The original article is from an Australian newspaper
(incidentally a country in Bush's "Coalition of the Willing"
whatever that means) that will be archived on Feb 9
Recent acknowledgements from the Bush administration has proven
what international skeptics of Bush's military adventure into Iraq
had been suspecting all along, that "intelligence" on Iraq's WMD
program had been misrepresented (at best) or twisted to pursue the
Administrations aims, which was an illegal "regime change" in Iraq
to suit American "interests".
----------------------------------
http://theage.com.au/articles/2004/02/05/1075853996640.html
How Bush misled the world
The United States intelligence
services didnot fail on Iraq - it was the Administration that
failed, writes Sidney Blumenthal.
Before he departed on his quest for Saddam Hussein's fabled weapons
of mass destruction last June, David Kay, chief of the Iraq Survey
Group, told friends that he expected promptly to find the cause of
the pre-emptive war. But on January 28, Kay appeared before the US
Senate to testify that there were no WMDs. "It turns out that we
were all wrong," he said. President Bush, he added helpfully, was
misinformed by the whole intelligence community which, like Kay,
made assumptions that turned out to be false.
Within days, Bush declared that he would, after all, appoint a
commission to investigate. Kay's testimony was the catalyst for
this U-turn, but only one of his claims is correct: that he was
wrong. The truth is that much of the intelligence community did not
fail, but presented correct assessments and warnings, that were
overridden and suppressed.
On virtually every single important claim made by the Bush
Administration in its case for war, there was serious dissension.
Discordant views - not from individual analysts but from several
intelligence agencies as a whole - were kept from the public as
momentum was built for a congressional vote on the war
resolution.
Precisely because of the qualms the Administration encountered, it
created a rogue intelligence operation, the Office of Special
Plans, located within the Pentagon and under the control of
neo-conservatives. The OSP roamed outside the ordinary process,
stamping its approval on stories from Iraqi exiles that the other
agencies dismissed as lacking credibility, and feeding them to the
President.
At the same time, constant pressure was applied to the intelligence
agencies to force their compliance. In one case, a senior officer
who refused to buckle under was removed.
Bruce Hardcastle was a senior officer for the Middle East for the
Defence Intelligence Agency. When Bush insisted that Saddam was
actively and urgently engaged in a nuclear weapons program and had
renewed production of chemical weapons, the DIA reported otherwise.
According to Patrick Lang, the former head of human intelligence at
the CIA, Hardcastle "told (the Bush Administration) that the way
they were handling evidence was wrong". The response was not simply
to remove Hardcastle: "They did away with his job," Lang says.
"They wanted only liaison officers... not a senior intelligence
person who argued with them."
When the US State Department's bureau of intelligence and research
(INR) submitted reports which did not support the Administration's
case - saying, for example, that the aluminium tubes Saddam
possessed were for conventional rockets, not nuclear weapons, or
that mobile laboratories were not for WMDs, or that the story about
Saddam seeking uranium in Niger was bogus, or that there was no
link between Saddam and al-Qaeda - its analyses were shunted aside.
Greg Thielman, chief of the INR at the time, told me: "Everyone in
the intelligence community knew that the White House couldn't care
less about any information suggesting that there were no WMDs or
that the UN inspectors were very effective."
When the CIA debunked the tales about Niger uranium and the
Saddam/al-Qaeda connection, its reports were ignored and direct
pressure applied. In October 2002, the White House inserted mention
of the uranium into a speech Bush was to deliver, but the CIA
objected and it was excised. Three months later, it reappeared in
his state of the union address.
Never before had any senior White House official physically
intruded into the CIA's headquarters to argue with mid-level
managers and analysts about unfinished work. But twice
Vice-President Cheney and Lewis Libby, his chief of staff, came to
offer their opinions. According to Patrick Lang: "They looked
disapproving, questioned the reports and left an impression of what
you're supposed to do. They would say: 'you haven't looked at the
evidence'. The answer would be, those reports (from Iraqi exiles)
aren't valid. The analysts would be told, 'you should look at this
again'. Finally, people gave up. You learn not to contradict
them."
The CIA had visitors too, according to Ray McGovern, former CIA
chief for the Middle East. Newt Gingrich came, and Condoleezza
Rice, and as for Cheney, "he likes the soup in the CIA cafeteria",
McGovern jokes.
Meanwhile, senior intelligence officers were kept in the dark about
the OSP. "I didn't know about its existence," said Thielman. "They
were cherry picking intelligence and packaging it for Cheney and
Donald Rumsfeld to take to the President. That's the kind of rogue
operation that peer review is intended to prevent."
CIA director George Tenet, for his part, opted to become a
political advocate for Bush's brief rather than a protector of the
intelligence community. On the eve of the congressional debate, the
agency wrote a 90-page national intelligence estimate justifying
the Administration's position on WMDs and scrubbed of all dissent.
Once the document was declassified after the war it became known
that it contained 40 caveats - including 15 uses of "probably", all
of which had been removed from the previously published
version.
On February 5, 2003, Colin Powell presented evidence of WMDs before
the UN. Cheney and Libby had tried to inject material from Iraqi
exiles and the OSP into his presentation, but Powell rejected most
of it. Yet, for the most important speech of his career, he refused
to allow the presence of any analysts from his own intelligence
agency.
"He didn't have anyone from INR near him," said Thielman. "Powell
wanted to sell a rotten fish. He had decided there was no way to
avoid war. His job was to go to war with as much legitimacy as we
could scrape up."
Powell ignored INR analysts' comments on his speech. Almost every
piece of evidence he unveiled turned out later to be false.
This week, when Bush announced he would appoint an investigative
commission, Powell offered a limited mea culpa. He said that if
only he had known the intelligence, he might not have supported an
invasion. Thus he began to show carefully calibrated remorse, to
distance himself from other members of the Administration. Powell
also defended his UN speech, claiming "it reflected the best
judgements of all of the intelligence agencies".
Powell is sensitive to the slightest political winds, especially if
they might affect his reputation. If he is a bellwether, will it
soon be that every man must save himself?
Sidney Blumenthal, a former
senior adviser to President Bill Clinton, is the author of The
Clinton Wars.