23 July 2005

Intelligence was manipulated, mangled, ignored, and analysts were harassed and bullied to present the false picture that Iraq was an imminent threat to the U.S.

That is the assessment of James Bamford, noted investigative journalist who's covered intelligence gathering for more than two decades in his book A Pretext for War. Every American should be outraged at how the Bush administration and the cabal of hawkish neoconservatives deceived and misrepresented intelligence in their quest for an already predetermined, preemptive war.
In talking with intelligence analysts and case officers, in the months leading up to the war none believed that Iraq posed a threat to the U.S. The most basic evidence was the fact that Iraq had never begun work on a long-range missile system (unlike Iran and North Korea), something that can be easily seen by imaging satellites space with a resolution down to the centimeter. And no country has ever built a warhead without simultaneously building a delivery system.

One CIA analyst from the Iraq Nonproliferation section told me that his boss once called his office together (about 50 people) and said, "You know what " if Bush wants to go to war, it's your job to give him a reason to do so." The former analyst added, "And I said, 'All right, it's time, it's time to go". And I just remember saying, 'This is something that the American public, if they ever knew, they would be outraged.'"

Congress was also lied to. Because Iraq had no long-range missiles, they were told in secret session that Iraq was planning to launch a series of unmanned drones loaded with chemical and biological agents against the East Coast of the U.S. Many members of Congress voted for the resolution exclusively because of that warning. It later turned out that not only did Iraq not have such warheads, the few drones they had were rudimentary, short range, and there was no way to launch them from sea off the East Coast in the first place. There were many such falsehoods.

In the first half of the book, Bamford gives a chronological view of events that lead up to the September 11, 2001 terrorist strike on World Trade Center towers and Pentagon. He details a intelligence community ill prepared to advise properly and/or take corrective action. Military and intelligence leaders were paralyzed, and were informed on events unraveling by the same medium as the general public — cable news networks. These agencies were structured for the cold war, and had been slow in changing to meet the requirements for threats in a new global age. Intercepts that could have alerted authorites sat untranslated, FBI reports of suspicious flight school students were ignored, and agencies were plagued by a dearth of language translators.

The ascent of George Tenet is covered, and his campaign to modernize the agency. Historically, the CIA is tied to foreign embassies — without that lifeline, they are blinded. Ironic, that just a few years earlier, the Afghanistan campaign to rid the country of Soviet rule was celebrated as an monumental intelligence community victory. But Tenet only has a grip on 15% of the nation's intelligence operations — Donald Rumsfled controls the other 85% and embarked on setting up additional groups to tell him what he wanted to hear.

Still, the latter third of Pretext for War is the alarming section, where the neconservative capture of foreign policy dictates is explained. How the original Iraq invasion was a plan for Israel and then prime minister Netanyahu rejected it. But immediately after taking office, the President's top national security advisors — Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, and David Wurmser began pleading for an invasion of Iraq, eager to unravel their plans initially designed for Israel and Netanyahu. Having worked for conservative pro-Israeli think tanks before Bush came to office, these individuals appear to be more concerned with the Likud party of Israel as they urged the United States to pull out of peace negotiations with the Palestinians and made the case for preemptive war to "rollback" Arab neighbors, and insitute puppet leaders friendly to Israel. When 9/11 occurred, this was the "crisis can be opportunity" moment the bloodlust yearning neoconservatives salivated for, and instead of focusing on the aftermath of the attacks, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz wanted to invade Iraq, despite there being no evidence of Iraq's involvement.

Bamford shows how dubious claim after dubious claim was trotted out by the Bush administration to justify a preemptive war with Iraq. Every charge is proven false, or garnered from an unreliable source. A compliant, obedient press eagerly regurgitated the PR copy handed to it, and elevated a convicted embezzler, Ahmed Chalabi, whom the CIA discarded as incredulous years prior, to the front page of the New York Times. Obvious forgeries were floated as proof Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear program, yet the IAEA, ambassador Joseph Wilson, and after the invasion, the Iraq Survey Group all easily debunked this spurious claim. Other evidence referenced by the Bush administration was of equally suspicious quality — unnamed exiles belonging to Ahmed Chalabi's INC, and other fantastic, unreal accusations, uncollaborated and unsubstantiated.

The final chapter is a doozie, devoted to Colin Powell's UN Security Council speech, where Powell was cajoled into selling the invasion, despite his better judgement that the material in the script handed to him was blatantly false. Powell would argue for the removal of items, and those items would be then reinserted. He knew even as he spoke, the case was "anything but solid". But in fact, the cited evidence was all bad, largely supplied by Chalabi's team of con men. Sadly, the public was never told how weak and ambiguous the evidence was.

It was a triumph of the power of lies, not logic, in a massive disinformation campaign, abetted by a lazy and timid press.

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