Drinking the Kool-Aid.
Lang, W. Patrick
Throughout my long service life in the Department of Defense, first
as an army officer and then as a member of the Defense Intelligence
Senior Executive Service, there was a phrase in common usage: "I
will fall on my sword over that." It meant that the speaker had
reached a point of internal commitment with regard to something that his
superiors wanted him to do and that he intended to refuse even though
this would be career suicide. The speaker preferred career death to the
loss of personal honor.
This phrase is no longer widely in use. What has taken its place is
far more sinister in its meaning and implications. "I drank the
Kool-Aid" is what is now said. Those old enough to remember the
Jonestown tragedy know this phrase all too well. Jim Jones, a
self-styled "messiah" from the United States, lured hundreds
of innocent and believing followers to Guyana, where he built a village,
isolated from the world, in which his Utopian view of the universe would
be played out. He controlled all news, regulated all discourse and
expression of opinion, and shaped behavior to his taste. After a time,
his paranoia grew unmanageable and he "foresaw" that
"evil" forces were coming to threaten his
"paradise." He decided that these forces were unstoppable and
that death would be preferable to living under their control. He called
together his followers in the town square and explained the situation to
them. There were a few survivors, who all said afterward that within the
context of the "group-think" prevailing in the village, it
sounded quite reasonable. Jim Jones then invited all present to drink
from vats of Kool-Aid containing lethal doses of poison. Nearly all did
so, without physical coercion. Parents gave their children the poison
and then drank it themselves. Finally Jones drank. Many hundreds died
with him.
What does drinking the Kool-Aid mean today? It signifies that the
person in question has given up personal integrity and has succumbed to
the prevailing groupthink that typifies policymaking today. This person
has become "part of the problem, not part of the solution."
What was the "problem"? The sincerely held beliefs of a
small group of people who think they are the "bearers" of a
uniquely correct view of the world, sought to dominate the foreign
policy of the United States in the Bush 43 administration, and succeeded
in doing so through a practice of excluding all who disagreed with them.
Those they could not drive from government they bullied and undermined
until they, too, had drunk from the vat.
What was the result? The war in Iraq. It is not anything like over
yet, and the body count is still mounting. As of March 2004, there were
554 American soldiers dead, several thousand wounded, and more than
15,000 Iraqis dead (the Pentagon is not publicizing the number). The
recent PBS special on Frontline concerning Iraq mentioned that senior
military officers had said of General Franks, "He had drunk the
Kool-Aid." Many intelligence officers have told the author that
they too drank the Kool-Aid and as a result consider themselves to be
among the "walking dead," waiting only for retirement and
praying for an early release that will allow them to go away and try to
forget their dishonor and the damage they have done to the intelligence
services and therefore to the republic.
What we have now is a highly corrupted system of intelligence and
policymaking, one twisted to serve specific group goals, ends and
beliefs held to the point of religious faith. Is this different from the
situation in previous administrations? Yes. The intelligence community
(the information collection and analysis functions, not "James
Bond" covert action, which should properly be in other parts of the
government) is assigned the task of describing reality. The policy
staffs and politicals in the government have the task of creating a new
reality, more to their taste. Nevertheless, it is "understood"
by the government professionals, as opposed to the zealots, that a
certain restraint must be observed by the policy crowd in dealing with
the intelligence people. Without objective facts, decisions are based on
subjective drivel. Wars result from such drivel. We are in the midst of
one at present.
The signs of impending disaster were clear from the beginning of
this administration. Insiders knew it all along. Statements made by the
Bush administration often seem to convey the message that Iraq only
became a focus of attention after the terrorist attacks on 9/11. The
evidence points in another direction.
Sometime in the spring of 2000, Stephen Hadley, now Condoleeza
Rice's deputy at the National Security Council (NSC), briefed a
group of prominent Republican party policymakers on the
national-security and foreign-policy agenda of a future George W. Bush
administration. Hadley was one of a group of senior campaign policy
advisers to then-Texas Governor Bush known collectively as "the
Vulcans." The group, in addition to Hadley, included Rice, Paul
Wolfowitz and Richard Perle and had been assembled by George Shultz and
Dick Cheney beginning in late 1998, when Bush first launched his
presidential bid.
Hadley's briefing shocked a number of the participants,
according to Clifford Kiracofe, a professor at the Virginia Military
Institute, who spoke to several of them shortly after the meeting.
Hadley announced that the "number-one foreign-policy agenda"
of a Bush administration would be Iraq and the unfinished business of
removing Saddam Hussein from power. Hadley also made it clear that the
IsraelPalestine conflict, which had dominated the Middle East agenda of
the Clinton administration, would be placed in the deep freeze.
Dr. Kiracofe's account of the pre-election obsession of the
Vulcans with the ouster of Saddam Hussein is corroborated by former U.S.
Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill's memory of the first meetings
of the Bush National Security Council, which he attended in late January
and early February of 2001. Ron Suskind's book The Price of
Loyalty, based on O'Neill's memory and notes, tells us of an
NSC meeting, ten days into the Bush administration, at which both the
Israel-Palestine and Iraq situations were discussed.
Referring to President Clinton's efforts to reach a
comprehensive peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians, President
Bush declared, "Clinton overreached, and it all fell apart.
That's why we're in trouble. If the two sides don't want
peace, there's no way we can force them. I don't see much we
can do over there at this point. I think it's time to pull out of
the situation."
Next, Condoleeza Rice raised the issue of Iraq and the danger posed
by Saddam's arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. A good deal of
the hour-long meeting was taken up with a briefing by CIA Director
George Tenet on a series of aerial photographs of sites inside Iraq that
"might" he producing WMD. Tenet admitted that there was no
firm intelligence on what was going on inside those sites, but at the
close of the meeting, President Bush tasked Secretary of Defense Donald
Rumsfeld and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Hugh Shelton to begin
preparing options for the use of U.S. ground forces in the northern and
southern no-fly zones in Iraq to support an insurgency to bring down the
Saddam regime. As author Ron Suskind summed it up: "Meeting
adjourned. Ten days in, and it was about Iraq. Rumsfeld had said little,
Cheney nothing at all, though both men clearly had long entertained the
idea of overthrowing Saddam." If this was a decision meeting, it
was strange. It ended in a presidential order to prepare contingency
plans for war in Iraq.
Surely, this was not the first time these people had considered
this problem. One interesting thing about those at the meeting is that
no one present or in the background had any substantive knowledge of the
Middle East. It is one thing to have traveled to the area as a senior
government official. It is another to have lived there and worked with
the people of the region for long periods of time. People with that kind
of experience in the Muslim world are strangely absent from Team Bush.
In the game plan for the Arab and Islamic world, most of the
government's veteran Middle East experts were largely shut out. The
Pentagon civilian bureaucracy of the Bush administration, dominated by
an inner circle of think-tankers, lawyers and former Senate staffers,
virtually hung out a sign, "Arabic Speakers Need Not Apply."
They effectively purged the process of Americans who might have
inadvertently developed sympathies for the people of the region.
Instead of including such veterans in the planning process, the
Bush team opted for amateurs brought in from outside the Executive
Branch who tended to share the views of many of President Bush's
earliest foreign-policy advisors and mentors. Because of this hiring
bias, the American people got a Middle East planning process dominated
by "insider" discourse among longtime colleagues and old
friends who ate, drank, talked, worked and planned only with each other.
Most of these people already shared attitudes and concepts of how the
Middle East should be handled. Their continued association only
reinforced their common beliefs. This created an environment in which
any shared belief could become sacrosanct and unchallengeable. A
situation like this is, in essence, a war waiting for an excuse to
happen. If there is no "imminent threat," one can be invented,
not as a matter of deliberate deception, but rather as an artifact of
group self-delusion. In normal circumstances, there is a flow of new
talent into the government that melds with the old timers in a process
both dynamic and creative. This does not seem to have happened in the
Bush 43 administration. Instead, the newcomers behaved as though they
had seized control of the government in a silent coup. They tended to
behave in such a way that civil servants were made to feel that somehow
they were the real enemy, barely tolerated and under suspicion. There
seemed to be a general feeling among the newcomers that professional
intelligence people somehow just did not "get it." To add to
the discomfort, the new Bush team began to do some odd things.
INFORMATION COLLECTION
Early in the Bush 43 administration, actions began that clearly
reflected a predisposition to place regime change in Iraq at the top of
the foreign-policy agenda. Sometime in January 2001, the Iraqi National
Congress (INC), the opposition group headed by Ahmed Chalabi, began
receiving U.S. State Department funds for an effort called the
"Information-Collection Program." Under the Clinton
administration, some money had been given to Iraqi exiles for what might
be called agit-prop activities against Saddam's government, but the
INC (Chalabi) had not been taken very seriously. They had a bad
reputation for spending money freely with very little to show for it.
The CIA had concluded that Chalabi and his INC colleagues were not to be
trusted with taxpayers' money. Nevertheless, Chalabi had
longstanding ties to a group of well-established anti-Saddam American
activists who were installed by the Bush administration as leading
figures of the politically appointed civilian bureaucracy in the
Pentagon and in the Office of the Vice President.
Those ties paid off. The Information-Collection Program, launched
in the early months of the Bush administration, was aimed at providing
funds to the INC for recruiting defectors from Saddam's military
and secret police, and making them available to American intelligence.
But what the program really did was to provide a steady stream of raw
information useful in challenging the collective wisdom of the
intelligence community where the "War with Iraq" enthusiasts
disagreed with the intelligence agencies. If the president and Congress
were to be sold the need for war, information had to be available with
which to argue against what was seen as the lack of imagination and
timidity of regular intelligence analysts. To facilitate the flow of
such "information" to the president, a dedicated apparatus
centered in the Office of the Vice President created its own
intelligence office, buried in the recesses of the Pentagon, to
"stovepipe" raw data to the White House, to make the case for
war on the basis of the testimony of self-interested emigres and exiles.
At the time of the first Gulf War in 1991, I was the defense
intelligence officer for the Middle East in the Defense Intelligence
Agency. This meant that I was in charge of all DIA substantive business
for the region. In discussions at the time of the victorious end of that
campaign and the subsequent Shia and Kurdish revolts in Iraq, it became
abundantly clear that the same people who later made up the war party in
the Bush 43 administration were not completely reconciled to the failure
of U.S. forces to overthrow the Saddam regime. In spite of the lack of
U.N. sanction for such an operation and the probable long-term costs of
the inevitable American occupation of Iraq, the group later known as the
neocons seemed deeply embittered by the lack of decisive action to
remove the Iraqi dictator. Soon after the dust settled on Operation
Desert Storm, the first Bush administration helped launch the Iraqi
National Congress (INC). The INC was initially an umbrella of
anti-Saddam groups largely composed of Kurdish and Shia organizations.
In the beginning, the CIA provided seed money as a result of
presidential direction, and a private consulting firm, the Rendon Group,
provided the initial public-relations support. To this day, one of the
Rendon advisors to the INC, Francis Brooke, serves as the INC's
chief Washington lobbyist.
Chalabi's American connections played a dominant role in the
INC's evolution over the next dozen years. At the University of
Chicago, Chalabi had been a student of Albert Wohlstetter, a hard-line
Utopian nuclear-war planner who had been the dissertation adviser to
another University of Chicago Ph.D., Paul Wolfowitz. Wohlstetter had
also been a mentor to Richard Perle. In the summer of 1969, Wohlstetter
arranged for both Wolfowitz and Perle to work for the short-lived
Committee to Maintain a Prudent Defense Policy, a Washington-based group
co-founded by two icons of American Cold War policy, Dean Acheson and
Paul Nitze. Wolfowitz and Perle remained close collaborators from that
time forward.
Chalabi, an Iraqi Shia Arab, had fled Iraq in 1958, just after the
overthrow of the royal Hashemite government. His father and grandfather
had held cabinet posts in the British-installed Hashemite regime. Before
coming to the United States to obtain a doctorate, Chalabi lived in
Jordan, Lebanon and Britain. He returned to Beirut after obtaining his
doctorate, but in 1977, he moved to Jordan and established a new
company, the Petra Bank, which grew into the second largest commercial
bank in the country. Twelve years later, the Jordanian government took
over the bank and charged Chalabi, who fled the country, with embezzling
$70 million. In 1992, Chalabi was tried and convicted in absentia and
sentenced to 22 years at hard labor. One of the persistent stories
concerning this scandal is that Chalabi's Petra Bank was involved
in arms sales to Iran during the Iran-Iraq War, and that Saddam Hussein
discovered this and pressured King Hussein of Jordan to crack down on
Chalabi.
Shortly after his hasty departure from Jordan, Chalabi, with the
backing of his neocon allies in Washington, most notably, Paul
Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and Professor Bernard Lewis of Princeton,
helped launch the INC. Chalabi had first been introduced to Perle and
Wolfowitz in 1985 by their mutual mentor, Albert Wohlstetter. Bernard
Lewis met Chalabi in 1990 and soon thereafter asked his own allies
inside the Bush 41 administration, including Wolfowitz's Pentagon
aide Zalmay Khalilzad, to help boost the Iraqi exile. Another future
Bush 43 Iraq War player also met Chalabi about that time. General Wayne
Downing was first introduced to Chalabi in 1991, when Downing commanded
the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) at Fort Bragg, North
Carolina.
In November 1993, Chalabi presented the newly inaugurated Clinton
administration with a scheme for the overthrow of the Saddam Hussein
regime. Dubbed "End Game," the plan envisioned a limited
revolt by an insurgent force of INC-led Kurds and Shiites in the oil
regions around Basra in the south and Mosul and Kirkuk in the north. The
"End Game" scenario: at the first sign of revolt against
Saddam, there would be a full-scale insurrection by military commanders,
who would overthrow the Saddam clique and install a Washington- and Tel
Aviv-friendly, INC-dominated regime in Baghdad. The plan was based on a
belief that Iraq was ripe for revolt and that there were no units in the
armed forces that would fight to preserve Saddam's government.
Since the same units had fought to keep Saddam in power during the
Kurdish and Shia revolts of a few years before, it is difficult to see
why the sponsors of End Game would have thought that. A limited effort
to implement End Game ended in disaster in 1995, when the Iraqis did
fight to defeat the rebels and the Iraqi Army killed over 100 INC
combatants. From that point on, both the CIA and DIA considered Chalabi
"persona non grata." The CIA also dropped all financial
backing for Chalabi, as the INC, once an umbrella group of various
opposition forces, degenerated into little more than a cult of
personality, gathered together in London, where Chalabi and his small
group of remaining INC loyalists retreated.
In spite of this, neoconservatives inside the United States,
largely in exile during the Clinton administration, succeeded in
influencing the Congress enough to obtain passage of the "Iraq
Liberation Act of 1998," largely to revive Chalabi's End Game
scheme. Now retired, Gen. Downing, along with retired CIA officer Duane
"Dewey" Clarridge of Iran-contra fame, became military
"consultants" to Chalabi's INC and then drafted their own
updated version of the Chalabi plan, now dubbed "the Downing
Plan." It was different in name only. The Downing-Clarridge plan
insisted that a "crack force" of no more than 5,000 INC
troops, backed by a group of former U.S. Army Special Forces soldiers
(Green Berets), could bring down the Iraq Army. "The idea from the
beginning was to encourage defections of Iraqi units," Clarridge
insisted to The Washington Post. "You need to create a nucleus,
something for people to defect to. If they could take Basra, it would be
all over." It is difficult to understand how a retired four-star
army general could believe this to be true.
In subsequent congressional testimony, then-Central Command head
General Anthony Zinni (USMC) denounced the Downing scheme in no
uncertain terms, warning that it would lead to a "Bay of
Goats," adding that, by his most recent counts, there were 91 Iraqi
opposition groups. None of them had "the viability to overthrow
Saddam." Elsewhere he mocked Chalabi and the INC as "some
silk-suited, Rolex-wearing guys in London." Despite CIA and
uniformed military repudiation of End Game, the Downing Plan and other
variations on the same theme, the neoconservative group continued to
crank out advocacy for Chalabi's proposed revolution.
On February 19, 1998, a group of neocons calling themselves the
Committee for Peace and Security in the Gulf issued an "Open Letter
to the President" (this was before the passage of the Iraq
Liberation Act) calling for the implementation of yet another revised
plan for the overthrow of Saddam. The letter was remarkable in that it
adopted some of the very formulations that would later be used by Vice
President Cheney and other current administration officials to justify
the preventive war in Iraq that commenced on March 20, 2003. The letter
stated,
Despite his defeat in the Gulf War,
continuing sanctions, and the
determined effort of U.N. inspectors to
root out and destroy his weapons of
mass destruction, Saddam Hussein
has been able to develop biological
and chemical munitions.... This
poses a danger to our friends, our
allies, and to our nation.
Equally striking were the recommendations in the letter. Chapter
and verse, the document called for the implementation of the Downing
Plan with a few added wrinkles. After demanding that the Clinton
administration recognize a "provisional government of Iraq based on
the principles and leaders of the Iraqi National Congress (INC),"
the letter called for the creation of INC-controlled "liberated
zones" in the north and south of the country; the lifting of
sanctions in those areas and the release of billions of dollars of
frozen Iraqi government funds to the INC; the launching of a
"systematic air campaign" against the Republican Guard
divisions and the military-industrial infrastructure of Iraq; and the
prepositioning of U.S. ground-force equipment "so that, as a last
resort, we have the capacity to protect and assist the anti-Saddam
forces in the northern and southern parts of Iraq."
The letter was co-authored by former Congressman Stephen Solarz
(D-NY) and Richard Perle. The signers included some people merely
sympathetic to the cause of Iraqi freedom and a pantheon of Beltway
neocons, many of whom would form the core of the Bush
administration's national security apparatus: Elliot Abrams,
Richard Armitage, John Bolton, Stephen Bryen, Douglas Feith, Frank
Gaffney, Fred Ikle, Robert Kagan, Zalmay Khalilzad, William Kristol,
Michael Ledeen, Bernard Lewis, Peter Rodman, Donald Rumsfeld, Gary
Schmitt, Max Singer, Casper Weinberger, Paul Wolfowitz, David Wurmser
and Dov Zakheim. Some of these gentlemen may have had cause to
reconsider their generosity in signing this document. This was in
February 1998. A month after the release of the letter, Paul Wolfowitz
and Gen. Wayne Downing briefed a group of U.S. senators on the INC war
scheme. The senators at the meeting may also have cause to regret their
subsequent sponsorship of the Iraq Liberation Act. This law clearly set
the stage for renewed fighting in the Middle East in 2003.
THE BUSH-CHENEY "CLEAN BREAK"
A core group of neoconservatives, including Vulcans Paul Wolfowitz
and Richard Perle, came into the Bush administration fully committed to
the overthrow of the Saddam Hussein regime in Baghdad as the number-one
foreign-policy priority for the United States, but they found it
necessary to spend much of the first nine months in bureaucratic combat
with the State Department, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the CIA, all of
whom remained unconvinced that Saddam posed any serious threat to
American strategic interests. At the first NSC meeting of the new
administration, Colin Powell argued that the existing sanctions regime
against Iraq was ineffective, and he promoted the idea of a change to
"smart sanctions." These would zero in on vital military
technologies that might enable Saddam to rebuild his military machine,
which had been devastated by Desert Storm, a decade of sanctions,
no-fly-zone bombing sorties, six years of U.N. inspections, and the 1998
Operation Desert Fox 70-hour bombing campaign.
Arguments like this were hard to deal with for those completely
convinced of the necessity of a new government in Baghdad. But Colin
Powell cast a mighty shadow on the American political scene, and his
military credentials were formidable. If there had not been a
cataclysmic event that tipped the balance, it is possible that the war
party would never have won the struggle to have their point of view
accepted as policy. It was the attacks on New York and Washington on
September 11, 2001, that provided the neocons with the opportunity to
turn dreams into reality. In a war-cabinet meeting at the presidential
retreat at Camp David four days after the 9/11 attacks, Deputy Defense
Secretary Paul Wolfowitz made an appeal for an immediate American
military invasion of Iraq in retaliation for the terrorist attacks.
Wolfowitz argued that attacking Afghanistan would be uncertain. He
worried about 100,000 American troops getting bogged down in mountain
fighting in Afghanistan indefinitely. In contrast, he said, Iraq was a
brittle, oppressive regime that might break easily. He said that Iraq
was "doable." He estimated that there was a 1050 percent
chance Saddam was involved in the September 11 terrorist attacks (this,
of course, is a judgment that he was not involved). The United States
"would have to go after Saddam at some time if the war on terrorism was to be taken seriously." Wolfowitz's pitch for war against
Iraq, rather than against the Afghan strongholds of Osama Bin
Laden's al-Qaeda, was rejected at the Camp David session, and two
days later, on September 17, President Bush signed a two-and-a-half page
directive marked "Top Secret," which spelled out the plan to
go to war against Afghanistan. The document also ordered the Pentagon to
begin preparing military options for an invasion of Iraq.
Instantly, the neocon apparatus inside the Pentagon and in the
office of Vice President Dick Cheney seized upon the opportunity
represented by the authorization. On September 19, 2001, the Defense
Policy Board (DPB) convened a closed-door meeting to discuss Iraq.
Vulcan Richard Perle chaired the DPB. In the past, the board had been
recruited from defense experts from both parties and with a broad range
of views. In contrast, Perle's DPB had become a neocon sanctuary,
including such leading advocates of war on Saddam as former Speaker of
the House Newt Gingrich (R-GA), former CIA Director James R. Woolsey (a
Democrat, but nevertheless a longstanding member of the neocon group),
former arms control adviser Ken Adelman, former Undersecretary of
Defense Fred C. Ikle, and former Vice President Dan Quayle. Wolfowitz
and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld attended the September 19 session.
The speakers at the event, who aggressively advocated U.S. military
action to overthrow Saddam Hussein, were Ahmed Chalabi and Princeton
professor Bernard Lewis.
One consequence of the DPB meeting was that former CIA Director
Woolsey was secretly dispatched by Wolfowitz to London to seek out
evidence that Saddam Hussein was behind the 9/11 attacks and the earlier
1993 attack on the World Trade Center. Part of Woolsey's mission
involved making contact with INC officials to get their help in further
substantiating the link between hijacker Mohammed Atta and Iraqi
intelligence. This theory was the brainchild of Laurie Mylroie, a
scholar completely "in tune" with neocon thinking. According
to news accounts at the time, Woolsey's actions drew the attention
of police officials in Wales, who contacted the U.S. embassy to confirm
that Woolsey was on "official U.S. government business," as he
claimed. It was only then that Secretary of State Colin Powell and CIA
Director Tenet found out about Woolsey's mission.
By October 2001, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith
had established a two-man intelligence cell inside his office with the
job of combing the intelligence community's classified files to
establish a pattern of evidence linking Saddam Hussein to al-Qaeda and
the 9/11 attacks. The permanent, statutory agencies of the national
intelligence community could not support such beliefs on the basis of
what they saw in their own files. Therefore, some other means was sought
to obtain the conclusion that the Iraqi government had been involved in
9/11. The team's mission was to cull the massive holdings of the
intelligence database and to uncover intelligence reports accumulated on
the subject of Iraq-al-Qaeda links. The issue of whether or not the
intelligence agencies considered these reports to be true was thought
immaterial. Not surprisingly, some of the sweetest cherries picked in
the data searches came from informants provided by the INC's
"Information Collection Program." The team in Feith's
office was later more formally constituted as the "Policy
Counterterrorism Evaluation Group."
This kind of single-minded intensity in pursuing his goals was
nothing new for Feith. In July 1996, he had been a principal author of a
study prepared for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. This paper
advocated abrogation of the Oslo accords and the launch of a new
regional balance-of-power scheme based on American-Israeli military
dominance with a subsidiary military role for Turkey and Jordan. The
study was produced by the "Institute for Advanced Strategic and
Political Studies" (IASPS), a Jerusalem-based Likud-party-linked
think tank, and was called "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for
Securing the Realm." In it, Feith and company wrote, "Israel
can shape its strategic environment, in cooperation with Turkey and
Jordan, by weakening, containing and even rolling back Syria. This
effort can focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq--an
important Israeli strategic objective in its own right--as a means of
foiling Syria's regional ambitions." The study-group leader
was Richard Perle. Other members of the team included Charles Fairbanks
Jr., a longtime friend of Paul Wolfowitz since their student days
together at the University of Chicago; and David Wurmser, an American
Enterprise Institute Middle East fellow, and his wife, Meyrav Wurmser,
who headed the Washington, DC office of the Middle East Media Research
Institute (MEMRI). Her boss in that group was a retired Israeli
intelligence officer, Yigal Cannon. On July 8, 1996, Richard Perle
presented the "Clean Break" document to Netanyahu, who was
visiting Washington. Two days later, the Israeli prime minister unveiled
the document as his own regional foreign-policy design in a speech
before a joint session of the U.S. Congress.
The initial team selected by Feith to conduct the cherry picking data search in the Pentagon, consisted of "Clean Break"
co-author David Wurmser and Michael Maloof. Maloof was a career Pentagon
bureaucrat who had joined forces with Perle during the Reagan years,
when Perle was a Pentagon official. At that time Maloof was a deputy to
Stephen Bryen. The existence of the Wurmser-Maloof unit was kept a
secret within the Pentagon for more than a year. Only on October 24,
2002, did Defense Secretary Rumsfeld formally announce that he had
commissioned what The Washington Post called "a small team of
defense officials outside regular intelligence channels to focus on
unearthing details about Iraqi ties with al-Qaeda and other terrorist
networks." The unveiling of the "Policy Counterterrorism
Evaluations Group," as Pentagon officials dubbed it, coincided with
a move by Rumsfeld to directly take over the financing and management of
the INC's "Information Collection Project" from the State
Department, which had developed serious reservations about maintaining
an "off the reservation" intelligence operation.
Rumsfeld defensively told the Pentagon press corps on October 24,
2002, "Any suggestion that it's an intelligence-gathering
activity or an intelligence unit of some sort, I think would be a
misunderstanding of it." But former CIA case officer and AEI fellow
Reuel Marc Gerecht, a relatively late recruit to the neocon cause, could
barely conceal his enthusiasm in discussing the group: "The
Pentagon is setting up the capability to assess information on Iraq in
areas that in the past might have been the realm of the agency (CIA).
They don't think the product they receive from the agency is always
what it should be." Gerecht was then consulting with the Policy
Counterterrorism Evaluation Group. In September 2001, the State
Department inspector general issued a scathing audit of the INC,
charging that the group had failed to account for how it was spending
its U.S. government cash. "The Information Collection Project"
was singled out as one of the particular problem cases. According to the
audit, there was no accounting for how informants were paid or what
benefit had been derived from their work. As a result of the audit, the
State Department placed severe restrictions on the INC, suspended some
payouts, and insisted that an outside auditor co-sign for all funds
drawn by the group.
It was not until June 2002 that the State Department loosened the
restrictions on the INC's cash flows. By then, the drive for a war
against Iraq was in high gear inside the Pentagon civilian bureaucracy,
and Feith and company (as opposed to the State Department) sought direct
control over the INC, particularly the informant program.
NO SADDAM-AL-QAEDA TIES
The overwhelming view within the professional U.S. intelligence
community was (and is) that there was no Saddam Hussein link to the 9/11
terrorists. Admiral Bob Inman, who served in both Democratic and
Republican administrations as head of the Office of Naval Intelligence,
Director of the National Security Agency and Deputy Director of the CIA,
bluntly stated,
There was no tie between Iraq and 9/
11, even though some people tried to
postulate one.... Iraq did support
terror in Israel, but I know of no
instance in which Iraq funded direct,
deliberate terrorist attacks on the
United States.
Vincent Cannistraro, who headed the CIA's counterterrorism
office before his retirement in 1990, maintains close ties to the
intelligence community to this day. He debunks the Saddam-9/11 claims:
The policymakers already had
conceits they had adopted without
reference to current intelligence
estimates. And those conceits were:
Saddam was evil, a bad man, he had
evil intentions, and they were greatly
influenced by neoconservative beliefs
that Saddam had been involved with
the sponsorship of terrorism in the
United States since as early as 1993,
with the first World Trade Center
bombing.... None of this is true, of
course, but these were their conceits,
and they continue in large measure to
be the conceits of a lot of people like
Jim Woolsey.
This, he added, is not the view of the intelligence community:
No, no, no. The FBI did a pretty
thorough investigation of the first
World Trade Center bombing, and
while it's true that their policy was to
treat terrorism as a law-enforcement
problem, nevertheless, they understood
how the first World Trade
Center bombing was supported ...
and had linkages back to Osama Bin
Laden. He was of course, not indicted
... because the FBI until recently
believed that you prosecuted perpetrators,
not the sponsors. In any
event they knew there was no Saddam
linkage. Laurie Mylroie promoted a lot
of this, and people who came in [to the
Bush Administration], particularly in
the Defense Department--Wolfowitz
and Feith--were acolytes, promoting
her book, The Study of Revenge,
particularly in the Office of Special
Plans, and the Secretary's Policy
Office. In any event, they already had
their preconceived notions.... So the
intelligence, and I can speak directly
to the CIA part of it, the intelligence
community's assessments were never
considered adequate.
THE OFFICE OF SPECIAL PLANS
Some time before the 9/11 attacks, Vice President Cheney dispatched
one of his Middle East aides, William Luti, over to the Pentagon as
deputy undersecretary of defense for Near East and South Asian affairs
(NESA). Luti, a retired Navy captain, is a member of the neocon group,
recruited by Albert Wohlstetter. They bad met in the early 1990s, when
Luti was part of an executive panel of advisers to the chief of naval
operations.
Parenthetically, I received what seems to have been an exploratory
recruiting visit from Dr. Wohlstetter and his wife, Roberta. In 1992,
the Wohlstetters unexpectedly arrived at my doorstep at the Pentagon
with the news that a mutual friend, now a senior personage in the
Pentagon, had told them to visit me. There followed an hour and a half
of conversation involving European and world history, philosophy and a
discussion of the various illustrious people who were friends and
associates of the Wohlstetters. Roberta Wohlstetter went so far as to
show me various books that they and their friends had written. An
unspoken question seemed to hang in the air. After a while they became
impatient with my responses and left, never to return. Clearly, I had
failed the test. At the time, I only vaguely knew who these people were
and did not really care, but since they have become so important to this
story, I have inquired of various people who might have received similar
visits and found that this was not uncommon. An old academic colleague
of Wohlstetter has also told me that the couple had done similar things
in the university setting.
In any case, Luti landed a job as a military aide to Speaker of the
House Gingrich from 1996 to 1997. There, he worked with Air Force Col.
William Bruner, another active-duty military officer on loan to the
speaker. Still on active duty when the Bush 43 administration came into
office, Luti worked in the vice president's office as part of a
shadow National Security Council staff, under the direction of
Cheney's chief of staff and chief policy aide, I. Lewis
"Scooter" Libby.
Libby was a Yale Law School protege of Paul Wolfowitz. Beginning in
the 1980s, Libby followed Wolfowitz into the Reagan and Bush 41
administrations. When he was not working for Uncle Sam or Wolfowitz,
Libby was the law partner/ protege of Richard Nixon's personal
attorney, Leonard Garment. Under his direction, for a period of 16
years, on and off, Libby was the attorney for fugitive swindler and
Israeli Mossad agent, Marc Rich. In the first Bush administration, Libby
served with Wolfowitz in the policy office of then-Defense Secretary
Cheney, where he gained some notoriety as one of the principal authors,
along with Wolfowitz and Zalmay Khalilzad, of the draft 1992
"Defense Planning Guidance" that advocated preventive war and
the development of a new arsenal of mini-nuclear weapons, to be used
against Third World targets thought to be developing WMD arsenals.
Midway through 2001, Luti retired from the Navy and took a civilian
Pentagon post as head of NESA. Under normal circumstances, NESA is a
Pentagon backwater, responsible primarily for arranging bilateral
meetings with military counterparts from a region stretching "from
Bangladesh to Marakesh." Before the recent war, the NESA staff
worked daily with the defense intelligence officer for the Near East,
South Asia and Counterterrorism. This was the most senior officer in DIA
for that region and the person responsible for seeing that NESA was well
provided with intelligence information. During the early Luti period at
NESA, the DIO was Bruce Hardcastle. There were DIOs for each of the
major regions of the world; Hardcastle happened to be the man for the
Middle East. I knew Hardcastle and respected his work. He had been a
middle-level analyst in DIA when I held the job of DIO for the Middle
East.
Abruptly last year, the Defense Department dismantled the entire
DIO system. It now seems likely that frictions that developed between
Luti and Hardcastle were a significant factor in this destruction of a
very worthwhile intelligence-analytic system. Historically, the DIO
oversaw all of the regional analysts and assets of DIA, but reported
directly to the director of the DIA, avoiding bureaucratic and
managerial duties while retaining responsibility for all analysis within
his or her geographical domain. The roots of the friction between
Hardcastle and Luti were straightforward: Hardcastle brought with him
the combined wisdom of the professional military intelligence community.
The community had serious doubts about the lethality of the threat from
Saddam Hussein, the terrorism links and the status of the Iraqi WMD
programs. Luti could not accept this. He knew what he wanted: to bring
down Saddam Hussein. Hardcastle could not accept the very idea of
allowing a desired outcome to shape the results of analysis.
Even before the Iraq desk at NESA was expanded into the
"Office of Special Plans" in August 2002, Luti had transformed
NESA into a "de facto" arm of the vice president's
office. While the normal chain of command for NESA ran through
Undersecretary for Policy Feith and up to Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz and
Secretary Rumsfeld, Luti made it clear that his chain of command
principally ran directly up to Scooter Libby, Cheney's chief of
staff. We are lucky enough to have a description of this relationship
from a participant in the business of the office itself.
Lt. Col. (ret.) Karen Kwiatkowski (USAF), who served at NESA from
June 2002 to March 2003, provides an interesting perspective. She says
she was "shocked to learn that Luti was effectively working for
Libby.... In one of the first staff meetings that I attended
there," she recalled recently, "Bill Luti said, 'Well,
did you get that thing over to Scooter? Scooter wants this, and
somebody's got to get it over to him, and get that up to him right
away.' After the meeting, I asked one of my co-workers, who'd
been there longer, 'Who is this Scooter?' I was told,
'That's Scooter Libby over at the OVP (Office of the Vice
President). He's the Vice President's chief of staff.'
Later I came to understand that Cheney had put Luti there."
Kwiatkowski learned that OSP personnel were participating, along
with officials from the DIA and CIA, in the debriefings of
Chalabi-delivered informants. John Trigilio, a DIA officer assigned to
NESA, confirmed it to her in a heated discussion.
I argued with him (Tregilio) after the
president's Cincinnati speech (in
October 2002). I told him that the
president had made a number of
statements that were just not supported
by the intelligence. He said
that the president's statements are
supported by intelligence, and he
would finally say, 'We have sources
that you don't have.' I took it to mean
the sources that Chalabi was bringing
in for debriefing.... Trigilio told me
he participated in a number of debriefs,
conducted in hotels downtown,
or wherever, of people that Chalabi
brought in. These debriefs had
Trigilio from OSP, but also CIA and
DIA participated.... If it (the information)
sounded good, it would go
straight to the OVP or elsewhere. I
don't put it out of possibility that the
information would go straight to the
media because of the (media's) close
relationship with some of the
neoconservatives. So this information
would make it straight out into the
knowledge base without waiting for
intelligence (analysts) to come by with
their qualifications and reservations.
NESA/OSP apparently carried the cherry-picking methods of the
smaller Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group to a new level of
effectiveness, according to Lt. Col. Kwiatkowski,
At the OSP, what they were doing was
looking at all the intelligence they
could find on WMD. That was the
focal point, picking bits and pieces
that were the most inflammatory,
removing any context that might have
been provided in the original intelligence
report, that would have caused
you to have some pause in believing it
or reflected doubts that the intelligence
community had, so if the
intelligence community had doubts,
those would be left out.... They
would take items that had occurred
many years ago, and put them in the
present tense, make it seem like they
occurred not many years ago.... But
they would not talk about the dates;
they would say things like, 'He has
continued since that time' and 'He
could do it tomorrow,' which of
course, wasn't true.... The other thing
they would do would be to take
unrelated events that were reported in
totally unrelated ways and make
connections that the intelligence
community had not made. This was
primarily in discussing Iraq's activities
and how they might be related to al-Qaeda
or other terrorist groups that
might be against us, or against Israel....
These kinds of links would be
made. They would be made casually,
and they would be made in a calculated
way to form an image that is
definitely not the image that anyone
reading the original reports would
have. The summaries that we would
see from Intelligence did not match the
kinds of things that OSP was putting
out. So that is what I call propaganda
development. It goes beyond the
manipulation of intelligence to
propaganda development.
A number of people have made the observation that Lt. Col.
Kwiatkowski did not have sufficient access to have seen what was going
on with intelligence materials. The previous paragraphs would seem to
disprove that idea.
Kwiatkowski also knows a lot about Luti's efforts to exclude
DIO Bruce Hardcastle from the briefings to foreign military officials.
Luti ordered that Hardcastle was not to be included in briefings on
Iraq, its WMD, and its links to terrorism. Instead, the Iraq desk of
NESA, and later the Office of Special Plans, would produce "talking
points" which, Luti insisted, were to be the only briefings
provided on Iraq. Kwiatkowski says,
With the talking points, many of the
propagandistic bullets that were given
to use in papers for our superiors to
inform them--internal propaganda--many
of those same phrases and
assumptions and tones, I saw in Vice
President Cheney's speeches and the
president's speeches. So I got the
impression that those talking points
were not just for us, but were the core
of an overall agenda for a disciplined
product, beyond the Pentagon. Over
at the vice president's office and the
Weekly Standard, the media, and the
neoconservative talking heads and
that kind of thing, all on the same
sheet of music.
Lt. Col. Kwiatkowski identified Abram Shulsky as the principal
author of the NESA/OSP talking points on Iraq. Shulsky was one of the
Pentagon's "defense intellectuals" who had been involved
on the periphery of intelligence work since the late 1970s, when he
first came to Washington as an aide to Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-NY). He also worked for Sen. Henry "Scoop" Jackson (D-WA.)
Shulsky shared a common background with Paul Wolfowitz. Both men had
graduated from the University of Chicago and had studied under Leo
Strauss. In 1999, Shulsky, along with his fellow Chicago alumnus and
Strauss protrg6 Gary Schmitt, founder of the "Project for the New
American Century" (PNAC), wrote an essay entitled, "Leo
Strauss and the World of Intelligence," which attacked American
intelligence-community icon Sherman Kent for failing to understand that
all intelligence work ultimately comes down to deception and
counterdeception. For Shulsky (as expressed in his article), the goal of
intelligence is to serve the needs of policymakers in making possible
the attainment of policy goals. Intelligence, he wrote, "was the
art of deception." Shulsky seems to have set out to use the OSP as
the means for providing the Bush administration policymakers all the
ammunition they needed to get their desired results. Interestingly,
neither Shulsky nor the great majority of the people employed at one
time or another by all these ad hoc intelligence groups were people with
any previous experience of intelligence work. They were former
congressional staffers, scholars and activists of one kind or another.
They were people embarked on a great adventure in pursuit of a goal, not
craftsmen devoted to their art.
SUBVERTING AND SUBDUING THE PROFESSIONALS
Supporting the statements of Kwiatkowski and others about the
pipeline of unevaluated information that flowed straight into the hands
of Vice President Cheney and other key policymakers, there is extant a
June 2002 letter from the INC's Washington office addressed to the
Senate Appropriations Committee that argues for the transfer of the
"Information Collection Program" from the State Department to
the Defense Intelligence Agency's Defense HUMINT Service (a service
I was instrumental in founding). In a clumsy act of indiscretion, the
letter's author explained that there was already a direct flow of
information from the INC into the hands of Bill Luti and John Hannah,
the latter being Scooter Libby's deputy in Cheney's office.
Armed with the INC product, Vice President Cheney made a series of
visits to the CIA headquarters at Langley to question agency analysts
who were producing assessments that did not match the material that had
been funneled to him through Luti and Hannah. The vice president also
made personal visits to many members of Congress, to persuade them, in
the autumn of 2002, to grant the president the authority to go to war
with Iraq. One leading Democratic senator says that Cheney sat in his
office and made what now appear to be greatly exaggerated claims about
Saddam's nuclear weapons program. The fear of Saddam's
possessing a nuclear bomb compelled the senator to vote in favor of
granting the war powers.
Part of the "Saddam bomb plot" tale came from Khadir
Hamza, an Iraqi nuclear scientist who defected in 1994 and settled in
the United States through the assistance of the INC. Hamza initially
went to work for the Institute for Science and International Security, a
think tank headed by former U.N. weapons inspector David Albright.
According to a May 12, 2003, New Yorker interview with Albright by
Seymour Hersh, Hamza and his boss drafted a 1998 proposal for a book
that would have exposed how Saddam's quest for a nuclear bomb had
"fizzled." There were no takers. But two years later, Hamza
co-authored a very different book, with Jeff Stein, vastly exaggerating
Saddam's nuclear weapons program. This, despite the fact that, in
1995, Saddam Hussein's son-in-law, General Hussein Kamel, who was
the head of Iraq's weapons agency, escaped to Jordan with a large
collection of Iraqi government documents showing how little was left of
Iraqi WMD programs. Kamel was interviewed by a team of U.N. weapons
inspectors headed by Rolf Ekeus, chairman of the U.N. teams, and he
confirmed that the inspections had, in effect, uprooted most of what was
left of the Iraqi WMD program after the 1991 Gulf War.
It is telling that, in the more than two-year run-up to the March
2003 invasion of Iraq, nobody in the Bush administration sought to
commission a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Saddam
Hussein's WMD programs. Perhaps it is unsurprising that they did
not want such an estimate. An estimate, if conducted over a period of
months, would undoubtedly have revealed deep skepticism about the threat
posed by Saddam's weapons program. It would have exposed major gaps
in the intelligence picture, particularly since the pullout of U.N.
weapons inspectors from Iraq at the end of 1998, and it would have
likely undercut the rush to war. It was only as a result of intense
pressure from Sen. Bob Graham (D-FL.), chairman of the Senate Select
Committee on Intelligence, that the intelligence community was finally
tasked, in September 2002, to produce an NIE on Saddam's WMD
programs. The report was to be rushed to completion in three weeks, so
it could reach the desks of the relevant congressional committee members
before a vote on war-powers authorization scheduled for early October,
on the eve of the midterm elections. As the NIE went forward for
approval, everyone knew that there were major problems with it.
The issue of the Niger yellowcake uranium precursor had been a
point of controversy since late 2001, when the Italian secret service,
SISMI, reported to their American, British and Israeli counterparts that
they had obtained documents on Niger government letterhead indicating
that Iraq had attempted to purchase 500 tons of yellowcake. The
yellowcake lead had been reported to the vice president by his CIA
daily-briefing officer, and Cheney had tasked the CIA to dig deeper.
Obviously, if the case could be made that Saddam was aggressively
seeking nuclear material, no one in Congress could justifiably oppose
war. The story proved to be a hoax. In February 2002, the CIA dispatched
former Ambassador Joseph Wilson to Niger to look into the report. Wilson
had served in several African countries, including Niger, and had also
been the U.S. charge d'affaires in Baghdad, at the time of the
Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. He knew all the players. After several days of
meetings in Niger, he returned to Washington and was debriefed by the
CIA. The yellowcake story simply did not check out. Case closed.
Contrary to Wilson's expectations, variations on the matter
continued to creep into policy speeches by top administration officials.
Although CIA Director Tenet personally intervened to remove references
to the discredited African uranium story from President Bush's
early October 2002 speech in Cincinnati, Ohio, promoting the overthrow
of Saddam Hussein, bogus yellowcake information appeared in a December
19, 2002, State Department "fact sheet" on Saddam's
failure to disclose his secret WMD programs. As we all know, President
Bush's January 2003 State of the Union speech contained the now
infamous 16 words citing British intelligence claims about Saddam's
seeking uranium in Africa.
For Greg Thielmann, who retired in September 2002 from his post as
director of the Strategic, Proliferation and Military Affairs Office at
the State Department's Intelligence Bureau, the issue of the
aluminum tubes was an even more egregious case of policymakers'
contamination of the intelligence process than the Wilson yellowcake
affair. His position is,
What was done with the aluminum
tubes was far worse than what was
done with the uranium from Africa.
Because the intelligence community
had debated over a period of months,
and involved key scientists and
engineers in the National Laboratories--and
foreigners as well--in a long
and detailed discussion. The way I
would have characterized it, if you had
asked me in July 2002, when I turned
over the leadership of my office, there
was a growing consensus in the
intelligence community that this kind
of aluminum was not suitable for the
nuclear weapons program. So I was
really quite shocked to see--I was just
retired--the National Intelligence
Estimate say that the majority of
agencies came to the opposite
interpretation, that it was going into
the nuclear weapons program.
Even with this "majority" view, Thielmann points out that
anyone at the White House or the National Security Council who was
genuinely seeking the truth would have seen through the subterfuge and
drawn the proper conclusion:
If they had read the NIE in October, it is
transparent that there were different
views in the intelligence community.
They could have read, for example, that
the Department of Energy and the
State Department INR believed that the
aluminum tubes were not going into
the nuclear weapons program and
instead were going into conventional
artillery rockets. And, if one assumes a
modicum of intelligence understanding
at the NSC, they should know that the
agency that is most able to judge on
this would be the Department of
Energy. They control all the laboratories
that actually over the years have
enriched uranium and built centrifuges.
Thielmann also had an important observation about the Office of
Special Plans and the other intelligence boutiques that Cheney and
Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz had established inside the Pentagon's policy
shop:
It was a stealth organization. They
didn't play in the intelligence community
proceedings that our office
participated in. When the intelligence
community met as a community, there
was no OSP represented in these
sessions. Because, if they had done
that, they would have had to subject
their views to peer review. Why do
that when you can send stuff right in
to the vice president?
THE NIE CONTAMINATION
Two other major INC-foisted fabrications made their way into the
NIE and from there into policy speeches by top Bush administration
officials, including the president, the vice president and the
secretaries of Defense and State. The first involved claims that Iraq
had mobile biological-weapons labs that could produce deadly agents. The
declassified version of the October 2002 NIE stated, "Baghdad has
mobile facilities for producing bacterial and toxin BW agents; these
facilities can evade detection and are highly survivable. Within three
to six months, these units probably could produce an amount of agent
equal to the total that Iraq produced in the years prior to the Gulf
war." The same claim was a dramatic highlight of Colin
Powell's February 5, 2003, presentation before the Security
Council.
But, a subsequent review of the intelligence files--long after the
NIE had been produced--revealed that the sole source for the mobile-lab
story was an Iraqi military defector, a major, who had been produced by
the INC via the "Information Collection Program." The CIA and
DIA had both given warnings about the defector, after concluding that he
was a fabricator. But, as CIA Director Tenet would later admit in a
February 2004 speech at Georgetown University, those warnings fell on
deaf ears. The fabrication judgment was shown to be correct after the
U.S. invasion, when two of the mobile labs were captured. They were, as
other Iraqi sources had claimed, mobile facilities for producing
hydrogen for weather balloons.
A somewhat different fiasco occurred on the issue of the equally
inflammatory claim that Iraq had unmanned airborne vehicles (UAVs),
outfitted to deliver biological and chemical weapons. Allegations about
the UAVs surfaced in early September 2002, prompting both CIA Director
Tenet and Vice President Cheney to visit House and Senate leaders on the
day Congress reconvened after the Labor Day recess to present their new
"smoking gun" argument for war. The UAV story appeared in
President Bush's October 7, 2002, speech in Cincinnati. It was also
featured in Colin Powell's Security Council presentation four
months later. Powell warned the Council then that "Iraq could use
these small UAVs, which have a wingspan of only a few meters, to deliver
biological agents to its neighbors or, if transported, to other
countries, including the United States."
Yet the declassified version of the October 2002 NIE, while
reporting that "Baghdad's UAVs could threaten Iraq's
neighbors, U.S. forces in the Persian Gulf and, if brought close to or
into the United States, the U.S. homeland," also noted that
"the Director, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance, US
Air Force, does not agree that Iraq is developing UAVs primarily
intended to be delivery platforms for chemical and biological warfare (CBW) agents. The small size of Iraq's new UAV strongly suggests a
primary role of reconnaissance, although CBW delivery is an inherent
capability." Indeed, the specifications of the Iraqi UAVs, known to
U.S. Air Force Intelligence, proved that they were ill-suited for CBW
dissemination. According to several news accounts, even the formulation
that "CBW delivery is an inherent capability" was foisted upon
the Air Force during the negotiating sessions over the final wording of
the NIE.
The subversion of the intelligence process was death by a thousand
cuts, a cumulative process of badgering in which the pipeline of
disinformation from the INC, through OSP, to the desk of the vice
president played a decisive role.
Vincent Cannistraro puts it this way:
Over a long period of time, there was a
subtle process of pressure and
intimidation until people started giving
them what was wanted.... When the
Senate Intelligence Committee
interviewed, under oath, over 100
analysts, not one of them said, 'I
changed my assessment because of
pressure.' ... The environment was
conditioned in such a way that the
analyst subtly leaned toward the
conceits of the policymakers.... The
intelligence community was vulnerable
to the aggressiveness of
neoconservative policymakers,
particularly at the Pentagon and at the
VP's office. As one analyst said to me,
'You can't fight something with
nothing, and those people had
something. Whether it was right or
wrong, fraudulent or specious, it
almost didn't make any difference,
because the policymakers believed it
already, and if you didn't have hard
countervailing evidence to persuade
them, then you were at a loss.'
Lt. Col. Dale Davis (USMC, ret.) concurs that the intelligence
process was badly subverted by a "political operation." Davis,
through March 2004, headed International Programs at the Virginia
Military Institute. A fluent Arabic speaker, he has served throughout
the Arab world. Davis initially said that he did not think that the
intelligence analysts were pressured, "per se":
They created an organization that
would give them the answers they
wanted. Or at least piece together a
very compelling case by rummaging
through all the various intelligence
reports and picking out the best, the
most juicy, but quite often the most
flimsy pieces of information.... By
creating the OSP, Cheney was able to
say, 'Hey, look at what we're getting
out of OSR How come you guys
aren't doing as well? What is your
response to what this alternative
analysis that we're receiving from the
Pentagon says?' That's how you do
it. You pressure people indirectly.
THE COUNTDOWN
Why on earth didn't [Saddam] let the inspectors in and avoid
the war?
--Sen. Pat Roberts, Chairman, Senate Select Committee on
Intelligence, quoted by Paul Krugman in a New York Times, column
February 6, 2004
Sen. Pat Roberts of Kansas is the Republican chairman of the Senate
Select Committee on Intelligence, which is today investigating the
misuse of intelligence prior to the Iraq war, the failures of
intelligence, the Iraqi National Congress, and the Office of Special
Plans. The answer to his question is simple: Saddam did let the
inspectors in, at a level of cooperation that was unprecedented. The
question that Senator Roberts should really be asking is, Why
didn't it matter?
It should have been a dire warning to the U.S. Congress when the
man who had been convicted of lying to Congress during the Iran-contra
affair--Elliot Abrams--was put in charge of the Middle East section of
the NSC staff. One underestimated talent of the neocon group in the
run-up to this war was its ability to manipulate Congress. They were
masters of the game, having made the team in Washington in the 1970s on
the staffs of two of the most powerful senators in recent decades, New
York's Patrick Moynihan and Washington's Henry
"Scoop" Jackson. The old boy's club--Abe Shulsky at OSP,
Undersecretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, Assistant Secretary of Defense
for Policy Douglas Feith, Middle East Desk Officer at the NSC Elliot
Abrams, Defense Policy Board Chairman Richard Perle--had not only worked
together in their early government years in these two Senate offices,
but they had stayed together as a network through the ensuing decades,
floating around a small number of businesses and think tanks, including
the American Enterprise Institute and the openly neoimperialist Project
for a New American Century. The neocons were openly contemptuous of
Congress, as they were of the U.N. Security Council. And a number of
tricks and manipulations of the congressional process have now been
exposed. But was the trickery planned? Was it a well-orchestrated
obfuscation, an accident or coincidence? What is the evidence?
First, there was the consistent refusal to provide witnesses and
information to the U.S. Senate, especially regarding the projected costs
of the war and the lack of opportunities to question key players such as
General Jay Garner, who was appointed by the Defense Department to be
the first head of the U.S. provisional authority in Iraq. There was also
the subtle hiding of the objections of the Department of Energy and the
State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) in the
NIE of October 2002. One congressional source explained that the
classified NIE was made available in its entirety to only a select few
members of Congress. There were verbal briefings and an elaborate
process to access the document in a secure location. But it was never
clear that the 27-page unclassified version that was available to every
office was missing any crucial information.
There were also false statements to Congress about providing the
U.N. inspectors all the intelligence that might have helped them locate
the Iraqi WMD and programs. Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan has accused the
administration, and especially CIA Director Tenet, of withholding
information because "the truth"--that the United States had
withheld the locations of 21 high- and middle-priority sites--might have
slowed down the drive for war. The truth might have convinced Congress
to take action to delay military action until the inspections were
completed.
The March 7, 2003, appearance by the chairmen of UNMOVIC (Hans
Blix) and the IAEA (Mohamed ElBaradei) before the U.N. Security Council
was a disaster for the neoeonservatives. The Iraqis and Saddam Hussein
had "accelerated" cooperation with the United Nations, said
Dr. Blix. Blix told the Council that Iraq had made a major concession:
they had agreed to allow the destruction of the Al Samoud ballistic
missiles. "We are not watching the breaking of toothpicks,"
Blix said. "Lethal weapons are being destroyed.... The destruction
undertaken constitutes a substantial measure of disarmament--indeed, the
first since the middle of the 1990s."
The Al Samoud, a massive missile seven meters long weighing two
tons with its warhead, was being destroyed, without the slightest
obstruction or even complaint from the Iraqis. Major Corrine Heraud, a
French woman who served as the chief weapons inspector for UNMOVIC in
this operation and who had also served from 1996 with UNSCOM, says that
the level of cooperation from the Iraqis was unprecedented, something
that she never would have expected and did not encounter during the
1996-98 inspections. Each missile cost more than $1 million, estimates
Maj. Heraud, who also cautions that this would be equivalent to a much
higher amount in Western dollars, considering the difficulty that Iraq
encountered in buying materials and parts, due to the U.N. sanctions.
Yet, to President Bush, the destruction of the Al Samoud, a missile
often mistaken in photographs for the better-known SCUD missile, was
meaningless. The missile destruction, said Bush, was a "campaign of
deception." For the U.N. inspectors, Bush's words were a
shock. "We didn't know what to make of this," an UNMOVIC
official said.
"Blix came down hard on the Iraqis, and we actually were in
the process of destroying all these Al Samoud missiles," says Greg
Thielman, the former head of the WMD section of INR. "As soon as
the Iraqis agreed to do that, I sighed a big sigh of relief. I thought,
the U.N. inspectors are working; we've stared Saddam down;
we've forced him to do what he desperately didn't want to do,
in that area of activity that was of most concern to us." Thielman
believes that the Al Samoud incident shows that the administration was
so intent on war that this compliance with the inspections "made no
difference."
But it was after the next presentation, by IAEA chairman Mohammed
ElBaradei, that "all hell broke loose" in Washington.
ElBaradei, in his statement, sank the U.S. intelligence community's
prestigious NIE, President Bush's State of the Union address, and
Colin Powell's February 5 address to the U.N. Security Council with
one blow. ElBaradei was calm in what he had to say: "Based on
thorough analysis, the IAEA has concluded, with the concurrence of
outside experts, that these documents, which form the basis for reports
of recent uranium transactions between Iraq and Niger are, in fact, not
authentic." The Niger yellowcake documents were forgeries. Then,
ElBaradei told the press that an IAEA staff member had, in fact, used
the common search engine Google to determine, within hours, that the
Niger documents, which had been passed on to the U.S. embassy in Rome
through an anonymous source, were fakes! Members of Congress then began
to grumble. In light of the contradictions, a bill was introduced
demanding that the administration disclose the intelligence reports that
were the basis for the statements made by Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and
Powell about the Iraqi WMD threat. It was still locked in committee when
the war began.
The destruction of the Al Samoud missiles continued. It was not
only missiles, reports UNMOVIC chief weapons inspector Corrine Heroud,
it was engines, launchers, training missiles and missiles still in
production that were destroyed. Heroud, called "the
terminator" in her native France for her expertise in destroying
missiles, described the delicate process of disarming the missiles, then
crushing them over and over till they "were a pancake" that
was then encased in concrete and buried.
How did the White House respond to these instances of effective
work by the United Nations in Iraq? In the final weeks of the countdown
to war, the administration's actions resembled nothing so much as
some of the madder scenes from Alice in Wonderland. The fact that the
documents the administration had used to "prove" that Iraq was
working on nuclear weapons were forged only led to greater insistence
that Iraq was a danger. The absence of discovery of WMD by the U.N.
inspectors was only further evidence that the Iraqis were the greatest
deceivers in history and that they had succeeded in concealing their
location. The destruction of the Al Samoud missiles was just more
evidence of a "grand deception."
George Tenet has now told us, on February 5, 2004, exactly one year
after he and Colin Powell drank the Kool-Aid at the U.N. Security
Council, that there was no imminent danger. The administration
spin-doctors immediately responded to this statement by saying that
nobody from the administration ever claimed there was an "imminent
danger."
On March 7, 2003, Mohammed ElBaradei spoke to the U.N. Security
Council in an open session watched by tens of millions of Americans and
countless congressional and government offices. He said,
In conclusion, I am able to report
today that, in the area of nuclear
weapons--the most lethal weapons of
mass destruction--inspections in Iraq
are moving forward. One, there is no
indication of resumed nuclear activities
in those buildings that were
identified through the use of satellite
imagery as being reconstructed or
newly erected since 1998, nor any
indication of nuclear-related activities
at any inspected sites. Second, there
is no indication that Iraq has attempted
to import uranium since 1990.
Third, there is no indication that Iraq
has attempted to import aluminum
tubes for use in centrifuge enrichment.
Moreover, even had Iraq pursued
such a plan, it would have encountered
practical difficulties in manufacturing
centrifuges out of the aluminum
tubes in question. Fourth, ... there is
no indication to date that Iraq imported
magnets for use in a centrifuge
enrichment programme.
After three months of intrusive
inspections, we have to date found no
evidence or plausible indication of the
revival of a nuclear weapons
programme in Iraq.... I should note
that, in the past three weeks, possibly
as a result of ever-increasing pressure
by the international community, Iraq
has been forthcoming in its cooperation,
particularly with regard to
the conduct of private interviews and
in making available evidence that
contributes to the resolution of
matters of IAEA concern.
On March 16, 2003, the neocons struck back with the heavy
artillery. Vice President Dick Cheney appeared on Meet the Press. When
pressured by Tim Russert about Iraq's nuclear danger, Cheney
retorted,
We know he has been absolutely
devoted to trying to acquire nuclear
weapons. And we believe he has, in
fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons
(emphasis mine). I think Mr. ElBaradei
frankly is wrong. And I think if you
look at the track record of the International
Atomic Energy Agency on this
kind of issue, especially where Iraq's
concerned, they have consistently
underestimated or missed what it was
Saddam Hussein was doing. I don't
have any reason to believe they're
any more valid this time than they've
been in the past.
On March 17, 2003, President George W. Bush went on national
television to tell Saddam and his sons, "They have 48 hours to get
out of town." No new evidence or reason was given. It was the
ultimate imperial moment.
On March 19, 2003, the bombs began to fall.
W. Patrick Lang
Col. Lang is president of Global Resources, Inc. and former defense
intelligence officer at the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA).