[Peace-discuss] Case for War Confected, Say Top US officials

[patton paul]

 Case for War Confected, Say Top US Officials
by Andrew Gumbel in Los Angeles


An unprecedented array of US intelligence professionals, diplomats and
former Pentagon officials have gone on record to lambaste the Bush
administration for its distortion of the case for war against Iraq. In
their view, the very foundations of intelligence-gathering have been
damaged in ways that could take years, even decades, to repair.

A new documentary film beginning to circulate in the United States
features one powerful condemnation after another, from the sort of people
who usually stay discreetly in the shadows - a former director of the CIA,
two former assistant secretaries of defense, a former ambassador to Saudi
Arabia and even the man who served as President Bush's Secretary of the
Army until just a few months ago.

Between them, the two dozen interviewees reveal how the pre-war
intelligence record on Iraq showed virtually the opposite of the picture
the administration painted to Congress, to US voters and to the world.
They also reconstruct the way senior White House officials - notably
Vice-President Dick Cheney - leaned on the CIA to find evidence that would
fit a preordained set of conclusions.

"There was never a clear and present danger. There was never an imminent
threat. Iraq - and we have very good intelligence on this - was never part
of the picture of terrorism," says Mel Goodman, a veteran CIA analyst who
now teaches at the National War College.

The case for accusing Saddam Hussein of concealing weapons of mass
destruction was, in the words of the veteran CIA operative Robert Baer,
largely achieved through "data mining" - going back over old information
and trying to wrest new conclusions from it. The agenda, according to
George Bush Senior's ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Chas Freeman, was both
highly political and profoundly misguided.

"The theory that you can bludgeon political grievances out of existence
doesn't have much of a track record," he says, "so essentially we have
been neo-conned into applying a school of thought about foreign affairs
that has failed everywhere it has been tried."

The hour-long film - entitled Uncovered: The Whole Truth About the Iraq
War - was put together by Robert Greenwald, a veteran TV producer in the
forefront of Hollywood's anti-war movement who never suspected, when he
started out, that so many establishment figures would stand up and be
counted.

"My attitude was, wow, CIA people, I thought these were the bad guys," Mr
Greenwald said. "Not everyone agreed on everything. Not everyone was
against the war itself. But there was a universally shared opinion that we
had been misled about the reasons for the war."

Although many elements in the film are not necessarily new - the forged
document on uranium sales from Niger to Iraq, the aluminum tubes falsely
assumed to be parts for nuclear weapons, the satellite images of "mobile
biolabs" that turned out to be hydrogen compression facilities, the
"decontamination vehicles" that were in fact fire engines - what emerges
is a striking sense of professional betrayal in the intelligence
community.

As the former CIA analyst Ray McGovern argues with particular force, the
traditional role of the CIA has been to act as a scrupulously accurate
source of information and analysis for presidents pondering grave
international decisions. That role, he said, had now been "prostituted"
and the CIA may never be the same. "Where is Bush going to turn to now?
Where is his reliable source of information now Iraq is spinning out of
control? He's frittered that away," Mr McGovern said. "And the profound
indignity is that he probably doesn't even realize it."

The starting point for the tarnishing of the CIA was a speech by
Vice-President Cheney on 26 August 2002, in which he told the Veterans of
Foreign Wars in Nashville that Saddam was reconstituting his nuclear
weapons program and was thus threatening to inflict "death on a massive
scale - in his own region or beyond".

According to numerous sources, Mr Cheney followed up his speech with a
series of highly unorthodox visits to CIA headquarters in Langley,
Virginia, in which he badgered low-level analysts to come up with
information to substantiate the extremely alarming - but entirely bogus -
contents of his speech.

By early September, intelligence experts in Congress were clamoring for a
so-called National Intelligence Estimate, a full rundown of everything
known about Iraq's weapons programs. Usually NIEs take months to produce,
but George Tenet, the CIA director, came up with a 100-page document in
just three weeks.

The man he picked to write it, the weapons expert Robert Walpole, had a
track record of going back over old intelligence assessments and reworking
them in accordance with the wishes of a specific political interest group.
In 1998, he had come up with an estimate of the missile capabilities of
various rogue states that managed to sound considerably more alarming than
a previous CIA estimate issued three years earlier. On that occasion, he
was acting at the behest of a congressional commission anxious to make the
case for a missile defense system; the commission chairman was none other
than Donald Rumsfeld, now Secretary of Defense and a key architect of the
Iraq war.

Mr Walpole's NIE on Iraq threw together all the elements that have now
been discredited - Niger, the aluminum tubes, and so on. It also gave the
misleading impression that intelligence analysts were in broad agreement
about the Iraqi threat, relegating most of the doubts and misgivings to
footnotes and appendices.

By the time parts of the NIE were made public, even those few
qualifications were excised. When President Bush's speechwriters got to
work - starting with the address to Congress on 7 October that led to a
resolution authorizing the use of force against Iraq - the language became
even stronger.

Mr Tenet fact-checked the 7 October speech, and seems to have played a
major role in every subsequent policy address, including Colin Powell's
powerful presentation to the United Nations Security Council on 5
February. Of that pivotal speech, Mr McGovern says in the film: "It was a
masterful performance, but none of it was true."

 2003 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd
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