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July
22, 2003
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This Day Shall Not Define My Life:
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July
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Third and Arizona, Santa Monica
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July
19 / 20, 2003
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Will the Pax Americana be More Sustainable
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We Shall be Heard
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Tenet Blames Wolfowitz
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Impeachment as the Message
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July
18, 2003
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Drowning in Deep Doo-Doo
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Mahajan
Deceit Runs Deep
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Enron-style Management in a Dangerous World
Harold
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The Bush-Musharraf Conclave
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Sovereignty and Solidarity in Indian Country...Rhode Island
Dave Lindorff
Bush and Hitler: a Response to the Wall Street Journal
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Murder of a Whistleblower? Timeline in David Kelly Affair
July
17, 2003
Ron
Jacobs
Sometimes Even the President of the
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Lisa
Walsh Thomas
Bush Country: the Venom and Adulation of Ignorance
Martin
Schwarz
Bush Pre-emptive Strike Doctrine is the Bane of Non-Proliferation
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Lypps
Better Justice Through Chemistry? Forced
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Norman
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Mehta
Criminalizing the Palestinian Solidarity Movement
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Bush, War Lies & Impeachment: the
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Guthrie
(Dis) Intelligence Revisited
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July
16, 2003
Jason
Leopold
Wolfowitz Told White House to Hype
Dubious Uranium Claims
William
Cook
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Elaine
Cassel
Judge Brinkema v. Ashcroft: She Whom
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How Can They Justify the War If WMDs Are Never Found?
Linda Heard
Bondage or Freedom?
Raymond
Barrett
From Detroit to Basra
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St. Clair
Back to the Future in Guatemala:
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July
15, 2003
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and Bill Christison
Why We Resigned from VIPS
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Ashcroft's War on Legal Whistleblowers:
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Floyd
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Leopold
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Gaius Publius
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Troyer
The Niger Syndrome
Becky Gillette
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The Bi-National State: The Wolf Shall
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Cost of Iraq War
July
14, 2003
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The Double Wall Before the Future
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A Fearful Symmetry: Washington and Pyongyang
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Shades of Gray in Iran
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Judicial Terrorism Against the Bill of Rights
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New White House Slogan: "Case Closed. Just Move On"
Jason
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The Mini-War Against Iraq Prior to 9/11
Lee Sustar
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Baroud
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Parable of the Lobbyist
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July
11, 2003
Conn
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Wise
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David Orr
Coffeen-gate: What's Going on at the Sierra Club Foundation?
David
Lindorff
An Iraq War & Occupation Glossary
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Dead Malls
July
10, 2003
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Jacobs
Dealing with the Devil: the Bloody
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Sean
Donahue
Bush and the Paramillitaries: Coddling Terrorists in Colombia
Yemi
Toure
Who Outted Bush in Afrika?
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Jensen
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Ali
Abunimah
US Leaves Injured Iraqis Untreated
Joanne
Mariner
Federal Courts, Not Military Commissions
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Electronic Iraq
July
9, 2003
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Lindorff
Is the Media Finally Turning on
Bush?
David
Krieger and Angela McCracken
10 Myths About Nuclear Weapons
Mickey
Z.
Why Speak Out?
Lee Sustar
The Great Medicare Fraud
John
Chuckman
The Worst Kind of Lie
Gary Leupp
"Pacifist" Japan and the Occupation of Iraq
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Hail to the Thief:
Songs for the Bush Years
July
8, 2003
Elaine
Cassel
Bully on the Bench: the Pathological
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Alan
Maass
Nights of Fire and Rage in Benton Harbor
Chris
Floyd
Troubled Sleep: Getting Used to the American Gulag
Linda
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America's Kangaroo Justice
Brian
Cloughley
They Tell Lies to Nodders
Charles
Sullivan
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Landau
The Intelligence Culture in the National Security Age
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July
7, 2003
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The Anti-Empire Report
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Wasserman
The Nuke with a Hole in Its Head
Ramzy
Baroud
Peace for All the Wrong Reasons
Simon
Jones
What Progressives Should Think About
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McCulloch
Fear, Pain and Shame in Aceh
Uri
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The Draw
Steve
Perry
Bush's Wars Web Log 7/3
July
4 / 6, 2003
Patrick
Cockburn
Dead on the Fourth of July
Frederick
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Martha
Honey
Bush and Africa: Racism, Exploitation
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The Rat in the Grain: Amstutz and
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Wayne
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Jim
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Bush's Surreal AIDS Appointment
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July
26, 2003
Faith-Based Intelligence
The
Office of Special Plans, the Niger Uranium Fraud and Neocon Arrogance
By GARY LEUPP
THE "FAITH-BASED" APPROACH
The scandal over the Niger uranium intelligence,
dismissed wishfully by high ranking Republicans in the House
and Senate as a fuss about "a flaw here or there,"
or "nothing but an absurd, media-driven, diversionary tactic,"
is in fact just one fragment of a much broader Intel-gate scandal.
That scandal is succinctly summed up by Daryl G. Kimball, executive
director of the private Arms Control Association: "the administration
made its case for going to war by misrepresenting intelligence
findings as well as citing discredited intelligence information."
Greg Thielmann, who worked until last fall as a proliferation
expert in the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research,
explains, "This administration has had a faith-based intelligence
attitude: 'We know the answers, give us the intelligence to support
those answers.'" Vincent Cannistraro, former head of anti-terrorism
operations and analysis at the CIA., says the neocon "cabal"
leading the administration has "never been able to coalesce
as they have now. September 11th gave them the opportunity, and
now they're in heaven. They believe the intelligence [justifying
war on Iraq] is there. They want to believe it. It has to be
there."
They wanted to believe (and more importantly
wanted us to believe) that Saddam was hunting for uranium
in Africa. So Bush told us that, indeed, Saddam definitely was.
They wanted to believe that the high strength aluminum tubes
apprehended en route to Iraq last year, which IAEA as well as
the U.S. State and Energy Departments say are intended to build
launch tubes for artillery rockets, were "only really suited
for nuclear weapons programs, centrifuge programs," as
Condoleezza Rice put it last September. They wanted us to accept
specific allegations, not yet proven during three months of occupation,
such as: Iraq "has stocked at least 100 metric tons, and
possibly as much as 500 metric tons" of chemical agents
"much of it added in the last year."
The neocons wanted us to be terrorized
by the threat of Iraq, to associate Iraq with terrorist groups,
and to view war with Iraq not as a distraction from the
war on terrorism focused on al-Qaeda but as part and parcel of
an endless terror war waged against disparate objects. Thus we
were advised that the Boeing 707 and Tupolev 154 fuselages at
Salman Pak, which the Iraqi's describe as an anti-terrorism
training base, were used for training terrorists (including al-Qaeda)
in hijacking. The most egregious piece of disinformation circulated
by the administration was that al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein were
in cahoots. An intimate operational connection was highly unlikely,
and the Bush charge immediately raised the eyebrows of Middle
East scholars aware of the historical mutual hatred between the
fundamentalist terrorist group and the secular Baathist state.
But (banking on ignorance and anti-Arab racism), the neocons
were able to blur the distinction between the two and, as Rice
put it, "exploit new opportunities" to implement longstanding
plans for regime change in Iraq. If there's to be a thorough
investigation into the "faith-based intelligence" that
produced the current quagmire, it should focus on the effort,
underway within hours of the Sept. 11 attacks, to link bin Laden
and Saddam, to thus prepare the country for war on Iraq.
They wanted us to believe that, as Rumsfeld
told the press in the summer of 2002, "There are al-Qaeda
in a number of locations in Iraq," the implication being
that they were there enjoying Saddam's hospitality. Iraq has
"clear ties to terrorist groups, including al-Qaeda,"
Powell told world leaders in Switzerland last January.
They wanted us to believe that Ansar
al-Islam, a group of hundreds of Kurds and Arabs controlling
several villages in northern Iraq and accused of al-Qaeda links,
was operating with Saddam's blessing. (But it operated in a Kurdish-controlled
zone, where it skirmished with U.S.-backed Kurdish forces. Tariq
Aziz claimed that Baghdad had actually provided weapons to the
latter for use against Ansar al-Islam.) They wanted us to believe
that Ansar with Saddam's blessing was producing chemical weapons;
the obliterated sites of the group's activity provide no evidence
for that.
They asked us to believe that Abu Musab
al-Zarqawi (who heads a group called Jund al-Shams, or Soldiers
of the Levant, which operates in Syria and Jordan; who is accused
of masterminding the assassination of a U.S. diplomat in Jordan
last October; and who specializes in chemical and biological
terrorism) is a ranking al-Qaeda working with Saddam's regime.
But as one exasperated U.S. intelligence source told The
Age, "the intelligence
is practically non-existent It is impossible to support the bald
conclusions being made by the White House and the Pentagon given
the poor quantity and quality of the intelligence available.
There is uproar within the intelligence community on all of these
points, but the Bush White House has quashed dissent and written
out those analysts who don't agree with their views."
Zarqawi received medical treatment (a
leg amputation) in a Baghdad hospital in 2002 after fleeing Afghanistan
via Iran (from which he may have been expelled), and then apparently
disappeared by August. His presence in Iraq is known because
of intercepted phone calls to his family in Jordan, which give
no indication that the Saddam regime knew of his presence or
was providing him any support. U.S. intelligence sources in fact
downplay his importance to the al-Qaeda network; in February
the New York Times quoted unnamed administration officials
as saying many in the FBI and CIA were upset about the way Zarqawi's
ties to Baghdad were being played up to bolster the case for
war. Meanwhile Colin Powell in his second speech to the United
Nations Security Council called Zarqawi a "deadly terrorist."
He referred to "Al-Qaeda affiliates, [which] based in Baghdad,
now coordinate the movement of people, money and supplies into
and throughout Iraq for [Zarqawi's] network, and they've now
been operating freely in the capital for more than eight months."
In his May 1 speech declaring victory
in Iraq, Bush described Iraq as an "ally" of al-Qaeda.
Fortunately more and more politicians and journalists say otherwise:
"There was and is no evidence," declares Sen. Edward
Kennedy, "that Saddam was conspiring with al-Qaeda."
And on the WMDs: "It appears," says John
W. Dean, "that not only the Niger uranium hoax, but
most everything else that Bush said about Saddam Hussein's weapons
was false, fabricated, exaggerated, or phony."
The fact is sinking in: They lied
to us. How many people are now thinking: We were willing
to support attacking Iraq as a way of getting even with the 9-11
terrorists, and to defend ourselves. Turns out Iraq was no threat,
and it's not connected to al-Qaeda anyway. The people just want
us out of their country, and we're losing another soldier every
day trying to keep the peace, but we don't have enough troops
in there, and the GIs hate it there and want to come home, the
world doesn't want to help us because they opposed the war and
don't agree with the occupation... Why do we have to be there
anyway?
While hoping for the day when Donald
Rumsfeld, under oath, explains whether he really believes
in the Iraq-al Qaeda connection, I am in the meantime trying
to grasp the flow of events involving this lesser if still pretty
damning affair of the Niger letters, and understand it in context.
What follows is a chronology based upon numerous internet sources,
indicating the key players who constructed the argument for war,
and suggesting that several neocons in the Defense Department,
Vice President's office, and the White House (Abram Shulsky,
Robert G. Joseph, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby , Stephen
Hadley) are worth particular attention.
THE NIGER LETTERS
According to some, the Iraqi ambassador
to the Holy See (or to Italy) visited a number of African countries,
including Niger, in 1999. Others speak of an "Iraqi trade
delegation" to Niger, which might be a confused reference
to the ambassador's visit. Thereafter Italian intelligence investigated
the trip to insure that Iraq was not seeking enriched uranium
from Niger. (Given that Niger receives 65% of its export income
from uranium ore, reference to that product might well have entered
any talks about trade, formal or informal, between Niger and
Iraq. But when Iraq had an active nuclear weapons program, up
to 1991, it used Iraqi uranium.)
In January 2001, someone broke into Niger's
embassy in Rome, stealing some items of value and ransacking
the office. Italian officials speculate that the burglars may
have sought letterhead stationary and seals to forge documents.
Six months later, the Italian intelligence service SISME obtained
a stack of official-looking documents from an African diplomat.
These included the Niger uranium letters. According to some accounts,
the Italians sent summaries of their content to London and Washington
in the fall of 2002, but Rome denies that it acquired such letters
during its investigation or passed any on to other countries.
Italian journalist Elisabetta Burba, who writes for the news
weekly Panorama, said that she acquired the letters from
a source in the Italian intelligence community and passed them
to the U.S. embassy in October 2002. Newsweek reports
the ambassador "tossed them out, rather than send them to
[CIA] analysts at Langley," but the Washington Post says
that by October 19 copies had been distributed to intelligence
officials. Another report states that Britain's MI6 passed information
about the letters (or copies) to Vice President Cheney's office.
(A congressional intelligence-committee staff member told Seymour
Hersh that "the Brits" initially "placed more
stock in them than we did.") This would have been months
before Burba's visit to the U.S. embassy; Cheney's Chief of Staff
Lewis Libby told Time, "The Vice President heard
about the possibility of Iraq trying to acquire uranium from
Niger in February 2002. As part of his regular intelligence briefing,
the Vice President asked a question about the implication of
the report." We must assume the administration had knowledge
of the documents by this time.
One of the letters purports to document a deal in 2000 between
Niger and Iraq whereby the former would supply 500 tons of uranium
oxide. Analysts at the Department of Energy and the State Department's
Bureau of Intelligence and Research raised questions at some
point about the documents' authenticity. By early 2002 U.S. Ambassador
to Niger Barbro Owens-Kirkpatrick was asked about Iraq-Niger
uranium trade; she informed Washington that there was no basis
to suspect any link. Then Cheney's office decided to investigate
the letters' substance. Former U.S. ambassador to Gabon, Joseph
C. Wilson (a man of exceptionally distinguished diplomatic career),
was (in his words) "invited out to meet with a group of
people at the CIA who were interested in this subject" and
agreed to investigate the content of the documents, which he
had not seen. He left for Niger in February, and made an oral
report in March. "Although I did not file a written report,"
Wilson declares, "there should be at least four documents
in U.S. government archives confirming my mission. The documents
should include the ambassador's report of my debriefing in Niamey
[capital of Niger], a separate report written by the embassy
staff, a CIA report summing up my trip, and a specific answer
from the agency to the office of the vice president (this may
have been delivered orally)." One must imagine that they
came to Libby's attention. The documents' gist is: there was
no evidence that Iraq was trying to acquire uranium from Niger.
Meanwhile, during the same month, a four-star
U.S. general, Marine Gen. Carlton W. Fulford Jr., deputy commander
of the U-S European Command (the headquarters responsible for
military relations with most of sub-Saharan Africa) also visited
Niger at the request of the U.S. ambassador. He met with Niger's
president February 24 and emphasized the importance of tight
controls over its uranium ore deposits. According to MSNBC, he
also visited the country two months later. This year, Fulford
told the Washington Post that he had come away convinced
that Niger's uranium stocks were secure. His report went to European
Command Commander, General Joseph Ralston, who passed it along
to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Richard
Myers. The Post reports that "it is unclear whether
they reached officials in the White House."
OFFICE OF SPECIAL
PLANS
As of summer 2002, both Wilson and Fulford
had reported that there was no evidence for Iraqi efforts to
import uranium from Niger. But that same summer, Secretary Rumsfeld
established the Office of Special Plans, headed by Paul
Wolfowitz, Abram Shulsky, Undersecretary of Defense for Near
Eastern and South Asian Affairs William Luti, and Undersecretary
of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith. Its official purpose was
to collect intelligence relating to terrorism and interpret
it. Its very establishment reflected the disappointment felt
by Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz over the CIA's "failure"
to find sufficient dirt on Iraq. They had asked for evidence
of an Iraq-al Qaeda link; instead, in May 2002 both the CIA and
FBI reported that, despite an exhaustive search, no evidence
had been found for such a connection.
So Rumsfeld instructed the new OSP "to
search for information on Iraq's hostile intentions or links
to terrorists" that might have been overlooked by
the CIA. It received in particular much information from Ahmad
Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress, a group held in contempt by
the State Department but favored by the Defense Department neocons.
(Simultaneously, in Israel, Ariel Sharon created a similar committee
outside the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad; this organization
was in close touch with Rumsfeld's operation.) The OSP was designed
to justify an attack on Iraq. Patrick Lang, former director of
Middle East analysis at the Defense Intelligence Agency, told
the New Yorker the OSP "started picking out things
that supported their thesis and stringing them into arguments
that they could use with the President. [That's] not intelligence.
It's political propaganda." The agency was quietly disbanded
in March, on the eve of the war, its (very special) mission accomplished.
The Defense Department, committed to
war, was willing to ignore intelligence that conflicted with
war preparations and to shrewdly deploy disinformation to promote
support for an attack. So too was the Vice President's office.
Having received Wilson's report, Cheney made frequent trips
to CIA offices to help shape the intelligence to favor war with
Iraq. Meanwhile the Vice President became the leading proponent
of the view that Iraq was a growing nuclear threat to the U.S.
and its allies: "now we know," he told the Veterans
of Foreign Wars convention in August 2002, "Saddam has resumed
his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons [emphasis added]"
(The Guardian, 8/27/02).
On September 24, the British government
published a white paper that made use of the Niger uranium connection
discredited by Wilson and Fulford months earlier. It stated
that Iraq "had recently 'sought significant quantities of
uranium from Africa.'" The mass media accepted the report;
the London Guardian headlined: "African gangs offer
route to uranium." The still-skeptical CIA contacted the
British, questioning the intelligence and suggesting the passage
be dropped from the report. (The British have since stated that
their assertion rests on intelligence aside from the discredited
letters, but they have not provided any details.) But the Office
for Special Plans wanted to exploit the specter of Iraqi nuclear
attack for all it was worth. Thus the Niger report was included
in the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate, a key intelligence
document to which only the president and a handful of other officials
are privy. This document noted that there were different interpretations
of the significance of the Niger documents, and that the State
Department regarded them as "highly dubious," but it
implicitly recommended reference to an African uranium link as
part of a case for war.
Meanwhile, top-ranking government spokespersons
continued to warn of Iraqi nukes. In September National Security
Advisor Condoleeza Rice told CNN, "We don't want the smoking
gun to be a mushroom cloud," and the next month Bush exploited
the same image in Cincinnati. "Facing clear evidence of
peril," he boomed, "we cannot wait for the final proof,
the smoking gun that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud."
Secretary of State Colin Powell, appearing before a closed hearing
of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Sept. 26, also cited
Iraq's attempt to obtain uranium from Niger as evidence of its
persistent nuclear ambitions. By this time the Office of Special
Plans was steering the dissemination of (dis)information about
Iraq, but meeting with some State Department and CIA resistance.
While warning the British about the Niger letters, the CIA (George
Tenet in particular) also urged that references to efforts by
Iraq to purchase 500 tons of uranium from Niger be dropped from
Bush's Cincinnati speech. Rice aide and deputy national security
adviser Stephen Hadley in fact jettisoned them, after two memos
and a phone call from Tenet.
But top-ranking officials' references
to Iraqi efforts to acquire uranium from Africa continued. A
publicly circulated State Department "fact sheet" released
December 19 mentioned Iraqi efforts to acquire uranium from Niger,
and asked rhetorically, "Why is the Iraqi regime hiding
their uranium procurement?" (Both Iraq and Niger denied
any procurement.) The charge was included in the President's
Daily Brief (P.D.B.), seen by the President and only a few other
senior officials. On January 23, Rice wrote an op-ed piece for
the New York Times ("Why We Know Iraq is Lying")
charging that, "Iraq has a high-level political commitment
to maintain and conceal its weapons For example, [Iraq's] declaration
[on its weapons programs] fails to account for or explain Iraq's
efforts to get uranium from abroad, its manufacture of specific
fuel for ballistic missiles it claims not to have, and the gaps
previously identified by the United Nations in Iraq's accounting
for more than two tons of the raw materials needed to produce
thousands of gallons of anthrax and other biological weapons"
In December, the International Atomic
Energy Agency (IAEA) requested from the State Department copies
of the Niger letters. They were not handed over until February.
AFRICAN URANIUM AND
THE STATE OF THE UNION ADDRESS
Throughout this period, the Office of
Special Plans seems to have enjoyed the upper hand, although
it skirmished with the State Department and CIA from time to
time over the utility of specific intelligence. The key exchange
occurred just before President Bush delivered his State of the
Union speech January 28, when one Robert G. Joseph, director
for nonproliferation at the National Security Council, asked
Alan Foley, a C.I.A. expert on weapons of mass destruction, whether
the president's address could include a reference to Iraq's seeking
uranium from Niger. Foley recommended that the reference be removed,
since the intelligence was of uncertain credibility. Joseph then
asked if it would be accurate to cite the British white paper
as the source of the information. Foley replied that the CIA
had actually informed British intelligence that it doubted the
Niger materials, but he apparently agreed that it would be technically
accurate to say that the British had a report that Iraq had attempted
to purchase uranium from Africa. Hence the infamous line in the
January 28 address: "The British government has learned
that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of
uranium from Africa.'' (The quality of British intelligence came
under scrutiny when, in early February, 10 Downing Street issued
the paper, "Iraq: Its Infrastructure of Concealment, Deception,
and Intimidation." The article was supposedly based on high-level
British intelligence, but at least 11 of the 16 pages were lifted,
verbatim, from two articles published in the September 2002 edition
of Middle East Review of International Affairs, an Israeli
journal.)
When Colin Powell made his presentation
to the UN February 5, he dropped the African uranium reference
entirely. (He has explained recently that the story "had
not stood the test of time.") Meanwhile the U.S., after
months' delay, turned over copies of the Niger letters to the
IAEA. In March IAEA director general Mohamed El Baradei announced
they were indeed "not authentic," but rather childish
forgeries. "These documents are so bad," a senior IAEA
official told the New Yorker, "that I cannot imagine
that they came from a serious intelligence agency. It depresses
me, given the low quality of the documents, that it was not stopped.
At the level it reached, I would have expected more checking."
"These were blatant forgeries," said IAEA spokeswoman
Melissa Fleming. A "former high-level intelligence official"
interviewed by the New Yorker suggested that it had been
an inside job. "Somebody deliberately let something false
get in there. It could not have gotten into the system without
the agency being involved. Therefore it was an internal intention.
Someone set someone up."
Powell, on NBC's "Meet the Press,"
took the news in stride. "It was the information that we
had. We provided it. If that information is inaccurate, fine."
Nevertheless, administration officials
(most notably, Cheney) continued to link Iraq with an active
nuclear program. On March 17, Bush repeated that, "Iraq
continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons
ever devised," and the next day, on "Meet the Press,"
Cheney reiterated: "We believe [Saddam] has, in fact, reconstituted
nuclear weapons." Ray McGovern, former spook and member
of the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, notes that
"if you look at Cheney's speeches, he's way out ahead"
in claiming Saddam has "a reconstituted nuclear capability."
But, McGovern adds, the vice president has "no evidence
to support that."
As the ground war began, the mainstream
press and some politicians had finally begun to raise the kinds
of questions that the antiwar activists had been asking for months.
"There is a possibility that the fabrication of these [Niger]
documents may be part of a larger deception campaign aimed at
manipulating public opinion and foreign policy regarding Iraq,"
concluded Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.). He wrote FBI
Director Robert S. Mueller III March 21 requesting an investigation
of the letters. Meanwhile investigative journalism, largely stymied
since 9-11, began to revive: on June 12, The Washington Post
revealed that an unnamed ambassador had traveled to Niger
and reported back that there was no Iraq-African uranium connection.
Soon Mr. Wilson identified himself through a New York Times
op-ed piece (July 6), inveighing against the Bush administration
for hyping the intelligence to support war with Iraq. "Based
on my experience with the administration in the months leading
up to the war," he wrote, "I have little choice but
to conclude that some of the intelligence related to Iraq's nuclear
weapons program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat."
He told "Meet the Press" that "Either the administration
has information that it has not shared with the public or ...
they were using the selective use of facts and intelligence to
bolster a decision that had already been made to go to war."
The backlash was immediate. Ari Fleischer
suggested that "Wilson's own report [shows] that officials
in Niger said that Iraq was seeking to contact officials in Niger
about sales." (According to Wilson, he mentioned only "an
Algerian-Nigerien intermediary" who had asked about "commercial"
sales, a query Niger had ignored. "That then translates
into an Iraqi effort to import a significant quantity of uranium
as the President alleged?" asks Wilson. "These guys
really need to get serious.") The White House "outed"
Wilson's wife, who apparently had CIA ties and who, following
her identification, was obliged to leave her post. In any case,
the White House was suddenly on the defensive. On July 7, it
admitted the obvious: "A senior Bush administration official
said in a statement authorized by the White House" that
"Knowing all that we know now, the reference to Iraq's
attempt to acquire uranium from Africa should not have been included
in the State of the Union speech." Immediately, journalists
and politicians began to aggressively question the pre-war intelligence
on Iraq. (And to some extent, more importantly, the production
and use of "intelligence" to generate support for the
Iraq war.) "This is a very important admission," Tom
Daschle, Democratic leader in the Senate, declared. "It's
a recognition that we were provided with faulty information.
And I think it's all the more reason why a full investigation
of all the facts surrounding this situation be undertaken."
By the 10th the controversy was everywhere front-page news. David
S. Broder wrote in the Washington Post, "If President
Bush is not reelected, we may look back on last Thursday, July
10, 2003, as the day the shadow of defeat first crossed his political
horizon."
The House and Senate intelligence committees
began closed-door hearings on pre-war intelligence. On July 17,
Sen. Richard Durbin (D-Il.) told the press that the Senate hearing
had so far discovered the identity of "the person was who
was insistent on putting this language in which the CIA knew
to be incredible, this language about the uranium shipment from
Africa." The press has identified the individual as the
above-mentioned Robert G. Joseph, a top aide to Condoleeza Rice,
a Special Assistant to the President, and Senior Director for
Proliferation Strategy, Counterproliferation and Homeland Defense.
He serves on the National Security Council, and is an adviser
of the pro-Israel Center for Security Policy. He coordinates
nuclear non-proliferation policy on the NSC, while advocating
"counter-proliferation" (the use of banned weapons
as the pretext for war.) Joseph has taught at Carleton
College and the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, and holds
a Ph.D. from Columbia University and an M.A. from the University
of Chicago. He was a Professor of National Security Studies,
and Director of the Center for Counterproliferation Research,
at the National Defense University.
As noted above, Joseph had sought Alan Foley's approval of the
wording of the uranium reference in the State of the Union speech.
"It is inconceivable," writes Robert Scheer, "that
in reviewing draft after draft of the State of the Union speech,
NSC staffers Hadley and Joseph failed to tell Rice that the president
was about to spread a big lie to justify going to war."
They should both be questioned. Hadley, after initially denying
that the White House had received any caution from the CIA about
the African uranium reference, has now taken responsibility for
it, just Tenet had earlier. He says, "It is now clear to
me that I failed in [the] responsibility" to delete the
passage, and declares that he should have remembered that
the CIA had objected to the story earlier. "Had I done so,
this would have avoided the whole current controversy" (Boston
Globe, July 23). But Bush's director of communications Dan
Bartlett insists that the bogus Africa report the State of the
Union address was "not at the specific request of anyone"
but something "one of the speechwriters had come up with"
after reviewing the intelligence. Hadley brings us to Condoleeza
Rice and the White House. But even more attention should go to
Abram Shulsky and William Luti, leaders of the Defense Department's
short-lived OSP, alongside Wolfowitz and Feith.
Shulsky, the program's director, received
his doctorate from the University of Chicago in 1972, having
(like Paul Wolfowitz who received his doctorate the same year)
studied under Leo Strauss. An expert on Strauss' thought, he
got his start in politics working in Senator Henry "Scoop"
Jackson's office alongside Elliott Abrams in the 1970s. He joined
the staff of the Senate Intelligence Committee in the early 1980s
and served in the Pentagon under Assistant Secretary of Defense
Richard Perle during the Reagan Administration. Later he worked
at RAND, where, along with other neocons, including I. Lewis
"Scooter" Libby (now Cheney's chief of staff---a man
who should be asked about the Wilson report), Shulsky authored
an essay entitled "From Containment to Global Leadership:
America and the World after the Cold War." This advocated
preemptive war if necessary to insure U.S. global hegemony. In
1999, he coauthored (with Gary Schmitt) an essay on "Leo
Strauss and the World of Intelligence," arguing that deception
is among the most vital tools in diplomacy and intelligence.
(A former CIA official, quoted by Seymour Hersh in a NYT article,
described the Shulsky group as "outsiders" in the intelligence
community, having "a high degree of paranoia. They've convinced
themselves that they're on the side of angels, and everybody
else in the government is a fool.") A key element of Strauss's
thought is that "a political order can be stable only if
it is united by an external threat. Following Machiavelli, he
maintained that if no external threat exists then one has to
be manufactured" (Shadia Drury, Leo Strauss and the American
Right, 1996). One can legitimately raise the question; did
Shulsky and other paranoid neo-cons manufacture the Iraqi WMD
threat?
The Office of Special Plans was overseen
by Undersecretary of Defense William Luti, a retired Navy captain,
Operation Desert Storm fighter pilot, former Cheney adviser,
early advocate of military action against Iraq, head of Pentagon's
post-war Iraq planning group, and liaison after 9-11 to Iraqi
exiles in Europe. In a speech in Washington in October 2002,
he advocated the U.S. adopt a policy of "anticipatory self-defense."
But in this case "self-defense" requiring deception
for its justification generated opposition from professional
intelligence operatives. These were silenced. Hersh quotes an
unnamed Pentagon policy adviser: "Shulsky and Luti won the
policy debate They beat 'em-they cleaned up against State and
the C.I.A. There's no mystery why they won-because they were
more effective in making their argument. Luti is smarter than
the opposition. Wolfowitz is smarter. They out-argued them. It
was a fair fight. They persuaded the President of the need to
make a new security policy."
ARROGANCE AS THE NEOCONS' ACHILLES' HEEL
Smart, effective, calculated liars emerged
victorious from that "fair fight." They achieved their
objective: the occupation of Iraq. The Bush administration will
now attempt to refashion Iraq as a U.S. ally in the Arab world,
"democratic" and globalized, friendly to Israel, dotted
with U.S. bases, open to foreign ideas, institutions, and missionary
efforts. But the neocons' Achilles heel is arrogance. They did
not plan on the degree of Iraqi opposition, just as they did
not anticipate the magnitude of the global antiwar movement in
the months before the March attack. They don't understand why
the Germans, French and Indians, having opposed the war, aren't
eager right now to help the U.S. impose its occupation. Now,
as what NBC News' Andrea Mitchell calls "a war between the
White House National Security Council and the CIA" heats
up, they might underestimate the intelligence community's indignation,
and ability to reveal damning evidence about the neocons' manipulation
of public opinion to support war.
"Well, we've liberated people from
a dictator, right?" That's what they want us to think. "I'm
not concerned about weapons of mass destruction," Paul Wolfowitz
told a group of reporters traveling with him from Iraq last week.
"I'm concerned about getting Iraq on its feet. I didn't
come (to Iraq) on a search for weapons of mass destruction. If
you could get in a relaxed conversation with Iraqis on that subject
they'd say why on earth are you Americans fussing so much about
this historical issue when we have real problems here,
when Baathists are killing us and Baathists are threatening us
and we don't have electricity and we don't have jobs. Those are
the real issues. I'm not saying that getting to the bottom of
this WMD issue isn't important. It is important. But it is not
of immediate consequence [emph. added]." Thus for Wolfowitz,
"This historical issue" (of the justification for war,
which he feverishly promoted) as opposed to the "real problems"
(produced by that unjustified war) requires no further discussion.
Such arrogance. He just can't understand why Americans would
be outraged that he, having contributed to the apparent disinformation
leading up to the Iraq war, would now openly acknowledge his
lack of concern with WMDs, discourage "fussing so much about"
their lack and and the lies surrounding them, which to him are
merely "historical" rather than "real issuesof
immediate consequence."
Wolfowitz is so smug that he assumes
he can tell a reporter that the WMDs weren't necessarily the
main issue for attacking Iraq, and that the public will take
it all in stride, happy to be (mis)led by the Straussian wise,
those who make clever use of deception in intelligence and of
manufactured external threats to stabilize the political order.
"For bureaucratic reasons we settled on one issue, weapons
of mass destruction, because that was the one reason everyone
could agree on," says Wolfowitz (Vanity Fair, July
2003). Too hard to make the al-Qaeda link stick. And the real
reasons (geopolitical advantage; control of oil; Israel's security)
not marketable. So we decided, let's go with the WMDs, scare
people, use the specter of another 9-11---only with an Iraqi
nuke---and see if we can get 60-70% support for an attack Doesn't
that make beautiful sense?
People are supposed to be cool with
that, three months after "victory," as Iraq is looking
like a quagmire?
Richard Perle, when asked by reporters
in Moscow July 22 about the absence of WMDs, said, "There
were of course many reasons for starting the war in Iraq,"
but implied that Iraqi liberation was the most important.
"We are clearly starting to see that up to 300,000 people
were killed and buried" by Saddam's regime, he declared.
He is "absolutely certain" that weapons of mass destruction
are hidden in Iraq, but he admits, "We don't know where
to look for them and we never did know where to look for them
I hope this will take less than 200 years." Does he imagine
people will smile indulgently at his little joke?
Blair told Congress he's "confident
that history will forgive" the decision to invade Iraq,
even if the weapons search is fruitless. Chances are the American
people won't forgive, as the truth about an unjustifiable invasion
comes out, the bills of occupation mount, the national reputation
plummets, the body bags come home, and the "liberated"
people of Iraq keep saying, "GO HOME!"
Gary Leupp
is an an associate professor in the Department of History at
Tufts University and coordinator of the Asian Studies Program.
He can be reached at: gleupp@tufts.edu
Weekend Edition Features for July 19 / 20, 2003
Arthur
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Julian
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We Shall be Heard
Cynthia
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Bush's Racial Politics at Home and Abroad
Mel
Goodman
What is to be Done with the CIA?
Jason Leopold
Tenet Blames Wolfowitz
Mickey
Z.
History Forgave Churchill
Doug Giebel
Impeachment as the Message
Jon
Brown
Whipping the Post
Mano Singham
Cheney's Oil Maps
Steven
Sherman
Nickle, Dimed and Slimed at UNC
Robin Philpot
Liberia: History Doesn't Repeat Itself, It Stutters
Khaldoun
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Capturing Friedman
Jeffrey
St. Clair
You Must Leave Home, Again: Gilad Atzmon's A Guide to the Perplexed
Lenni
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Sitting in with Mingus
Vanessa
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Three Dog Night
Adam
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Video Judas Video
Poets'
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Foley, Smith and Curtis
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