The recently report intelligence failures over Iraq were already

[whistle]

...discussed by Al Franken on AAR last summer and posted on his website

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The Paper Trail
by John Prados
June 23, 2004


This one you’ll want to print and save for future reference. In the past year and half, America has witnessed firsthand what happens when politicians distort intelligence information or use it irresponsibly. In his push for war, President Bush manipulated facts, gave credence to false claims and knowingly advanced unproven information to the American public. Here, national security expert John Prados follows the president’s paper trail step by deceptive step.

John Prados is a senior analyst at the National Security Archive in Washington, D.C. His current book, Hoodwinked (The New Press), supplies a comprehensive narrative of the maneuvers to affect American thinking on Iraq and examines these and other documents central to the march to war.

In all the heat and noise of the suitability, or lack thereof, of American intelligence before the Iraq war, the elephant in the closet remains the White House and President George W. Bush himself. Intelligence is supposed to inform policymaking. The charge made about Iraq is that the intelligence was really used to sell the war, to hoodwink America. This is no academic debate, but rather an issue with legal ramifications and moral implications that reach directly into the Oval Office. There will be much to be said over coming months about the performance of the Central Intelligence Agency, the U.S. intelligence community as a whole and the products they delivered, but that is the more academic debate. Today’s aim is to shine light on the White House question: how did George Bush further distort U.S. intelligence estimates, and to what end?

The White House pronouncements in their proper context show quite clearly how the hoodwinking progressed. A good point of departure is the speech President Bush made to the Veterans of Foreign Wars in Cincinnati on Oct. 7, 2002. As Congress considered a resolution that would permit the use of force in Iraq, Bush’s mission that day was to reinforce the message conveyed by the U.S. national intelligence estimate given to Congress and the CIA white paper that distilled that document. Reinforce it he did. President Bush took one allegation disputed in the intelligence estimate—that Iraq had a fleet of unmanned aerial vehicles that could be used to dispense chemical or biological weapons—and recited it as fact. Bush attributed to Iraq’s own admission the claim, actually drawn from a British government paper, that Iraq had produced 30,000 liters of anthrax (in fact, a number in excess of the British estimate, which was of a potential amount) and to U.N. inspectors the further claim that really Baghdad had “likely produced” 60,000 to 120,000 liters of that potent agent. These figures far exceeded anything in U.S. intelligence estimates (and none of these stocks were used in the war or could be found afterward). Bush also said, explicitly, “Iraq has trained Al Qaeda members in bomb making and poisons and deadly gases,” a claim highly disputed within the intelligence community but again relayed as fact.

With these and additional assertions, President Bush got his congressional resolution. This permitted the president to utilize force to ensure compliance with “all relevant United Nations Security Council resolutions” and against the continuing threat posed by Iraq. No part of the law allowed war for the purpose of regime change, to compel changes in Iraqi government internal actions, or for any other purpose. The authority to use force was explicitly linked to the sole question of the alleged Iraqi weapons. If Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction, the U.N. resolutions by definition would have stood as fulfilled and the authorization for a U.S. war would expire. Thus, Iraqi weapons stood at the very heart of the entire Bush enterprise. The drive for war required not only the assertion that Iraq possessed these weapons, but also the avoidance of any judgment by UN inspectors that Saddam had been effectively disarmed.

The set of charges in the Bush October 2002 speech became a litany driven home by repetition in an orchestrated series of speeches and interviews of senior U.S. officials, statements by White House spokesmen and papers released by the White House. When UN inspectors returned to Iraq in December and the Baghdad government supplied a comprehensive statement of its weapons programs and efforts to disarm, discrediting that report became the next hurdle. The State Department and CIA jointly crafted a fact sheet that Secretary of State Colin L. Powell released on Dec. 19 with the assertion that Baghdad was in “material breach” of the U.N. disarmament resolutions. This document did not actually analyze the contents of the Iraqi declaration. Rather, it hit the same points featured in the previous U.S. litany of charges about Iraq. Remarkably, it was in the State/CIA fact sheet —not in Bush’s State of the Union Address a month later—that the administration first used the bogus charge that Saddam had sought uranium from Niger, asserting that “The Declaration ignores efforts to procure uranium from Niger.” It is also of interest that the State/CIA paper dropped Bush’s huge exaggeration of Iraqi anthrax production. Neither point was picked up by the media at the time; no one called the Bush administration on its assertions.

As the U.N. inspectors began their intensive searches for weapons in Iraq, it became more apparent than ever that the administration case for war had not stuck. Widespread public demonstrations were growing larger; cities, towns and various associations were denouncing the march to war, and Bush’s poll numbers were falling. In subfreezing weather on Jan.15, 2003, some 300,000 demonstrators hit the streets of Washington to protest. New polls showed the public evenly divided on war, and some also had a majority believing the administration had not made a sufficient case. On Jan. 27, despite White House efforts to induce the United Nations inspection commissioners to take a hard line on Iraqi weapons, both Hans Blix of the general disarmament unit and Mohammed El Baradei of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) reported finding no significant evidence of the Iraqi weapons stockpiles the Bush people were claiming existed. In fact, in regard to the most significant technology, nuclear weapons, IAEA chief ElBaradei declared “We have to date found no evidence that Iraq had revived its nuclear weapons program since the elimination of the program in the 1990s.”

There can be no question but that these declarations posed a challenge to the Bush drive for war. Barely 36 hours later, President Bush appeared before Congress to deliver his state of the union address. In that speech Bush reversed the conclusions of the IAEA by reverting to old information, declaring that “The International Atomic Energy Agency confirmed in the 1990s that Saddam Hussein had an advanced nuclear weapons program.” He then asserted that “Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa,” a sally that became notorious as the “16 words” claim but was by no means the only misleading statement in this speech. The president abandoned his earlier exaggeration on alleged Iraqi anthrax stockpiles, but then substituted a wholly new one: that Saddam had materials sufficient to produce 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin (the State/CIA fact sheet on Dec. 19 had put this number at 1,200 liters, for an exaggeration of more than 3,000 percent). American inspectors with the complete run of the country and unlimited time after the conquest could find no more than one vial of (a precursor form of) botulinum.

President Bush again asserted that Saddam “aids” terrorists, including Al Qaeda. The September 11 Commission and a United Nations commission have both found no evidence for this charge, which, as related earlier, was in dispute within U.S. intelligence at the time. Lastly, Bush inserted the claim that Iraq had mobile biological weapons labs designed to produce germ warfare agents, openly acknowledging that this claim to be based upon information provided by three Iraqi defectors.

Americans, subjected to a systematic effort to mislead them by officials at the highest level of the Bush administration, have lost a measure of the checks and balances that hold back the dogs of war. The hoodwinking of America was no accident nor failure due to ignorance. It was carefully planned within the White House and National Security Council. President George W. Bush directly participated in the deception, the effect of which was to initiate a war of aggression. Americans are still paying the price in blood and treasure for Bush’s folly. Meanwhile, the president, questioned , could not think of any mistake he has made in his administration. Accountability must be enforced not merely on intelligence estimators but on the perpetrators of the Iraq tragedy.

<link> http://www.airamericaradio.com/weblogs/alfrankenshow/index.php?/franken/comments/2176/P200/

America is waking up much like an alcoholic comes to after a four and a half year drinking binge.