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June
12, 2003
Gary
Leupp
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Ahmad Faruqui
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McGovern
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Close
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June
13, 2003
Six Months Before
the War
Bush
White House Silenced Critics of Iraq WMD Intelligence
By JASON LEOPOLD
Six months before the United States was dead-set
on invading Iraq to rid the country of its alleged weapons of
mass destruction, experts in the field of nuclear science warned
officials in the Bush administration that intelligence reports
showing Iraq was stockpiling chemical and biological weapons
was unreliable and that the country did not pose an imminent
threat to its neighbors in the Middle East or the U.S.
But the dissenters were told to keep
quiet by high-level administration officials in the White House
because the Bush administration had already decided that military
force would be used to overthrow the regime of Iraq's President
Saddam Hussein, interviews and documents have revealed.
The most vocal opponent to intelligence
information supplied by the CIA to the hawks in the Bush administration
about the so-called Iraqi threat to national security was David
Albright, a former United Nations weapons inspector and the president
and founder of the Institute for Science and International Security,
a Washington, D.C. based group that gathers information for the
public and the White House on nuclear weapons programs.
With the likelihood of finding WMD in
Iraq becoming increasingly remote, new information, such as documents
and interviews provided by Albright and other weapons experts,
prove that the White House did not suffer so much from an intelligence
failure on Iraq's WMD, but instead shows how the Bush administration
embellished reams of intelligence and relied on murky intelligence
in order to get Congress and the public to back the war. That
may explain why it is becoming so difficult to find WMD: Because
it's entirely likely that the weapons don't exist.
"A critical question is whether
the Bush Administration has deliberately misled the public and
other governments in playing a "nuclear card" that
it knew would strengthen public support for war," Albright
said in a March 10 assessment of the CIA's intelligence, which
is posted on the ISIS website.
John Dean, the former counsel to President
Richard Nixon, wrote in a column this week that if President
Bush mislead the public in building a case for war in Iraq, largely
because the WMD have yet to be found, a case for impeachment
could be made, according to Dean.
"Presidential statements, particularly
on matters of national security, are held to an expectation of
the highest standard of truthfulness," Dean wrote this week.
"A president cannot stretch, twist or distort facts and
get away with it. President Lyndon Johnson's distortions of the
truth about Vietnam forced him to stand down from reelection.
President Richard Nixon's false statements about Watergate forced
his resignation."
In September, USA Today reported that
"the Bush administration is expanding on and in some cases
contradicting U.S. intelligence reports in making the case for
an invasion of Iraq, interviews with administration and intelligence
officials indicate."
"Administration officials accuse
Iraq of having ties to al-Qaeda terrorists and of amassing weapons
of mass destruction despite uncertain and sometimes contrary
intelligence on these issues, according to officials," the
paper reported. "In some cases, top administration officials
disagree outright with what the CIA and other intelligence agencies
report. For example, they repeat accounts of al-Qaeda members
seeking refuge in Iraq and of terrorist operatives meeting with
Iraqi intelligence officials, even though U.S. intelligence reports
raise doubts about such links. On Iraqi weapons programs, administration
officials draw the most pessimistic conclusions from ambiguous
evidence."
In secret intelligence briefings last
September on the Iraqi threat, House Minority Whip Nancy Pelosi,
D-Calif., said administration officials were presenting "embellishments"
on information long known about Iraq.
A senior Bush administration official
conceded privately that there are large gaps in U.S. knowledge
about Iraqi weapons programs, USA Today reported.
The concerns jibe with warnings about
the CIA's intelligence information Albright first raised last
September, when the agency zeroed in on high-strength aluminum
tubes Iraq was trying to obtain as evidence of the country's
active near-complete nuclear weapons program.
The case of the aluminum tubes is significant
because President Bush identified it during a speech last year
as evidence of Iraq's nuclear weapons program and used to rally
the public and several U.N. countries in supporting the war.
But Albright said many officials in the intelligence community
knew the tubes weren't meant to build a nuclear weapon.
"The CIA has concluded that these
tubes were specifically manufactured for use in gas centrifuges
to enrich uranium," Albright said. "Many in the expert
community both inside and outside government, however, do not
agree with this conclusion. The vast majority of gas centrifuge
experts in this country and abroad who are knowledgeable about
this case reject the CIA's case and do not believe that the tubes
are specifically designed for gas centrifuges. In addition, International
Atomic Energy Agency inspectors have consistently expressed skepticism
that the tubes are for centrifuges."
"After months of investigation,
the administration has failed to prove its claim that the tubes
are intended for use in an Iraqi gas centrifuge program,"
Albright added. "Despite being presented with evidence countering
this claim, the administration persists in making misleading
comments about the significance of the tubes."
Albright said he tried to voice his concerns
about the intelligence information to White House officials last
year, but was rebuffed and told to keep quiet.
"I first learned of this case a
year and a half ago when I was asked for information about past
Iraqi procurements. My reaction at the time was that the disagreement
reflected the typical in-fighting between US experts that often
afflicts the intelligence community. I was frankly surprised
when the administration latched onto one side of this debate
in September 2002. I was told that this dispute had not been
mediated by a competent, impartial technical committee, as it
should have been, according to accepted practice," Albright
said. "I became dismayed when a knowledgeable government
scientist told me that the administration could say anything
it wanted about the tubes while government scientists who disagreed
were expected to remain quiet."
Albright said the Department of Energy,
which analyzed the intelligence information on the aluminum tubes
and rejected the CIA's intelligence analysis, is the only government
agency in the U.S. that can provide expert opinions on gas centrifuges
(what the CIA alleged the tubes were being used for) and nuclear
weapons programs.
"For over a year and a half, an
analyst at the CIA has been pushing the aluminum tube story,
despite consistent disagreement by a wide range of experts in
the United States and abroad," Albright said. "His
opinion, however, obtained traction in the summer of 2002 with
senior members of the Bush Administration, including the President.
The administration was forced to admit publicly that dissenters
exist, particularly at the Department of Energy and its national
laboratories."
But Albright said the White House launched
an attack against experts who spoke critically of the intelligence.
"Administration officials try to
minimize the number and significance of the dissenters or unfairly
attack them," Albright said. "For example, when Secretary
Powell mentioned the dissent in his Security Council speech,
he said: "Other experts, and the Iraqis themselves, argue
that they are really to produce the rocket bodies for a conventional
weapon, a multiple rocket launcher." Not surprisingly, an
effort by those at the Energy Department to change Powell's comments
before his appearance was rebuffed by the administration."
Moreover, former scientists who worked
on Iraq's nuclear weapons program and escaped the country also
disputed the CIA's intelligence of the country's existing nuclear
weapons program, saying it ended in 1991 after the first Gulf
War. However, some Iraq scientists who supplied the Pentagon
with information claim that Iraq's nuclear weapons program continues,
but none of these Iraqis have any direct knowledge of any current
banned nuclear programs. They appear to all carry political baggage
and biases about going to war or overthrowing Saddam Hussein,
and these biases seem to drive their judgments about nuclear
issues, rendering their statements about current Iraqi nuclear
activities suspect, according to Albright, who said he was privy
to much of the information being supplied to the Bush administration
and the CIA.
Another example of disputed intelligence
used by the Bush administration to build its case for war is
Iraq's attempts to obtain uranium from Niger as evidence of another
secret nuclear weapons program. Bush in his State of the Union
Speech in January used this information as an example of a "smoking
gun" and the imminent threat Iraq posed to the U.S. But
the information has since been widely discounted.
"One person who heard a classified
briefing on Iraq in late 2002 said that there was laughter in
the room when the uranium evidence was presented," Albright
said. "One of (the) most dramatic findings, revealed on
March 7, was that the documents which form the basis for the
reports of recent uranium transactions between Niger and Iraq
are not authentic."
Iraq's attempts to acquire a magnet production
plant are likewise ambiguous. Secretary of State Colin Powell
stated to the UN Security Council on February 5, 2003 that this
plant would produce magnets with a mass of 20 to 30 grams. He
added: "That's the same weight as the magnets used in Iraq's
gas centrifuge program before the Gulf War." One US official
said that because the pieces are so small, many end uses are
possible, making it impossible to link the attempted acquisition
to an Iraqi centrifuge program."
One piece of intelligence information
that seemed to go unnoticed by the media was satellite photographs
released by the White House last October of a facility in Iraq
called Al Furat to support Bush's assertion that Iraq was making
nuclear weapons there.
But Albright said that Iraq already admitted
making such weapons at Al Furat before the Gulf War and that
the site had long been dismantled.
In addition to Albright, other military
experts also were skeptical of the intelligence information gathered
by the CIA.
"Basically, cooked information is
working its way into high-level pronouncements and there's a
lot of unhappiness about it in intelligence, especially among
analysts at the CIA," said Vincent Cannistraro, the CIA's
former head of counter-intelligence, in an interview with London's
Guardian newspaper last October.
Cannistraro told the Guardian that hawks
at the Pentagon had deliberately skewed the flow of intelligence
to the top levels of the administration.
Last October, Bush said the Iraqi regime
was developing unmanned aerial vehicles, which "could be
used to disperse chemical or biological weapons across broad
areas."
"We're concerned that Iraq is exploring
ways of using these UAVs for missions targeting the United States,"
Bush said.
While U.S. military experts confirmed
that Iraq had been converting eastern European trainer jets into
UAV's, but with a maximum range of a few hundred miles they were
no threat to targets in the U.S.
"It doesn't make any sense to me
if he meant United States territory," said Stephen Baker,
a retired US navy rear admiral who assesses Iraqi military capabilities
at the Washington-based Center for Defense Information, also
in an interview with the Guardian last October.
In true Bush fashion, however, the administration
had long believed it was better to strike first and ask questions
later.
When Senator Dianne Feinstein, D-California,
who sits on the intelligence committee, sent Bush a letter Sept.
17, 2002 requesting he urge the CIA to produce a National Intelligence
Estimate, a report that would have showed exactly how much of
a threat Iraq posed, Condoleeza Rice, the National Security Adviser,
said in the post 9-11 world the U.S. cannot wait for intelligence
because the Iraq is too much of a threat to the U.S.
"We don't want the smoking gun to
be a mushroom cloud," Rice said.
Jason Leopold
can be reached at: jasonleopold@hotmail.com
Today's
Features
Gary
Leupp
The Intel-gate Row in Britain: a Chronology
Ahmad Faruqui
The Tragic Legacy of the Six Day
War
Wayne
Madsen
Unfit for Office: Time for Rumsfeld to Resign
Laura Carlsen
Hunger and Security
Tarif
Abboushi
Warm and Fuzzy in Aqaba
Ray
McGovern
Deceived into War: Reflections of
a Former CIA Analyst
Steve
Perry
Bush's Wars
Web Log 6/12
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