After fleeing Jordan, Chalabi went to Europe and founded the INC in 1992 at a meeting of some anti-Saddam Hussein exiles held in Vienna, Austria. James Woolsey, who became the Director of the CIA under President Bill Clinton, made Chalabi's INC the cutting-edge of the CIA's operations against Saddam Hussein. Chalabi allegedly became Woolsey's blue-eyed boy and the INC became the most favored recipient of CIA funds meant for the overthrow of Saddam, according to Raman.
In the 1980s, when he was associated with the Petra Bank, Chalabi, who was allegedly helping the Mossad, the Israeli external intelligence agency, used to visit Israel secretly.
During those visits, he became close to the late Albert Wohlstetter, who is reputed to be "a godfather of the neoconservative movement in the US," according to Raman.
Chalabi had met Wohlstetter during his student days at the University of Chicago, Raman wrote, but the friendship became close only after their meetings in Israel. Through Wohlstetter, Chalabi became acquainted with Richard Perle, who was Under-Secretary of Defence for international-security policy under President Reagan, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, both of whom served under President Ronald Reagan.
Perle, as chief of the Defence Policy Advisory Board, has been a strong supporter of Chalabi, but the CIA and the State Department have serious reservations about him.
Chalabi's criminal past notwithstanding, Chalabi is today being presented as the possible head of an interim Iraqi authority to provide an Iraqi face for what is likely to become an extended U.S. military occupation of Iraq.
"He is tipped to occupy an important post in the US occupation regime in Baghdad to create a new Iraqi intelligence agency, which would be loyal to the USA and protect its national interests," Raman wrote.
On April 16, two close associates of Chalabi said they had been elected
mayor and governor of Baghdad by tribal and religious chiefs acting with the
consent of the U.S. government.
INC General Jaudat Obeidi who, prior to his return to Iraq, had reportedly
lived in exile in Oregon claimed he had been selected mayor of Baghdad. And, with a massive media entourage, Mohammed Mohsen Zubeidi, proclaimed himself governor of a new interim administration for Baghdad.
A spokesman for the U.S. Marines in Baghdad denied that the United States
has recognized anyone to head up a new Iraqi government.
http://www.rumormillnews.com/cgi-bin/forum.cgi?read=31508 | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Sat Apr 03, 2004 7:06 pm Post subject: Chalabi Poised to Rule Iraq |
| Subj: Chalabi Poised to Rule Iraq
Date: 4/3/04 5:15:11 AM Pacific Standard Time
From: hectorpv@comcast.net
To: hectorpv@comcast.net
Friends,
Chalabi Poised to Rule Iraq
Ahmed Chalabi, the tool of the neocons who spread the most extreme stories about Saddam’s non-existent WMD to bring the US into war, is now poised to achieve his goal: ruler of Iraq. Arnaud de Borchgrave writes that Chalabi is well-positioned to become the prime minister in the new government, which will be the most powerful governmental post.
It has been well-documented how Chalabi was long supported by the neocons and how the phony intelligence provided by his Iraqi group—the Iraqi National Congress (INC)—was used by the neocon-controlled Office of Special Plans (OSP) in the Defense Department and even by the CIA (pushed by Vice President Cheney).http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2004/01/12_405.html http://www.tompaine.com/feature2.cfm/ID/9890 http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/7952660.htm
De Borchgrave writes: "Temporary constitutional arrangements are structured to give the future prime minister more power than the president. The role of the president will be limited because his decisions will have to be ratified by two deputy presidents, or vice presidents. Key ministries, such as Defense and Interior, will be taking orders from the prime minister."
De Borchgrave adds:
"If Mr. Chalabi's fast track to power is not derailed and he becomes prime minister in July, the president won't be able to fire him unless his two deputies agree. The provisional constitution seems tailor-made for Mr. Chalabi to call the shots into 2005.
"As head of the Governing Council's economic and finance committee, Mr. Chalabi already has maneuvered loyalists into key Cabinet positions in the provisional authority — finance, oil and trade. The Central Bank governor, the head of the trade bank and the managing director of the largest commercial bank also owe their positions to his influence."
Chalabi also has other sources of power. As head of the de-Ba'athification commission, he has tons of documents to use for blackmail purposes. "He also appears to have impressive amounts of cash at his disposal and a say in which companies get the nod for some of the $18.4 billion earmarked for reconstruction." Chalabi gets hefty kick-backs here. Furthermore, Chalabi "is still on the Defense Intelligence Agency's budget for a secret stipend of $340,000 a month."
De Borchgrave alludes to Chalabi’s role in getting the US to invade Iraq, though without connecting all the dots. "Referring to Mr. Chalabi, a former U.S. ambassador recently back from an extended trip to Iraq, said: ‘Anyone who can get the U.S. to invade Iraq must be a very clever politician. As for the people his INC coached in London to disinform the U.S. intelligence community about Saddam's nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, you've got to hand it to the guy. Don't blame him. Blame the Pentagon for not seeing through him.’"
Of course, the neocons were using Chalabi and his lies for their own propaganda purposes, which De Borchgrave does hint at. "While in exile in London, Mr. Chalabi cultivated close contacts with Israeli officials."
"His strongest backers in Washington are Vice President Dick Cheney, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, and neoconservative theoretician ("An End to Evil") Richard Perle."
The fact of the matter is, of course, that Chalabi has been serving the interests of Israel and the neocons—in fact, he has been directly connected to the Israelis and the neocons—and has benefited immensely as a result.
Undoubtedly, Chalabi will be pursuing the neocon/Israel line as long as he can. He needs protection there in Iraq. And the more valuable he is, the greater protection he’ll get. Still it’s a lot safer in neocon think tanks in Washington or in Richard Perle’s villa in the south of France. The neocons are fortunate to have a mercenary on the scene in Iraq—sort of like when Israel had the South Lebanon Army (SLA) doing its dirty work in Lebanon. Of course, when Israel pulled out of southern Lebanon, the members of the SLA suffered the consequences from the enraged populace. But Chalabi is crafty and knows well the ways of the world.
_________________________________________________________
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20040330-094240-7127r.htm
March 31, 2004
Chalabi poised to lead Iraq
By Arnaud de Borchgrave
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
With only three months to go before L. Paul Bremer trades in his Iraqi proconsul baton for beachwear and a hard-earned vacation, the country's most controversial politician is already well-positioned to become prime minister.
Ahmed Chalabi, the Pentagon's heartthrob and the State Department's and CIA's heartbreak, has taken the lead in a yearlong political marathon.
Temporary constitutional arrangements are structured to give the future prime minister more power than the president. The role of the president will be limited because his decisions will have to be ratified by two deputy presidents, or vice presidents. Key ministries, such as Defense and Interior, will be taking orders from the prime minister.
Mr. Chalabi holds the ultimate weapons — several dozen tons of documents and individual files seized by his Iraqi National Congress (INC) from Saddam Hussein's secret security apparatus.
Coupled with his position as head of the de-Ba'athification commission, Mr. Chalabi, barely a year after he returned to his homeland from 45 years of exile, has emerged as the power behind a vacant throne.
He also appears to have impressive amounts of cash at his disposal and a say in which companies get the nod for some of the $18.4 billion earmarked for reconstruction. One company executive who asked that both his and the company's name be withheld said: "The commission was steep even by Middle Eastern standards."
Mr. Chalabi is still on the Defense Intelligence Agency's budget for a secret stipend of $340,000 a month.
The $40 million the INC has received since 1994 from the U.S. government also covered the expenses of Iraqi military defectors' stories about weapons of mass destruction and the Iraqi regime's links with al Qaeda, which provided President Bush with a casus belli for the war on Iraq.
When Mr. Chalabi established the Petra Bank in Amman, Jordan, in the 1980s, he favored small loans to military officers, noncommissioned officers, royal guards and intelligence officers. He developed a close rapport with Crown Prince Hassan, who borrowed a total of $20 million. After Petra went belly up with a loss of $300 million at the end of the decade, Mr. Chalabi escaped to Syria in a car supplied by the crown prince — minutes ahead of the officers who had come to arrest him for embezzling his own bank. The Petra debacle left him sufficient funds to create the INC a few days later.
Today, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology-trained mathematician says he has the documents that will prove he was framed by two Husseins — Saddam and the late king of Jordan — who wanted to put an end to his anti-Iraqi activities. Jordan used to get most of its oil from Iraq free of charge or heavily discounted, which explains why King Hussein declined to join the anti-Iraq coalition in the 1991 Gulf war.
Sentenced in absentia in Jordan to 22 years of hard labor for massive bank fraud, Mr. Chalabi hints he also has incriminating evidence of a close "subsidiary" relationship between Jordan's present King Abdullah and Saddam's sadistic elder son, Uday, killed last year in a shootout with U.S. troops.
Potentially embarrassing for prominent U.S. citizens, Mr. Chalabi's aides hint his treasure trove of Mukhabarat documents includes names of American "agents of influence" on Saddam's payroll, as well as several Qatar-based Al Jazeera TV news reporters who were working for Iraqi intelligence.
The final selection for prime minister will need the assent of the president and his two deputies — representing the country's three principal ethnic and religious groupings.
Standard-bearer for Iraq's 60 percent Shi'ite majority and free Iraq's first president will be Abdulaziz al-Hakim. He is the brother of Ayatollah Muhammad Baqr al-Hakim, killed last year with 90 worshippers when a car bomb rocked the country's holiest Shi'ite shrine in Najaf. With an Islamic green light from Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Husseini al-Sistani, Mr. Hakim almost certainly will opt for Mr. Chalabi, a fellow Shi'ite, as prime minister.
Slated for one of the two vice-presidential slots is Adnan Pachachi, a Sunni octogenarian with a secular liberal outlook. He served as foreign minister and ambassador to the United Nations before the Ba'athists seized power in a military coup in 1968. Mr. Pachachi's nod also may go to Mr. Chalabi.
For the third leg of the troika, rival Kurdish parties have agreed to unite behind Jalal Talabani, chief of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan. His vote, now believed to be favorable, would make it three out of three for Mr. Chalabi.
Referring to Mr. Chalabi, a former U.S. ambassador recently back from an extended trip to Iraq, said: "Anyone who can get the U.S. to invade Iraq must be a very clever politician. As for the people his INC coached in London to disinform the U.S. intelligence community about Saddam's nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, you've got to hand it to the guy. Don't blame him. Blame the Pentagon for not seeing through him."
If Mr. Chalabi's fast track to power is not derailed and he becomes prime minister in July, the president won't be able to fire him unless his two deputies agree. The provisional constitution seems tailor-made for Mr. Chalabi to call the shots into 2005.
As head of the Governing Council's economic and finance committee, Mr. Chalabi already has maneuvered loyalists into key Cabinet positions in the provisional authority — finance, oil and trade. The Central Bank governor, the head of the trade bank and the managing director of the largest commercial bank also owe their positions to his influence.
While in exile in London, Mr. Chalabi cultivated close contacts with Israeli officials.
He also has visited Iran several times to confer with leading ayatollahs in a bid for their support. He was given permission to open an INC office in Tehran.
His strongest backers in Washington are Vice President Dick Cheney, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, and neoconservative theoretician ("An End to Evil") Richard Perle.
•Arnaud de Borchgrave is editor at large of The Washington Times and of United Press International. | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Mon Apr 26, 2004 8:17 pm Post subject: Woodward: Cheney's Unwavering Desire for War |
| Subj: Woodward: Cheney's Unwavering Desire for War
Date: 4/24/04 7:32:12 AM Pacific Daylight Time
From: hectorpv@comcast.net
To: hectorpv@comcast.net
Friends,
Woodward: Cheney’s Unwavering Desire for War
Woodward in _Plan of Attack_ points out it was Cheney who was the central Bush administration figure pushing for war on Iraq. Of course, Cheney did not come up with the war on Iraq idea by himself. Cheney has been intimately tied to the neoconservative elite. Prior to becoming VP, Cheney was a member of the board of advisors of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA) and was a founding member of the neocon Project for a New American Century (PNAC), whose chairman is arch-neocon Bill Kristol, editor of _The Weekly Standard_ . PNAC gave birth to "The Committee for the Liberation of Iraq," headed by Ahmed Chalabi. Th at committee was first staffed entirely by PNAC members. [http://www.disinfopedia.org/wiki.phtml?title=Project_for_the_New_American_Century] [http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article1665.htm]
PNAC is based in the same building as the neocon American Enterprise Institute in Washington DC. Cheney’s wife Lynne is a prestigious member of the American Enterprise Institute.
Cheney would play a major role in staffing the Bush administration. And as James Mann points out in his _The Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush’s War Cabinet_: "The selection of Cheney was of surpassing importance for the future direction of foreign policy. It went further than any other single decision Bush made toward determining the nature and the policies of the administration he would head.""(pp. 252-53) Of course, when Bush picked Cheney there was no evidence that Bush wanted someone who could lead the US into war on Iraq. Cheney set this agenda, relying on his neocon coterie to bring it off.
The following excerpt from Woodward’s book begins with Cheney praising one of neocon Ken Adelman’s pro-war propaganda pieces and inviting him to dinner with neocons Scooter Libby (Libby is currently Assistant to the President and Chief of Staff to the Vice President) and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz. (Adelman was U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations during the Ronald Reagan administration as well as serving as Reagan's director of arms control.) Both Libby and Wolfowitz have played major roles in pushing for war on Iraq.
And Cheney’s neocon-supported wife Lynn is an active participant in the conversation. Hey, it’s part of the cabal. Cheney and the neocons.
And what are they talking about. They are in ecstasy about the start of the war on Iraq. "Let's talk about this Gulf war. It's so wonderful to celebrate," as Adelman puts it.
Now it is crucial to see who Cheney is in cahoots with here and throughout Wooward’s book.. It is always the neocons. Some people, fearful of the obvious Jewish connection, want to believe that Cheney reflects the thinking of other groups--oilmen, war profiteers, elder Bush cronies--whom one is allowed to detest. But there is no evidence that Cheney ever consorts with these people. In fact Cheney sees the opposition to the war coming from the oilmen/elder Bush contingent. They were the enemy. Woodward writes: "Here was Scowcroft, the pillar of establishment foreign policy, vocally on the other side, widely seen as a surrogate for the president's father. There had been James A. Baker III, the former secretary of state, insisting on a larger coalition of nations. And Lawrence Eagleburger, Baker's successor in the last half year of the first Bush administration, on television all the time saying war was justified only if there was evidence that Hussein was about to attack us." As much as the war critics want to imagine that the war was provoked by oil and the hateful Bushites—the obviously preferred enemies--the fact of the matter is that this is totally untrue.
Cheney wanted the Bush administration to focus on attacking Iraq from its very beginning. And Woodward illustrates how Cheney especially made rescue efforts when a peace scare emerged. There appeared to be a danger in August 2002, when Powell persuaded Bush to go the UN route to bring back the weapons inspectors, which Cheney feared would be a diversion from war. Moreover, at the same time Scowcroft, Baker, and Eableburger, the pillars of the Republican foreign policy establishment, were expressing their opposition to the move to war.
Cheney gave a super hard-line address to the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention in Nashville, which became a media splash. Woodward observes: "’Cheney Says Peril of a Nuclear Iraq Justifies Attack,’ read the headline in the New York Times on Aug. 27. Powell was dumbfounded. The vice president had delivered a hard-line address to the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention in Nashville and basically called weapons inspections futile."
.Woodward adds that "These remarks, just short of a declaration of war, were widely interpreted as administration policy. Powell was astonished. It was a preemptive attack on what the president had agreed to 10 days earlier. Cheney's speech blew it all up."
Still, Woodward emphasizes that Cheney was not able to alter Bush’s acceptance of the UN approach. In short, Bush does not automatically accept the neocon agenda, the neocons have to use their influence in key positions to move Bush toward their agenda.. Powell was able to put up limited opposition.
Powell and Cheney were always at loggerheads. Woodward writes: "Powell detected a kind of fever in Cheney. He was not the steady, unemotional rock that he had witnessed a dozen years earlier during the run-up to the Gulf War. The vice president was beyond hell-bent for action against Hussein. It was as if nothing else existed."
"Powell thought that Cheney had the fever. The vice president and Wolfowitz kept looking for the connection between Hussein and Sept. 11. It was a separate little government that was out there -- Wolfowitz, Libby, Undersecretary of Defense Douglas J. Feith and Feith's ‘Gestapo office,’ as Powell privately called it."
What Powell called "Feith’s ‘Gestapo office’" was the Office of Special Plans under neocon Abram Shulsky which provided the phony WMD propaganda that came from Chalabi and Israeli intelligence, which influenced Bush, the American people, and even, to some extent, the CIA. [http://www.twf.org/News/Y2003/0722-Spies.html]
Woodward continues: "He saw in Cheney a sad transformation. The cool operator from the first Gulf War just would not let go. Cheney now had an unhealthy fixation. Nearly every conversation or reference came back to al Qaeda and trying to nail the connection with Iraq. He would often have an obscure piece of intelligence. Powell thought that Cheney took intelligence and converted uncertainty and ambiguity into fact."
But, of course, Cheney’s emphasis on making war on Iraq was not some peculiar obsession of his, but rather reflected the agenda of the neocons, with whom he had long been closely associated. In short, Cheney took the lead in pushing the neocon agenda, but he was hardly a lone figure. He had helped to fill the Bush administration with numerous neocons who were essential to the success of this venture.
I heard Chris Matthews on TV claim that Woodward shows that Bush ultimately made the decision for war. And I think it is true that Bush is not coerced by Cheney to do anything against his will and that he really believes in what he does. But what does this mean? Where does Bush get his information? He admittedly doesn’t read or even follow the news on TV. He seems like a complete simpleton in his views of the Middle East. In fact, during the 2000 campaign he admitted that he knew little about foreign policy. The neocons were his most numerous advisors—controlling the Defense Department, the VP office, and looming large in the National Security Council staff. The only real resistance came from the State Department. Moreover, the neocons were feeding Bush with the bogus intelligence. Furthermore, neocons Richard Perle and Wolfowitz had been Bush’s advisors during the 2000 campaign. In short, the weight of information provided to Bush naturally moved him in the pro-war direction—it was understandable that a man who knew nothing else would adopt the neocon line. (Although a curious individual might grasp the neocons’ biases.) Added to this was the fact that the pro-war policy seemed to have political support and Bush could bask in the praise of his supporters for his firm "leadership." As I wrote in an earlier message, I think that even if Bush loses the upcoming election, he can be made to feel good as a martyr for the cause of righteousness by his war party supporters.
__________________________________________
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A25550-2004Apr19.html
washingtonpost.com
Cheney Was Unwavering in Desire to Go to War
Tension Between Vice President and Powell Grew Deeper as Both Tried to Guide Bush's Decision
By Bob Woodward
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, April 20, 2004; Page A01
This is the third of five articles adapted from "Plan of Attack," a book by Bob Woodward that is a behind-the-scenes account of how and why President Bush decided to go to war against Iraq. Simon & Schuster. © 2004.
On April 10, 2003, Ken Adelman, a Reagan administration official and supporter of the Iraq war, published an op-ed article in The Washington Post headlined, " 'Cakewalk' Revisited," more or less gloating over what appeared to be the quick victory there, and reminding readers that 14 months earlier he had written that war would be a "cakewalk." He chastised those who had predicted disaster. "Taking first prize among the many frightful forecasters" was Brent Scowcroft, who served as national security adviser in the first Bush administration. Adelman wrote that his own confidence came from having worked for Donald H. Rumsfeld three times and "from knowing Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz for so many years."
Vice President Cheney phoned Adelman, who was in Paris with his wife, Carol. What a clever column, the vice president said. You really demolished them. He said he and his wife, Lynne, were having a small private dinner Sunday night, April 13, to talk and celebrate. The only other guests would be his chief adviser, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, and Wolfowitz, now deputy secretary of defense. Adelman realized it was Cheney's way of saying thank you, and he and his wife came back from Paris a day early to attend the dinner.
When Adelman walked into the vice president's residence that Sunday night, he was so happy he broke into tears. He hugged Cheney for the first time in the 30 years he had known him. There had been reports in recent days of mass graves and abundant, graphic evidence of torture by Saddam Hussein's government, so there was a feeling that they had been part of a greater good, liberating 25 million people.
"We're all together. There should be no protocol; let's just talk," Cheney said when they sat down to dinner.
Wolfowitz embarked on a long review of the 1991 Persian Gulf War and what a mistake it had been to allow the Iraqis to fly helicopters after the armistice. Hussein had used them to put down uprisings.
Cheney said he had not realized then what a trauma that time had been for the Iraqis, particularly the Shiites, who felt the United States had abandoned them. He said that experience had made the Iraqis worry that war this time would not end Hussein's rule.
"Hold it! Hold it!" Adelman interjected. "Let's talk about this Gulf war. It's so wonderful to celebrate." He said he was just an outside adviser, someone who turned up the pressure in the public forum. "It's so easy for me to write an article saying, 'Do this.' It's much tougher for Paul to advocate it. Paul and Scooter, you give advice inside and the president listens. Dick, your advice is the most important, the Cadillac. It's much more serious for you to advocate it. But in the end, all of what we said was still only advice. The president is the one who had to decide. I have been blown away by how determined he is." The war has been awesome, Adelman said. "So I just want to make a toast, without getting too cheesy. To the president of the United States."
They all raised their glasses. Hear! Hear!
Adelman said he had worried to death that there would be no war as time went on and support seemed to wane.
After Sept. 11, 2001, Cheney said, the president understood what had to be done. He had to do Afghanistan first, sequence the attacks, but after Afghanistan -- "soon thereafter" -- the president knew he had to do Iraq. Cheney said he was confident after Sept. 11 that it would come out okay.
Adelman said it was still a gutsy move. When John F. Kennedy was elected by the narrowest of margins, Adelman said, he told everyone in his administration that the big agenda items such as civil rights would have to wait for a second term. Certainly it was the opposite for Bush.
Yes, Cheney said. And it began the first minutes of the presidency, when Bush said they were going to go full steam ahead. There is such a tendency, Cheney said, to hold back when there is a close election, to do what the New York Times and other pundits suggest and predict. "This guy was just totally different," Cheney said. "He just decided here's what I want to do, and I'm going to do it. He's very directed. He's very focused."
"I want you three guys to shut up," Lynne Cheney said, pointing at Cheney, Wolfowitz and Adelman. "Let's hear what Scooter thinks."
Libby, smiling, just said he thought what had happened was "wonderful."
It was a pretty amazing accomplishment, they all agreed, particularly given the opposition to war. Here was Scowcroft, the pillar of establishment foreign policy, vocally on the other side, widely seen as a surrogate for the president's father. There had been James A. Baker III, the former secretary of state, insisting on a larger coalition of nations. And Lawrence Eagleburger, Baker's successor in the last half year of the first Bush administration, on television all the time saying war was justified only if there was evidence that Hussein was about to attack us. Eagleburger had accused Cheney of "chest thumping."
They turned to the current secretary of state, Colin L. Powell, and there were chuckles around the table.
Cheney and Wolfowitz remarked that Powell was someone who followed his poll ratings and bragged about his popularity. Several weeks earlier in a National Public Radio interview, Powell had said, "If you would consult any recent Gallup poll, the American people seem to be quite satisfied with the job I'm doing as secretary of state."
He sure likes to be popular, Cheney said.
Wolfowitz said that Powell did bring credibility and that his presentation to the United Nations on weapons of mass destruction intelligence had been important. As soon as Powell had understood what the president wanted, Wolfowitz said, he became a good, loyal member of the team.
Cheney shook his head, no. Powell was a problem. "Colin always had major reservations about what we were trying to do."
Cheney said he had just had lunch with the president. "Democracy in the Middle East is just a big deal for him. It's what's driving him."
"Let me ask," Adelman inquired, "before this turns into a love fest. I was just stunned that we have not found weapons of mass destruction." There were several hundred thousand troops and others combing the country.
"We'll find them," Wolfowitz said.
"It's only been four days, really," Cheney said. "We'll find them."
Immediate Focus on Iraq
In early January 2001, before Bush was inaugurated, Cheney passed a message to the outgoing secretary of defense, William S. Cohen, a moderate Republican who served in the Democratic Clinton administration.
"We really need to get the president-elect briefed up on some things," Cheney said, adding that he wanted a serious "discussion about Iraq and different options." The president-elect should not be given the routine, canned, round-the-world tour normally given incoming presidents. Topic A should be Iraq.
Cheney had been secretary of defense during George H.W. Bush's presidency, which included the Gulf War, and he harbored a deep sense of unfinished business about Iraq. In addition, Iraq was the only country the United States regularly, if intermittently, bombed these days.
The U.S. military had been engaged in a frustrating low-grade, undeclared war with Iraq since the Gulf War when Bush's father and a United Nations-backed coalition had ousted Hussein and his army from Kuwait after they had invaded that country. The United States enforced two designated no-fly zones, which meant the Iraqis could fly neither planes nor helicopters in these areas, which made up about 60 percent of the country. Cheney wanted to make sure Bush understood the military and other issues in this potential tinderbox.
On Jan. 10, a Wednesday morning 10 days before the inauguration, Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice and Powell went to the Pentagon to meet with Cohen. Afterward, Bush and his team went downstairs to the Tank, the secure domain and meeting room for the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Two generals briefed them on the state of the no-fly zone enforcement. No-fly zone enforcement was dangerous and expensive. Multimillion-dollar jets were put at risk bombing 57mm antiaircraft guns. Hussein had warehouses of them. As a matter of policy, was the Bush administration going to keep poking Hussein in the chest? Was there a national strategy behind this, or was it just a static tit for tat?
Lots of acronyms and program names were thrown around -- most of them familiar to Cheney, Rumsfeld and Powell, who had spent 35 years in the Army and been chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 1989 to 1993. President-elect Bush asked some practical questions about how things worked, but he did not offer or hint at his desires.
The Joint Chiefs' staff had placed a peppermint at each place. Bush unwrapped his and popped it into his mouth. Later he eyed Cohen's mint and flashed a pantomime query, Do you want that? Cohen signaled no, so Bush reached over and took it. Near the end of the hour-and-a-quarter briefing, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Army Gen. Henry H. Shelton, noticed Bush eyeing his mint, so he passed it over.
Cheney listened, but he was tired and closed his eyes, conspicuously nodding off several times. Rumsfeld, who was sitting at a far end of the table, paid close attention, though he kept asking the briefers to please speak up or please speak louder. "We're off to a great start," one of the chiefs commented privately to a colleague after the session. "The vice president fell asleep, and the secretary of defense can't hear."
Given Cheney's background in national security going back to the Ford administration, his time on the House intelligence committee and as secretary of defense, the new president said that at the top of his list of things he wanted Cheney to do was intelligence.
In the first months of the new administration, Cheney made the rounds of the intelligence agencies -- the CIA; the National Security Agency, which intercepts communications; and the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency. He was determined to get up to speed on what had transpired in the eight years since he had left government. Bush also asked Cheney to study the nation's vulnerability to terrorism, primarily from biological and chemical threats. By the summer of 2001, Cheney had hired a retired admiral, Steve Abbott, to oversee a program for taking homeland defense more seriously.
With the president's full knowledge and encouragement, Cheney became the self-appointed examiner of worst-case scenarios. He would look at the darker side, the truly bad and terrifying scenarios. Because of his experience and temperament, it was the ideal assignment for Cheney. He felt the administration had to be prepared to think about the unthinkable. It was one way to be an effective second-in-command -- carve out a few matters, become the expert in them and then press the first-in-command to adopt your solutions.
Cheney thought that the Clinton administration had failed in its response to terrorist acts, going back to the World Trade Center bombing, in 1993, and that there had been a pattern of weak responses: no effective response to the 1996 bombing of Khobar Towers, the U.S. military installation in Saudi Arabia; not enough to the 1998 embassy bombings in East Africa; none to the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen.
After Sept. 11, it was clear to Cheney that the threat from terrorism had changed and grown enormously. So two matters would have to change. First, the standard of proof would have to be lowered -- irrefutable smoking-gun evidence would not have to be required for the United States to defend itself. Second, defense alone wasn't enough. They needed an offense.
The most serious threat now facing the United States was a nuclear weapon or a biological or chemical agent in the hands of a terrorist inside the country's borders. And everything, in his view, had to be done to stop it.
"The vice president, after 9/11, clearly saw Saddam Hussein as a threat to peace," Bush said in an interview last December. "And was unwavering in his view that Saddam was a real danger."
Powell Gets Bush's Ear
Colin Powell had always been just one level beneath Cheney in the pecking order. Over three decades he had worked his way up to become the top uniformed military man, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and had wound up reporting to Cheney, who had been an improbable pick as defense secretary for Bush's father when the nomination of Sen. John Tower (R-Tex.) was rejected by his Senate colleagues. Then as secretary of state, the senior Cabinet post, Powell was again outranked by Cheney, this time the unexpected pick as vice president. At National Security Council meetings, Cheney sat at Bush's right hand, Powell at his left.
Powell was often confounded by Cheney. Years earlier, writing his best-selling memoir, Powell kept trying to pin down the remoteness of the man and had drafted and redrafted the sections on Cheney, sending them off to his best friend, Richard L. Armitage, now deputy secretary of state. Not quite right, Armitage kept replying. Powell finally told Armitage he had found a way to be "relatively truthful but not harmful."
In the final version of "My American Journey," published in 1995, Powell wrote of Cheney, "He and I had never, in nearly four years, spent a single purely social hour together." He told of Cheney's last day as defense secretary, when he had gone to Cheney's suite of offices at the Pentagon and asked, "Where's the secretary?" Informed that Cheney had left hours ago, Powell wrote, "I was disappointed, even hurt, but not surprised. The lone cowboy had gone off into the sunset without even a last, 'So long.' "
Powell had different issues with Bush. They were uncomfortable with each other. A sense of competition hovered in the background of their relationship, a low-voltage pulse nearly always present. Powell had considered running for president in 1996. He had had stratospheric poll ratings as the country's most admired man. For personal reasons and after making a calculation that there were no guarantees in American politics, he had decided not to run. But he had been the man in the wings, the former general and war hero, a moderate voice who would not run in 2000 when George W. Bush did.
For the first 16 months of the administration, Powell had been "in the refrigerator," or worse, as he and Armitage called his frequent isolation. It gnawed at him when stories appeared in the media suggesting that he was going to resign, what he privately called the "Powell's-on-his-way-out-again mode." As planning for a war with Iraq became the focus of the war cabinet, Powell became more and more frustrated. Armitage had been pushing hard for Powell to request private time with the president to build a personal relationship -- and present his case.
He achieved a breakthrough of sorts on Aug. 5, 2002, when Bush invited Powell and Condoleezza Rice to the residence. The meeting expanded to include dinner in the family dining room and then continued in the president's office.
Powell's notes filled three or four pages. War could destabilize friendly governments in Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan, he said. It could divert energy from almost everything else, not just the war on terrorism, and dramatically affect the supply and price of oil. What of the image of an American general running an Arab country, a Gen. MacArthur in Baghdad? Powell asked. How long would it be? No one could know. How would success be defined? War would take down Hussein, and "you will become the government until you get a new government."
By the time they were in Bush's office, Powell was on a roll.
"You are going to be the proud owner of 25 million people," he told the president. "You will own all their hopes, aspirations and problems. You'll own it all." Privately, Powell and Armitage called this the Pottery Barn rule: You break it, you own it.
"It's going to suck the oxygen out of everything," the secretary continued. So as not to sidestep the politics of it, he added, "This will become the first term." The clear implication was: Did the president want to be defined this way? Did he want to run for reelection on an Iraq war?
Powell thought he was scoring. Iraq has a history that is quite complex, he said. The Iraqis have never had a democracy. "So you need to understand that this is not going to be a walk in the woods."
The president listened and asked some questions but did not push back that much. Finally he looked at Powell. "What should I do? What else can I do?"
Powell realized he needed to offer a solution. "You can still make a pitch for a coalition or U.N. action to do what needs to be done," he said. The United Nations was only one way, but some way had to be found to recruit allies, to internationalize the problem.
Though the conversation was tense several times, Powell felt that he had left nothing unsaid. There were no histrionics. The president thanked him after two hours, an extraordinary amount of time for Powell without static from Cheney and Rumsfeld.
A Strong Assertion From Cheney
Cheney saw he was rapidly losing ground. Talk of the United Nations, diplomacy and now patience was wrong in his view. Nothing could more effectively slow down the march to war -- a war he deemed necessary. It was the only way. His former colleagues from the Ford and the first Bush administrations were weighing in with a blizzard of commentary -- Scowcroft with his cautionary antiwar message, former secretary of state Baker, who urged that unilateral action be avoided. Former secretary of state Henry A. Kissinger, dean of realpolitik foreign policy, had on Aug. 12, 2002, published a long, somewhat convoluted piece in The Washington Post supporting Bush for forcing the issue of Hussein to a head, but warning about the importance of building support from the public and the world.
The New York Times had made the Scowcroft and Kissinger positions the lead article on its front page on Aug. 16: "Top Republicans Break with Bush on Iraq Strategy." It was a misinterpretation of Kissinger's remarks, which more or less backed Bush. The Times eventually ran a correction, but Cheney and his deputy, Scooter Libby, found the article extremely aggravating. The correction would never catch up with the front-page headline, and Scowcroft's dissent was indisputable and more potent. It looked as if the march to war was put off.
Cheney decided that everyone was offering an opinion except the administration. There was no stated administration position and he wanted to put one out, make a big speech if necessary. It was highly unusual for the vice president to speak on such a major issue before the president, who was going to address the United Nations on Iraq on Sept. 12. But Cheney couldn't wait. Nature and Washington policy debates abhor a vacuum. He was not going to cede the field to Scowcroft, Baker, a misinterpreted Kissinger -- or Powell. He spoke privately with the president, who gave his approval without reviewing the details of what Cheney might say.
At an NSC meeting, Cheney said to the president, "Well, I'm going to give that speech."
"Don't get me in trouble," Bush half joked.
Trouble is what Cheney had in mind.
"Cheney Says Peril of a Nuclear Iraq Justifies Attack," read the headline in the New York Times on Aug. 27. Powell was dumbfounded. The vice president had delivered a hard-line address to the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention in Nashville and basically called weapons inspections futile. "A return of inspectors would provide no assurance whatsoever of his compliance with U.N. resolutions," Cheney had said of Hussein. "On the contrary, there is a great danger that it would provide false comfort that Saddam was somehow 'back in the box.' "
The vice president also issued his own personal National Intelligence Estimate of Hussein: "There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction [and] there is no doubt that he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies and against us." Ten days earlier, the president himself had said only that Hussein "desires" these weapons. Neither Bush nor the CIA had made any assertion comparable to Cheney's.
Cheney also said that these weapons in the hands of a "murderous dictator" are "as great a threat as can be imagined. The risks of inaction are far greater than the risk of action."
These remarks, just short of a declaration of war, were widely interpreted as administration policy. Powell was astonished. It was a preemptive attack on what the president had agreed to 10 days earlier. Cheney's speech blew it all up. Now Powell felt boxed in. To add to his problem, the BBC started releasing excerpts of an interview Powell had given before Cheney's speech, asserting, "The president has been clear that he believes weapons inspectors should return."
Stories began appearing saying that Powell was contradicting Cheney. He was accused of disloyalty, and he counted seven editorials calling for his resignation or implying he should quit. How can I be disloyal, he wondered, when I'm giving the president's stated position?
Adelman thought Bush was really delaying too long in deposing Hussein. Two days after Cheney's speech, he weighed in with a blistering op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal. Hussein was a bigger threat than al Qaeda, he wrote, because he had a country, billions in oil revenue, an army and "scores of scientific laboratories and myriad manufacturing plants cranking out weapons of mass destruction."
The problem could not be solved with new U.N. inspections, Adelman wrote. "Every day Mr. Bush holds off liberating Iraq is another day endangering America. Posing as a 'patient man,' he risks a catastrophic attack. Should that attack occur and be traced back to an Iraqi WMD facility, this president would be relegated to the ash heap of history."
It was strong stuff. Cheney did not communicate directly with Adelman on such matters, but he passed word to a mutual friend, who called Adelman right after his article appeared to report the vice president's reaction. "Ken has been extremely helpful in all this," the friend quoted Cheney as saying, "and I really appreciate what he has done and it's been great."
A day later, Aug. 29, Cheney spoke to the Veterans of the Korean War in San Antonio. It was the same speech with significant differences. He dropped his assertion that weapons inspections might provide "false comfort" and watered down his criticism, saying that "inspections are not an end in themselves."
Instead of asserting as he had in the first version of the speech that, "We now know that Saddam has resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons," he said simply that Hussein was pursuing "an aggressive nuclear weapons program." Some other language was moderated, by eliminating a "very," for example, and about eight paragraphs were removed from the speech.
Cheney and Powell at Odds
On the evening of Sept. 6, the national security principals met at Camp David without Bush to go over the U.N. issues before Saturday morning's scheduled NSC meeting with the president and afternoon summit with British Prime Minister Tony Blair.
Cheney continued to argue that to ask for a new resolution would put them back in the hopeless soup of U.N. process. All Bush needed to say in his speech was that Hussein was bad -- a willful, serial violator of U.N. resolutions -- and that the president reserved the right to act unilaterally.
But that would not be asking for U.N. support, Powell replied. The United Nations would not just roll over, declare Hussein evil and authorize war. That approach was not salable. The president had decided to give the United Nations a chance, and the only practical way to do that was to seek a new resolution.
Powell detected a kind of fever in Cheney. He was not the steady, unemotional rock that he had witnessed a dozen years earlier during the run-up to the Gulf War. The vice president was beyond hell-bent for action against Hussein. It was as if nothing else existed. Powell attempted to summarize the consequences of unilateral action, an argument he felt he had down pretty well. He added a new dimension, saying that the international reaction would be so negative that he would have to close U.S. embassies around the world if we went to war alone.
That is not the issue, Cheney said. Hussein and the clear threat are the issue.
Maybe it would not turn out as the vice president thinks, Powell said. War could trigger all kinds of unanticipated and unintended consequences -- some that none of them, he included, had imagined.
Not the issue, Cheney said.
The conversation exploded into a tough debate between the two men, who danced on the edge of civility but did not depart from the formal deference they generally showed each other. It was sharp and biting, however, and they both knew how to score debating points as they pulled apart the last fraying threads of what had connected them for so many years. Powell appeared to harbor a deep-seated anger even though he was getting his way this time.
On Saturday morning, Sept. 7, Bush met with the NSC and the argument was joined again. Powell said that if for no other reason than U.S. credibility, they needed to offer a plan to begin inspections again as part of any reengagement with the United Nations on Iraq. Procedurally, the only way to do this was to seek new resolutions.
Cheney then listed all the reasons inspections could mire them in a tar pit. First, the inspectors would not be Americans, but lawyers and experts from around the world who were less concerned about, and less skeptical of, Hussein. Second, these inspectors, like those in the past, would be more inclined to accept what they were told by Iraqi authorities, less likely to challenge, more likely to be fooled. The end result, Cheney said, would be deliberations or reports that would be inconclusive. So inspections would make getting to a decision to actually take out Hussein much more difficult.
Swayed by Blair's plea later that day that for his political viability he had to be able to show he had tried the United Nations, Bush decided this time in Powell's favor.
Cheney Stands His Ground
On Jan. 31, 2003, Blair again prevailed on Bush to go to the United Nations, again over Cheney's objections. This time the president asked Powell to make the case against Hussein. As Powell was preparing his speech, he received a call from Cheney.
Colin, the vice president said, look carefully at the terrorism case that Scooter prepared. Give it a good look.
Sure, Dick, Powell said. He generally used the vice president's first name when they were alone. Cheney was not ordering him or trying to direct him. It was just a request to take a serious look.
Powell looked at it. Four meetings between Sept. 11 pilot Mohamed Atta with an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague -- meetings that had been alleged but never proved to have taken place. That was worse than ridiculous. Powell pitched it.
Powell thought that Cheney had the fever. The vice president and Wolfowitz kept looking for the connection between Hussein and Sept. 11. It was a separate little government that was out there -- Wolfowitz, Libby, Undersecretary of Defense Douglas J. Feith and Feith's "Gestapo office," as Powell privately called it. He saw in Cheney a sad transformation. The cool operator from the first Gulf War just would not let go. Cheney now had an unhealthy fixation. Nearly every conversation or reference came back to al Qaeda and trying to nail the connection with Iraq. He would often have an obscure piece of intelligence. Powell thought that Cheney took intelligence and converted uncertainty and ambiguity into fact.
It was about the worst charge that Powell could make about the vice president. But there it was. Cheney would take an intercept and say it shows something was happening. No, no, no, Powell or another would say, it shows that somebody talked to somebody else who said something might be happening. A conversation would suggest something might be happening, and Cheney would convert that into a "We know." Well, Powell concluded, we didn't know. No one knew.
Strained Relations
After major combat operations ended in Iraq in May 2003, Powell spent the next months more often than not on the defensive. To those who thought he should have been a more forceful advocate against war, he replied that he had taken his best shot. He had not misled anyone, he told associates. He had argued successfully in August and September 2002 that the president should adopt two tracks -- plan for war and conduct diplomacy through the United Nations. The president could travel those two tracks only so long before he would reach a fork in the road, and one fork was war.
"He's the president," Powell told associates, "and he decided and, therefore, it was my obligation to go down the other fork with him."
As the war planning had progressed over the nearly 16 months, Powell had felt that the easier the war looked, the less Rumsfeld, the Pentagon and Army Gen. Tommy R. Franks had worried about the aftermath. They seemed to think that Iraq was a crystal goblet and that all they had to do was tap it and it would crack. It had turned out to be a beer mug instead. Now they owned the beer mug.
Visiting Iraq in the fall of 2003, Powell saw the mass graves and heard the testimony of witnesses to the torture and oppression. He was delighted that Hussein and his whole rotten government were gone. It was the saving grace. Certainly the decision to go to war was not 100 percent wrong. History, after all, had not yet determined whether it was right or wrong.
Cheney continued to be Powell's bête noire. At meetings of the principals, in Powell's view, Cheney improved on his technique of not betraying his position by insisting he either didn't have one, or could change his mind in 30 minutes. Powell finally decoded the technique. He concluded that he had to listen carefully because Cheney's disavowals generally turned out to be positions about which Cheney was not going to change his mind.
Relations became so strained that Powell and Cheney could not, and did not, have a sit-down lunch or any discussion about their differences. Never.
Powell thought that now that Bush and the administration had to live with the consequences of their Iraq decisions, they were becoming dangerously protective of those decisions. There was no one in the White House who could break through to insist on a realistic reassessment. There was no Karen Hughes who could go to Bush and say, "Pay attention, you're in trouble." Powell believed it was the hardest of all tasks to go back to fundamentals and question one's own judgment, and there was no sign it was going to happen. So he soldiered on once again against the current.
Cheney in Charge?
At the beginning of 2004, Cheney was confident that the Iraq war would be seen as a history-shaping event. He was unrepentant about his analysis of terrorism and his assertions about Hussein. The great threat to the nation was al Qaeda armed -- not just with box cutters and airline tickets, but with a nuke in the middle of an American city. The administration had been accused of not having connected the dots before Sept. 11. How could it afford to ignore the dots after Sept. 11? It was just that simple.
Cheney believed that given the intelligence reporting about Iraq-al Qaeda links over so many years and the intelligence evidence on weapons of mass destruction, no one in his right mind sitting in Bush's position as president could have ignored it.
There was so much focus on the aftermath and criticism of the postwar planning. Cheney thought it wouldn't matter in the end. It would be noise to history as long as they were successful in what they were trying to do. Outcomes mattered. He thought history would treat Bush very well, though he acknowledged that the jury was still out.
Nearly all presidents have had to deal with vice presidents with real or imagined political futures. Even Bush senior, the super-loyal vice president, broke publicly with President Ronald Reagan several times when he deemed it politically necessary, such as when the Reagan administration was negotiating with Panamanian leader Manuel Noriega and Bush had distanced himself from dealings with the unsavory strongman. But Cheney had made it clear he did not aspire to the presidency.
On a few occasions, political adviser Karl Rove and the president had discussed the news stories that Cheney was the one pulling the strings and running things behind the scenes. Some of the White House communications people worried about this. Bush laughed. Both of them had seen how deferential Cheney was. "Yes, Mr. President," or "No, Mr. President." It was no different when the president and Cheney were alone.
When the president wasn't around, Cheney often referred to him as "The Man," saying, "The Man wants this." Or, "The Man thinks this." Cheney was a forceful, persistent advocate, but the president decided. The clearest evidence of that was Cheney's strenuous objection to going to the United Nations to seek new weapons inspection resolutions. The president had gone against his advice. Cheney had saluted.
Rove argued that the politics of the Cheney-is-in-charge thesis worked in their favor. First, anyone who believed that was long lost to them anyway. Second, Rove wanted them to keep talking about it, throw the campaign into that briar patch. He believed the ordinary person wouldn't buy it. Here 67 percent were saying Bush was a strong leader and that included a third of the people who disapproved of his performance in office. A strong leader would not kowtow to his vice president, and Bush did not look meek in public.
Mark Malseed contributed to this report. | | | | | ©2002-2009 WarWithoutEnd.co.uk |
