Hubris
Page 57
Return to text.
†3Two weeks earlier, Rumsfeld had written a memo in which he described the wars in Iraq and
Return to text.
Afghanistan as “a long, hard slog” and observed, “Today, we lack metrics to know if we are winning or losing the global war on terror.”
Return to text.
*72Three days later, ABC News’ Diane Sawyer asked Bush if December 13 was “the best day” of his presidency. No, he said, the best day had been Inauguration Day. She also asked him to respond to polls showing that 50 percent of the public believed his administration had exaggerated the evidence on Iraq’s WMD and connections to al-Qaeda. Bush maintained that he had “operated on…good sound intelligence.” When Sawyer noted that Bush officials had said prior to the war that Iraq had actual weapons of mass destruction, not merely programs or the intent to acquire WMDs, Bush responded, “So what’s the difference?”
Return to text.
*73Sitting with Laura Bush in the U.S. Capitol that night was Ahmad Chalabi, whose INC had provided faulty WMD intelligence from fabricators.
Return to text.
†4As Kay was leaving the ISG job, he later recalled, Tenet said to him that no matter what Kay had found (or not), Tenet would always believe there had been chemical weapons in Iraq.
Return to text.
*74With Democrats, especially the party’s presidential candidates, calling for an independent investigation of the WMD intelligence failure, Bush declared on January 30, “I, too, want to know the facts.” But he initially declined to endorse an outside commission. His aides told reporters they were worried an inquiry might produce information harmful to Bush’s reelection effort. A week later, as political pressure mounted, Bush appointed an “independent” commission to study the WMD intelligence, with the White House picking all its members. The commission would not have to issue a report until March 31, 2005—months after the election.
Return to text.
*75The day before the speech, CIA officers briefed Tenet that most analysts now believed Curveball had been a fabricator. But Tenet and other CIA managers were reluctant to declare Curveball a total loss. In March, CIA officers would finally interview Curveball and find he couldn’t explain the various discrepancies in his reporting. In May, the CIA would recall all of Curveball’s reporting.
Return to text.
*76Days earlier, at the annual black-tie Radio and Television Correspondents’ Association dinner, Bush had joked about the missing WMDs. As part of a humorous slide show, he flashed pictures of himself looking out the window of the Oval Office and looking under the furniture, and he said, “Those weapons of mass destruction have got to be somewhere.”
Return to text.
*77More than a year later, The Washington Post, citing classified documents, disclosed that members of Shahwani’s CIA-created Scorpions had been involved in the brutal November 24, 2003, death of an Iraqi general named Abed Hamed Mowhoush, who had turned himself in. While being questioned by American military interrogators at a detention facility, Mowhoush was stuffed into a sleeping bag. He died of suffocation. But two days earlier, four Scorpions and a CIA case officer had interrogated Mowhoush. According to U.S. military records reviewed by the Post, the Scorpions had beat him with fists, a club, and a rubber hose until he was nearly senseless. An Army memo said this beating “complicated” the “circumstances surrounding the death.” John Maguire, the CIA officer who had helped develop the Scorpions, later maintained the four Scorpions had only questioned Mowhoush and that “there was nothing to substantiate” the allegation that the Scorpions had beaten him. A U.S. Army interrogator was later convicted of negligent homicide. No CIA officer or Scorpion was charged with any crime.
Return to text.
*78Editors and lawyers at the Post worked out a deal with Fitzgerald related to Kessler. After receiving a limited waiver from Libby, Kessler, in an interview with Fitzgerald, noted that his conversation with Libby hadn’t covered the Wilson matter. The Post was looking to duck a full brawl with Fitzgerald. “We wanted to establish a base of cooperation with Fitzgerald to protect Walter [Pincus] from having to reveal his source,” a Post source later said. “And we didn’t want to challenge this in court and end up with an unfavorable appeals court or Supreme Court ruling. We worried that there were Supreme Court justices just waiting to take away the secret-source privilege.”
Return to text.
*79The day after the 9/11 Commission report came out, Bush insisted, “There was a relationship between Iraq and al-Qaeda.” He noted that “Iraqi intelligence officers met with bin Laden, the head of al-Qaeda, in the Sudan”—even though the thirdhand report of this meeting (which supposedly occurred after bin Laden had left Sudan) had been discounted by U.S. intelligence. That same day, Cheney, in an interview, again asserted that the Atta-in-Prague report might be credible—even though the CIA, FBI, and the 9/11 Commission had found there was nothing to support it.
Return to text.
*80After the 2004 election, Roberts tried to ditch this part of the investigation. But after being criticized for that, he decided this part of his committee’s investigation would look at what both Republicans and Democrats had said about Iraq’s WMDs going back over ten years. Still, the inquiry would be placed on a slow track and take years to complete.
Return to text.
†5The Senate intelligence committee report raised questions about Joe Wilson’s version of events relating to the origins of his Niger trip. It noted that a colleague of Valerie Wilson in the Counterproliferation Division had said that she had “offered up” her husband’s name. Joseph Wilson later maintained that after the Senate report came out this CPD officer told Valerie Wilson that he had been misquoted and that he had written a memo stating that. But the officer’s supervisor would not permit him to send it to the committee, according to Joseph Wilson.
Return to text.
*81The Washington Post had not signed up for this fight. Walter Pincus worked out a deal that allowed him to testify to the grand jury without disclosing the identity of his source, who testified to the grand jury separately.
Return to text.
*82Barton and another weapons inspector resigned from the Iraq Survey Group when Duelfer killed Kay’s final report, which, among other things, reported that it was now certain that the trailers were not bioweapons labs but facilities that made hydrogen for military weather balloons.
Return to text.
*83In the redacted pages, some of which would be released a year later, Tatel noted that Fitzgerald had already obtained evidence contradicting Libby’s grand jury testimony. He wrote, “The special counsel appears already to have at least circumstantial grounds for a perjury charge.” Tatel maintained that perjury “is itself a crime with national security implications.”
Return to text.
†6Most news organizations were generally supportive of Time and The New York Times, but some professional journalists were troubled. In a May 13, 2005, column, David Ignatius of The Washington Post noted that Fitzgerald appeared to be probing into perjury by one or more high-level government officials. If that were indeed the case, Ignatius wrote, it raised questions as to whether reporters were still obligated to protect the officials under investigation. “Does a reporter’s confidentiality agreement extend to protecting a cover up?” he asked.
Return to text.
*84 On February 24, 2005, The New York Times won a victory over Fitzgerald on another front: a federal judge in New York blocked the prosecutor’s attempt to obtain the phone records of Miller and Philip Shenon in the Islamic charities case. The judge ruled that the reporters had a qualified privilege to protect their confidential sources and that Fitzgerald hadn’t “reasonably exhausted” alternative means of finding out who had leaked word of the December 14, 2001, FBI raid on Global Relief. Abrams hailed the decision as a “substantial vindication of the right of journalists to protect their sources.” But Fitzgerald appealed. In
August 2006, a federal appeals court overturned the ruling and said Fitzgerald could inspect Miller’s and Shenon’s phone records.
Return to text.
*85Shortly after Pearlstine handed Cooper’s notes and e-mails to Fitzgerald, he went to Washington to meet the Washington bureau staff. He reiterated his reasoning for cooperating with Fitzgerald. The editors and writers did not hide their anger. Michael Weisskopf, a reporter who had lost a hand while covering the war in Iraq, said that he had always considered Pearlstine a “journalistic giant”—but he could not fathom his decision. This was a moment to stand up, Weisskopf told him. Other reporters noted that sources were telling them that they could no longer cooperate with Time. “Cooper sat there looking distressed,” one participant recalled. “Norm was startled by the level of anger. It was clear to everyone our reputation had suffered.”
Return to text.
*86In June 2004, Bush had reaffirmed his pledge to dismiss anyone who had committed this leak.
Return to text.
*87Right after Miller left jail, her legal team and Libby’s entered into a public squabble. Libby’s lawyer, Joseph Tate, claimed that the accommodation that had been reached could have been struck a year earlier because Libby had signed a waiver and Tate had told Abrams that Miller should accept it. But Abrams said that Tate had told him that this waiver was not voluntary because Libby would have been fired had he not signed it. Still, the tussle raised a question: Could Miller have resolved this issue without going to jail, and could she have testified to Fitzgerald a year earlier (and before the presidental election)? When later asked whether there had been an earlier mix-up between Abrams and Libby’s lawyer, Miller said, “If you ever get into a situation like I did, make sure you know the difference between a criminal defense lawyer and a First Amendment lawyer.”
Return to text.
*88In a first-person account accompanying the Times piece, Miller noted that Fitzgerald had asked her how she had interpreted Libby’s strange reference to aspens in his letter to her. Rather than supply a straight answer, she wrote that she had recounted the last time she had seen Libby: at a rodeo in Jackson Hole, where he had been wearing jeans and a cowboy hat.
Return to text.
*89To replace Libby as his national security adviser, Cheney picked John Hannah, whom Ahmad Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress had previously identified as its contact person in Cheney’s office. As his new chief of staff, Cheney tapped David Addington, who had been Cheney’s legal counsel and who had been accused by human rights advocates of drafting policies that led to the abusive treatment of prisoners in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Return to text.
*90After the New Hampshire speech, Murtha went on Meet the Press and criticized Rove for “sitting in his air-conditioned office with his big, fat backside, saying, ‘Stay the course!’ ” Once again advancing a Rove attack, Robert Novak, four days later, wrote a column swiping at Murtha. He dug up an issue from Murtha’s distant past: the fact that twenty-six years earlier, Murtha had been investigated by the FBI in the Abscam congressional bribery probe. (Murtha hadn’t been charged with any crimes.) Novak belittled Murtha’s efforts to force a troop withdrawal from Iraq. “Murtha now wears his heroic combat record like a suit of armor,” Novak wrote.
Return to text.
*91After Luskin had disclosed his off-the-record conversation with Viveca Novak to Fitzgerald, Novak arranged to talk informally to the prosecutor—without consulting her editors. “Unrealistically,” she later wrote, “I hoped this would turn out to be an insignificant twist in the investigation.” She later testified officially, with the knowledge of her editors. The episode led to her departure from Time.
Return to text.
*92Judy Miller was at a conference on blogging in New York City the morning the news broke about Woodward’s involvement in the leak case. As she read the Post article and Woodward’s statement on the newspaper’s Web site for the first time, she could hardly contain herself: “This is weird…. Do you realize the ramifications of this? This guy knew before I did.” Shethen dashed off to call her lawyer.
Return to text.
Copyright © 2006 by Michael Isikoff and David Corn
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Crown Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com
Crown is a trademark and the Crown colophon is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Isikoff, Michael
Hubris : the inside story of spin, scandal, and the selling of the Iraq War / Michael Isikoff and David Corn.—1st ed.
p. cm.
1. United States—Politics and government—2001– 2. United States—Foreign relations—2001– 3. Iraq War, 2003—Causes. 4. Bush, George W. (Geoge Walker), 1946– 5. Political corruption—United States. 6. Pride and vanity—Political aspects—United States. 7. Scandals—United States. 8. Spin doctors—United States. 9. Public relations and politics—United States. 10. Press and politics—United States. I. Corn, David. II. Title.
E902.184 2006
956.7044'31—dc22 2006025160
eISBN: 978-0-307-38193-4
v3.0