Neo-Conned! Again

by D Liam O'Huallachain

  Subverting and Subduing the Professionals

  Supporting the statements of Kwiatkowski and others about the pipeline of unevaluated information that flowed straight into the hands of Vice President Cheney and other key policymakers, there is extant a June 2002 letter from the INC's Washington office addressed to the Senate Appropriations Committee that argues for the transfer of the “Information Collection Program” from the State Department to the Defense Intelligence Agency's Defense HUMINT Service (a service I was instrumental in founding). In a clumsy act of indiscretion, the letter's author explained that there was already a direct flow of information from the INC into the hands of Bill Luti and John Hannah, the latter being Scooter Libby's deputy in Cheney's office.

  Armed with the INC product, Vice President Cheney made a series of visits to the CIA headquarters at Langley to question agency analysts who were producing assessments that did not match the material that had been funneled to him through Luti and Hannah. The vice president also made personal visits to many members of Congress, to persuade them, in the autumn of 2002, to grant the President the authority to go to war with Iraq. One leading Democratic senator says that Cheney sat in his office and made what now appear to be greatly exaggerated claims about Saddam's nuclear weapons program. The fear of Saddam's possessing a nuclear bomb compelled the senator to vote in favor of granting the war powers.

  Part of the “Saddam bomb plot” tale came from Khadir Hamza, an Iraqi nuclear scientist who defected in 1994 and settled in the United States through the assistance of the INC. Hamza initially went to work for the Institute for Science and International Security, a think tank headed by former UN weapons inspector David Albright. According to a May 12, 2003, New Yorker interview with Albright by Seymour Hersh, Hamza and his boss drafted a 1998 proposal for a book that would have exposed how Saddam's quest for a nuclear bomb had “fizzled.” There were no takers. But two years later, Hamza co-authored a very different book, with Jeff Stein, vastly exaggerating Saddam's nuclear weapons program. This, despite the fact that, in 1995, Saddam Hussein's son-in-law, General Hussein Kamel, who was the head of Iraq's weapons agency, escaped to Jordan with a large collection of Iraqi government documents showing how little was left of Iraqi WMD programs. Kamel was interviewed by a team of UN weapons inspectors headed by Rolf Ekeus, chairman of the UN teams, and he confirmed that the inspections had, in effect, uprooted most of what was left of the Iraqi WMD program after the 1991 Gulf War.

  It is telling that, in the more than two-year run-up to the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, nobody in the Bush administration sought to commission a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Saddam Hussein's WMD programs. Perhaps it is unsurprising that they did not want such an estimate. An estimate, if conducted over a period of months, would undoubtedly have revealed deep skepticism about the threat posed by Saddam's weapons program. It would have exposed major gaps in the intelligence picture, particularly since the pullout of UN weapons inspectors from Iraq at the end of 1998, and it would have likely undercut the rush to war. It was only as a result of intense pressure from Senator Bob Graham (D-Fla.), chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, that the intelligence community was finally tasked, in September 2002, to produce an NIE on Saddam's WMD programs. The report was to be rushed to completion in three weeks, so it could reach the desks of the relevant congressional committee members before a vote on war-powers authorization scheduled for early October, on the eve of the mid-term elections. As the NIE went forward for approval, everyone knew that there were major problems with it.

  The issue of the Niger yellowcake uranium precursor had been a point of controversy since late 2001, when the Italian secret service, SISMI, reported to their American, British and Israeli counterparts that they had obtained documents on Niger government letterhead indicating that Iraq had attempted to purchase 500 tons of yellowcake. The yellowcake lead had been reported to the vice president by his CIA daily-briefing officer, and Cheney had tasked the CIA to dig deeper. Obviously, if the case could be made that Saddam was aggressively seeking nuclear material, no one in Congress could justifiably oppose war. The story proved to be a hoax. In February 2002, the CIA dispatched former Ambassador Joseph Wilson to Niger to look into the report. Wilson had served in several African countries, including Niger, and had also been the U.S. chargé d'affaires in Baghdad, at the time of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. He knew all the players. After several days of meetings in Niger, he returned to Washington and was debriefed by the CIA. The yel-lowcake story simply did not check out. Case closed.

  Contrary to Wilson's expectations, variations on the matter continued to creep into policy speeches by top administration officials. Although CIA Director Tenet personally intervened to remove references to the discredited African uranium story from President Bush's early October 2002 speech in Cincinnati, Ohio, promoting the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, bogus yellowcake information appeared in a December 19, 2002, State Department “fact sheet” on Saddam's failure to disclose his secret WMD programs. As we all know, President Bush's January 2003 State of the Union speech contained the now infamous 16 words citing British intelligence claims about Saddam's seeking uranium in Africa.

  For Greg Thielmann, who retired in September 2002 from his post as director of the Strategic, Proliferation and Military Affairs Office at the State Department's Intelligence Bureau, the issue of the aluminum tubes was an even more egregious case of policymakers' contamination of the intelligence process than the Wilson yellowcake affair. His position is:

  What was done with the aluminum tubes was far worse than what was done with the uranium from Africa. Because the intelligence community had debated over a period of months, and involved key scientists and engineers in the National Laboratories – and foreigners as well – in a long and detailed discussion. The way I would have characterized it, if you had asked me in July 2002, when I turned over the leadership of my office, there was a growing consensus in the intelligence community that this kind of aluminum was not suitable for the nuclear weapons program. So I was really quite shocked to see – I was just retired – the National Intelligence Estimate say that the majority of agencies came to the opposite interpretation, that it was going into the nuclear weapons program.

  Even with this “majority” view, Thielmann points out that anyone at the White House or the National Security Council who was genuinely seeking the truth would have seen through the subterfuge and drawn the proper conclusion:

  If they had read the NIE in October, it is transparent that there were different views in the intelligence community. They could have read, for example, that the Department of Energy and the State Department INR believed that the aluminum tubes were not going into the nuclear weapons program and instead were going into conventional artillery rockets. And, if one assumes a modicum of intelligence understanding at the NSC, they should know that the agency that is most able to judge on this would be the Department of Energy. They control all the laboratories that actually over the years have enriched uranium and built centrifuges.

  Thielmann also had an important observation about the Office of Special Plans and the other intelligence boutiques that Cheney and Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz had established inside the Pentagon's policy shop:

  It was a stealth organization. They didn't play in the intelligence community proceedings that our office participated in. When the intelligence community met as a community, there was no OSP represented in these sessions. Because, if they had done that, they would have had to subject their views to peer review. Why do that when you can send stuff right in to the vice president?

  The NIE Contamination

  Two other major INC-foisted fabrications made their way into the NIE and from there into policy speeches by top Bush administration officials, including the President, the vice president, and the secretaries of Defense and State. The first involved claims that Iraq had mobile biological-weapons labs that could produce deadly agents. The declassified version of the October 2002 N
IE stated, “Baghdad has mobile facilities for producing bacterial and toxin BW agents; these facilities can evade detection and are highly survivable. Within three to six months, these units probably could produce an amount of agent equal to the total that Iraq produced in the years prior to the Gulf war.” The same claim was a dramatic highlight of Colin Powell's February 5, 2003, presentation before the Security Council.

  But, a subsequent review of the intelligence files – long after the NIE had been produced – revealed that the sole source for the mobile-lab story was an Iraqi military defector, a major, who had been produced by the INC via the “Information Collection Program.” The CIA and DIA had both given warnings about the defector, after concluding that he was a fabricator. But, as CIA Director Tenet would later admit in a February 2004 speech at Georgetown University, those warnings fell on deaf ears. The fabrication judgment was shown to be correct after the U.S. invasion, when two of the mobile labs were captured. They were, as other Iraqi sources had claimed, mobile facilities for producing hydrogen for weather balloons.

  A somewhat different fiasco occurred on the issue of the equally inflammatory claim that Iraq had unmanned airborne vehicles (UAVs), outfitted to deliver biological and chemical weapons. Allegations about the UAVs surfaced in early September 2002, prompting both CIA Director Tenet and Vice President Cheney to visit House and Senate leaders on the day Congress reconvened after the Labor Day recess to present their new “smoking gun” argument for war. The UAV story appeared in President Bush's October 7, 2002, speech in Cincinnati. It was also featured in Colin Powell's Security Council presentation four months later. Powell warned the Council then that “Iraq could use these small UAVs, which have a wingspan of only a few meters, to deliver biological agents to its neighbors or, if transported, to other countries, including the United States.”

  Yet the declassified version of the October 2002 NIE, while reporting that “Baghdad's UAVs could threaten Iraq's neighbors, U.S. forces in the Persian Gulf and, if brought close to or into the United States, the U.S. homeland,” also noted that “the Director, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance, U.S. Air Force, does not agree that Iraq is developing UAVs primarily intended to be delivery platforms for chemical and biological warfare (CBW) agents. The small size of Iraq's new UAV strongly suggests a primary role of reconnaissance, although CBW delivery is an inherent capability.” Indeed, the specifications of the Iraqi UAVs, known to U.S. Air Force Intelligence, proved that they were ill-suited for CBW dissemination. According to several news accounts, even the formulation that “CBW delivery is an inherent capability” was foisted upon the Air Force during the negotiating sessions over the final wording of the NIE.

  The subversion of the intelligence process was death by a thousand cuts, a cumulative process of badgering in which the pipeline of disinformation from the INC, through OSP, to the desk of the vice president played a decisive role.

  Vincent Cannistraro puts it this way:

  Over a long period of time, there was a subtle process of pressure and intimidation until people started giving them what was wanted …. When the Senate Intelligence Committee interviewed, under oath, over 100 analysts, not one of them said, “I changed my assessment because of pressure” …. The environment was conditioned in such a way that the analyst subtly leaned toward the conceits of the policymakers …. The intelligence community was vulnerable to the aggressiveness of neoconservative policymakers, particularly at the Pentagon and at the VP's office. As one analyst said to me, “You can't fight something with nothing, and those people had something. Whether it was right or wrong, fraudulent or specious, it almost didn't make any difference, because the policymakers believed it already, and if you didn't have hard countervailing evidence to persuade them, then you were at a loss.”

  Lt. Col. Dale Davis (USMC, ret.) concurs that the intelligence process was badly subverted by a “political operation.” Davis, through March 2004, headed International Programs at the Virginia Military Institute. A fluent Arabic speaker, he has served throughout the Arab world. Davis initially said that he did not think that the intelligence analysts were pressured, “per se”:

  They created an organization that would give them the answers they wanted. Or at least piece together a very compelling case by rummaging through all the various intelligence reports and picking out the best, the most juicy, but quite often the most flimsy pieces of information …. By creating the OSP, Cheney was able to say, “Hey, look at what we're getting out of OSP. How come you guys aren't doing as well? What is your response to what this alternative analysis that we're receiving from the Pentagon says?” That's how you do it. You pressure people indirectly.

  The Countdown

  “Why on earth didn't [Saddam] let the inspectors in and avoid the war?”

  —Senator Pat Roberts1

  Senator Pat Roberts of Kansas is the Republican chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, which was charged with investigating the misuse of intelligence prior to the Iraq war, the failures of intelligence, the Iraqi National Congress, and the Office of Special Plans.2 The answer to his question is simple: Saddam did let the inspectors in, at a level of cooperation that was unprecedented. The question that Senator Roberts should really be asking is, “Why didn't it matter?”

  It should have been a dire warning to the U.S. Congress when the man who had been convicted of lying to Congress during the Iran-contra affair - Elliot Abrams – was put in charge of the Middle East section of the NSC staff. One underestimated talent of the neocon group in the run-up to this war was its ability to manipulate Congress. They were masters of the game, having made the team in Washington in the 1970s on the staffs of two of the most powerful senators in recent decades, New York's Patrick Moynihan and Washington's Henry “Scoop” Jackson. The old boy's club - Abe Shulsky at OSP, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith, Middle East Desk Officer at the NSC Elliot Abrams, Defense Policy Board Chairman Richard Perle - had not only worked together in their early government years in these two Senate offices, but they had stayed together as a network through the ensuing decades, floating around a small number of businesses and think tanks, including the American Enterprise Institute and the openly neoimperialist Project for a New American Century. The neocons were openly contemptuous of Congress, as they were of the UN Security Council. And a number of tricks and manipulations of the congressional process have now been exposed. But was the trickery planned? Was it a well-orchestrated obfuscation, an accident or coincidence? What is the evidence?

  First, there was the consistent refusal to provide witnesses and information to the U.S. Senate, especially regarding the projected costs of the war and the lack of opportunities to question key players such as General Jay Garner, who was appointed by the Defense Department to be the first head of the U.S. provisional authority in Iraq. There was also the subtle hiding of the objections of the Department of Energy and the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) in the NIE of October 2002. One congressional source explained that the classified NIE was made available in its entirety to only a select few members of Congress. There were verbal briefings and an elaborate process to access the document in a secure location. But it was never clear that the 27-page unclassified version that was available to every office was missing any crucial information.

  There were also false statements to Congress about providing the UN inspectors all the intelligence that might have helped them locate the Iraqi WMD and programs. Senator Carl Levin of Michigan has accused the administration, and especially CIA Director Tenet, of withholding information because “the truth” – that the United States had withheld the locations of 21 high-and middle-priority sites – might have slowed down the drive for war. The truth might have convinced Congress to take action to delay military action until the inspections were completed.

  The March 7, 2003, appearance by the chairmen of UNMOVIC (Hans Blix) and the IAEA (Mohamed ElBa
radei) before the UN Security Council was a disaster for the neoconservatives. The Iraqis and Saddam Hussein had “accelerated” cooperation with the United Nations, said Dr. Blix. Blix told the Council that Iraq had made a major concession: they had agreed to allow the destruction of the Al-Samoud ballistic missiles. “We are not watching the breaking of toothpicks,” Blix said. “Lethal weapons are being destroyed …. The destruction undertaken constitutes a substantial measure of disarmament – indeed, the first since the middle of the 1990s.”

  The Al Samoud, a massive missile seven meters long weighing two tons with its warhead, was being destroyed, without the slightest obstruction or even complaint from the Iraqis. Major Corrine Heraud, a French woman who served as the chief weapons inspector for UNMOVIC in this operation and who had also served from 1996 with UNSCOM, says that the level of cooperation from the Iraqis was unprecedented, something that she never would have expected and did not encounter during the 1996–98 inspections. Each missile cost more than $1 million, estimates Maj. Heraud, who also cautions that this would be equivalent to a much higher amount in Western dollars, considering the difficulty that Iraq encountered in buying materials and parts, due to the UN sanctions. Yet, to President Bush, the destruction of the Al Samoud, a missile often mistaken in photographs for the better-known SCUD missile, was meaningless. The missile destruction, said Bush, was a “campaign of deception.” For the UN inspectors, Bush's words were a shock. “We didn't know what to make of this,” an UNMOVIC official said.