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Froomkin: Another
thunderbolt from Col. Wilkerson. Tasked to assemble documents on torture policy, Wilkerson says he traced a trail of memos
authorizing the questionable practices through Sec. of Defense Donald
Rumsfeld's office directly to VP Cheney's staff…” it was clear
to me that there was a visible audit
trail from the vice president's office through the secretary of Defense down to
the commanders in the field that in carefully couched terms
-- I'll give you that -- that to a soldier in the field meant two things: We're
not getting enough good intelligence and you need to get that evidence, and,
oh, by the way, here's some ways you probably can get it. And even some of the
ways that they detailed were not in accordance with the spirit of the Geneva
Conventions and the law of war. "You just -- if you're a military man, you
know that you just don't do these sorts of things because once you give just
the slightest bit of leeway, there are those in the armed forces who will take
advantage of that. There are those in the leadership who will feel so pressured
that they have to produce intelligence that it doesn't matter whether it's
actionable or not as long as they can get the volume in. They have to do what
they have to do to get it, and so you've just given in essence, though you may not
know it, carte blanche for a lot
of problems to occur." http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/linkset/2005/04/11/LI2005041100879.html Audio of the NPR
interview here http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4987598 Col. Wilkerson continues his
expose of the Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal “Wilkerson
also told National Public Radio that Cheney's office ran an "alternate national
security staff"
that spied on and undermined the president's formal National Security Council. He said National
Security Council staff stopped sending emails when they found out Cheney's
staffers were reading their messages.
He said he believed that Cheney's staff prevented Bush from seeing a NSC memo
arguing strongly that the US needed far more troops for the March 2003 invasion
and occupation of Iraq. Wilkerson also said that former CIA chief George Tenet
was not "possessed of the intestinal fortitude" to inform Cheney's
office of key weaknesses in the government's argument that Iraq had or was
seeking weapons of mass destruction.
That argument was central to the Bush administration's justifications
for the Iraq war. Wilkerson has
also said recently that Cheney and Rumsfeld operated a "cabal" that
hijacked US foreign and military policy.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20051103/pl_afp/uspoliticsjusticeiraq_051103182259 Below is the beginning of the June 2003 reporting that probably sent Cheney,
Libby and Rove into panic mode, which Fitzgerald cited in his Oct 2005
indictment of Libby. Remember that by that time, the president had dramatically
declared “Mission Accomplished” but no WMDs had been found, and the critical
scrutiny of pre-war intelligence was beginning. Please contact me if you would like a reader-friendly version. kwc THE SELLING
OF THE IRAQ WAR: The First
Casualty October
28, 2005: In his indictment of Lewis Libby, special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald
cited this TNR piece. Here's the paragraph from the article that figured
prominently in the indictment: One
year earlier, Cheney's office had received from the British, via the Italians,
documents purporting to show Iraq's purchase of uranium from Niger. Cheney had
given the information to the CIA, which in turn asked a prominent diplomat, who
had served as ambassador to three African countries, to investigate. He
returned after a visit to Niger in February 2002 and reported to the State
Department and the CIA that the documents were forgeries. The CIA circulated
the ambassador's report to the vice president's office, the ambassador confirms
to TNR. But, after a British dossier was released in September detailing the
purported uranium purchase, administration officials began citing it anyway,
culminating in its inclusion in the State of the Union. "They knew the
Niger story was a flat-out lie," the former ambassador tells TNR.
"They were unpersuasive about aluminum tubes and added this to make their
case more persuasive." ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Foreign policy
is always difficult in a democracy. Democracy requires openness. Yet foreign
policy requires a level of secrecy that frees it from oversight and exposes it
to abuse. As a result, Republicans and Democrats have long held that the
intelligence agencies--the most clandestine of foreign policy
institutions--should be insulated from political interference in much the same
way as the higher reaches of the judiciary. As the Tower Commission, established to investigate the Iran-Contra
scandal, warned in November 1987, "The democratic processes ... are
subverted when intelligence is manipulated to affect decisions by elected
officials and the public." If
anything, this principle has grown even more important since September 11,
2001. The Iraq war presented the United States with a new defense paradigm: preemptive war, waged in response to a
prediction of a forthcoming attack against the United States or its allies.
This kind of security policy requires the public to base its support or
opposition on expert intelligence to which it has no direct access. It is up to
the president and his administration--with a deep interest in a given policy
outcome--nonetheless to portray the intelligence community's findings honestly.
If an administration represents the intelligence unfairly, it effectively
forecloses an informed choice about the most important question a nation faces:
whether or not to go to war. That is exactly what the Bush administration did
when it sought to convince the public and Congress that the United States
should go to war with Iraq. From late August 2002
to mid-March of this year, the Bush administration made its case for war by
focusing on the threat posed to the United States by Saddam Hussein's nuclear,
chemical, and biological weapons and by his purported links to the Al Qaeda
terrorist network. Officials conjured up images of Iraqi mushroom clouds over
U.S. cities and of Saddam transferring to Osama bin Laden chemical and
biological weapons that could be used to create new and more lethal September
elevenths. In Nashville on August 26, 2002,
Vice President Dick Cheney warned
of a Saddam "armed with an arsenal of these weapons of terror" who
could "directly threaten America's friends throughout the region and
subject the United States or any other nation to nuclear blackmail." In
Washington on September 26, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld claimed he had
"bulletproof" evidence of ties between Saddam and Al Qaeda. And, in
Cincinnati on October 7, President George W. Bush warned, "The Iraqi
dictator must not be permitted to threaten America and the world with horrible
poisons and diseases and gases and atomic weapons." Citing Saddam's
association with Al Qaeda, the president added that this "alliance with
terrorists could allow the Iraqi regime to attack America without leaving any
fingerprints." Yet there was no
consensus within the American intelligence community that Saddam represented
such a grave and imminent threat. Rather, interviews with current and former
intelligence officials and other experts reveal that the Bush administration
culled from U.S. intelligence those assessments that supported its position and
omitted those that did not. The administration ignored, and even suppressed, disagreement
within the intelligence agencies and pressured the CIA to reaffirm its
preferred version of the Iraqi threat. Similarly, it stonewalled, and sought to
discredit, international weapons inspectors when their findings threatened to
undermine the case for war. Three months after the
invasion, the United States may yet discover the chemical and biological
weapons that various governments and the United Nations have long believed Iraq
possessed. But it is unlikely to find, as the Bush administration had
repeatedly predicted, a reconstituted nuclear weapons program or evidence of
joint exercises with Al Qaeda--the two most compelling security arguments for
war. Whatever is found, what matters as far as American democracy is concerned
is whether the administration gave Americans an honest and accurate account of
what it knew. The evidence to date is that it did not, and the cost to U.S.
democracy could be felt for years to come. The Battle over Intelligence
Fall 2001 – Fall 2002 The Bush
administration decided to go to war with Iraq in the late fall of 2001. At Camp
David on the weekend after the September 11 attacks, Deputy Defense Secretary
Paul Wolfowitz floated the idea
that Iraq, with more than 20 years of inclusion on the State Department's
terror-sponsor list, be held immediately accountable. In his memoir,
speechwriter David Frum recounts that, in December, after the Afghanistan
campaign against bin Laden and his Taliban sponsors, he was told to come up
with a justification for war with Iraq to include in Bush's State of the Union
address in January 2002. But, in
selling the war to the American public during the next year, the Bush
administration faced significant obstacles. In the wake of
September 11, 2001, many Americans had automatically associated Saddam's regime
with Al Qaeda and enthusiastically backed an invasion. But, as the immediate
horror of September 11 faded and the war in Afghanistan concluded successfully
(and the economy turned downward), American enthusiasm diminished. By
mid-August 2002, a Gallup poll showed support for war with Saddam at a
post-September 11 low, with 53 percent in favor and 41 percent opposed--down
from 61 percent to 31 percent just two months before. Elite opinion was also
turning against war, not only among liberal Democrats but among former
Republican officials, such as Brent Scowcroft
and Lawrence Eagleburger.
In Congress, even conservative Republicans such as Senate Minority Leader Trent
Lott and House Majority Leader
Dick Armey began to express doubts
that war was justified. Armey declared on August 8, 2002, "If we try to
act against Saddam Hussein, as obnoxious as he is, without proper provocation,
we will not have the support of other nation-states who might do so." Unbeknownst to the
public, the administration faced equally serious opposition within its own
intelligence agencies. At the CIA, many analysts and officials were skeptical
that Iraq posed an imminent threat. In particular, they rejected a connection
between Saddam and Al Qaeda. According to a New
York Times report in February 2002,
the CIA found "no evidence that Iraq has engaged in terrorist operations
against the United States in nearly a decade, and the agency is also convinced
that President Saddam Hussein has not provided chemical or biological weapons
to Al Qaeda or related terrorist groups." CIA analysts also
generally endorsed the findings of the International
Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which concluded that, while serious
questions remained about Iraq's nuclear program--many having to do with
discrepancies in documentation--its present capabilities were virtually nil.
The IAEA possessed no evidence that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear program
and, it seems, neither did U.S. intelligence. In CIA Director George Tenet's January 2002 review of global
weapons-technology proliferation, he did not even mention a nuclear threat from
Iraq, though he did warn of one from North Korea. The review said only,
"We believe that Iraq has probably continued at least low-level
theoretical R&D [research and development] associated with its nuclear
program." This vague determination didn't reflect any new evidence but
merely the intelligence community's assumption that the Iraqi dictator remained
interested in building nuclear weapons. Greg Thielmann,
the former director for strategic proliferation and military affairs at the
State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), tells The New
Republic, "During the time that I was office director, 2000 to 2002, we
never assessed that there was good evidence that Iraq was reconstituting or
getting really serious about its nuclear weapons program." The CIA and other
intelligence agencies believed Iraq still possessed substantial stocks of
chemical and biological weapons, but they were divided about whether Iraq was
rebuilding its facilities and producing new weapons. The intelligence
community's uncertainty was articulated in a classified
report from the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) in September 2002.
"A substantial amount of Iraq's chemical warfare agents, precursors,
munitions, and production equipment were destroyed between 1991 and 1998 as a
result of Operation Desert Storm and UNSCOM [United Nations Special Commission]
actions," the agency reported. "There is no reliable information on
whether Iraq is producing and stockpiling chemical weapons, or where Iraq
has--or will--establish its chemical warfare agent production facilities."
Had the administration
accurately depicted the consensus within the intelligence community in
2002--that Iraq's ties with Al Qaeda were inconsequential; that its nuclear
weapons program was minimal at best; and that its chemical and biological
weapons programs, which had yielded significant stocks of dangerous weapons in
the past, may or may not have been ongoing--it would have had a very difficult
time convincing Congress and the American public to support a war to disarm
Saddam. But the Bush administration painted a very different, and far more
frightening, picture. Representative Rush Holt,
a New Jersey Democrat who ultimately voted against the war, says of his
discussions with constituents, "When someone spoke of the need to invade,
[they] invariably brought up the example of what would happen if one of our
cities was struck. They clearly were convinced by the administration that
Saddam Hussein--either directly or through terrorist connections--could unleash
massive destruction on an American city. And I presume that most of my
colleagues heard the same thing back in their districts." One way the
administration convinced the public was by badgering CIA Director Tenet into
endorsing key elements of its case for war even when it required ignoring the
classified findings of his and other intelligence agencies. As a result of its failure to anticipate the
September 11 attacks, the CIA, and Tenet in particular, were under almost
continual attack in the fall of 2001. Congressional leaders, including Richard Shelby, the ranking Republican on the
Senate Intelligence Committee, wanted Tenet to resign. But Bush kept Tenet in
his job, and, within the administration, Tenet and the CIA came under an
entirely different kind of pressure: Iraq hawks in the Pentagon and in the vice
president's office, reinforced by members of the Pentagon's semi-official Defense Policy Board, mounted a year-long
attempt to pressure the CIA to take a harder line against Iraq--whether on its
ties with Al Qaeda or on the status of its nuclear program. A particular bone of contention was the CIA's analysis of the ties
between Saddam and Al Qaeda. In the immediate aftermath of September 11, former
CIA Director James Woolsey, a
member of the Defense Policy Board who backed an invasion of Iraq, put forth
the theory--in this magazine and elsewhere--that Saddam was connected to the
World Trade Center attacks. In September 2001, the Bush administration flew
Woolsey to London to gather evidence to back up his theory, which had the
support of Wolfowitz and Richard Perle,
then the Defense Policy Board chairman. While Wolfowitz and Perle had their own
long-standing and complex reasons for wanting to go to war with Iraq, they and
other administration officials believed that, if they could tie Saddam to Al
Qaeda, they could justify the war to the American people. As a veteran aide to
the Senate Intelligence Committee observes, "They knew that, if they could really show a link between Saddam Hussein
and Al Qaeda, then their objective, ... which was go in and get rid of Hussein,
would have been a foregone conclusion." http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20030630&s=ackermanjudis063003&c=1&pt=0cQNpJfYxhSff7JJVl4q9T%3D%3D |
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