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More Whitewash: the wmd mirage

2006; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 27; Issue: 8 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/01436590601027347

1360-2241

Piyush Mathur,

Military and Defense Studies

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes An abridged version of this review has previously appeared in Asia Times Online. Acknowledgements are due to Dr Eihab M Abdel-Rahman—Assistant Professor, Department of Systems Design Engineering, University of Waterloo, Canada—for his invaluable comments on this essay. 1 Agha Shahid Ali, ‘Resumé’, in Ali, A Nostalgist's Map of America: Poems, New York: Norton, 1991, p 86. 2 Adel Darwish & Gregory Alexander, Unholy Babylon: The Secret History of Saddam's War, New York: St Martin's Press, 1991, pp 25 – 26. 3 Quoted in ibid, p 63. 4 This letter is accessible on the pnac website, at http://www.newamericancentury.org/iraqclintonletter.htm. 5 This letter is accessible on the pnac website, at http://www.newamericancentury.org/Bushletter.htm. 6 Ron Suskind, The Price of Loyalty: George W Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O'Neill, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004. 7 See Suskind's statement, 11 January 2004, at http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/01/09/60minutes/main592330.shtml. In The Price of Loyalty, Suskind refers to this document on page 96. 8 Eric Schmitt & Thom Shanker, ‘Pentagon sets up intelligence unit: team is seeking data overlooked by spy agencies’, New York Times, 24 October 2002, p A1. 9 Judith Miller, ‘Threats and responses: intelligence defectors bolster US case against Iraq, officials say’, New York Times, 24 January 2003, p A11. 10 As the Washington Post noted on 21 May 2004: ‘In recent weeks, occupation authorities have cut off a $335, 000 monthly subsidy to the inc's intelligence arm and have pursued an investigation focusing on alleged fraud against government agencies by Sabah Nouri, a Chalabi aide who served as the anti-corruption chief at the Ministry of Finance’. See Scott Wilson, ‘US aids raid on home of Chalabi: Iraqi criminal probe seeks associates of ex-ally of Pentagon’, Washington Post, 21 May 2004, A01. 11 Barton Gellman & Walter Pincus, ‘Depiction of threat outgrew supporting evidence’, Washington Post', 10 August 2003, A01. 12 Ibid. 13 Barton Gellman, ‘Secret unit expands Rumsfeld's domain: new espionage branch delving into cia territory’, Washington Post, 23 January 2005, A01. 14 Ibid. 15 Kwiatkowski's anonymous columns can be accessed at http://www.hackworth.com/dt_archive.html. 16 Karen Kwiatkowski, ‘The new Pentagon Papers’, Salon.com, 10 March 2004. Kwiatwoski's articles continue to be accessible at http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2004/03/10/osp_moveon/index.html. 17 Robert Dreyfuss & Jason Vest, ‘The lie factory’, Mother Jones, January – February 2004, at http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2004/01/12_405.html. 18 Robert Dreyfuss, ‘The Pentagon muzzles the cia: devising bad intelligence to promote bad policy’, American Prospect, 16 December 2002, at http://www.prospect.org/print/V13/22/dreyfuss-r.html. 19 Julian Borger, ‘White House “exaggerating Iraqi threat”’, Guardian, 9 October 2002, at http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,807286,00.html. 20 Dreyfuss, ‘The Pentagon muzzles the cia’. 21 Ibid. 22 Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (vips), ‘Intelligence fiasco’, 1 May 2003, at http://www.counterpunch.org/vips05012003.html. 23 vips, ‘Intelligence unglued’, 14 July 2003, at http://www.counterpunch.org/vips07142003.html. 24 Clarke's excerpted comments can be viewed in the report on the interview, at http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/03/19/60minutes/main607356.shtml. 25 See Seymour M Hersh, ‘The stove pipe’, the New Yorker, 27 October 2003, at http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?031027fa_fact. 26 The transcript of Lang's interview can be accessed at http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/content/2003/s867719.htm. 27 See Seymour Hersh, ‘Selective intelligence: Donald Rumsfeld has his own special sources. Are they reliable?’, the New Yorker, 12 May 2003, at http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?030512fa_fact. 28 See John J Lumpkin, ‘Ex-official: evidence distorted for war’, Associated Press, 7 June 2003, at http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0607-09.htm. 29 Michael Scheuer, Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror, Washington, DC: Brassey's, 2004. 30 Excerpts of Scheur's letter were published in the Atlantic Monthly in December 2004. See Anon, ‘How not to catch a terrorist: a ten-step program, from the files of the US intelligence community’, Atlantic Monthly, December 2004, at http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200412/anonymous. 31 Scheuer used that term in several publications, including in his 24 June 2004 interview with Andrea Mitchell of nbc News. See Andrea Mitchell, ‘cia insider says US fighting wrong war: anonymous career officer makes bold claims in book about US war on terror’, at http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5279743/. 32 Goss's resignation on 5 May 2006 from the cia's directorship—followed (on 8 May 2006) by the nomination of Gen Michael V Hayden to that position, and Kappes's reinstatement—reinforces the idea that there had been considerable discord between the cia and the Bush administration, discord that had only been aggravated since Goss's appointment as the head of the cia. Illustrative here is the following comment by Peter Baker and Charles Babington of the Washington Post on Kappes's reinstatement: The move was seen as a direct repudiation of Goss's leadership and as an olive branch to cia veterans disaffected by his 18-month tenure, during which many other senior officials followed Kappes out the door. The White House was so eager to get out the news of Kappes's likely appointment that it was announced from the lectern in the briefing room, even though the Senate has not yet confirmed Hayden and Kappes was officially described as ‘the leading contender’ for the job. The above comment aside, Baker and Babington buy the Bush administration's line on the hunt for alleged Iraqi wmd. They frame Kappes's reinstatement as an attempt by ‘Bush…to [reach] out to the skeptical cia workforce, which has gone through years of tumult since the failure to stop the Sept 11, 2001, attacks and the flawed assessments of Iraq's weapons programs’. The question one needs to ask here is this: If the inaccurate assessment of Iraq's weapons programme was predominantly an intelligence, rather than a political, misstep—comparable to ‘the failure to stop’ the 11 September attacks—then why would the Bush administration commit the egregious error of reinstating a key pillar of the old guard responsible precisely for that misstep? Alternatively, why would such a self-righteous administration go to such insane lengths to appease an intelligence agency that it had itself sought to radically reform—and that it was at least able already to significantly alter? Baker and Babington are unlikely to have an adequate response to the above queries simply because the reasoning that permeates their reporting framework is internally contradictory—and it has been unwittingly influenced (in line with the mainstream American imagination) by the Bush administration's domestic propaganda related to the erstwhile state of American intelligence and the hunt for Iraqi wmd. For the record, disclosures since the 9/11 attacks have established that the intelligence community was not such a failure, after all, at least—or even—with regard to the threat from al-Qaida. In a 12 February 2005 report published in the nyt, Scott Shane revealed that ‘[a] strategy document outlining proposals for eliminating the threat from Al Qaeda, given to Condoleezza Rice as she assumed the post of national security adviser in January 2001, warned that the terror network had cells in the United States and 40 other countries and sought unconventional weapons’. The nyt report further pointed out that ‘the 13-page proposal presented to Dr Rice by her top counterterrorism adviser, Richard A Clarke, laid out ways to step up the fight against Al Qaida, focusing on Osama bin Laden's headquarters in Afghanistan’. That this proposal ‘and an accompanying three-page memorandum’ were suppressed by the Bush administration is evident from the fact that the two documents ‘were declassified by the National Security Council’ no sooner than ‘on April 7, one day before Dr Rice testified before the 9/11 commission’—and, even then, they ‘were not released publicly until the National Security Archive filed a Freedom of Information Act request’. Some other factual details provided in the nyt report are also significant: The shorter memorandum was written in response to a request for ‘major presidential policy reviews’ worthy of a meeting of ‘principals’, the president's top foreign policy advisers. It began: ‘We urgently need such a Principals level review on the al Qaida network’. The word ‘urgently’ was italicized and underscored. ‘We would make a major error if we underestimated the challenge al Qaida poses’, the memorandum said. The report goes on to mention that ‘the principals’ meeting on Al Qaida took place, but not until Sept 4, 2001, a week before the attacks on New York and the Pentagon'. Notably, Baker and Babington published their report for the Washington Post more than a year after Shane's nyt report—yet, and rather symptomatically, they failed to get beyond the Bush administration's line on the subject matter. See Peter Baker & Charles Babington, ‘General formally named to lead cia: official who quit under Goss would be Hayden's No 2’, Washington Post, 9 May 2006, A01; and Scott Shane, ‘'01 memo to Rice warned of Qaeda and offered plan’, New York Times, 12 February 2005, National Desk, Section A. 33 Laura Miller, ‘Our man in Iraq: the rise and fall of Ahmed Chalabi’, PR Watch, 11 (2), at http://www.prwatch.org/prwissues/2004Q2/chalabi.html. 34 Jane Mayer, ‘The manipulator’, the New Yorker, 7 June 2004, at http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?040607fa_fact1.