2002: October: This Far and No Further

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October: The State Department's propaganda office, closed in 1996, is reopened. Called the Counter-Disinformation/Misinformation Team, this office supposedly only aims its propaganda overseas to counter propaganda from other countries. (CCR)
October: A classified CIA report claims that Iraq is trying to convert some of its J-29 jet trainer aircraft into remotely piloted drone aircraft that could be fitted to spray toxins. President Bush tells the American public that these drones exist, and that they pose a direct threat to the US. The "drones" are later proven to be "five burned and blackened wings dumped near the front gate," according to US Air Force captain Libbie Boehm. She believes the wings were part of a student project, or perhaps a model. (Amy Goodman and David Goodman)
October: The Department of Defense begins dealing with Halliburton and its subsidiary Kellogg, Brown, &Root (KBR) for eventual rights to operate Iraq's oil industry after the upcoming invasion. It is worthwhile to note that publicly the Bush administration is still claiming that an armed invasion of Iraq is an option of last resort; obviously the DOD's negotiations with Halliburton are made with a different understanding. According to Halliburton employees, representatives were in Kuwait City drawing up plans for post-invasion oil industry management as early as November 2002. On November 11, the Pentagon awards KBR the first Iraqi rebuilding project, to plan for the postwar repair of Iraq's oil industry. Shortly thereafter, USAID and other governmental agencies will develop detailed plans for providing emergency food, shelter, and medical treatments. (Online Journal, T. Christian Miller)
October: A New York Times article reveals the existence of the secret Office of Special Plans, the Rumsfeld-directed intelligence agency mandated to prove links between Iraq and al-Qaeda, and to prove the existence of Iraqi WMDs; the OSP, says the article, is attempting "to search for information on Iraq's hostile intentions or links to terrorists" that the CIA either overlooked or dismissed as unfounded. The bureau is created from the original Northern Gulf Affairs office of the Pentagon.
Rumsfeld is initially coy about the existence of the group, saying, "I'm told that after September 11th a small group, I think two to start with, and maybe four now...were asked to begin poring over the mountain of information that we were receiving on intelligence-type things. ...You don't know what you don't know. So in comes the [CIA's] daily briefer, and she walks through the daily brief. And I ask questions. 'Gee, what about this?' or 'What about that? Has somebody thought about this?' While deliberately lying about the size and scope of the OSP, Rumsfeld states as proven fact that "solid evidence of the presence in Iraq of al-Qaeda members" exists, intelligence that in fact does not exist in any reliable form except from Iraqi exile Ahmad Chalabi. "Rumsfeld's got to discredit the CIA's analysts to make his intelligence more reliable," later says a former high-level intelligence officer. Another former CIA official tells journalist Seymour Hersh that Rumsfeld "wants his own GRU" -- a reference to the former Soviet military intelligence agancy. "He does not want to be dependent on the CIA for intelligence to prepare the battlefield for his troops." In December 2001, the Defense Department, in an internal memo, accused the CIA of deliberately "downplay[ing] or [seeking] to disprove" links between Hussein and al-Qaeda. "For many years, there has been a bias in the intelligence community" towards defectors, the memo says, in a direct reference to the wildly unreliable Chalabi, and urges that OSP analysts working with OSP director Abram Shulsky be given the authority to "investigate linkages to Iraq" by having access to the "proper debriefing of key Iraqi defectors." Though Rumsfeld and the OSP will rely heavily on Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress for information regarding Iraq's supposed weapons programs and links to Islamic terrorists, a former CIA station chief in the Middle East says the CIA has known for years that Chalabi is unreliable: "You had to treat [Chalabi and the INC] with suspicion. The INC has a track record of manipulating intelligence because it has an agenda. It's a political unit -- not an intelligence agency."
"Feith and Luti see everybody not 100% with them as 100% against them -- it's a very Manichean world," says a defense consultant. A former CIA expert who worked closely with Iraqi exile affairs says of the OSP personnel, "They see themselves as outsiders. There's a high degree of paranoia. They've convinced themselves that they're on the side of angels, and everybody else in government is a fool." (Seymour Hersh, Frank Rich [PDF file])
October: The US State Department begins a public relations program designed by Madison Avenue marketing specialist Charlotte Beers called "shared Values," or sometimes "Brand America," designed to convince Muslims around the world that they share key moral and cultural values with America. (Beers is now a State Department official.) The sophisticated effort, making use of films, CD-ROMs, pamphlets, and a splashy magazine for young Muslim readers, errs in portraying how well-to-do American Muslims are, instead of cogently defending US policies in Muslim terms. Governments in Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon refuse to run the films, says they will not "run messages on behalf of other countries." The program is terminated in January 2003, but the apparent perception among administration officials that marketing campaigns can change fundamental Muslim impressions of the West still runs strong in Washington. A research paper by two professors of marketing and journalism states that, in the authors' beliefs, the program was having some effect among Muslims in the countries in the Middle East and Asia that allowed it to be disseminated, but most experts believe the ad campaign is either useless or provokes a backlash of resentment among its viewers. "The ads were extremely poor," says Youssef Ibrahim, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, a think tank based in New York. "It was like this was the 1930s and the government was running commercials showing happy blacks in America. It is the policy itself we have to explain. You have to grab the bull by the horn, and the bull is 'Hey, here's our policy and there are good reasons for it,' instead of saying, 'Gee, there are a lot of happy Muslim people here.'" Steve Hayden, vice chairman of Ogilvy & Mather, says, "My premise was that any effort to address ordinary people that have been ignored too long is worthy. But Islamic opinion is influenced more by what the US does than anything it can say." Professor Shibley Telhami writes, "The US has a legacy of decades that is based in part on our policy and in part on impression; it is not going to be able to change the paradigm overnight simply by a charm campaign.... People are not going to trust the message if they don't trust the messenger." (Wall Street Journal, Public Diplomacy Watch, Michael Scheuer)
October: US District Court Judge Emmitt Sullivan orders the Cheney Energy Task Force to either reveal documents sought by Judicial Watch and the Sierra Club, in their lawsuit attempting to force disclosure of the task force's proceedings and decisions, or to detail its reasons why those documents must remain secret. Cheney does neither, and continues to keep the documents under wraps as he challenges the court's authority to force the administration to reveal anything it chooses to keep secret under the separation of powers doctrine. (Forbes)
October: In his book Pipe Dreams, Robert Bryce writes: "The Enron failure is the biggest political scandal in American history. Teapot Dome -- a scandal about payoffs to Secretary of the Interior Albert Fall by a couple of greedy oilmen -- was memorable but involved very few people. The Watergate scandal was bigger and more pernicious but it, too, involved relatively few people.... Enron was different. By the time of its bankruptcy, Enron owned -- or perhaps was just renting -- politicians in the White House, Congress, state courts, state legislatures, and bureaucrats at every level." (quoted by Kevin Phillips)
October: A press release from a new organization called "America 21" exhorts the mobilization of Christian voters through the auspices of right-wing ministers, who it asks to join the group's "Margin of Victory" project and ensure that fundamentalist voters swarm the polls on Election Day. The group, operating under Section 527 of the federal election code, is a front for the House Republican Leadership, and almost identical to House Whip Tom DeLay's "Republican Majority Issues Committee." The letter asserts that Republicans are "losing the moral high ground in this country," and warns that the election will decide "whether godly leaders will control the agenda and the policy in the US Congress."
The letter is written and signed by Republican representative Helen Chenowith-Hage. Chenowith, an Idaho congresswoman, is notorious for her myriad extramarital adventures and her public support of her state's right-wing militias. Her own sordid sexual past gets somewhat lost in the blaze of publicity about Clinton's own affair with Monica Lewinsky, and the backblast of coverage about the sexual improprieties of Republican accusers such as Newt Gingrich (who divorced his wife while carrying on an affair with an intern), Henry Hyde (who carried on an affair for eight years), Dan Burton (who fathered a child out of wedlock and refused to acknowledge the child), Bob Barr (carried on affairs and forced his second wife to have an abortion), and Bob Livingston (who resigned as Speaker of the House rather than have his multiple affairs revealed by Hustler publisher Larry Flynt). Ironically, Chenowith advanced to public office in 1994 by playing up the sexual misadventures of her Democratic opponent, and presenting herself as the embodiment of Christian values. She had served as chief of staff to Idaho Republican senator Steven Symms, who lost re-election in 1992 because he divorced his very ill wife of thirty years and because his numerous sexual liasons (including a possible affair with Chenowith) became public. Chenowith earned public notoriety in 1995, when she blamed Democratic public policies for the Oklahoma City terrorist bombings, and again in 1998 with a righteous blast against Clinton, intoning, "President Clinton's behavior has severely damaged his ability to lead our nation, and the free world. To restore honor in public office, and the trust of the American people, we must affirm that personal conduct does count, and integrity matters." Chenowith's polemic invites the scrutiny of Idaho journalists, who shortly reveal her long and checkered history of affairs with both married and unmarried men. In particular, she is exposed as having had a long-term affair with former busines partner and family values poseur Vernon Ravenscroft, an affair she heatedly denied in 1995. After being revealed as an adulterer, she tells the press, "Fourteen years ago, when I was a private citizen and a single woman, I was involved in a relationship that I came to regret, that I'm not proud of. I've asked God's forgiveness and I've received it." The day she made her "confession," a reporter says, "There [are] a lot of nervous legislators down at the [Idaho] Statehouse." A GOP operative tells another reporter that the consensus opinion of Chenowith in the Idaho GOP is, "Helen is living proof that you can f*ck your brains out." More problems arose for Chenowith in 1995 over charges of illegal campaign financing, and again in 1997, when Democrats prove she accepted money from Hong Kong sources. Chenowith will decide not to run for re-election in 2002. (Joe Conason, Hilton and Testa)
October: At the Christian Coalition's annual Washington gathering, co-founder Pat Robertson boasts about the movement's success in achieving the goals it had set for itself in 1990, when the group was founded. He cites the electoral victories that have brought conservatives to power in Washington, and the election that brought a "born-again" President to the White House, along with "born-again" politicians serving as Speaker of the House, House Majority Leader, and Senate Majority Leader. Robertson promises that the US court system will be next. (Joe Conason)

Forged documents purporting to show Iraq's attempt to purchase African uranium surface, are debunked, and are used by Bush officials to "prove" Iraq's nuclear ambitions

Early October: A set of documents purporting to prove that Iraq indeed attempted to purchase "yellowcake" uranium surface. Italian reporter Elisabetta Burba, who works for the glossy weekly Panorama (co-owned by right-wing Italian premier Silvio Berlusconi), receives a phone call from an Italian businessman and security consultant whom she believes to have connections to Italian intelligence. The businessman, her old source Rocco Martino, says he has proof that Iraq tried to purchase uranium from Niger; Burba, who received credible intelligence information from him in 1995, considers him reliable. She meets for a second time with Martino on October 7, who offers to sell her the documents for around $12,000. (Payment for journalistic information is considered acceptable in Italy.) The documents, all photocopies, are composed of 22 pages, mostly in French, some on official Nigeran letterhead and two with the letterhead of Iraq's embassy to the Holy See (the story is that Iraq's ambassador to the Vatican tried to facilitate the purchase). Some of the documents are telexes. Burba asks how the documents can be authenticated, and the source shows her a photocopy of the codebook from the Niger embassy, along with other items. "What I was sure of was that he had access," Burba says later. "He didn't receive the documents from the moon." Most of the documents deal with the purported sale of uranium to Iraq. After first showing the documents to her husband, a historian. They both immediately find a number of disturbing flaws and gaps in the documents. Burba wonders if the documents aren't fraudulent. Nevertheless, the next day, Burba shows the documents to her editors. Her editor-in-chief Carlo Rossella, who has ties to the Berlusconi government, tells her to send the documents to the American embassy in Rome for authentication. On October 9, she does so.
Interestingly, both Burba and Martino are certain that the US will invade Iraq very soon. Martino, who secretly tape-recorded the meeting between him and Burba, makes a reference to Bush's October 6 "big speech," and suggests to Burba that they could make the war even more certain to happen. "Let's make this war start," he tells Burba. "This is a megagalactica situation." (See the October 15, 2001 entry for more information.)
When Burba visits the US embassy in Rome, her documents are treated with cool interest. She refuses to divulge the source, nor will she allow them to have the documents themselves. She will, however, let them make copies. The embassy staff immediately transmits the documents to the State Department for analysis. CIA station chief Jess Castelli has been alerted about the session, and tells his deputy that the documents are bogus. "This is bullsh*t we don't have time to waste on," he says. Castelli gets his own copy of the documents, and promptly forgets about them. European Division chief Tyler Drumheller later explains that Castelli is "not the most organized guy in the world. And his view was, 'This is the least important thing that's coming across my desk right now.' He just made a mistake." Because of Castelli's insouciance, the CIA will not be able to review the documents for a long time.
Burba visits Niger and is unable to find any evidence or witnesses to any such transactions as purported in the documents. She also learns that the transport company and the bank named in the documents are too small and ill-equipped to handle such a transaction. As Joseph Wilson had concluded in February, she decides that the entire story is a hoax. While Panorama decides to spike the story, the documents themselves are in American hands, and they prove a bonanza for US administration officials eager to use them to allege Iraqi nuclear ambitions. According to one CIA official, the documents are "stovepiped" directly to Washington without any of the usual verification. "Everybody knew at every step of the way that they were false," says the official, "until they got to the Pentagon [and Abram Shulsky's Office of Special Plans], where they were believed." A second CIA official, former counterterrorism chief Vincent Cannistraro, says that the documents were passed through the embassy to the CIA's station chief in Rome, where they were forwarded to Washington. He is told months later that "the jury is still out" on the authenticity of the documents. The first official says, "It's not a question as to whether they were marginal. They can't be 'sort of' bad or 'sort of' ambiguous. They knew it was a fraud -- it was useless. Everybody bit their tongue and said, 'Wouldn't it be great if the Secretary of State said this?' The Secretary of State never saw the documents. ...He's absolutely apoplectic about it." A former intelligence officer says that questions about the documents' authenticity were raised by analysts at the Department of Energy as well as inside the State Department; however, these warnings were ignored.
Originally, CIA director Tenet is uneasy about the documents' authenticity, and intervenes to prevent Bush from mentioning Niger in a speech in Cincinnati, but, under pressure from the White House, gives up any resistance, and, in journalist Seymour Hersh's words, "Saddam's desire for uranium from Niger soon became part of the administration's public case for going to war." A 12,000-page report from Iraq denying any such nuclear ambitions is derided both in the administration and in the American press. The entire process will culminate in Bush's infamous 16-word declaration in his January 28, 2003 State of the Union address, where he informs the world, "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."
Burba is startled by Bush's direct reference in his address. She revisits her source, who tells her that he had no idea the documents were false, and tells her that "he'd also been fooled." Burba wants to publish the entire story of the hoax and its repercussions in global foreign policy, but Rossella tables the idea. "When I heard the State of the Union statement," Burba recalls, "I thought to myself that perhaps the United States government has other information. I didn't think the documents were that important -- they weren't trustable." In July 2003 Burba will publish her account of events, and in September of that year will be grilled by FBI agents.
Inside the administration, many experts are appalled and confounded by the inclusion of the statement in Bush's address. "They said, 'Holy sh*t, all of a sudden the President is talking about it in the State of the Union address'," recalls a former CIA official. "They began to panic. Who the hell was going to expose it?" The CIA originally denied to Hersh that it had received the documents until after the address, and therefore had no way of vetting them; later the agency admits that it lied. Hersh writes, "True or not, [the agency's] original statement put the CIA in an unfortunate position; it was, essentially, copping a plea of incompetence. And it didn't explain why the agency left the task of revealing the embarrassing forgery to the IAEA." The IAEA will publicly denouce the documents as fraudulent in March 2003; the administration will retaliate against Joseph Wilson's public denunciation of the entire fiasco by outing his wife, undercover CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson, in July 2003; in July 2004 the Senate Intelligence Committee report will reveal that it took the CIA nearly three weeks to get the documents translated from French to English, and days longer to issue an internal warning that the documents "may be fraudulent. The CIA informed Defense Secretary Rumsfeld of the documents' failure to pass muster four days after the IAEA publicly debunked them, but even that admission was tucked inside a farrago of speculation that Iraq was probably being doubly devious and deceptive in masking its nuclear efforts. The CIA's report to Dick Cheney "massaged the available information in an effort to please the office of [the] Vice President," writes Hersh. "The [report] repeatedly minimized or ignored expressions of skepticism from other agencies, most notably the State Department's INR, forwarding assessments suggesting that there was credible evidence, from third-party reports, of Iraq's desire to purchase uranium ore from Niger." Even the committee report, generated largely by the committee's Republican leadership, says, without a shred of evidence, that it was "reasonable" to assume that Iraq may have tried to purchase uranium in 1999. It will not issue its report on the White House's complete failure to provide any intelligence about Iraq's WMD programs until after the November 2004 elections. (Seymour Hersh, Michael Isikoff and David Corn)
Early October: Bush administration envoys, including assistant secretary of state James Kelly, journey to Pyongyang, North Korea, to deliver a carefully scripted ultimatum to that regime: dismantle your burgeoning nuclear program now, or else. No negotiations would be possible, Kelly tells the North Koreans, until the nuclear program is eliminated. "It was dead wrong," says an intelligence official. "I hope thiere are other people in the agency who understand the North Koreans better than the people who wrote this." A Japanese diplomat says, "The Koreans were stunned. They didn't know that the US knew what it knew." In return, the North Koreans accuse the US of threatening their right to survive as a nation, and provides its own list of US failures to live up to the 1994 treaty. The Koreans actually offer to shut down the program if the Americans promise not to attack their country, and to engage in normalization of relations. Constrained by his brief, Kelly refuses. "There was a huge fight [within the administration] over whether to give the North Koreans an ultimatum or to negotiate," recalls one American expert on Korea. "Which is the same fight they're having now." The envoys were authorized to tell the Koreans that the US had learned about the illicit uranium program, but were left with no room to negotiate; North Korea would have to scrap the program before any negotiations could begin. "This is a sad tale of bureaucracy," says another American expert. "The script Kelly had was written in the [National Security Council] by hard-liners. I don't think the President wanted a crisis at this time." The CIA holds that the North Koreans would not risk an open break with the 1994 agreement, and would abide by the non-proliferation treaty. Instead, the North Koreans reacted angrily, and refused to comply.
As with so many other potentially catastrophic foreign policy events, the Bush administration keeps the failed negotiations with North Korea secret until the news of it leaks. It withholds the information from Congress until five days after the October 16 vote on authorization for military action against Iraq. On October 20, Rice, appearing on Face the Nation, denies that the news had been withheld until after the vote. "I could never understand what was going on with the North Korea policy," says a former intelligence official expert in North Korean affairs. "We couldn't get people's attention [inside the administration], and even if we could, they never had a sensible approach. The administration was deeply, viciously ideological." He says that not only are administration officials contemptuous of North Korea, it holds the Clinton adminstrations' attempts to contain North Korea's nuclear program in contempt -- even though it was far more effective than the Bush efforts. In fact, Bush's policy towards the North Korean threat has been, up till now, to ignore it. "When it came time to confront North Korea," the official says, "we had no plan, no contact -- nothing to negotiate with. You have to be in constant diplomatic contact, so you can engage and be in the strongest position to solve the problem. But we let it all fall apart." The administration's response: deny there is a crisis. Rice states the position of the administration when she tells the press, "Saddam Hussein is in a category by himself." The message is clear: the Iraq "crisis" is imminent, the North Korean crisis is irrelevant. Publicly the message is unyielding and belligerent; in private, administration officials try with little success to engage the Koreans in talks through third parties. Meanwhile, North Korea expels international observers, renounces the non-proliferation treaty, and threatens to once again begin reprocessing spent nuclear fuel for weapons.
In June 2002, Robert Gallucci, the diplomat who negotiated the 1994 agreement with Pyongyang, says that the original approach of the administration has been to make North Korea a "poster child" for the necessity of a missile-defense system (Star Wars). "This was the cutting edge of the threat against which we were planning and shaping our defense," he said. "There was a belief that North Korea was not to be dealt with by negotiation. But then September 11th happened, and September 11th meant that national missile defense could not defend America, because the threat was not going to come from missiles but from a hundred other ways as well. And so we've come full circle.... North Korea and other rogue states who threaten us with weapons of mass destruction threaten not only because they themselves might not be deterrable but because they may transfer this capability to those who can't be deterred or defended against." Gallucci calls Pakistan's A.Q. Khan "the Johnny Appleseed" of the nuclear-arms race. "Bad as it is with Iran, North Korea, and Libya having nuclear weapons material, the worst part is that they could transfer it to a non-state group. That's the biggest concern, and the scariest thing about all this -- that Pakistan could work with the worst terrorist groups on Earth to build nuclear weapons. There's nothing more important than stopping terrorist groups from getting nuclear weapons. The most dangerous country for the United States now is Pakistan, and second is Iran. ...We haven't been this vulnerable since the British burned Washington in 1814." (The New Yorker, Seymour Hersh)
October 1: The US Northern Command (NORTHCOM) begins operations at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado. (It will eventually move to Washington, DC.) Tasked with providing and coordinating military assistance to domestic agencies, its existence further weakens the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act which forbids the military to police American citizens. (Mark Crispin Miller)
October 1-4: The National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq (NIE) is released to select administration and other officials. Although 90 pages in length, only a 28-page "white paper," or abstract, of the document. entitled "Iraq's Continuing Programs for Weapons of Mass Destruction," has ever been declassified. The white paper itself is little more than a slickly produced marketing brochure for the proposed invasion of Iraq. Supposedly the best and most comprehensive assessment US intelligence can produce regarding Iraq, its connections to al-Qaeda, and Iraq's WMD programs, the NIE is a cobbled-together mishmash of contradictory information, unevaluated intelligence, and wild speculation; part of the explanation of why the NIE is so badly done and contradictory may be because of frequent visits from Cheney to the CIA to pressure analysts to produce the "proper" information and justifications. As a result, some of it is obviously written to give Bush what he wants to justify his invasion; other sections flatly contradict those assertions of Iraqi WMDs and terrorist connections. Much of the NIE casts serious doubts upon the supposed connections between Saddam Hussein's regime and al-Qaeda. "There has always been an internal argument within the intelligence community about the connections between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda," said a senior intelligence official. "The NIE had alternative views."
CIA director George Tenet hand-delivers a one-page summary of the NIE to Bush, who reads it in Tenet's presence. According to a National Journal report from March 2, 2006, the summary outlines intelligence community doubts that Iraq's aluminum tubes were ever intended for any sort of WMDs. A "senior official" tells the Journal that the summary is "the one document which illustrates what the president knew and when he knew it." The summary has never been declassified; the administration has continuously refused to make the summary available even to Congressional intelligence committees.
Bush refuses to consider the report, and on October 7 will make a landmark speech that directly accuses Hussein and al-Qaeda of having deep and long-standing connections. He will offer little in the way of evidence, but his assertions are so concrete that most observers will conclude that he must have evidence of his claims. The New Republic notes, "Bush's speech brought together all the misinformation and exaggeration that the White House had been disseminating that fall." Senator Bob Graham, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, later charges that "they [the Bush administration] declassified only things that supported their position and left classified what did not support that policy." Graham and Durbin are outraged to find that the public version omits the qualifications and countervailing evidence that had characterized the classified version and played up the claims that strengthened the administration's case for war. Graham demands that the administration declassify the dissenting material. In contrast to the contents of the NIE, on October 2, Bush will make the following statement: "On its present course, the Iraqi regime is a threat of unique urgency...it has developed weapons of mass death. ...We know the designs of the Iraqi regime. In defiance of pledges to the UN, it has stockpiled biological and chemical weapons. ...The regime has the scientists and facilities to build nuclear weapons, and is seeking the materials needed to do so." Of course, the NIE directly contradicts Bush's statement.
The scientific advisor to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Peter Zimmerman, is horrified by the NIE. While the conclusions offer bold, definitive conclusions in its "key judgments" section, declaring that Iraq "has chemical and biological weapons" and "is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program," the evidence for these claims cited in the NIE is nowhere near as conclusive, and loaded with caveats and contradictions. Zimmerman had hoped that the CIA would finally cough up the evidence for the brazen claims made by the White House in this NIE, but he is keenly disappointed. He is most struck by the dissents against the claims. "The dissents leaped out -- they're in bold, almost like flashing lights," he later recalls. "I remember thinking, 'Boy, there's nothing there. If anybody takes the time to actually read this, they can't believe there actually are major WMD programs." Zimmerman and others later learn just how politicized the process of creating the NIE was, thrashed out in interagency meetings presided over by senior CIA officials who pushed for conclusions that were not supported by solid intelligence. One intelligence analyst later tells Senate investigators that the entire NIE was produced with the idea that the US was going to war, and the NIE "was to be written with that in mind." Though two investigations -- one by the Republican-controlled Senate Intelligence Committee and one by a White House-appointed commission -- conclude that there had been no direct pressure brought to bear to alter the NIE's conclusions, the indirect pressures were immense. "You were never told what to write," recalls DIA analyst Bruce Hardcastle, "but you knew what assessments administration officials would be receptive to -- and what they would not be receptive to." Hardcastle himself clashed with an official from Douglas Feith's office over Iraq, and found himself shunted aside and uninvited to key meetings.
Three years later, Paul Pillar, then the CIA's national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia, wrote in an article for Foreign Affairs that the NIE was entirely the product of a tainted intellectual environment. "It was clear that the Bush administration would frown on or ignore analysis that called into question a decision to go to war and welcome analysis that supported such a decision," he wrote. "Intelligence analysis...felt a strong wind consistently blowing in one direction. The desire to bend with such a wind is natural and strong, even if unconscious."
But in the end, the NIE didn't really matter. Minds were made up throughout the White House, and the faulty and erroneous intelligence contained in the NIE was already the basis for wild and outlandish claims made by Bush, Cheney, and other senior White House officials. Where disputes existed, they were ignored, and those raising the questions were marginalized as not being "team players." Bush himself never bothered to read the NIE; nor did any but a half-dozen senators. And the intelligence finding its way into the President's Daily Briefs and the Senior Executive Intelligence Briefs were even more skewed. The CIA, in the person of George Tenet and John McLaughlin, were giving the White House just what it wanted. Zimmerman recalls, "There was not a g*ddamn thing I or any staffer could do to stop this. We had an election coming up. The Democrats were afraid of being seen as soft on Saddam or on terrorism. The whole notion was, 'Let's get the war out of the way as fast as possible and turn back to the domestic agenda.'"
One senator who did read the NIE was the chair of the intelligence committee, Democrat Bob Graham. Graham is dismayed by the NIE's chaotic series of claims and dissents. But under the rules of the committee, Graham and the other committee members were not allowed to say anything in public about the NIE. In committee, fellow Democrat Carl Levin pushed Tenet and McLaughlin to give the sources for the NIE's claims. Tenet admits that the sources don't really exist, and the CIA hasn't had many reliable assets in Iraq since 1998. "I was stunned," Graham later recalls. Graham and Levin request that portions of the NIE be declassified for public consumption, so some of the equivocations and dissents could be discussed publicly. The White House demurred, and instead recycled an old CIA white paper, a slick, glossy publication full of colorful charts and photos. It was a marketing product and not a legitimate analysis, and unsurprisingly, contained none of the dissents that studded the NIE itself. It was nothing more than a product designed to sell the war. Pillar, who was forced to help produce the white paper, says later that he was embarrassed by the whole thing. "In retrospect, we shouldn't have done that white paper at all," he says. It wasn't really intelligence analysis, he says: "The white paper was policy advocacy." He says that he wished then he had had the guts to stand up and refuse to produce the paper. "If I had to do it all over again, I would say, 'Hell no, I'm not going to do this!'" he recalls. Pillar, ashamed of his participation, acknowledges that he, too, bent with the wind.
Pillar can be criticized for a lack of spine. But as the NIE is causing controversy, he is battling his own set of pressures. He had recently written a book that concluded the major sources of terror threats came from freelance groups like al-Qaeda. While this was the CIA's longstanding position, it conflicted directly with the positions of neoconservatives like Laurie Mylroie, who insisted that Iraq was behind the world's terrorism. Mylroie's assertions, wild and unfounded as they are, are quite popular with powerful Pentagon and White House officials like Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz; Pillar's book made him suspect with the administration's hardliners, a member of the supposed cabal of CIA officials hostile to the Bush agenda. After the 2002 State of the Union address, Pillar, speaking to a class at Johns Hopkins, said that Bush should have been a "little clearer" in making distinctions about terrorism and WMDs. Pillar thought he was speaking off the record, but his comments made it into an article by Insight, a magazine published by the conservative Washington Times, which reported inaccurately that Pillar had attacked Bush's speech and mocked Mylroie. Wolfowitz pushed for Pillar to be fired, and Pillar found himself on the verge of losing his job. So Pillar plays ball.
The white paper served its purpose. It generated headlines favorable to the Bush policy, such as the New York Times's article headlined "CIA Says Iraq Revived Forbidden Weapons Program After the UN Inspectors Left." And an AP story reported that "Iraq is making new biological and chemical weapons and could have a nuclear weapon by 2010, a new report by US intelligence agencies concludes."
Graham is outraged by the white paper. "I had earlier concluded that a war with Iraq would be a distraction from the successful and expeditious completion of our aims in Afghanistan," he later wrote. "Now I had come to question whether the White House was telling the truth -- or even had an interest in knowing the truth." He savages Tenet, demanding to know how the CIA could produce two such disparate documents, a secret NIE full of contradictions and dissents, and a public white paper that conveys unanimity and bellicose certainty. A defensive Tenet counters with charges that Graham is questioning his patriotism, but Graham is having none of it. He demands that portions of the NIE be made public. Tenet says he will look into it. In particular, Graham wants to know why the "white paper" declares that Iraq is an imminent threat, ready to attack the US at a moment's notice, but in the NIE and in closed-door hearings, officials like Tenet and McLaughlin say the likelihood of such an attack is low unless Iraq is attacked by US forces. Graham and Levin want that testimony declassified as well. Three days later, on October 7, while the Senate is debating the resolution authorizing Bush to use force against Iraq, the CIA produces a declassified letter that includes a few of the dissents, but also includes a newly written section restating and augmenting the earlier claims from the NIE and the white paper. It is the best Graham can get; he releases the letter the next day. The New York Times calls it a "new element" in the ongoing discussion over what to do about Iraq. But Tenet is going public, playing damage control for the Bush administration -- an unheard-of role for a CIA director. "There is no inconsistency between our view of Saddam's growing threat and the view as expressed by the president," he says in a statement. Tenet even calls a Times reporter to ensure that his statement makes it into the article.
Levin is enraged. "The head of the CIA was saying there was no difference between that CIA testimony and the administration," he later recalls. "That's a fabrication and bullsh*t. It was wrong and totally inappropriate for him to say that. That was important testimony, and they were lying about it. I believed it was likely that Saddam had chemical or biological weapons. But a lot of countries have WMDs. The question is, are they an imminent threat to you?" Levin believes the CIA's answer is no, but Tenet is undermining his own agency's findings as well as Graham's and Levin's efforts to make the truth known. Tenet, Levin believes, is acting more like a White House propaganda maven than the director of central intelligence. (Washington Post, The New Republic, Federation of American Scientists [includes excerpts from NIE], Bush on Iraq, Mother Jones, Frank Rich [PDF file], Michael Isikoff and David Corn)
October 1: "Of course I haven't made up my mind we're going to war with Iraq," says Bush after a meeting with his Cabinet. "I've made up my mind we need to disarm the man." (Mother Jones)
October 2: Judith Miller publishes a New York Times article citing Richard Perle as saying that Ahmad Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress have "been without question the single most important source of intelligence about Saddam Hussein." Miller later reveals that Chalabi is her best source for information about Iraq's WMD programs. The INC was created in 1992 by the CIA and the Rendon Group, a public relations firm with close ties to the Bush family and the GOP, as an exile group intended to function in opposition to the regime of Saddam Hussein. Chalabi, who was convicted by a Jordanian court of embezzlement and who is known to have stolen at least $4 million in CIA funds, has always been a darling of neoconservative hawks in the Pentagon such as Perle, but has long been known by US intelligence to be thoroughly unreliable. The Pentagon will later establish the shadowy Office of Special Plans to trumpet Chalabi's lies about Iraq's WMDs and use these lies as a justification for the US invasion of Iraq. Journalist Howard Kurtz will later ask the rhetorical question in the Washington Post: "Could Chalabi have been using the Times to build a drumbeat that Iraq was hiding weapons of mass destruction?" As Kurtz well knows, the answer is yes. (Amy Goodman and David Goodman)
October 2: The deputy director of intelligence, John McLaughlin, testifies before the Senate Intelligence Committee. Republican Jon Kyl asks if he disagrees with the recent dossier of British intelligence reports claiming that Iraq has a vast and dangerous arrays of WMDs. McLaughlin responds that "the one thing where I think they stretched a little bit beyond where we would stretch it is on the points about Iraq seeking uranium from various African locations. We;ve looked at those reports and we don't think they are very credible. It doesn't diminish our conviction that he's going for nuclear weapons, but I think they reached a little bit on that one point. Otherwise I think it's very solid." As McLaughlin should know, the British intelligence dossier is as chock full of wild speculation and unfounded assertions as the recently released National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq. None of this prevents Bush, and Bush officials, from telling both Congressmen and citizens that they have, in Donald Rumsfeld's words, "irrefutable proof" that Iraq has chemical and biological weapons, and that Saddam Hussein has attempted to buy huge amounts of uranium from Niger. (Frank Rich [PDF file])
October 3: Senator Robert Byrd, a Democrat, says on the Senate floor, "...we are embarking on a course of action with regard to Iraq that, in its haste, is both blind and improvident. We are rushing into war without fully discussing why, without thoroughly considering the consequences, or without making any attempt to explore what steps we might take to avert conflict. ...The newly bellicose mood that permeates this White House is unfortunate, all the moreso because it is clearly motivated by campaign politics. Republicans are already running attack ads against Democrats on Iraq. ...The resolution before us today is not only a product of haste; it is also a product of presidential hubris. This resolution is breathtaking in its scope. It redefines the nature of defense, and reinterprets the Constitution to suit the will of the Executive Branch. It would give the President blanket authority to launch a unilateral preemptive attack on a sovereign nation that is perceived to be a threat to the United States. This is an unprecedented and unfounded interpretation of the President's authority under the Constitution, not to mention the fact that it stands the charter of the United Nations on its head. Representative Abraham Lincoln, in a letter to William H. Herndon, stated: 'Allow the President to invade a neighboring nation whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion, and you allow him to do so whenever he may choose to say he deems it necessary for such purpose -- and you allow him to make war at pleasure. Study to see if you can fix any limit to his power in this respect, after you have given him so much as you propose. If, today, he should choose to say he thinks it necessary to invade Canada, to prevent the British from invading us, how could you stop him? You may say to him, "I see no probability of the British invading us" but he will say to you "be silent; I see it, if you don't." This, our Convention understood to be the most oppressive of all Kingly oppressions; and they resolved to so frame the Constitution that no one man should hold the power of bringing this oppression upon us. But your view destroys the whole matter, and places our President where kings have always stood.'" If he could speak to us today, what would Lincoln say of the Bush doctrine concerning preemptive strikes?" (Robert Byrd)
October 3: Bill O'Reilly, a conservative talk show host on Fox News, accuses Democratic congressman Jim McDermott of treason after McDermott's visit to Iraq. He says McDermott "showed up last night on Phil Donahue's program to justify his giving aid and comfort to Saddam while he was in Baghdad." (FAIR
October 3-11: Both French and British investigators and intelligence deny any claim of a link between al-Qaeda and Iraq. The British specifically deny any meeting between Atta and Iraqi agents in the Czech Republic. They state that Iraq has purposely distanced itself from al-Qaeda, not embraced it. Meanwhile, Vincent Cannistraro, the CIA's former head of counterintelligence, says, "Basically, cooked information is working its way into high-level pronouncements and there's a lot of unhappiness about it in intelligence, especially among analysts at the CIA." A source connected to the 9/11 investigation says, "The FBI has been pounded on to make this link." The Los Angeles Times also reports an escalating "war" between the Pentagon and the CIA over tying Iraq to al-Qaeda. (CCR)
October 4: Bush states that Iraq is developing unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs, which "could be used to disperse chemical or biological weapons across broad areas. ...We're concerned that Iraq is exploring ways of using these UAVs for missions targeting the United States." US military experts confirm that Iraq has been converting eastern European trainer jets into UAV's, but with a maximum range of a few hundred miles they were no threat to targets in the U.S. "It doesn't make any sense to me if he meant United States territory," responds Rear Admiral Stephen Baker, who assesses Iraqi military capabilities at the Washington-based Center for Defense Information. Journalist Simon Tisdale says Bush's claim "stray[s] into the realms of horror-movie fantasy," and even Israel's chief of intelligence, Major General Aharon Ze'evi, says not only that Bush's claims about Iraqi UAVs are specious, but Bush's previous assertions that Iraq is a threat to Turkey and its other neighbors are implausible. (Daily Herald, Guardian, Guardian)
October 4: The UN Security Council is split on whether or not to approve the US request for automatic UN approval of US military action in Iraq. Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Saltanov says, "Attempts to make the U.N. Security Council subscribe to the automatic use of force against Iraq are unacceptable for us. ...What the British and Americans have presented to us only strengthens us in the correctness of our view that the inspection/monitoring regime in Iraq should be resumed and that a political solution concerning this country is needed without the automatic use of force." France and Germany also voice their opposition to the request. "We are totally opposed to any resolution that gave as of now an automatic character to military intervention," says French PM Jacque Chirac. (CNN)
October 4: The newly assigned head of US military intelligence for Iraq, General James "Spider" Marks, holds his first meeting on the subject of Iraq's WMDs with a dozen officials from the DIA. Marks is dismayed at the information he receives in the meeting, and angered by the DIA officials' marked lack of interest in the subject. The DIA gives him a highly classified database, the WMD Master Site List, of 946 sites in Iraq noted by one intelligence report or another as possible locations of chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons or weapons technology. The DIA hasn't decided what military units will be exploring those sites, and what will be done with WMDs if found. Marks knows that it is critically important that these sites be secured as soon as possible once US boots are on the ground in Iraq, even more important to the soldiers than to Bush. As Marks tells Bob Woodward, and Woodward paraphrases, "Bush might be staking his political capital [on finding the WMDs], but the troops were staking their lives." Marks cannot believe how little strong information the DIA has on the supposed WMDs. "We haven't done anything," one of them says, and tells Marks that it's the military's job, not theirs, to find out what exists where and decide what to do with the materials once found. Marks cannot even determine if the sites are prioritized by importance -- if Site #1 is more likely to have WMDs, or more dangerous WMDs, than Site #946. Marks and the DIA team finally hash out a list of 120 "high priority" sites. He later recalls, "I was shocked at the lack of detail," and realizes during the meeting that the Pentagon would be of little help in the operation. As he pores over the list, he realizes that the intelligence surrounding the information is sketchy at best. Satellite photos are five years old or older. Nothing conclusive exists for any of the sites. Woodward writes, "What Marks was confronting was a decade of intelligence blindness. In fact, he realized, of the 946 sites on the WMD site list, he couldn't say with confidence that there were any weapons of mass destruction or stockpiles at a single site. Not one." He wonders repeatedly over the next year, "Why are we the only guys doing this? I don't get it." (Bob Woodward)
October 4: Weapons experts and intelligence officials have serious doubts about the Bush administration's handling of dissent on intelligence, says a Knight Ridder report that is only picked up by a single American newspaper, Florida's Bradenton Herald. (The report is not currently available at its given URL.) It reads in part, "several senior administration and intelligence officials, all of whom spoke only on the condition of anonymity, charged that the decision to publicize one analysis of the aluminum tubes and ignore the other one is typical of the way the administration has been handling intelligence about Iraq. The White House and the Pentagon, these officials said, are pressuring intelligence analysts to highlight information that supports Bush's policy and suppress information and analysis that might undercut congressional, public, or international support for war." (Knight Ridder/Mother Jones)
October 4: The American captured with the Taliban in November 2001, John Walker Lindh, is sentenced in an American civil court to 20 years in prison for supplying his services to the Taliban. He apologized for fighting alongside the Taliban, saying, "had I realized then what I know now...I would never would have joined them." Lindh said Osama bin Laden is against Islam and that he "never understood jihad to mean anti-American or terrorism. ...I understand why so many Americans were angry when I was first discovered in Afghanistan. I realize many still are, but I hope in time that feeling will change." Lindh admits to working with al-Qaeda, but denies he ever took arms or participated in any violent actions against Americans or Israelis. He spent seven weeks in an al-Qaeda training camp in Kandahar, learning about weapons, studying maps, and receiving battlefield training, and was eventually captured by Afghan forces. He survived November's bloody prison riot in Mazar-e Sharif, was driven out of the prison by Northern Alliance troops, and turned over to US authorities. (CNN)
October 5: During a campaign appearance before the debate with Al Gore, Bush tells his audience, "In defiance of the United Nations, Iraq has stockpiled biological and chemical weapons, and is rebuilding the facilities used to make more of those weapons." No evidence of any of these "stockpiles" is in existence. (Bush on Iraq)
October 5: During a presidential debate with Al Gore, George W. Bush tells the Boston audience that he is for the continued funding of the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP), which provides assistance for poor consumers unable to pay their electric and gas bills during cold weather. Once Bush takes office, he will refuse to release $300 million already allocated for LIHEAP during the winter of 2003, condemning thousands to cope with the bitter Northeast winter without heat. The media will report, erroneously, that Bush will later relent and release $200 million in January 2003; in reality, the Senate will pass a bill that takes the discretionary funds away from Bush's control and mandates their release. Bush responds by releasing the funds (as required by law) and then issuing a press release that claims he does so voluntarily. (Molly Ivins and Lou Dubose)
October 6: Diplomatic efforts by the US to obtain the backing of France and Russia for a possible invasion of Iraq hinge on which nations get what kind of control over Iraqi oil resources after the Hussein regime is toppled. Both France and Russia have billion-dollar contracts with Baghdad for Iraqi oil, and fear that those contracts will be rendered null and void after the US overthrows the Hussein government. Both countries fear an "oil grab by Washington" if the US installs a puppet government to replace Hussein. The US's "predatory interest" in Iraqi oil is clear, and has been so since the Cheney Task Force's energy report of 2001 demanded a priority of ensuring American control of Persian Gulf oil reserves. In November, Ahmad Chalabi meets with members of three US oil multinationals to begin dividing Iraqi oil production facilities between them. British Petroleum (BP) complains that it is being "squeezed out" of any oil deals. Bush administration hawks are attempting this takeover as a part of their long-term plan to destroy OPEC, the international oil cartel, and replace it with American control over Persial Gulf oil. Bush advisor Larry Lindsey says that a successful overthrow of the Hussein regime will be good for American business and the American economy. An Israeli proposal would have the three US oil companies each controlling a separate region of Iraq's oil facilities, one in the Kurdish-controlled north, one in the Sunni region around Baghdad, and a third in the Shi'a-controlled south. (Observer/Guardian, Observer/Guardian)
October 6: Newsweek reports that the US has dropped hundreds of thousands of leaflets across Afghanistan offering $25 million for the capture of Taliban leader Mullah Omar and bin Laden. However, the picture of Omar is actually that of an Afghan villager named Mulvi Hafizullah, who is now afraid to leave his house for fear of being killed for the reward money. (CCR)
October 6: The CIA recommends that a reference to the Iraqi pursuit of African uranium be stricken from Bush's upcoming October 7 speech (see below). In its rationale, the CIA writes, "Three points: (1) The evidence is weak. One of the two mines cited by the source as the location of the uranium oxide is flooded. The other mine cited by the source is under the control of the French authorities. (2) The procurement is not particularly significant to Iraq's nuclear ambitions ecause the Iraqis already have a large stock of uranium oxide in their inventory. [This is true, but that uranium is under lock and seal by the UN and the IAEA.] And (3) we have shared points one and two with Congress, telling them that the Africa story is overblown and telling them this is one of the two issues where we differ with the British." Though Bush will not make the African uranium assertion in the October 7 speech -- he will in his January 2003 State of the Union address -- he does make explosive, and false, statements about Iraq's burgeoning nuclear program. (Frank Rich [PDF file])
October 6: 60 Minutes airs a program on the religious support for Bush's expansionist Middle Eastern policies. A Guardian editorial from around the same time suggests that "Christian millenarians" who are "driven by visions of messiahs and Armageddon" have formed an alliance with "secular, neoconservative Jewish intellectuals, such as Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz" and are strongly influencing Bush's foreign policy. A later Washington Post article also sees the support of evangelical Christians and right-wing Jewish groups as instrumental in defining US Middle East policy. Kevin Phillips writes in his 2004 examination of the Bush family, American Dynasty, that the Republican Party he once supported has changed drastically since the mid 1980s: "[T]here is [now] a Republican Party dangerously dominated by southern fundamentalists and evangelical constituencies, willing to blend biblical theology into US-Middle East policy and attach faith healers to the advisory structure of the US Food and Drug Administration." Phillips adds, noting the "dovetailing" of evangelical fundamentalist and corporate interests, "The fact is that any emergence of a US 'crusader state' stands to profit important economic interests even as it pleases religious fundamentalists." (CCR, Kevin Phillips)

Bush accuses Iraq of having a nuclear program

October 7: In a speech in Cincinnati to an audience of supporters bused in by his campaign managers, Bush says flatly that Iraq "possesses and produces chemical and biological weapons," that Hussein "is seeking nuclear weapons" and is "rebuilding facilities that it had used to produce chemical and biological weapons," warns, "The Iraqi dictator must not be permitted to threaten America and the world with horrible poisons and diseases and gases and atomic weapons," and goes on to warn, "Our smoking gun could come in the form of a mushroom cloud." (Condoleezza Rice will use the same "mushroom cloud" statement the same day in another speech. The warning has already become a linchpin of Bush administration rhetoric, and picked up on by media pundits.) The amount of misinformation and outright lies in this speech is staggering. He declaims about nonexistent unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) that could spread toxins or nuclear weapons over US land, cites Saddam's supposed association with al-Qaeda, saying, "We know that Iraq and al-Qaeda have had high-level contacts that go back a decade. Some al-Qaeda leaders who fled Afghanistan went to Iraq. These include one very senior al-Qaeda leader who received medical treatment in Baghdad this year, and who has been associated with planning for chemical and biological attacks. We've learned that Iraq has trained al-Qaeda members in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gases." Of course, these assertions are a mixture of overblown allegations and outright lies.
Bush says that the supposed alliance between Iraq and al-Qaeda "could allow the Iraqi regime to attack America without leaving any fingerprints. ...Iraq could decide on any given day to provide a biological or chemical weapon to a terrorist group or individual terrorists. ...Iraq has trained al-Qaeda members in bombmaking and poisons and deadly gases...[which] could allow the Iraqi regime to attack America without leaving any fingerprints." He says that answering the Iraqi threat is "crucial to winning the war on terror." In reality, the alleged al-Qaeda training camp, which Colin Powell will describe to the United Nations in February 2003, is later revealed to be in northern Iraq, an area outside of Hussein's control, and is patrolled by US and British warplanes. By late June 2003, Michael Chandler, the head of the UN team monitoring global efforts to counter al-Qaeda, tells Agence France Press: "We have never had information presented to us -- even though we've asked questions -- which would indicate that there is a direct link." State Department spokesman Richard Boucher will say, "secretary Powell provided clear and convincing evidence of the links between Iraq and al-Qaeda." Powell's evidence is false.
Bush continues, "The evidence indicates that Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program. ...Iraq has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes and other equipment needed for gas centrifuges, which are used to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons." He claims that "satellite photographs reveal that Iraq is rebuilding facilities at [past nuclear] sites," and cites Hussein's "numerous meetings with Iraqi nuclear scientists, a group he calls his 'nuclear muhajadeen,' his nuclear holy warriors," as further evidence that the program is being reconstituted, along with Iraq's attempts to buy high-strength aluminum tubes "needed" for centrifuges used to enrich uranium. "If the Iraqi regime is able to produce, buy, or steal an amount of highly enriched uranium a little larger than a single softball, it could have a nuclear weapon in less than a year.... Saddam Hussein would be in a position to pass nuclear technology to terrorists." Three months later, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) will report to the UN Security Council that two months of inspections in Iraq had found that no prohibited nuclear activities had taken place at former Iraqi nuclear sites. Bush ignores the reports and continues to make the charges well after this speech. Bush's warnings of Iraq's ballistic missile arsenal are similarly specious: "Iraq possesses ballistic missiles with a likely range of hundreds of miles -- far enough to strike Saudi Arabia, Israel, Turkey, and other nations -- in a region where more than 135,000 American civilians and service members live and work." The missiles possessed by Iraq will be verified by UN weapons inspectors as having a range of less than 200 miles, not nearly far enough to hit the targets Bush claims are vulnerable.
As noted in the paragraph above, Bush flatly asserts that "We know that Iraq and al-Qaeda have had high-level contacts that go back a decade." Combined with numerous comments from his vice president, Dick Cheney (who told a conference on December 2, 2002, that "[Hussein's] regime has had high-level contacts with al-Qaeda going back a decade and has provided training to al-Qaeda terrorists") and other top-level officials, the American people have been told straight out that Iraq and al-Qaeda have been working together since at least 1992. This is used as a prima facie justification for the invasion of Iraq. When questions begin to arise about the actual connections, or lack thereof, between Iraq and al-Qaeda, culminating (so far) in a September 2006 Senate report that proves outright that there were no connections whatsoever between al-Qaeda and the Hussein regime -- that in fact, the two were enemies -- Bush, Cheney, and others will simply deny that they ever made any such connections.
Bush also gives specifics about Iraq's supposed stockpile of biological and chemical weapons that are not based in any intelligence estimates: "[Iraq] possesses and produces chemical and biological weapons ...In 1995, after several years of deceit by the Iraqi regime, the head of Iraq's military industries defected. It was then that the regime was forced to admit that it had produced more than 30,000 liters of anthrax and other deadly biological agents. The inspectors, however, concluded that Iraq had likely produced two to four times that amount. This is a massive stockpile of biological weapons that has never been accounted for, and capable of killing millions." The defector from Iraq's military industries is regarded as unreliable by American intelligence. The information he provided about the anthrax is considered worthless. Bush also ignores the fact that any stockpiles of anthrax toxins from 1995 or earlier were long since degraded to the point of unusuability.
Bush also makes the baseless claim that "Iraq possesses ballistic missiles with a likely range of hundreds of miles -- far enough to strike Saudi Arabia, Israel, Turkey, and other nations -- in a region where more than 135,000 American civilians live and work." Combined with the specter of nuclear warheads he has already raised, the threat of such missiles is ominous indeed. Unfortunately, Iraq only possesses a small number of Al-Samoud 2 missiles, with a range far less than two hundred miles, nowhere near enough to reach the named targets.
In addition, he claims that Iraq can use the new unmanned aerial vehicles that it was developing to deliver WMDs to American targets: "We have also discovered through intelligence that Iraq has a growing fleet of manned and unmanned aerial vehicles that could be used to disperse chemical or biological weapons across broad areas. We are concerned that Iraq is exploring ways of using these UAVs for missions targeting the United States." In reality, the UAVs that Iraq possessed had ranges of less than 300 miles, making it impossible for Saddam to use them to strike Tel Aviv, much less America; worse, the UAV program had not made it out of the initial conceptional stages. About these claims, an editorial writer for the Guardian writes, "since when has it been the proper function of an American president to scare the children? But with his claim that Iraq might use unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for biological and chemical weapons attacks "targeting the United States," he strayed into the realms of horror-movie fantasy;"
Bush also says that Iraq had tried to undermine and thwart the UN weapons inspectors from the outset, and had been remarkably successful in doing so, charges that are not true. Bush claims, without fact to back him up, that Iraq had continually spied on the inspectors: "The Iraqi regime bugged hotel rooms and offices to find where they were going next." In reality, though many inspectors believed that the Ba'athists were trying to spy on them, no evidence of any such spying exists. What is known is that the UNSCOM teams were infiltrated with CIA agents who were spying on the inspectors for the US.
As the speech concludes, Bush does not directly advocate a military invasion of Iraq, but he dismisses any other options. He calls on Congress "to authorize the use of America's military" and notes that both chambers of Congress are "nearing a historic vote." The audience rewards Bush's lies and belligerence with a two-minute standing ovation.
Bush fails to mention the plethora of dissents, caveats, and contradictions that plague the NIE, the basis for his speech's allegations.
One claim that does not make it into Bush's speech is the allegation that Iraq has attempted to buy weapons-grade uranium from Niger, a story that has by now been thoroughly discredited. CIA director George Tenet, reviewing the text of the speech two days before, asked that the reference be removed. Bush officials hold onto it, though, and spring it on a credulous public in the January 2003 State of the Union address. Originally, speechwriters John Gibson and Michael Gerson had written that Iraq "had been caught attempting to purchase up to 500 metric tons of uranium oxide from Africa," a claim not even found in the NIE, which made dubious reference to the Niger allegation. Lower-level CIA officials had the reference struck from earlier drafts, only to find it cropping up again and again. Finally, Tenet had to personally intervene with Hadley to get the reference out. This would be the fourth time in less than a month that the CIA had warned senior White House officials about the allegation. But, as noted, it would finally appear in the State of the Union speech less than three months later.
The CIA attempted to purge Bush's speech of some of its more specious claims, and succeeded in purging one sentence asserting that Iraq had attempted to buy weapons-grade uranium from Niger. "You need to take this f*cking sentence out because we don't believe it," CIA director George Tenet tells Rice's deputy Stephen Hadley. Instead, Bush tells his listeners, "Many people have asked how close Saddam Hussein is to developing a nuclear weapon. Well, we don't know exactly, and that's the problem." The equivocation fits more closely with the latest National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq's WMDs, issued just five days before, which stated that it is unlikely that Iraq has any nuclear weapons program to speak of. But Bush and his speechwriters choose to use far more alarming language to imply that a nuclear threat exists in spite of the best intelligence estimates.
The speech is the final element of the sophisticated, well-orchestrated marketing campaign conducted by the White House to sell the war to Congress and the American people. Congress was in line already -- the alternative Biden-Lugar proposal (see above) had been defeated, Republicans were firmly behind Bush, and Democrats were either supportive of the war, too worried about looking soft on terrorism, or marginalized -- antiwar "fringe" elements. For days in advance, Gibson had worked, as per his orders, to load up the speech with as much ammo as possible. He made sure the speech contained every alarming element the CIA would let him put in, whether there was any support or not. The Niger element went in because Gibson found it referenced in the October 1 NIE; chief speechwriter Gerson signed off on it. (As noted above, Tenet had it stricken from the final draft.) Gerson and Gibson also wanted to have Bush say that only one canister of Saddam's chemical agents could wipe out the entire population of New York City, or another American metropolis. Again, the CIA balked, and that line was also removed.
Days before the speech, White House communications aide Adam Levine was invited to the Situation Room by Condoleezza Rice to review hundreds of surveillance photographs, supposedly giving photographic proof of Hussein's WMDs, and select some for simultaneous release along with the speech. Levine is a marketing and communications specialist, not an intelligence expert, so he is looking for photos with "bite" or "punch" that will alarm a credulous population. Levine found one, a nicely detailed shot of an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) of the type that Bush officials assert could be used in a bioweapons or chemical weapons attack on US soil. But Levine, peering closer, notes that the insignia on the UAV is not Iraqi. It is Czechoslovakian. When he asked what significance a Czech UAV has towards Iraq's WMD programs, he is told that it signifies nothing -- it's just a good picture of a UAV that might be like the ones Iraq possesses. Levine is appalled. All of the more recent shots are similar -- shots that prove nothing. The aerial photos could be of anything. The weapons sites shots are pre-1998, and are of sites neutralized by UN inspectors. "Oh my God," Levine recalls thinking, "I hope this isn't all we have. We've got to have better stuff than this."
"Although Bush invoked 'clear evidence of peril,'" writes Mark Crispin Miller, "his speech presented none, implying that his claims alone were 'evidence.' Every statement that he made was either dubious or demonstrably untrue, and yet the press was largely deferential." The rightist press celebrates the speech -- "Case Closed," proclaims an article in the National Review -- while the mainstream media repeats Bush's allegations and lies without question, with a few timidly saying that Bush presented "nothing new" or spending its time analyzing Bush's tone and speculating on the effect the speech would have on the American public. (CNN's Connie Chung bluntly attacks Democrat Mike Thompson for questioning the validity of some of Bush's assertions.) All in all, Bush's speech is a farrago of lies, unfounded assumptions, and misleading statements, but it has its desired effect -- four days later, Congress votes overwhelmingly to grant Bush the authority to make war on Iraq.
Political satirist Al Franken sums up the transparent effort to breed fear in American voters thusly: "Fortunately, the 2002 midterm elections were only a month away. Frightened Americans had an opportunity to manage their mortal fear by voting Republican and electing senators like Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, Jim Talent of Missouri, Elizabeth Dole of North Carolina, John Sununu of New Hampshire, and my personal favorite, Norm Coleman of Minnesota." (White House [text of speech] Democratic Underground, CNN, The New Republic, Shepherd-Express, Washington Post, TomPaine, Washington Post, Guardian, Bush on Iraq, Mother Jones, Laura Flanders, David Corn, Peter Singer, Mark Crispin Miller, Salon/Eric Alterman and Mark Green, Al Franken, Bob Woodward, Michael Isikoff and David Corn, Frank Rich p.61)
October 7: The day of Bush's speech, CIA Director George Tenet releases a statement that says, "[The CIA possesses] solid reporting of senior-level contacts between Iraq and al-Qaeda going back a decade." Bush will echo this statement in his speech. In reality, intelligence agencies knew of tentative contacts between Saddam and al-Qaeda in the early '90s, but found no proof of a continuing relationship. Bush and Tenet deliberately misinterpret the data to say far more than it suggests. (See October 1-4 item above.) (Shepherd-Express)
October 7: The CIA releases a threat assessment of Iraq to Congress; it judges the likelihood of Iraq attacking the United States without provocation as "low" but rising dramatically if the US prepared for a preemptive strike. "In other words," writes columnist Sam Parry, "Bush's strategy might touch off precisely the nightmare scenario that he says he is countering." (Consortium News)
October 8: George Bush says, "A military option is my last choice, the last choice." Note by this time, Bush had long since committed to attacking Iraq. (White House/Doug Long)
October 8: During a hearing of the Senate Intelligence Committee, chairman Bob Graham reads from a letter sent to him by CIA director George Tenet. The letter reads, in part, "Baghdad for now appears to be drawing a line short of conducting terrorist attacks with conventional or CBW [chemical or biological weapons] against the United States." According to Tenet, the CIA believes, "should Saddam conclude that a US-led attack [against Iraq] could no longer be deterred, he probably would become much less constrained in adopting terrorist actions. ...Sadda, might decide that the extreme step of assisting Islamist terrorists in conducting a WMD attack against the United States would be his last chance to exact vengeance by taking a large number of victims with him." The letter also refers to an October 2 exchange between a CIA official and Senate democrat Carl Levin, when Levin asked the official, "If [Saddam] didn't feel threatened...is it likely that he would initiate an attack using a weapons of mass destruction?" The official replied, "My judgment would be that the probability of him initiating an attack -- let me put a time frame on it -- in the foreseeable future, given the conditions we understand now, the likelihood I think would be low." In other words, the threat assessment Bush is providing Americans is exactly the reverse of what the CIA believes: that Iraq will not attack the US, or cooperate with terrorist attacks upon American targets, unless attacked first. (David Corn)
October 8: Senior military and intelligence officials and diplomats are privately expressing severe doubts about the administration's relentless march towards war with Iraq. Knight-Ridder reports that "a growing number of military officers, intelligence professionals and diplomats in his own government privately have deep misgivings about the administration's double-time march toward war. These officials charge that administration hawks have exaggerated evidence of the threat that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein poses -- including distorting his links to the al-Qaeda terrorist network -- have overstated the amount of international support for attacking Iraq and have downplayed the potential repercussions of a new war in the Middle East. They charge that the administration squelches dissenting views and that intelligence analysts are under intense pressure to produce reports supporting the White House's argument that Saddam poses such an immediate threat to the United States that pre-emptive military action is necessary. 'Analysts at the working level in the intelligence community are feeling very strong pressure from the Pentagon to cook the intelligence books,' said one official, speaking on condition of anonymity." A dozen other officials agree with this assessment; none dispute it. "None of the dissenting officials, who work in a number of different agencies, would agree to speak publicly, out of fear of retribution. But many of them have long experience in the Middle East and South Asia, and all spoke in similar terms about their unease with the way that US political leaders are dealing with Iraq."
Two days later, current and former administration officials reveal to London's Guardian that US officials such as Cheney and Rumsfeld are deliberately distorting and falsifying intelligence analyses of Iraq's weapons programs and connections, or lack of connections, to Islamic terrorist organizations in order to justify their plans for war. "Basically, cooked information is working its way into high-level pronouncements and there's a lot of unhappiness about it in intelligence, especially among analysts at the CIA," says Vincent Cannistraro, the CIA's former head of counter-intelligence. The controversy over the "aluminum tubes" supposedly to be used for nuclear weapons construction is particularly bitter. David Albright, a physicist and former UN weapons inspector who was consulted on the purpose of the aluminium tubes, says it is anything but clear that the tubes were intended for a uranium centrifuge. Albright says, "There's a catfight going on about this right now. On one side you have most of the experts on gas centrifuges. On the other you have one guy sitting in the CIA." Albright says skeptics at the Energy Department's Lawrence Livermore Laboratory have been ordered to keep their doubts to themselves. He quotes a colleague at the laboratory as saying: "The administration can say what it wants and we are expected to remain silent." Cannistraro says the flow of intelligence to the top levels of the administration has been deliberately skewed by hawks at the Pentagon. "CIA assessments are being put aside by the defence department in favor of intelligence they are getting from various Iraqi exiles," he says. "Machiavelli warned princes against listening to exiles. Well, that is what is happening now." (Knight-Ridder, Guardian, Mother Jones)
October 8: Senator Jim Jeffords, a former Republican who switched to being an independent and who caucuses with the Democrats, releases a statement that says, "I am very disturbed by President Bush's determination that the threat from Iraq is so severe and so immediate that we must rush to a military solution. I do not see it that way. ...I have heard nothing that convinces me that an immediate preemptive military strike is necessary or that it would further our interests in the long term." (Jim Jeffords)
October 8: At a campaign luncheon in Knoxville, Tennessee, Bush gushes about his close friendship with openly gay Republican mayor Victor Ashe. Bush says in part, "I want to thank my old college classmate -- you used to call him Bulldog, we call him Victor -- the Mayor of Knoxville, Mayor Victor Ashe." "Bulldog" is not only the same nickname as gay prostitute and Bush journalistic shill James Guckert (who writes under the pseudonym Jeff Gannon), but a nickname for practicioners of particularly aggressive gay sex. (Roedy Green)

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THIS FAR AND NO FURTHER

A Timeline of Events Surrounding the Radical Right's Attempt to Subvert American Democracy

Written and Compiled by Black Max

2002:

October

Forged documents purporting to show Iraq's attempt to purchase African uranium surface, are debunked, and are used by Bush officials to "prove" Iraq's nuclear ambitions

Bush accuses Iraq of having a nuclear program

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