| Author | Message | | Alpha | | Posted: Sun Jun 05, 2005 1:55 am Post subject: JINSA Zionist Operative Bolton Orchestrated Unlawful Firing |
| JINSA Zionist Operative Bolton Orchestrated Unlawful Firing
Bolton Said to Orchestrate Unlawful Firing
By CHARLES J. HANLEY, AP Special Correspondent
1 hour, 46 minutes ago
John R. Bolton flew to Europe in 2002 to confront the head of a global arms-control agency and demand he resign, then orchestrated the firing of the unwilling diplomat in a move a U.N. tribunal has since judged unlawful, according to officials involved.
A former Bolton deputy says the U.S. undersecretary of state felt Jose Bustani "had to go," particularly because the Brazilian was trying to send chemical weapons inspectors to Baghdad. That might have helped defuse the crisis over alleged Iraqi weapons and undermined a U.S. rationale for war.
Bustani, who says he got a "menacing" phone call from Bolton at one point, was removed by a vote of just one-third of member nations at an unusual special session of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), at which the United States cited alleged mismanagement in calling for his ouster.
The United Nations' highest administrative tribunal later condemned the action as an "unacceptable violation" of principles protecting international civil servants. The OPCW session's Swiss chairman now calls it an "unfortunate precedent" and Bustani a "man with merit."
"Many believed the U.S. delegation didn't want meddling from outside in the Iraq business," said the retired Swiss diplomat, Heinrich Reimann. "That could be the case."
Bolton's handling of the multilateral showdown takes on added significance now as he looks for U.S. Senate confirmation as early as this week as U.N. ambassador, a key role on the international stage, and as more details have emerged in Associated Press interviews about what happened in 2002.
A spokeswoman told AP Bolton, keeping a low profile during his confirmation process, would have no comment for this article.
Bolton has been criticized for supposed bullying of junior U.S. officials and for efforts to get them fired. Bustani, a senior official under the U.N. umbrella, says Bolton used a threatening tone with him and "tried to order me around."
The Iraq connection to the OPCW affair comes as fresh evidence surfaces that the Bush administration was intent from early on to pursue military and not diplomatic action against Saddam Hussein's regime.
An official British document, disclosed last month, said Prime Minister Tony Blair agreed in April 2002 to join in an eventual U.S. attack on Iraq. Two weeks later, Bustani was ousted, with British help.
In 1997, the Brazilian arms-control specialist became founding director-general of the OPCW, whose inspectors oversee destruction of U.S., Russian and other chemical weapons under a 168-nation treaty banning such arms. The agency, based in The Hague, Netherlands, also inspects chemical plants worldwide to ensure they're not put to military use.
In May 2000, one year ahead of time and with strong U.S. support, Bustani was unanimously re-elected OPCW chief for a 2001-2005 term. Colin Powell, the new secretary of state, praised his leadership qualities in a personal letter in 2001.
But Ralph Earle, a veteran U.S. arms negotiator, told AP that he and others in Bolton's arms-control bureau grew unhappy with what they considered Bustani's mismanagement. The agency chief also "had a big ego. He did things on his own," and wasn't responsive to U.S. and other countries' positions, said Earle, now retired.
Both Earle and career diplomat Avis Bohlen, who retired in June 2002 as a top Bolton deputy, said the idea to remove Bustani did not originate with the undersecretary. But Bolton "leaped on it enthusiastically," Bohlen recalled. "He was very much in charge of the whole campaign," she said, and Bustani's initiative on Iraq seemed the "coup de grace."
"It was that that made Bolton decide he had to go," Bohlen said.
After U.N. arms inspectors had withdrawn from Iraq in 1998 in a dispute with the Baghdad government, Bustani stepped up his initiative, seeking to bring Iraq — and other Arab states — into the chemical weapons treaty.
Bustani's inspectors would have found nothing, because Iraq's chemical weapons were destroyed in the early 1990s. That would have undercut the U.S. rationale for war because the Bush administration by early 2002 was claiming, without hard evidence, that Baghdad still had such an arms program.
In a March 2002 "white paper," Bolton's office said Bustani was seeking an "inappropriate role" in Iraq, and the matter should be left to the U.N. Security Council — where Washington has a veto.
Bolton said in a 2003 AP interview that Iraq was "completely irrelevant" to Bustani's responsibilities. Earle and Bohlen disagree. Enlisting new treaty members was part of the OPCW chief's job, they said, although they thought he should have consulted with Washington.
Former Bustani aide Bob Rigg, a New Zealander, sees a clear U.S. motivation: "Why did they not want OPCW involved in Iraq? They felt they couldn't rely on OPCW to come up with the findings the U.S. wanted."
Bustani and his aides believe friction with Washington over OPCW inspections of U.S. chemical-industry sites also contributed to the showdown, which went on for months.
In June 2001, Bolton "telephoned me to try to interfere, in a menacing tone, in decisions that are the exclusive responsibility of the director-general," Bustani wrote in 2002 in a Brazilian academic journal.
He elaborated in an interview with the French newspaper Le Monde in mid-2002, saying Bolton "tried to order me around," and sought to have some U.S. inspection results overlooked and certain Americans hired to OPCW positions. The agency head said he refused.
Bustani, now in a sensitive position as Brazil's London ambassador, indicated to the AP through an intermediary that he would have no additional comment.
The United States went public with the campaign in March 2002, moving to terminate Bustani's tenure. On the eve of an OPCW Executive Council meeting to consider the U.S. no-confidence motion, Bolton met Bustani in The Hague to seek his resignation, U.S. and OPCW officials said.
When Bustani refused, "Bolton said something like, `Now we'll do it the other way,' and walked out," Rigg recounted.
In the Executive Council, the Americans failed to win majority support among the 41 nations. A month later, on April 21, at U.S. insistence, an unprecedented special session of the full treaty conference was called.
Addressing the delegates, Bustani said the conference must decide whether genuine multilateralism "will be replaced by unilateralism in a multilateral disguise."
Only 113 nations were represented, 15 without voting rights because their dues were far in arrears. The U.S. delegation had suggested it would withhold U.S. dues — 22 percent of the budget — if Bustani stayed in office, stirring fears of an OPCW collapse.
This time the Americans, with British help, got the required two-thirds vote of those present and voting. But that amounted to only 48 in favor of removing Bustani — and seven opposed and 43 abstaining — in an organization then with 145 member states.
Bustani appealed the decision to the Administrative Tribunal of the International Labor Organization in Geneva, a judicial body to which agencies in the U.N. family submit personnel cases. The OPCW, meanwhile, named a new director-general, Rogelio Pfirter of Argentina.
In a stern rebuke issued in July 2003, the three-member U.N. tribunal said the U.S. allegations were "extremely vague" and the dismissal "unlawful." It said international civil servants must not be made "vulnerable to pressures and to political change."
Noting that Bustani did not seek reinstatement, it awarded him unpaid salary and 50,000 euros, or $61,500, in damages. He said he would donate the damages to an OPCW technical aid fund for poorer countries.
Reimann, the former OPCW conference chairman, says he looks back with sadness at what was done.
"I think there's no doubt Bustani wanted to serve the organization, to get wider membership and all these things," the Swiss diplomat said. "He was fighting very bravely to make it work."
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Back Jose Bustani
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,687544,00.html
Saturday April 20, 2002
The Guardian
Tomorrow, the US government will attempt to remove the director-general of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons from his post (Chemical coup d'etat, April 16). By encouraging Saddam Hussein to sign the chemical weapons convention, Jose Bustani appears to have become an obstacle to the American intention to engage in military action in Iraq. If the US succeeds, it will be a victory for unilateralism and a blow to international law.
The OPCW is the first global regime aimed at abolishing an entire category of weapons of mass destruction. With the backing of the UN security council, Bustani believes he can persuade Iraq to join the convention, offering the most realistic peaceful means of eliminating its chemical weapons.
At stake is the independence of the OPCW and of all the multilateral organisations. After seeking unsuccessfully, in defiance of international law, to force Bustani to resign, the US government has called a special meeting, beginning tomorrow, to sack him. It has threatened to withdraw OPCW's funding if it does not get its way, which would cripple the organisation. This action is unprecedented. If the other signatories to the convention give in, the entire system of international treaties and organisations could become endangered, as powerful nations see that they can challenge their independence.
The UK's record of support for the chemical weapons convention has so far been exemplary. We call upon the government to put world peace ahead of the special relationship by defending the OPCW against US unilateralism.
Brian Eno, Robbie Williams, Damien Hirst, Salman Rushdie, Peter Gabriel, Dave Stewart, Thom Yorke, Joe Strummer, Annie Lennox, Bianca Jagger, Jonathan Ross, Marc Quinn, Robert Wyatt, Robert Fripp, Holly Johnson, Andy Kershaw, Bonnie Greer, Charlie Gillettand 16 others.
Special reports
Iraq
Guardian Unlimited Politics: Britain and Iraq
Israel & the Middle East
George Bush's America
Interactive guides
Iraq under threat - how the US might attack
The Gulf war
Iraq in pictures
Photo gallery: 10 years after the Gulf war
The weblog
Weblog special: America at war
Media, information and portals
Guardian Unlimited news guide - Iraq
Middle East News Online
Arab Gateway: Iraq briefing
Middle East Daily
Useful links
Iraq sanctions - UN security council
UN special commission on Iraq
Campaign Against Sanctions on Iraq
Last edited by Alpha on Sun Jun 05, 2005 9:00 am; edited 1 time in total | |  | | Alpha | | | | Alpha | | | | Alpha | | | | Alpha | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Sun Jun 05, 2005 5:39 pm Post subject: What's Up With the Downing Street Memo? |
| http://www.the-signal.com/News/ViewStory.asp?storyID=7284
What's Up With the Downing Street Memo?
6/4/2005
Diana Sevanian Signal Staff Writer
If I had lost a loved one fighting in Iraq or currently had a soldier over there, I would be enraged over the Downing Street Memo. Even without that link, I am fuming about this formerly “extremely sensitive” and now public memorandum.
In case you're unaware, the Downing Street Memo is the recently leaked minutes from a 2002 British government meeting between Prime Minister Tony Blair and his senior national security team. It pertains to their intelligence analysts’ concerns over President Bush's determination to topple Saddam Hussein — despite “wobbly evidence” that Iraq posed a serious threat to its neighbors or to the United States.
Penned by top Blair aide Matthew Rycroft almost one year before we gave Iraq the shock and awe no one will ever forget, the top-secret memo spoke of how that cause for war would have to be scripted — because a desire for regime change was just not a good enough reason to send in the troops.
Per the minutes, Foreign Secretary Jack Straw concurred that Bush's case to go to war was slim.
“Saddam was not threatening his neighbors, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran,” Straw said.
The memo also told of how Bush's decision to strike was already set prior to his presenting the plan to Congress; that the National Security Council lacked patience with the United Nations’ route and had no zeal for releasing information on Iraq's regime record; and that there was “little discussion” in Washington to plan an aftermath to military action.
Here's the kicker: The former head of British Secret Intelligence Services, Richard Dearlove (who had just gotten back from meetings in Washington, D.C.), was sure Bush wanted to “remove Saddam Hussein through military action justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. ... But the intelligence and the facts were being fixed around the policy.”
Facts “fixed”?
Isn't that like manufacturing evidence?
How do you explain that to kids who signed on to fight evildoers and secure their WMDs, only to come home in flag-draped boxes to a nation where, according to a recent Gallup poll, almost 60 percent of its citizens now feel the war was a total mistake?
How do you explain it to grieving parents who thought their sons and daughters died in a war where military power had been used only as the absolute last resort — like Bush said it would be?
While Blair's cabinet has acknowledged the authenticity of the memo, White House spokesman Scott McClellan stiffly discounted it, saying “there is no need to respond” to it.
I am not surprised at that reaction.
Now for another disturbing twist: This whole memo story has largely gone to the back burner of our nation's consciousness. Although it was first divulged in Great Britain more than one month ago, you just aren't hearing or reading much about it here.
Someone who is quite vocal about it, however, is Michigan Rep. John Conyers, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee who, along with 88 other Congressional Democrats,, has formally requested answers from President Bush.
To date, no reply.
So what does this silence say?
It says,, ignore the issue and the people will forget about it.
Further, it says that “we the people” do not matter; what matters is preserving the cold-steely dogma that drives this human meat-grinding machine our leaders have set into voracious motion.
Senior statesman Conyers feels the mainstream media have ignored the story and helped let the president off the hook.
Why this reticence in reporting? After all, the “liberal” media is considered by many to be a mongrel that'll bite any bone if it makes the administration look bad.
I know some folks are saying, “They're not writing about it because it is a non-issue. We are in a war now. That's what matters.”
Others, like McClellan, will just deny its validity.
But I believe this paucity of front-page attention is more complex. Possibly some journalists are so burned up with — or burned out by — this historic debacle that they've chosen to stay mum and see what unfolds. Perhaps they feel there's too much fresh residue from the Newsweek and Dan Rather incidents to stick their necks out.
Maybe a pervasive numbness has enveloped many of us. Each day the horrific news from Iraq, as well as the White House PR spin on it, give people more reason to feel sick, worried, mad, misguided and hopeless.
It could also be that some people who have voiced their concerns over this cursed Pandora's Box and the fact that we have no exit strategy from it — just a new generation of dying soldiers and hemorrhaging pockets — are weary from speaking out and being excoriated. After all, when they do voice their opinions, the “real” patriots of this nation viciously label them cowardly, liberal, un-American, gun-absconding, fetus-killing, commie-wacko traitors who deserve to be deported.
Speaking of communism, or totalitarianism or socialism, or any “ism” that strays from what this nation's founding government was supposed to be about, how far off are we from being under what many would consider an aberrant regime if we cannot depend on straight answers from the top?
Democrats are not the only folks fired up over this situation. Republicans are coming forward, too. Count in Paul Craig Roberts, a conservative Republican and syndicated columnist.
A Hoover Institution senior fellow and former Reagan Administration economic policy cabinet member, Roberts says, “George W. Bush and his gang of neocon warmongers have destroyed America's reputation.”
In his recent column, “A Reputation in Tatters,” Roberts writes that our dismal standing will likely prevail unless drastic measures are taken — including the same penalty served on our former commander-in-chief.
“As intent as Republicans were to impeach President Clinton for lying about a sexual affair, they have a blind eye for President Bush's far more serious lies. Bush's lies have caused the deaths of tens of thousands of people, injured and maimed tens of thousands more, devastated a country, destroyed America's reputation, caused one billion Muslims to hate America, ruined our alliances with Europe, created a police state at home, and squandered $300 billion dollars and counting,” he said.
So, Mr. President. What about a bona fide, non-scripted face-the-nation about the memo and this war? This is a democracy and you are supposed to listen to our concerns — and responsibly address them.
Validate our right to know the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
You owe us that, Mr. Bush.
You especially owe it to the more than 1,600 soldiers who have died in Iraq, those still serving there, those bound to go, and all the people who love them.
Diana Sevanian is a Stevenson Ranch resident. Her column represents her own views, and not necessarily those of The Signal. | | | | Alpha | | | | Alpha | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Mon Jun 06, 2005 11:43 pm Post subject: "Downing Street memo" on Iraq met mostly with sile |
| http://www.insidebayarea.com/sanmateocountytimes/ci_2781868
Article Last Updated: 6/06/2005 01:18 PM
"Downing Street memo" on Iraq met mostly with silence
Bush officials mum despite calls for answers on Brit report
By Josh Richman, STAFF WRITER
Inside Bay Area
It's been more than a month since The Times of London published a secret British government memo from mid-2002 describing the Bush administration's resolve to invade Iraq whether it posed a threat or not.
It's been about a month since 89 House Democrats — including six from the Bay Area — asked the president to explain himself in light of this memo.
And it's been almost three weeks since the White House press secretary said that isn't going to happen.
So now what?
The blogosphere still burns with items about what's often called the "Downing Street memo," named for the site of the British prime minister's home and office.
And House Judiciary Committee ranking Democrat John Conyers, D-Mich., who authored the House Democrats' letter, has put a version of that letter on his campaign Web site, www.johnconyers.com, so the public can add their "signatures" for submittal to the White House; about 89,000had signed by Wednesday.
Otherwise, there's nothing doing.
Apparently authored by a foreign-policy aide to Prime Minister Tony Blair, the Downing Street memo contains minutes from a July 23, 2002, meeting of high-ranking officials. Sir Richard Dearlove, head of the British secret intelligence service MI6, had recently met with CIA officials in Washington and was quoted as saying, "(m)ilitary action was now seen as inevitable."
"Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD (weapons of mass destruction)," the memo says. "But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC (National Security Council) had no patience with the U.N. route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime's record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action."
The memo also said Foreign Secretary Jack Straw indicated he would discuss the issue with U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell later that week. "It seemed clear that Bush had made up his mind to take military action, even if the timing was not yet decided. But the case was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbors, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran."
Blair's office told The Times the memo contained "nothing new." White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan more than two weeks later said claims that intelligence was fixed to justify the war are "flat-out wrong," adding he hadn't seen the "specific memo" but only reports of its content.
The lawmakers' May 5 letter to President Bush asked him to publicly state, among other things, whether his administration tried to manipulate intelligence and create an ultimatum to justify the war. Among those signing the letter were Barbara Lee, D-Oakland; Pete Stark, D-Fremont; George Miller, D-Martinez; Ellen Tauscher, D-Alamo; Lynn Woolsey, D-San Rafael; and Zoe Lofgren, D-San Jose.
McClellan said on May 17 that the White House saw "no need" to respond to the Conyers letter. Stark said Thursday he's not surprised.
"If the President won't respond to the deaths of more than 1,600 U.S. troops and more than 20,000 Iraqi civilians, why would I expect him to respond to a memo?" he said. "America doesn't trust the president or his administration on Iraq, and when further evidence of their lies become public, it's just as expected as the discovery of another shady relationship between a lobbyist and (House Majority Leader) Tom DeLay."
Lee said Friday the memo "is strong evidence that the Bush administration not only manipulated intelligence data to justify the invasion of Iraq, but deliberately misled Congress and the American people about it while telling the truth to the British government.
"Given the gravity of the questions this memo raises, I think the Bush administration's silence speaks volumes. Our nation deserves answers."
Among those who didn't sign the Conyers letter were House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-San Francisco, and Rep. Tom Lantos, D-San Mateo, the House International Relations Committee's ranking Democrat.
Pelosi always has said the war lacked adequate justification, spokesman Brendan Daly said Thursday. "This (memo) basically told us what we already knew, it verified what we already knew."
As for the letter, Pelosi often supports efforts like this without actually signing on to them, Daly added. "She felt her position was already clear, so she didn't feel a need to sign it."
Lantos spokesman Lynne Weil said Friday that "the Conyers letter escaped notice (in Lantos' office) until after the deadline to sign it had gone by." She didn't comment on what Lantos — who supports the war in Iraq but has criticized President Bush's handling of it — thought of the Downing Street memo.
Critics complain U.S. news media have been mostly silent on the memo. Cursory searches this week turned up four stories about the memo at CNN.com, and one each on the Web sites of Fox News, the New York Times and the Washington Post.
"I think that the media is afraid to follow up on the very grave implications of this story because they have grown accustomed to being bullied by the Bush administration, and because the story implicates the media for giving the Bush administration a free ride in deliberately misleading the American people into an unnecessary and increasingly disastrous war," Lee said. "Sadly, the type of courageous, independent journalism that uncovered the Watergate scandal is nowhere to be found today."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
See the entire Downing Street memo at http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-1593607,00.html
See the Congressional letter to President Bush at http://www.house.gov/judiciary_democrats/ letters/bushsecretmemoltr5505.pdf.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Contact Josh Richman at jrichman@angnewspapers.com. | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Tue Jun 07, 2005 11:23 am Post subject: 'Pretext for War' |
| http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20040801/news_lz1v1pretext.html
'Pretext for War'
... finds a slew of flaws and abuses
Reviewed by Michiko Kakutani
August 1, 2004
In the walk-up and wake of the Iraq war, it's no secret that one of the most bitter battles in Washington has been between the CIA and the State Department on one side, and neoconservative hawks in the Pentagon and White House on the other.
Intelligence and State Department officials have characterized the neocons as hawkish ideologues who entered office before 9/11 with an agenda to depose Saddam Hussein. They have accused the hard-liners of cherry-picking and hyping intelligence in order to sell the war against Iraq.
The hawks have characterized the CIA as a bunch of risk-averse, bean-counting bureaucrats, hobbled by what Richard Perle has called "ideologically liberal assumptions." They have accused the agency of continuing intelligence failures, from the overthrow of the shah's government in Iran in 1979 to the terrorist attacks of 9/11.
As James Bamford, the author of two respected books on American intelligence, tells it, there is plenty of blame to go around. His new book, "A Pretext for War," draws a damning portrait of the country's intelligence agencies as woefully ill-equipped to deal with the threats of terrorism and a post-Cold War world. It also draws a scathing picture of ideologues in the Bush administration, manipulating dubious evidence about links between al-Qaeda and Saddam and flawed information about weapons of mass destruction in the push toward war.
In addition, Bamford suggests that the CIA caved to pressure from administration hard-liners. He quotes a CIA case officer who says that in January 2003, one of the agency's higher-ups called a meeting and said, "You know what – if Bush wants to go to war, it's your job to give him a reason to do so." And he writes that the CIA chief George Tenet said of the provocative intelligence about Iraq that Secretary of State Colin Powell presented to the United Nations in February 2003: "I'm standing behind it 100 percent," even though much of that intelligence later turned out to be flawed, and Tenet stated this year that his agency "never said there was an 'imminent' threat" from Saddam.
Much of the information and many of the theories in Bamford's book will be familiar to readers from earlier magazine and newspaper articles, and other books: most notably, Bob Woodward's "Bush at War" and "Plan of Attack"; "Ghost Wars," Steve Coll's exhaustive history of the CIA, Osama bin Laden and Afghanistan; the former counterterrorism czar Richard A. Clarke's best-selling expose of the war on terror, "Against All Enemies"; and "Inside 9-11," a detailed chronicle of the terrorist attacks of 2001 by Der Spiegel journalists.
But Bamford unearths new details about everything from the identity of one of the undisclosed locations used by Vice President Dick Cheney after 9/11 (Site R, a secret military command post on the Maryland-Pennsylvania border) to the failures of a special CIA unit charged with tracking bin Laden, and he connects the many dots, both old and new, to create a vivid, unsettling narrative.
Discursive in organization, "A Pretext for War" provides selective context for the failure to prevent the attacks of 9/11 and the Bush administration's path to war. Bamford is highly persuasive in recounting the many ways in which American intelligence agencies failed to adapt to the end of the Cold War: They lacked specialists in many key Middle Eastern languages and a sufficient number of analysts to grapple with an avalanche of cyber-age data, and even though Americans like John Walker Lindh had been secretly joining al-Qaeda, operatives appear to have made little effort to penetrate terrorist organizations, preferring the decorous, low-risk tack of trying to recruit foreign embassy officials at cocktail parties.
Bamford does not address the broader question of how Cold War paradigms shaped the thinking of key Bush administration members such as national security adviser Condoleezza Rice and Cheney. And unlike James Mann in "Rise of the Vulcans," he does not delve into many of the larger factors shaping the hawks' thinking – from their experiences in dealing with the Soviet Union to their appropriation of the Wilsonian idea of exporting democracy.
What he does focus on is the role that Israel has played in shaping American policy. Bamford contends that "the blueprint for the new Bush policy" on the Middle East "had actually been drawn up five years earlier by three of his top national security advisers" (Richard Perle, Douglas Feith and David Wurmser) for the Israeli prime minister at the time, Benjamin Netanyahu (who rejected the plan), and that when they entered office in January 2001, all these hawks needed was "a pretext" for war against Iraq. Citing a report from the British newspaper The Guardian, Bamford adds that the Office of Special Plans, a Pentagon unit set up by Feith, "forged close ties to a parallel, ad hoc intelligence unit within Ariel Sharon's office in Israel," which "was designed to go around the country's own intelligence organization, Mossad."
In recounting the failures of intelligence before 9/11, Bamford points to missed clues about the hijackers and the poisonous rivalry (not to mention fatal lack of communication) between the CIA and FBI. He also writes that a special unit of the CIA named Alec Station, which was set up in 1996 "with the sole mission of collecting intelligence" on bin Laden and "disrupting his network," had an abysmal record. He notes that "after four years and hundreds of millions of dollars," it failed "to recruit a single source within bin Laden's growing Afghanistan operation." He adds: "It was George Tenet's biggest secret. Not only was al-Qaeda never penetrated, neither the Counterterrorism Center nor Alec Station ever picked up a single piece of usable intelligence on bin Laden or his organization, the country's greatest threat."
Bamford is equally scorching on the subject of an alternative intelligence gathering operation (called the Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group) set up at the Pentagon by Feith and Wurmser, arguing that it "was little more than a pro-war propaganda cell" designed "to produce evidence to support the pretexts for attacking Iraq."
He also denounces the Pentagon's heavy reliance on intelligence acquired through Ahmed Chalabi, the head of the Iraqi National Congress and a longtime friend of many prominent administration hawks. Though much of the information from Chalabi's sources about weapons of mass destruction later turned out to be incorrect or fabricated, Bamford writes, it was funneled to the White House and to the press – most notably, The New York Times – to help sell the "war to the American public."
Both President Bill Clinton and President George W. Bush are taken to task in these pages as well. In describing the country's vulnerability in the face of terrorism, Bamford repeatedly notes that budget cutbacks during the Clinton administration weakened the country's intelligence agencies, and he writes that the now famous Aug. 6, 2001, President's Daily Brief – titled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S." – seemed "to have made little impression" on Bush.
He observes that when Tenet, the head of the CIA during both administrations, declared war on terrorism – in the wake of the 1998 embassy bombings in Africa – it was so low-key that senior officials at the Pentagon and the FBI had not heard of it. And he points out that Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, who actually controls a large portion of America's spy world, was "far more concerned with downsizing the Pentagon than reorganizing and reinvigorating the intelligence community" when he entered office.
In the end Bamford's conclusions are alarming, if not unfamiliar ones: that incompetence, timidity and a lack of readiness contributed to the failure to prevent the terrorist attacks of 9/11, and that misinformation, ideological agendas and poor intelligence led to the decision to go to war against Iraq.
©New York Times News Service
A Pretext for War
9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse of America's Intelligence Agencies
James Bamford
Doubleday, 420 pages, $26.95 | | | | | ©2002-2009 WarWithoutEnd.co.uk |
