----- Original Message -----
From: "Andy Mensah" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Friday, February 06, 2004 10:01 AM
Subject: [unioNews] How Bush misled the world


Friday, February 6, 2004
<H3>How Bush misled the world</H3>
<B><i>The United States intelligence services didnot fail on Iraq -
it was the Administration that failed, writes Sidney
Blumenthal.</i></B>

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.


Copyright  © 2004. The Age Company Ltd





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