| Author | Message | | Alpha | |  | | Alpha | | Posted: Tue Jun 07, 2005 11:25 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 | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Tue Jun 07, 2005 11:56 am Post subject: Turning Point On the War? |
| Turning Point On the War?
This past week, widely scattered newspaper editorialists roused themselves from seeming acceptance of the continuing slaughter in Iraq to voice, for the first time in many cases, outright condemnation of the war.
(June 06, 2005) -- Suddenly there seems to be something in the air -- the smell of death? Or something in the water -- blood? In any case, this past week, widely scattered newspaper editorialists roused themselves from seeming acceptance of the continuing slaughter in Iraq to voice, for the first time in many cases, outright condemnation of the war.
While still refusing to use the "W" word in offering advice to Dubya -- that is, "withdrawal" -- some at least are finally using the "L" word, for lies.
Memorial Day seemed to bring out the anger in some editorial writers, who at that time are normally afraid to say anything about a current conflict that might seem to slight the brave sacrifices of men and women, past and present. Maybe it was the steadily growing Iraqi and American death count, or the increasing examples of White House "disassembling" (to quote the president this week), or the horror stories emerging from Gitmo.
Or perhaps it's a hidden trend that might have even more impact than the rest: the writing on the wall spelled out by plunging military recruitment rates. That only adds to the sense that, overall, the Iraq adventure has made America far less safe in this world.
For whatever reason, it's possible that more than a few editorial pages may finally be on the verge of saying "enough is enough." Perhaps they might even catch up with their readers, as the latest Gallup polls find that 57% feel the war is "not worth it," and nearly as many want us to start pulling out troops, not sending more of them.
There were numerous signs of editorial unrest in the past week, too many to cite. The Sun of Baltimore, in its Memorial Day editorial, declared: "If the president truly wished to honor their memory, he would demonstrate to the nation that the government that has botched so much of the war at least has some inkling as to how to draw it to a successful conclusion -- so that the dead will not have died in vain." The Minneapolis Star-Tribune called Iraq "an unnecessary war based on contrived concerns. ... President Bush and those around him lied, and the rest of us let them. Harsh? Yes. True? Also yes."
Steve Chapman, syndicated columnist and editorial writer for the Chicago Tribune (and generally considered a conservative), on Thursday declared: "The dilemma the U.S. faces in fighting the insurgents is that military methods are not enough to solve the problem and may make it worse. If the movement is a reaction to the U.S. military presence, keeping American troops in Iraq amounts to fighting a fire with kerosene.
"That explains why the longer we stay, the more suicide attacks we face. And it suggests that the only feasible strategy is to withdraw from Iraq and turn the fight over to the Iraqi government. The alternative is to stay and keep doing what we've been doing for the last two years. But that approach has shown no signs of fostering success. It only promises to raise the cost of failure."
But perhaps the most powerful denunciation came from an unlikely source, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. An editorial in that Hearst paper this past Wednesday, just after Memorial Day, really thundered, and deserves reprinting here:
"President Bush was among the 260,000 graves at Arlington National Cemetery when he said it. But it was clear Monday that the president was referring to the more than 1,650 Americans killed to date in Iraq when he said, 'We must honor them by completing the mission for which they gave their lives; by defeating the terrorists.'
"Bush insists on clinging to the thoroughly discredited notion that there was any connection between the old Iraqi regime -- no matter how lawless and brutal -- and the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
"U.S. military action against an Afghan regime that harbored al-Qaida was a legitimate response to the 9/11 attacks. The invasion of Iraq was not.
"As of Memorial Day 2003, Bush had declared major combat operations at an end, predicted that weapons of mass destruction would be found and that U.S. forces were in the process of stabilizing Iraq. One hundred sixty U.S. troops had died.
"The U.S. death toll has grown more than tenfold. No weapons of mass destruction were found. More than 700 Iraqis have been killed since Iraq's new government was formed April 28.
"Bush said of the insurgents at a news conference yesterday, 'I believe the Iraqi government is plenty capable of dealing with them.'
"Of course, this is the same president that assured the world that military intervention in Iraq was a last resort and that the United States would make every effort to avoid war through diplomacy. Giving lie to that as well is the so-called Downing Street War Memo, which shows that as early as July 2002, 'Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD ... the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.'
"Perhaps all presidents' remarks in military graveyards are by nature self-serving. But few have been so callow as the president's using the deaths of U.S. troops in his unjustified war as justification for its continuance."
At the close of the editorial online, the paper polled readers, asking if they thought it was "time to begin the careful but quick withdrawal of American forces from Iraq?" These highly unscientific surveys usually should be ignored. But the result in this case, from over 2,600 votes, was so one-sided it deserves mention: Nearly 92% called for the beginning of a pullout.
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(gmitchell@editorandpublisher.com) is the editor of E&P.
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