THIS FAR AND NO FURTHER

Written and Compiled by Black Max

2002: September

Page Two

 

• September 10: Former South African prime minister Nelson Mandela condemns the US as a tremendous threat to world peace: "The United States has made serious mistakes in the conduct of its foreign affairs, which have had unfortunate repercussions long after the decisions were taken. Unqualified support of the Shah of Iran led directly to the Islamic revolution of 1979. Then the United States chose to arm and finance the [Islamic] mujahedin in Afghanistan instead of supporting and encouraging the moderate wing of the government of Afghanistan. That is what led to the Taliban in Afghanistan. But the most catastrophic action of the United States was to sabotage the decision that was painstakingly stitched together by the United Nations regarding the withdrawal of the Soviet Union from Afghanistan. If you look at those matters, you will come to the conclusion that the attitude of the United States of America is a threat to world peace. Because what [America] is saying is that if you are afraid of a veto in the Security Council, you can go outside and take action and violate the sovereignty of other countries. That is the message they are sending to the world. That must be condemned in the strongest terms. And you will notice that France, Germany Russia, China are against this decision. It is clearly a decision that is motivated by George W. Bush's desire to please the arms and oil industries in the United States of America." Mandela cites an article that posits Dick Cheney as the "real president" of the US: "I don't know how true that is. Dick Cheney, [Defense Secretary Donald] Rumsfeld, they are people who are unfortunately misleading the president. Because my impression of the president is that this is a man with whom you can do business. But it is the men who around him who are dinosaurs, who do not want him to belong to the modern age. The only man, the only person who wants to help Bush move to the modern era is Gen. Colin Powell, the secretary of State. ...Quite clearly we are dealing with an arch-conservative in Dick Cheney." (Newsweek/MSNBC)
• September 10: Two Democratic candidates, Janet Reno and Bill MacBride, vie for their party's nomination for governor, the winner to challenge Jeb Bush in November for the governorship. Reno, the former attorney general for the Clinton administration, is considered a far more formidable challenger for Bush than the mild-mannered, centrist MacBride. The election is a hash, largely because of tremendous problems with the new ES&S touch-screen voting machines being used in 12 counties, including the huge Miami-Dade and Broward counties. Because of machine problems, many polls in Miami-Dade open late. (In one precinct, residential contractor and volunteer poll monitor Keith Hartley works single-handedly to get the machines up and running after clerks give up trying.) A plethora of problems with the new machines manifest themselves. Some machines fail to record a single vote; in total, at least 1500 votes cast vanish without a trace. In Broward, dozens of poll workers had quit the night before, frustrated beyond tolerance by the machines. Polls in Broward County also open late; at least 34 precincts turn away voters because of huge delays. As in Miami-Dade, the results are scrambled and unreliable. Of 1.3 million votes cast, MacBride wins an initial victory by less than 8,000 votes. As reports of irregularities flood in, Reno demands a statewide recount, but is told by the state that she is too late. Even though "final" tallies from Miami-Dade and Broward shave MacBride's margin of victory to less than 4,000 votes, Reno grudgingly concedes, leaving MacBride to face Bush in November.
• The ACLU helps form a coalition, the Miami-Dade Election Reform Coalition (MDERC), with the goal of making Miami-Dade's voting fair and functional; among its achievements are its success in getting international vote monitors into Florida for the November 2002 elections. MDERC head Lida Rodriguez-Taseff insists that, despite criticisms of the organization from Governor Jeb Bush's administration, her organization -- or rather, her umbrella of loosely affiliated organizations -- is relentlessly non-partisan. "There's a certain purity to what we do that makes us successful," she explains. "It leads to really unrigorous thinking when people are willing to polarize and say that this party is stealing the election from that party. Al Gore got everything coming to him [in November 2000] because he did nothing to ensure every vote was counted. He didn't care about counting every vote. He just wanted to win." One of its first battles was to replace GOP courtesan Steve Leahy as the county's supervisor of elections. Leahy ramrods Chicago elections specialist Constance Kaplan into the position, but MDERC works to inform Kaplan of the realities of her new position, including the sweetheart deals Miami-Dade has made with voting machine manufacturers such as ES&S and the fact that the machines, in violation of state law, are incapable of providing for a recount if needed. As the November elections stand, MDERC has an uneasy relationship with Kaplan, but is cautiously hopeful that those elections will stand up to scrutiny. (Vanity Fair/Make Them Accountable, Miami New Times)
• September 10: Historian Phillip Zelikow, a member of the 2000 Bush/Cheney transition team, a colleague of Condoleezza Rice, and the future head of the "independent" 9/11 investigative commission, tells an audience at the University of Virginia that the best reason for the US to invade Iraq is the defense of Israel. "Why would Iraq attack America or use nuclear weapons against us?" Zelikow asks. "I'll tell you what I think the real threat is and actually has been since 1990 -- it's the threat against Israel." Zelikow goes on to say that such a threat "dare not speak its name" because it is not a "popular sell" in Europe. (Asia Times/Buzzflash)
• September 10 - 11: Would-be hijacker Ramzi bin al-Shibh is arrested after a huge gunfight in Karachi, Pakistan, involving thousands of police. He is considered "a high-ranking operative for al-Qaeda and one of the few people still alive who know the inside details of the 9/11 plot." Khalid Shaikh Mohammed called bin al-Shibh "the coordinator of the Holy Tuesday [9/11] operation" in an interview aired days before. Captured with him are approximately nine associates, as well as numerous computers, phones, and other evidence. There are conflicting claims that bin al-Shibh is arrested in Pakistan, is killed in the raid, is shot while escaping, someone who looks like him is killed, leading to initial misidentification, someone matching his general appearance is captured, or that he narrowly escapes capture but his young children are captured. (CCR, Michael Scheuer)

• September 11: The Bush administration uses the anniversary of the WTC attacks to pump up public support for an invasion of Iraq. The opening salvo comes a few days before, with a leak to Judith Miller and Michael Gordon of the New York Times regarding the aluminum tubes. Miller and Gordon reported that, according to administration officials, Iraq had been trying to buy tubes specifically designed as "components of centrifuges to enrich uranium" for nuclear weapons. Cheney, Rumsfeld, and national security adviser Condoleezza Rice appear on the political talk shows to trumpet the discovery of the tubes and the Iraqi nuclear threat. Rice explains, "There will always be some uncertainty about how quickly [Saddam] can acquire nuclear weapons. But we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud." Rumsfeld added, "Imagine a September eleventh with weapons of mass destruction. It's not three thousand -- it's tens of thousands of innocent men, women, and children." Intelligence personnel are appalled at the statements: "You had senior American officials like Condoleezza Rice saying the only use of this aluminum really is uranium centrifuges. She said that on television. And that's just a lie." David Albright, of the Institute for Science and International Security, recalls, "I became dismayed when a knowledgeable government scientist told me that the administration could say anything it wanted about the tubes while government scientists who disagreed were expected to remain quiet." Miller and Gordon's story relies solely on administration sources, and fails to note the IAEA's counter-statement that Iraq has no viable nuclear program. Months later, numerous congressional representatives cite the stories of Iraq's supposed nuclear threat as a reason for voting to authorize war.
• Albright is outraged with Miller and Gordon's blanket statements about the aluminum tubes. Miller had called him before the story's publication for comment, but Albright had been out of town. He returns Miller's call the day after the story hit the front page, telling Miller that it is important for the Times to set the record straight. Most scientists believe the aluminum tubes are not for nuclear weapons developments, Albright informs Miller, and the Times story is deceptive. Miller tells Albright that Gordon, not herself, is the source of the allegation. But she will pass along Albright's concerns to her editors, and a follow-up story will be written.
• A follow-up story is indeed written, and published on September 13. This story, by Miller and Gordon, leaves Albright aghast. It is worse than the first. The article reproduces the allegations from the September 12 WHIG white paper (see item below), itself sourced in part from articles by Gordon and Miller. While this article reports that there have been "debates among intelligence experts about Iraq's intentions in trying to buy such tubes," it goes on to say that "it was the intelligence agencies' unanimous view that the type of tubes that Iraq has been seeking are used to make such centrifuges," a flat lie. The article calls the dissent over the tubes "a minority view among intelligence experts and...the CIA had wide support, particularly among the government's top technical experts and nuclear scientists." According to the story, hurriedly put together primarily by Miller, "the best technical experts and nuclear scientists at laboratories like Oak Ridge supported the CIA assessment," another lie. (According to the Senate Intelligence Committee's later report, "the vast majority of scientists and nuclear experts at the DOE and the National Labs did not agree with the CIA's analysis.") Albright is beside himself. The reporters, relying solely on administration sources, have gotten it wrong again. Worse, the disclosure in the article about the dispute over the tubes leads to an Energy Department edict to its scientists for them to keep quiet to the media about their questions. As reporters Michael Isikoff and David Corn write in 2006, "The order sent fear throughout the department's nuclear laboratories. It prevented scientists who could see that the White House was exploting [CIA analyst] Joe Turner's incorrect assessment from countering the misguided intelligence." (Turner's rogue assessment of the tubes' nuclear purpose is discussed at length in items below.)
• Albright persuades DOE consultant Houston Wood, skittish because of the DOE edict, to talk on background to the Washington Post about his dissent from Turner's assessment of the purpose of the tubes. Albright himself gives Post reporter Jody Warrick a draft report on the tubes prepared by his organization, the Institute for Science and International Security, calling the tubes' assessment into question. Warrick indeed writes a balanced and measured story about the disagreement over the tubes, but the story is buried deep inside the Post's pages, and does little to counter the storm of anger and fear generated by the Times. Warrick's story does not appear until September 19, the same day the White House sends a draft resolution to Congress authorizing Bush to use military force against Iraq. One of the reasons cited for the authorization, according to the resolution, is that Iraq is "actively seeking a nuclear weapons capability." (The New Republic, Washington Post, Institute for Science and International Security, Dissident Voice, Amy and David Goodman, Michael Isikoff and David Corn)
• September 11: Bush gives a carefully written and orchestrated speech commemorating the first anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, given on Ellis Island and broadcast against a dramatic backdrop of the backlit Statue of Liberty. The official story is that Ellis Island was chosen over Governors Island because of its historic significance; the reality is that Bush's PR team chose Ellis Island because camera angles would highlight the Statue of Liberty behind Bush. The PR team is headed by former ABC News producer Scott Sforza, former Fox News producer Greg Jenkins, and former NBC cameraman Bob DeServi, who positions three barges' worth of stadium lights for the speech. (The same team is responsible for the summer's shoot at Mount Rushmore, where TV crews were carefully positioned so that their camera shots would merge Bush's countenance with the four carven presidents' visages.)
• The speech, co-written by Michael Gerson and Karen Hughes and "tweaked" by Bush, is designed not only to commemorate the tragedy of 9/11, but to lay the groundwork for the adminstration's push for war against Iraq. In the speech, a grim Bush tells listeners, "We will not allow any terrorist or tyrant to threaten civilization with weapons of mass murder." Having laid the groundwork with this speech and with rampant claims of proof that Iraq is building nuclear weapons, the next step is to win the approval of the United Nations. Bush begins this chore on September 12.
• While putting the finishing touches on the next speech, slated to be given to the UN, assistant speechwriter John Gibson receives a call from Gerson, who himself has just gotten off the phone with White House communications director Dan Bartlett. They have just received a new piece of intelligence that might be worked into the speech, Gerson tells Gibson; if not, they should leak it to the New York Times. (Interesting that the White House recognizes that so-called bastion of "liberal journalism" a fine target for their leaks.) Gerson tells Gibson to call Robert Joseph, an NSC aide who handles many of Bush's national security-related speeches. Saddam Hussein has been caught trying to purchase a massive quantity of yellowcake uranium from Africa, Joseph tells Gibson, most likely for the development of a nuclear bomb. Gibson adds the following to the speech: "And we also know this: within the past few years, Iraq has resumed efforts to obtain large quantities of a type of uranium oxide known as yellowcake, which is an essential ingredient of this [uranium enrichment] process. The regime was caught trying to purchase 500 metric tons of this material. It takes about 10 tons to produce enough enriched uranium for a single nuclear weapon." The CIA approves the statement, asking only that Gibson add the words "up to" in front of the "500 metric tons" phrase. But the CIA quickly backs down from its approval. The information comes from a single foreign source, it says, and isn't confirmed. It isn't solid enough for a presidential speech. Joseph tells Gibson to strike the reference, and he does. Bush does not make the uranium reference in the speech, but he will include it in his January 2003 State of the Union address. (White House/Mother Jones, Michael Isikoff and David Corn, Frank Rich p.57)
• September 11: A member of the so-called "Lackawanna Six," a purported al-Qaeda cell operating out of Buffalo, New York, is arrested while traveling in Bahrain; the announcement is splashed over the news in time for the evening news broadcasts. The man is arrested because he uses the word "wedding" in e-mails, a term often interpreted as al-Qaeda code for attacks. The FBI knows that the man, whose name is not revealed, is in Bahrain for an actual wedding, but the word comes down from the White House to arrest him as part of its marketing campaign for war with Iraq. The FBI has been holding off on arresting him and his colleagues, feeling that they pose no imminent threat and tracking them in hopes that they might lead them to more important targets, but the White House order, apparently originating with Dick Cheney, foils their plans. The man reveals under interrogation that he had once met Osama bin Laden in a terrorist training camp, and that he did so with the other men from the Buffalo/Lackawanna area; the FBI quickly arrests the rest of his "cell." (Mother Jones)
• September 12: Bush calls Iraq a "grave and gathering danger" to the US and its allies. In an address to the UN General Assembly, Bush states, "Right now, Iraq is expanding and improving facilities that were used for the production of biological weapons. ...Our greatest fear is that terrorists will find a shortcut to their mad ambitions when an outlaw regime supplies them with the technologies to kill on a massive scale," he says. "In one place, in one regime, we find all these dangers in their most lethal and aggressive forms, exactly the kind of aggressive threat the United Nations was born to confront." He claims that the US has proof that Hussein is collaborating with Islamist terrorists such as al-Qaeda to supply those groups with horrific weapons of mass destruction. He exhorts the UN to take action against Iraq, and warns that if the UN doesn't do so, the US is prepared to move against Iraq itself. "By heritage and by choice, the United States of America will make that stand," Bush says. "And delegates to the United Nations, you have the power to make that stand as well. ...Will the United Nations serve the purpose of its founding, or will it be irrelevant?" UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan declares his opposition to a unilateral US strike.
• During the speech, which Bush reads from a teleprompter, he makes one notable gaffe. Both Colin Powell and British prime minister Tony Blair have been pushing Bush and his more unilateralist officials, particularly Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, to gain the support of the UN and make the invasion of Iraq a multinational affair. Though Cheney and his staff are openly contemptuous of the idea of "appeasing" the UN and Blair (who needs the multinational agreement to placate his rebellious populace), the final draft of Bush's speech contains a sentence stating the US will seek a new Security Council resolution. However, to ensure against leaks, the sentence had been omitted from copies distributed to most staffers and agencies for review. And at the UN, a staffer had inserted the wrong draft into the teleprompter, a draft omitting the key sentence. Bush reads the speech as it flashes onscreen, and does not state that the US will seek the resolution, though he catches the error and ad-libs, "We will work with the UN for the necessary resolutions." Even the ad-lib is wrong; the idea is to ask for a single resolution, not multiple ones. After the speech, Bush tongue-lashes his staff over the omission.
• Bush's speech to the UN is part of a coordinated PR effort to swing the opinions of the UN and of the American citizenry behind his intent to invade Iraq. (See related items throughout this page and throughout this site.) (White House, US Department of Defense, CBS News, Reuters/ABC News/Awesome Library, FactMonster, (MidEast Web, Michael Isikoff and David Corn)
• September 12: A White House white paper entitled "A Decade of Deception and Defiance" alleges that a "highly secret terrorist training facility in Iraq known as Salman Pak" exists near Baghdad, and was used to train Iraqi and non-Iraqi Arabs in hijacking planes and trains, planting explosives in urban centers, sabotage, and assassinations. No such evidence of any such training camp has ever been found, though one source, an Iraqi defector named Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri (the source for Judith Miller's sensational New York Times reports), is later taken to Iraq, where he is unable to identify a single location. The CIA has noted that al-Haideri has already failed a polygraph test and is considered unreliable. Worse, al-Haideri is another product of the Iraqi National Congress, a group led by the elegantly corrupt and completely untrustworthy Ahmad Chalabi; State Department Iraqi expert Wayne White said of Chalabi after spending an evening with him, that Chalabi, "despite all his so-called winning charm," is no more than "a clever used-car salesman."
• The white paper is produced by the White House Iraq Group, and compiled by Jim Wilkinson, a former congressional staffer and deputy to White House communications chief Karen Hughes. The paper cobbles together every allegation against Saddam Hussein, both fact and fiction, and is largely put together from public sources. One White House staffer sees it as a "spin job" that makes no effort to distinguish credible allegations from speculation and fabrication. Aside from the Salman Pak tale, the paper portrays Iraq as a storehouse of banned weapons. But most of the "proof" of the WMD stores comes from the early 1990s, and Wilkinson leaves out the subsequent documentation showing that those weapons stores were destroyed by UN inspection teams.
• The paper also reports that Iraq is developing mobile biological weapons labs, an allegation not previously reported to the public, and without naming any source. The now-infamous allegations of the aluminum tubes for nuclear weapons development are included, pulled almost word for word from the New York Times article by Michael Gordon and Judith Miller published days before (see above item).
• Al-Haideri and fellow defector Sabah Khalifa Khodada al-Lami, the primary sources for the Salman Pak allegation, are both products of Ahmad Chalabi's INC propaganda effort (see the June 26 item above). The INC brought Khodada, who claims to have worked at Salman Pak, to the US after 9/11 with the help of an influential friend, former CIA director James Woolsey, who is representing -- pro bono -- INC exiles in deportation proceedings, and whose law firm, Shea & Gardner, is lobbying for the INC. After Khodada tells Woolsey about the Salman Pak training camp, Woolsey arranges for Khodada to speak with his highly placed neoconservative friends in the Pentagon. Asked later about any attempts to verify Khodada's lurid tale, Woolsey simply replies, "That's not my problem." Meanwhile, INC lobbyists Francis Brooke and Zaab Sethna are escorting Khodada to one newspaper after another. Brooke later tells a Vanity Fair reporter that the INC's overall plan is to provide the Bush administration cause for invading Iraq and overthrowing Saddam Hussein. Propaganda and misinformation is a large and effective part of that plan. "I told [the INC] as their campaign manager, 'Go get me a terrorist and some WMD, because that's what the Bush administration is interested in.'" The secondary objective is to get Chalabi named by the US as Hussein's successor.
• Before long, Khodada's false revelations are appearing in columns and articles in, among other media outlets, the Washington Post, the New York Times, and as a key item in a PBS Frontline documentary, the last of which promulgates the fiction that Salman Pak's training program was "directed towards attacking American targets" and the 9/11 operation was "conducted by people who were trained by Saddam." But Khodada's sensational allegations have no support from other sources. US officials believe that Salman Pak, a real military facility that houses a derelict Boeing 707 aircraft, is used for counterterrorism training -- training Iraqi soldiers to respond to a terrorist hijacking. This is, of course, the exact opposite of what Khodada is asserting. Soon after, according to Sethna, the INC cuts off ties with Khodada after the defector begins demanding money for his information. But the damage has already been done.
• Al-Haideri's story is equally fantastical. His claim is that he has personally visited clandestine facilities for the production of chemical, biological, and even nuclear weapons in Iraq. Al-Haideri is spirited out of Damascus by the INC in mid-2001, and flown to Thailand, where the INC contacts the Pentagon with news that they have landed a "big fish." "This guy is the mother lode," a DIA officer tells Sethna, "and if even 5% of what he says turns out to be right, then we have hit the jackpot." Unfortunately, even after days of intensive preparation with Sethna, al-Haideri flunks the CIA's polygraph test, with the tester judging al-Haideri's statements "replete with deception." He concludes that al-Haideri has fabricated his entire tale. But Chalabi and Sethna aren't done. They contact journalists Paul Moran, an Australian freelancer who had worked with the INC and with the secretive conservative-aligned PR firm the Rendon Group, and the ever-reliable Judith Miller of the Times. Miller in particular gives the INC the kind of widespread, believable exposure they need to promote their agenda; for their part, Miller and the Times are eager to print such material.
• One editor at the Times describes executive editor Howell Raines as "maniacal" after the 9/11 attacks, demanding that his paper be first and best in covering the attacks and anything related to them. Getting repeatedly scooped by the Washington Post sends Raines over the top. Investigative editor Stephen Engelberg comes out of one meeting with Raines and says to a deputy, "Is this literally that personal, that Howell views this as 'You're f*cking up my place in hostory'?" Another Times reporter later says that there is a "lethal combination of ambition, anger, and mania [at the Times]. A line that runs from Howell to Judy Miller." Raines, a believer in the "star system" of reporting, sends Miller to Washington. "She has people in the White House who will talk to her and who will not talk to any other Times reporters," Raines explains. Raines means, of course, the INC and neocons in Washington. Miller has long been a source of controversy, with an unusual amount of free rein and a propensity to socialize with her sources. Former undersecretary of state Richard Burr calls Miller "an unguided missile." Widely considered a disaster in her brief stint as Washington bureau deputy editor due to her abrasive manner and heavy-handed management style, she co-authored a best-selling quickie paperback on Hussein and the Gulf War crisis with discredited neoconservative academic Laurie Mylroie in 1990 and a later book on the rise of Muslim fundamentalism.
• In early 2001, she had co-written a three-part series on the rising threat of al-Qaeda that had won a Pulitzer Prize, but co-author Craig Pyes pulled his name from the second and third articles in the series because of his disgust with Miller's fast-and-loose journalistic style. Pyes tried to alert editors that Miller was relying too much on unconfirmed information from US intelligence sources, and wrote in one e-mail that "secret single source intel info that runs counter to the stated facts is nothing I hope we'd rely on." In a note to Engelberg, Pyes wrote of Miller, "I do not trust her work, her judgment, or her conduct. She is an advocate, and her actions threaten the integrity of the enterprise, and of everyone who works with her.... She has turned in a draft of a story...that is little more than dictation from government sources over several days, filled with unproven assertions and factual inaccuracies, which she then called the product of a year's investigation. Once she submitted the story...she then, as is her wont, tried to stampede it into the paper. This exact paradigm...has been her MO from day one." But Times editors refused to listen. Pyes later says that it is "absolute hubris" for the Times editors to believe they can compensate for Miller's faults with effective editing: "Ultimately, the editor is a hostage of the judgments of the reporter."
• After the 9/11 attacks, Miller becomes the perfect outlet for INC-sourced propaganda. In December 2001, the INC contacted her about al-Haideri, and she flew to Thailand to interview the exile. Days later, Miller succeeded in getting several sensational stories based on al-Haideri's tales on the front page of the Times. According to Miller, al-Haideri had personally helped renovate secret facilities in Iraq for biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons. She wrote that his account "gives new clues abuot the types and possible locations of illegal laboratories, facilities and storage sites that American officials and international inspectors have long suspected Iraq of trying to hide." She conceded that "there was no means to independently verify" al-Haideri's allegations, but he should be trusted because "he seemed familiar with key Iraqi officials in the military establishment, with many facilities previously thought to be associated with unconventional weapons, and with Iraq itself." Also, she wrote, an unnamed INC associate says he trusts al-Haideri, and unnamed government sources, whom she does not identify or characterize, "said his information seemed reliable and significant." That should be verification enough. Engelberg later says the Times had no idea al-Haideri had flunked his lie detector test. Miller doesn't seem concerned that she is a linchpin of an INC/White House propaganda effort. And her stories are perfect for use in Wilkinson's WHIG paper. (Mother Jones, Amy Goodman and David Goodman, Michael Isikoff and David Corn
• September 12: Independent experts challenge the US assessment that a stockpile of aluminum tubes found by UN weapons inspectors is evidence of an Iraqi nuclear program. The report, issued by the Institute for Science and International Security, also contends that the administration is trying to quiet dissent among its own analysts over how to interpret the evidence. Most experts, including DOE experts who are perhaps the most qualified to judge, have said that the aluminum tubes cannot be linked with nuclear research. Says David Albright of the Institute for Science and International Security, "For over a year and a half, an analyst at the CIA has been pushing the aluminum tube story, despite consistent disagreement by a wide range of experts in the United States and abroad. His opinion, however, obtained traction in the summer of 2002 with senior members of the Bush Administration, including the President." The most likely explanation now appears to be that the tubes were to be used in normal rocketry manufacturing. (Washington Post, Institute for Science and International Security, Dissident Voice)
• September 12: CNN reports that Vice President Cheney says on Meet the Press that speculations that the drive towards a war with Iraq has anything to do with Bush's re-election campaign is "reprehensible." He says, "The suggestion that I find reprehensible is the notion that somehow, you know, we saved this and now we've sprung it on them for political reasons." Strategist Dick Morris points out that "[p]olls show that only one issue works in Bush's favor: terrorism. ...He doesn't need to wag the dog. He just needs to talk about wagging it to make the impact to keep control of Congress." In answer to the question of why the administration waited until September to make its case against Iraq, White House chief of staff Andrew Card, a former lobbyist for General Motors, said in August, "From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August." (CNN)
• September 13: Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld observes, "There's no debate in the world as to whether they [Iraq] have these weapons.... We all know that. A trained ape knows that." (David Corn)
• September 13-15: Seven Yemeni-born men are arrested by the FBI in Buffalo, and accused of being al-Qaeda "sleeper" agents who received training in Pakistan and Afghanistan. (Michael Scheuer)
• September 13: Former vice-president Al Gore calls the administration's doctrine of pre-emptive war one that will replace "a world in which states consider themselves subject to law" with "the notion that there is no law but the discretion of the President of the United States." (Seymour Hersh)
• September 14: A group of senior intelligence officials, including CIA chief George Tenet, briefs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Iraq's weapons capabilities in the committee's secure briefing room. Tenet tells the committee that he knows for a fact that the aluminum tubes recently intercepted on their way to Iraq are for the construction of centrifuges that will produce weapons-grade uranium. He also tells the committee that between 1999 and 2001, Iraq had attempted to buy 500 tons of uranium oxide from Niger, one of the world's largest producers. Commonly known as "yellowcake uranium," uranium oxide can be used to make fuel for nuclear reactors, and also be converted into weaponized uranium. Both statements of Tenet's are lies. At the same time, the Blair administration makes public a dossier with some of the same information Tenet is providing to the committee, that Iraq had sought to buy "significant quantities of uranium" from an unnamed African country "despite having no active civil nuclear power program that could require it." Both the American and European press quickly print story after story about the purported African uranium buy. A CIA spokesman later denies that Tenet made any such claim to the committee, and journalist Seymour Hersh, who spoke with two people present at the meeting before reporting the hearing, later learns that an internal Senate investigation will be launched to identify his sources. (Seymour Hersh)
• September 14: Dick Cheney, appearing on the Rush Limbaugh radio broadcast, tells Limbaugh's avid listeners, "What's happening, of course, is we're getting additional information that, in fact, [Saddam Hussein] is reconstituting his biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons programs, and that's what precipitates the concern now." As is documented exhaustively throughout this site, Cheney is lying. (Mother Jones)
• September 14: Scott Ritter, the former UN weapons inspector in Iraq who resigned in 1998 after claiming that then-President Clinton was too soft on Saddam Hussein, gives an interview to Time magazine explaining why he is challenging the Bush administration's stories of Iraqi WMDs. He denies that he ever said Iraq did not possess any contraband weapons: "I have never given Iraq a clean bill of health! Never! Never! I've said that no one has backed up any allegations that Iraq has reconstituted WMD capability with anything that remotely resembles substantive fact. To say that Saddam's doing it is in total disregard to the fact that if he gets caught he's a dead man and he knows it. Deterrence has been adequate in the absence of inspectors but this is not a situation that can succeed in the long term. In the long term you have to get inspectors back in. ...I am more aware than any UN official that Iraq has set up covert procurement funds to violate sanctions. This was true in 1997-1998, and I'm sure its true today. Of course Iraq can do this. The question is, has someone found that what Iraq has done goes beyond simple sanctions violations? We have tremendous capabilities to detect any effort by Iraq to obtain prohibited capability. The fact that no one has shown that he has acquired that capability doesn't necessarily translate into incompetence on the part of the intelligence community. It may mean that he hasn't done anything."
• Ritter told the Iraqi parliament that Hussein had legitimate complaints against the previous inspections regime. He explains, "The US had a track record of putting pressure on the weapons inspectors program during my entire seven years there. It's ironic that everyone has focused on the struggle of the inspectors vs. Iraq. Not too many people speak of the struggle between the weapons inspectors and the US to beat back the forces of US intelligence which were seeking to infiltrate the weapons inspectors program and use the unique access the inspectors enjoyed in Iraq for purposes other than disarmament. Iraq has a clear case that under this past inspection regime, unfortunately, it was misused for purposes other than set out by the Security Council resolution." Ritter is angered by criticism from conservatives, some of who have labeled him the "new Jane Fonda:" "Those on the right who say that disgrace the 12 years of service I gave to my country as a Marine." he says. "I love my country. I'll put my record of service up against anyone, bar none. If they want to have an exercise video then why don't they come here and say it to my face and I'll give'm an exercise video, which will be called, 'Scott Ritter Kicking Their Ass.'" (Time)
• September 15: The national security advisor for the Ford and Bush I administrations, Brent Scowcroft, writes an impassioned op-ed for the Wall Street Journal imploring the current administration not to invade Iraq. Scowcroft, currently the chair of George W. Bush's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, is a close confidant of the elder Bush; such a direct plea for a redirection of Bush's foreign policy from Scowcroft is correctly seen as implicit criticism of the son's plans for Iraq by the father. Though the American media refuses to give Scowcroft's editorial any play, insiders are shocked that Scowcroft would openly write such a piece directly chastizing the current administration's plans for Iraq. Scowcroft acknowledges the dangers posed to the Middle East by the Hussein regime, and admits that at some point the US might have to remove him from power, but he writes, bluntly: "Our pre-eminent security priority -- underscored repeatedly by the president -- is the war on terrorism. An attack on Iraq at this time would seriously jeopardize, if not destroy, the global counterterrorist campaign we have undertaken." Scowcroft warns of the dangers posed by an overthrow of Hussein by the US: "The United States could certainly defeat the Iraqi military and destroy Saddam's regime. But it would not be a cakewalk. On the contrary, it undoubtedly would be very expensive -- with serious consequences for the US and global economy -- and could as well be bloody. In fact, Saddam would be likely to conclude he had nothing left to lose, leading him to unleash whatever weapons of mass destruction he possesses."
• Even if the invasion and overthrow are successful, and Hussein does not counterattack with his supposed arsenal of WMDs (which by now is well understood not to exist), as Scowcroft notes, "The most serious cost, however, would be to the war on terrorism. Ignoring that clear sentiment would result in a serious degradation in international cooperation with us against terrorism. And make no mistake, we simply cannot win that war without enthusiastic international cooperation, especially on intelligence." Scowcroft says that the most immediate cost would be in the resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. "If we were seen to be turning our backs on that bitter conflict -- which the region, rightly or wrongly, perceives to be clearly within our power to resolve -- in order to go after Iraq, there would be an explosion of outrage against us. We would be seen as ignoring a key interest of the Muslim world in order to satisfy what is seen to be a narrow American interest. Even without Israeli involvement, the results could well destabilize Arab regimes in the region, ironically facilitating one of Saddam's strategic objectives. At a minimum, it would stifle any cooperation on terrorism, and could even swell the ranks of the terrorists. Conversely, the more progress we make in the war on terrorism, and the more we are seen to be committed to resolving the Israel-Palestinian issue, the greater will be the international support for going after Saddam. ...In sum, if we will act in full awareness of the intimate interrelationship of the key issues in the region, keeping counterterrorism as our foremost priority, there is much potential for success across the entire range of our security interests -- including Iraq. If we reject a comprehensive perspective, however, we put at risk our campaign against terrorism as well as stability and security in a vital region of the world." Naturally, the Bush administration will ignore Scowcroft's warnings; interestingly enough, this op-ed and the following September 21 article by Bush Sr. and Scowcroft in Time (see below) apparently triggers a rift between father and son, leading the junior Bush to no longer seek his father's advice. (Wall Street Journal/Forum for Foreign Policy, Wikipedia)
• September 16: Iraq agrees to allow "unfettered" access to its weapons sites by UN inspectors "without conditions." A day later, the US announces that it is not satisfied with Iraq's offer. "This is not a matter of inspections. It is about disarmament of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and the Iraqi regime's compliance with all other Security Council resolutions," says an administration spokesperson. "If [Saddam] thinks this is about letting inspectors in, or playing the same old game of give a little when under pressure, he is about to learn differently." Two days later Bush calls Hussein's offer "his latest ploy." (Bloomberg/Awesome Library, Fox News, Mother Jones)
• September 16: Colin Powell, widely considered the most believable of the administration's senior officials, says in a closed meeting of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that his State Department has confirmed Iraq's attempts to buy "yellowcake" uranium from Niger, an allegation proven false by his own department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), the CIA, and French intelligence. Powell's testimony, along with the September 14 presentation from Tenet, mollifies recalcitrant Senate Democrats, leading them to set aside their opposition to Bush's demand for Congressional authorization for military action against Iraq. Powell is lying. A former high-level intelligence officer later confirms that the information about the uranium buy is placed in the Presidential Daily Briefing, a highly classified report prepared by the CIA and provided only to the president and a few senior officials. Bush officials will reveal that Niger is the purported source of the sought-after uranium on December 19, in a State Department position paper that asks challengingly, "Why is the Iraqi regime hiding their uranium procurement?" Both Niger and Iraq deny the allegations, denials which have already proven to be true and will be proven true yet again. (Seymour Hersh, Michael Isikoff and David Corn)
• September 16: Donald Rumsfeld repeatedly tells reporters, "The president hasn't made a decision with respect to Iraq." Rumsfeld is lying; Rumsfeld himself has been supervising planning for the invasion for the better part of a year. (Mother Jones, Bob Woodward)
• September 16: Two Pentagon researchers arrive at the White House to brief deputy security advisor Stephen Hadley and Lewis Libby, Dick Cheney's hardline chief of staff. The researchers are from the small "Iraqi intelligence cell," created by undersecretary of defense Douglas Feith, who, like his boss Donald Rumsfeld, believes the CIA is too bureaucratically paralyzed and too gutless to draw the proper conclusions about Iraq from its own intelligence analysts. The Pentagon researchers have spent months poring over raw intelligence reports and constructing patterns that they believe have eluded the rest of the US intelligence community. They show Libby and Hadley a PowerPoint presentation that documents what they believe is solid proof of a decade's worth of connections between Iraq and al-Qaeda. They delineate at least two dozen "high-level contacts" between Iraqi officials and al-Qaeda operatives date back over ten years. Another slide shows "multiple areas of cooperation" between Iraq and al-Qaeda. Another slide shows that Hussein's intelligence service, the Mukhabarat, played a "facilitation" role in the 9/11 attacks. One Mukhabarat agent, according to the researchers, had ordered funds to be disbursed to one of the hijackers. If this isn't enough reason for a war, they argue, what is?
• The centerpiece of their case concerns the supposed meeting between Mohammed Atta, the lead 9/11 hijacker, and an Iraqi intelligence agent in Prague on April 9, 2001. The alleged meeting has been under discussion both privately and in public for a year; columnist William Safire calls the meeting "an undisputed fact," and Dick Cheney has repeatedly cited it as proof of the connection between Iraq and al-Qaeda. In fact, just eight days before, Cheney had calmly reiterated the tale to NBC's Tim Russert on Meet the Press, disingenuously spinning the "credible" story with the caveat, "It's unconfirmed at this point." The CIA and FBI have already debunked the story. The Pentagon researchers handle the CIA and FBI's dismissal of the tale by simply ignoring it, and plunging forward with discredited evidence as if it has been confirmed. In fact, they say that Atta met twice with Iraqi intelligence agent Ahmed Khalil Ibrahim Samir al-Ani in Prague, once in June 2000 and again in April 2001. They claim that Atta also met with the Iraqi charge d'affaires in Prague, and that al-Ani ordered the Iraqi intelligence "finance officer" in Prague to give Atta money. They say witnesses at the Prague airport identified Atta after 9/11, and "remember him traveling with his brother Farhan Atta." They offer no proof whatsoever. But, both Hadley and Libby, who desperately want proof of complicity between Iraq and al-Qaeda, find the story of Atta meeting with Iraqi intelligence far more credible than, say, Laurie Mylroie's wild tales of two Ramzi Yousefs.
• The next day, a Feith aide reports to Feith's boss, Paul Wolfowitz, that Hadley and Libby were intensely interested in the presentation. Both requested more information, including a "chronology of Atta's travels."
• The problem with the slide show is that the information has been severely cherrypicked, with crucial information disproving the allegations simply discarded. Both the FBI and the CIA found long ago that Atta was nowhere near Prague in April 2001 (in fact, he was probably in the US). No Iraqi "finance officer" ever gave Atta a dime. And the Prague airport workers could not have seen Atta with his brother -- Atta had no brother, only two sisters. As one 9/11 commission member later asked after viewing the slide show, "Are you sure Elvis wasn't there also?"
• Reporters Michael Isikoff and David Corn write, "Feith's exploitation of the Atta-in-Prague allegation was a case of true believers twisting skimpy intelligence reports to create illusions of proof." After 9/11, the CIA put out urgent requests to allied intelligence agencies for whatever information they could scrape up that might shed light on the attacks. Czech intelligence produced a report it had received from an informant inside its Middle Eastern community; the informant said he saw Atta's picture in the paper and believed he might have seen Atta in the company of al-Ani five months before outside the Iraqi embassy. The Czechs also forwarded a photo taken outside the Iraqi embassy that day of an unidentified Middle Eastern-looking man who might have been the hijacker. "We knew right away that's not Atta," recalls one US counterterrorism official. The man in the photo is much bigger than the rather small Atta, and looks nothing like the hijacker. He looks, says the official, "sort of an Albanian thug." The CIA and FBI technical labs reported, with their usual refusal to issue definitive judgments, that the photo is "probably" not Atta. But that slight bit of wiggle room is enough for Feith's researchers and, apparently, for Cheney. FBI investigations of Atta's travels outside the US show that he left the country twice: once to meet with his terrorist accomplice Ramzi bin al-Shibh in Germany in January, and once to meet bin al-Shibh in Spain in July. Both times he traveled openly, under his own name and using his own passport. No evidence of any excursions under an alias or a false passport can be unearthed. Five days before his alleged meeting with al-Ani, on April 4, he had been photographed by a surveillance camera cashing a check at a Virginia Beach bank. On April 11, Atta and another of the hijackers, Marwan al-Shehhi, had leased an apartment in Coral Springs, Florida. And on April 6, 9, 10, and 11, Atta's cell phone was used repeatedly to make phone calls to Florida. No evidence of any visit by Atta to Prague anytime in 2001 can be found. "We looked at this real hard because, obviously, if it were true, it would be huge," a senior US law enforcement official told Newsweek in April 2002. "But nothing has matched up."
• But Wolfowitz won't give up so easily. In the summer of 2002, he summoned Pasquale D'Amuro, the chief of FBI counterterrorism, and a senior FBI agent to his office, and grilled them about the Atta-in-Prague story. He forced the two to admit that the FBI couldn't account for every second of Atta's whereabouts during the week of the alleged Prague meeting. Wasn't it theoretically possible, Wolfowitz demanded, that Atta could have flown out of the US under an alias, met briefly with the Iraqi intelligence official in Prague, and flown back? Anything was possible, the two FBI officials admitted. That was enough for Wolfowitz and for Feith's team. And, though White House officials never officially countenance the story, Cheney and other senior officials continue to hammer it into the public consciousness as proof of Hussein's connections to al-Qaeda. CIA and FBI officials become ever more disgusted with the entire charade, but no one challenges the policy makers. "Who is going to question the vice president when he keeps espousing this sh*t?" asks the US counterterrorism official who investigated the Atta allegations. "Nobody at the FBI or CIA is going to speak up and say, stop the bullsh*t."
• Other parts of the slide show are equally dubious. One slide referred to the fact that Abdul Rahman Yasin, a minor conspirator in the 1993 WTC bombings, had fled to Iraq after the attack. Echoing Mylroie's conspiracy theories, this is "proof" that Iraq helped carry out the 1993 attacks. Another slide presents the story of Ahmad Hikmar Shakir, an Iraqi who worked as an airport greeter in Kuala Lumpur and had escorted two 9/11 hijackers in January 2000 when they arrived for a key al-Qaeda planning session in the Malaysian capital. Shakir was of interest to US intelligence, and Wolfowitz was fascinated with Shakir. But CIA analysts can find no ties between Shakir and the Iraqi government. The only connection is Shakir's nationality. Another slide alleges a July 1996 meeting between the director of Iraqi intelligence, Mani abd-al-Rashid al-Tikriti, and Osama bin Laden on bin Laden's farm in the Sudan. But, bin Laden had left the Sudan for Afghanistan two months before.
• But the researchers covered themselves with slides accusing the CIA, FBI, and other agencies of experiencing what they delicately term "fundamental problems" with their assessments. The CIA believed (rightly) that a Ba'athist like Saddam Hussein wouldn't associate himself with radical Islamist terrorists, and that assumption colors every analysis thereafter. But once you accepted the idea that Iraq and al-Qaeda are cooperating, then the intelligence looks different. Both sides are deviously concealing the evidence of their connections; wisps and crumbs are all that is available. And good, committed analysts like Feith's team can fill in the blanks and prove an enormous, overarching conspiracy. "When operational security is very good," says the first slide in the presentation, "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence." With that mindset, one can prove or disprove anything he likes. And that mindset provides all the proof that Feith, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld (who loves the "absence of evidence" line), and Cheney need.
• On August 15, after a year of contention between Feith's group and the CIA, the Feith team shows its slide show to George Tenet and other senior CIA officials. Tenet walks out after about ten minutes. But Feith and his minions know that if the CIA won't listen, there are plenty of White House officials who will.
• Days after his staffers make their September 16 presentation to Hadley and Libby, Feith makes his own pitch. Hadley convenes a meeting to ensure that all the administration's witnesses who are about to testify before Congress -- Powell, Tenet, and Rumsfeld -- are on the same page on Iraq. But Feith quickly takes over the meeting. He begins his practiced rant on the "well-documented" connections between Iraq and al-Qaeda, becoming more heated and accusatory as he goes. "I know you guys don't believe this!" he snaps at the CIA officials present. But, Feith says, the CIA is "not putting it together...not connecting the dots." When one CIA official observes that members of Congress might be skeptical about Feith's badly sourced conspiracy theory, Feith retorts, "[I]f some congressman is going to nitpick about this, he's going to look really dumb. Larry Wilkerson, Powell's chief of staff, is astounded by the powerful combination of ignorance and arrogance that Feith brings. His attitude towards the CIA officials, Wilkerson recalls, is, "You're all just dumb sh*ts. I'm the smartest guy in this room." Wilkerson is equally amazed that Hadley is letting Feith rant without stopping him. Hadley finally observes that the meeting isn't about Feith's theories, and Feith should just sit down. CIA official Paul Pillar calls Feith a "zealot" and his work on the connections between Iraq and al-Qaeda fraudulent. "It was a deliberate effort to try to stitch things together to try to make a case," Pillar recalls. "It had nothing to do with intelligence analysis as I understood it -- which is ultimately to try to get at the truth."
• Feith says later that he has no recollection at all of the meeting, and denies that he had anywhere near the "passion" for the issue of the Iraq-al-Qaeda connection, unlike Wolfowitz. But he doesn't back down from his theories, calling himself "a very careful person and an honest one." Most of the "facts" behind Feith's conspiracy theories are never made public, with the notable exception of the Atta-in-Prague tale. (Michael Isikoff and David Corn)
• September 16: The ACLU's executive director, Anthony Romero, says that "Americans don't fully realize what has happened to some core American principles and basic workings of our democracy" in the aftermath of 9/11 and the passage of the USA Patriot Act. "Most Americans don't realize that American citizens are being held on American soil without access to lawyers and no charges having been brought against them. This fundamentally puts the Bill of Rights on its head -- there's no such thing anymore as the presumption of being innocent until proved guilty. This is just fundamentally un-American." Dave Kopel of the Independence Institute says that "the misnamed USA Patriot Act has plenty of search-and-seizure provisions that are not limited to terrorism even under the new, very broad definition. These would allow secret searches of your house -- warrantless searches without regard to whether it's a terrorism offense. The FBI with the active assistance of the DoJ and White House pulled a real bait-and-switch on the American people. They said we've got to have these emergency powers for fighting terrorism, and what they really got was a whole lot of non-emergency powers for non-terrorist purposes. It's not a police state yet, but we're closer to it, and there has to be continued vigilance among the people. ...[T]he problem with the USA Patriot Act is that it has little to do with fighting terrorism." And John Whitehead, head of the Rutherford Institute, says that if the USA Patriot Act stands, "the Fourth Amendment will have been totally blown. What the Fourth Amendment says is that you have to individualize suspicion, a judge has to carefully look at it and it has to be reasonable. Today, everything is considered suspicious. [But,] I'm hopeful that we'll look back in 10 years and say this was all crazy stuff. Back in the 1940s we put Japanese-Americans in prison camps, in the 1950s we had the McCarthy era, and in the 1960s there was government harassment of the hippies and Martin Luther King. Today, most of us look back and say all that was wrong, so there is hope." (Insight Magazine/Karen Balkin
• September 17: Dianne Feinstein, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, asks Bush to provide a National Intelligence Estimate, a report that would have showed exactly how much of a threat Iraq posed. The reply is delivered by National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, who says in the post 9-11 world the US cannot wait for intelligence because Iraq is too much of a threat to the US. "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud," Rice says. The NIE is never delivered. (CCR)
• September 17: Iraq's Foreign Affairs Minister writes to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan and indicates that Iraq will allow UN weapons inspectors to return without conditions. UNMOVIC proposes a timetable of inspections to continue over the next 4-6 months. (CNN/Electric Venom)
• September 17: USA Today publishes an analysis of the Bush administration's manipulation and mischaracterization of intelligence reports on Iraq, writing, "The Bush administration is expanding on and in some cases contradicting US intelligence reports in making the case for an invasion of Iraq.... Administration officials accuse Iraq of having ties to al-Qaeda terrorists and of amassing weapons of mass destruction despite uncertain and sometimes contrary intelligence on these issues, according to officials. In some cases, top administration officials disagree outright with what the CIA and other intelligence agencies report. For example, they repeat accounts of al-Qaeda members seeking refuge in Iraq and of terrorist operatives meeting with Iraqi intelligence officials, even though US intelligence reports raise doubts about such links. On Iraqi weapons programs, administration officials draw the most pessimistic conclusions from ambiguous evidence.
• "...[S]ome lawmakers and diplomats question the evidence being assembled by the US and British governments. Hans Blix, the chief United Nations arms inspector, said satellite images of Iraq show no evidence that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was rebuilding an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. And House Minority Whip Nancy Pelosi...said that in secret intelligence briefings, administration officials were presenting 'embellishments' on information long known about Iraq. A senior Bush administration official conceded privately that there are large gaps in US knowledge about Iraqi weapons programs but insisted that the only prudent course is to suspect the worst. To give Iraq the benefit of the doubt, officials argue, would be naive and dangerous. ...Not only the facts are in dispute, but also the interpretation of those facts. CIA analysts have reported that Saddam wants weapons for prestige and security, not for an attack on US interests that would almost certainly bring a devastating US response. Bush administration officials warn that once Saddam develops his arsenal, he must be considered a risk to use it. Conversely, the CIA says the US military should assume that Saddam would use chemical and biological weapons against American invaders if the survival of his regime were at stake. Bush's top advisers view this risk as manageable." The report notes that the CIA was so far resisting pressure from Vice President Cheney and Defense Secretary Rumsfeld to confirm that al-Qaeda members are "hiding in Iraq with Saddam's blessings," a conclusion that is accepted as fact by Rumsfeld, Cheney, and National Security advisor Condoleezza Rice. Weeks later, the Los Angeles Times notes that "senior Bush administration officials are pressuring CIA analysts to help build a case against Saddam Hussein," and blames Rumsfeld and his deputy Paul Wolfowitz for applying pressure. Neither the House nor the Senate will choose to investigate the allegations of intelligence manipulation. (USA Today, David Corn)

"There's an old saying in Tennessee -- I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee -- that says, fool me once, shame on -- shame on you. Fool me -- you can't get fooled again." -- George W. Bush, September 17, 2002

• September 18: Paris CIA station chief Bill Murray meets to discuss the possible recruitment of Iraqi foreign minister Naji Sabri as a CIA asset. As noted above, Sabri had been pursued as a potential CIA asset since late August by Murray. Sabri, according to the source, knows that the White House is wrong about Hussein's WMD programs. The chemical weapons arsenal is long gone, mostly destroyed, and with its few remnants distributed to tribal and provincial leaders years ago. Hussein didn't want the responsibility for them any longer, and didn't want them found by UN inspectors. What few chemical weapons that might still exist are long since degraded and useless. As for the biological weapons program, it too is virtually defunct. What few remnants of that programs, a few vials of toxins, are old and probably useless. There is no current bioweapons program. The nuclear weapons program is also long gone. According to the source, Hussein had been told by his scientists that if Hussein could procure the right fissile materials, they could build him a nuclear weapon in two years. But no one in Iraq had the right materials, and no prospect of getting any. Whatever Hussein's intentions, there is no nuclear weapons program whatsoever.
• Murray flies to Washington to confer with deputy CIA director John McLaughlin over the Sabri matter. On September 19, Sabri speaks at the United Nations General Assembly, and reads a lengthy letter from Hussein. The letter denounces the "American propaganda machine" and its "lies, distortion, and falsehood" about Iraq. The letter declares that Iraq is "clear of all nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons." Sabri delivers his statement wearing a particularly expensive, hand-tailored suit -- the agreed-upon signal that Sabri is willing to cooperate with the CIA. Soon thereafter, Tyler Drumheller, the European Division chief of the CIA, tells Murray, "[Y]ou may be a hero. You may be the guy who stopped the war." But Murray and Drumheller are outmanuevered. John Maguire and "Luis," the two agents in charge of Operation Anabasis, the paramilitary sabotage and assassination program under development by the CIA (see the items on the 2001 page of this site), see no value in Sabri's statements, and the three end up in shouting matches. "We weren't interested in having Sabri stay in place and work for us because we knew we were going to war," Maguire later recalls. Sabri's only value, recalls Maguire, is as a "high-level defector" whose defection would embarrass the Hussein regime. As long as Sabri remains a member of Hussein's government, anything he says should just be dismissed as disinformation. And White House officials will have no use for Sabri's judgments on Hussein's WMD programs. "One of these days you're going to get it," Luis tells Murray. "This is not about intelligence. This is about regime change."
• Drumheller and Murray eventually learn that CIA director George Tenet informs the White House about Sabri's statements. Maguire and Luis are correct: the only value that Sabri would have is as a high-level defector. Nothing else he says is of interest. (Michael Isikoff and David Corn)
• September 18: Veteran political observer Robert Fiske writes, "Saddam would do everything he could to avoid war. President Bush was doing everything he could to avoid peace." (Independent/Buzzflash)
• September 19: The Bush administration sends a draft resolution to the US House of Representatives calling for authorization from Congress to invade Iraq if Bush deems it necessary. "If you want to keep the peace, you've got to have authorization to use force," Bush says. "This is a chance for Congress to indicate support. It's a chance for Congress to say, 'We support the administration's ability to keep the peace." Little specific information is provided in the legislation, only vague warnings and unspecified allegations, including the "fact" that "known al-Qaeda members" are in Iraq. (At the time, US intelligence and law enforcement officials know that al-Qaeda members are in at least 60 countries, including the United States.) What evidence the intelligence community does possess shows that the al-Qaeda members that are in Iraq are "on the run," and associating with Kurdish rebels in the north of Iraq, out of Saddam Hussein's purview. However, as David Corn writes, "The aim was not to prove an assertion but to conflate Iraq with al-Qaeda any way possible." The resolution also cites "the high risk that the current Iraqi regime will...launch a surprise attack against the United States." Few, if any, Congressmen know as they cast their votes that the decision to invade has been made a year before; in fact, Colin Powell tells Congress, "The president has not decided on a military option; nobody wants war as a first resort." Donald Rumsfeld also provides Congress with a list of biological and chemical weapons supposedly stockpiled by Iraq, including anthrax, botulism, sarin, VX, mustard gas, and smallpox. Iraq has no such stockpiles. Rumsfeld also tells his lawmaker audience flatly that Iraq has an active nuclear weapons program, a stunning lie.
• Though the resolution is replete with references to UN resolutions, it also contains rhetoric that escalates the rhetoric of previous weeks, claiming that Iraq has shown a "willingness to attack" the US (referring to several futile efforts to shoot down US fighter jets enforcing no-fly zones in Iraq), and the reference to known members of al-Qaeda in Iraq. The resolution claims that there is a "high risk that the current Iraqi regime will either employ [WMDs] to launch a surprise attack against the United States or its armed forces or provide them to international terrorists who would do so." This is an extremely serious allegation, and one not sourced with a scrap of believable intelligence. After the war, White House officials will insist that Bush never used the word "imminent" in his rhetoric about Iraq's threat to the US, but the phrase "high risk" of a "surprise attack" has the very same meaning, just as stark and frightening.
• After hearing Bush's resolution, Republican senator Chuck Hagel thinks, "My God, this crowd down at the White House is rolling right over top of us -- and we're letting them do it." The legislation Bush wants is tremendously broad, permitting Bush "to use all means that he determines to be appropriate, including force, in order to enforce the United Nations Security Council resolutions [demanding Iraq dismantle its WMD programs], defend the national security interests of the United States against the threat posed by Iraq, and restore international peace and security in the region." In essence, Hagel realizes, the resolution is a blank check for Bush to do pretty much what he pleases in Iraq and perhaps in other countries. Congressional Democrats, and a few Republicans like Hagel, are taken aback. Hagel confers with Joe Biden, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Both Hagel and Biden believe that the White House has plans for more than just Iraq. "I remember saying to Joe over the phone, the way this is written, the president could go to war anywhere in the Middle East," Hagel recalls. "And I remember Joe and I talked about Iran and Syria. Maybe they're thinking, 'We just take them all down, just take two, three of them out, go after Syria and Iran too.' What's to stop them?" (Mother Jones, David Corn, Paul Waldman, Al Franken, Michael Isikoff and David Corn)
• September 19: Democratic senator John Kerry, the future presidential candidate, explains why he will vote to grant authorization to the presidenti to use military force against Iraq. Contrary to right-wing spin, Kerry's stance on this issue remains unchanged throughout the entire presidential campaign. Kerry says, "As the president made clear earlier this week, 'Approving this resolution does not mean that military action is imminent or unavoidable.' It means 'America speaks with one voice.' Let me be clear, the vote I will give to the president is for one reason and one reason only: to disarm Iraq of weapons of mass destruction, if we cannot accomplish that objective through new, tough weapons inspections in joint concert with our allies. In giving the president this authority, I expect him to fulfill the commitments he has made to the American people in recent days -- to work with the United Nations Security Council to adopt a new resolution setting out tough and immediate inspection requirements, and to act with our allies at our side if we have to disarm Saddam Hussein by force. If he fails to do so, I will be among the first to speak out." Kerry will cast his vote in good faith; his biggest mistake is choosing to believe that Bush, too, is acting in good faith. Almost a year later, on September 14, 2003, Kerry says on Face the Nation, "The president promised he would go to war as a matter of last resort. He didn't. The president promised he would build a coalition and work through the United Nations. He didn't. We're paying the price for the reckless way in which this president approached this. It's a failure of diplomacy and today it's a failure of leadership." Mark Sandalow, the Washington bureau chief of the San Francisco Chronicle, on September 23, 2004, analyzes over 200 speeches and statements made by Kerry on this subject and concludes, "Kerry has offered the same message ever since talk of attacking Iraq became a national conversation more than two years ago." As effective as the claims of Kerry repeatedly "flip-flopping" on the issue -- exemplified by Sean Hannity's March 2004 claim that Kerry changed position "six separate times" on the issue -- the claims are entirely false. (San Francisco Chronicle/Fox/Al Franken)

"People say, how can I help on this war against terror? How can I fight evil? You can do so by mentoring a child; by going into a shut-in's house and say I love you." George W. Bush, September 19, 2002

• September 19: On Meet the Press, Vice President Dick Cheney denies Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle's report that Cheney called him several times and urged Daschle not to investigate the events of 9/11. "Tom's wrong," says Cheney. "I think in this case -– well, let's say a misinterpretation. What I did do was work, at the direction of the president, with the leadership of the intelligence committees to say, 'We prefer to work with the Intelligence committees.'" But Cheney's characterization of his request is contradicted by Daschle, who appears on the show a week later. After hearing a tape of Cheney's statement and being asked by moderator Tim Russert, "Did the vice president call you and urge you not to investigate the events of Sept. 11?" Daschle flatly contradicts Cheney: "Yes, he did, Tim, on Jan. 24, and then on Jan. 28 the president himself at one of our breakfast meetings repeated the request." Russert persists: "It wasn't, 'Let's not have a national commission, but let's have the intelligence committees look into this,' it was 'No investigation by anyone, period'?" Daschle says, "That's correct. ...[T]hat request was made" by Cheney not only on Jan. 24 and by President Bush four days later, but "on other dates following" as well. Daschle completely discredits Cheney's claim that Daschle has several times misinterpreted Cheney's calls and Bush's face-to-face request. Journalist Morton Mintz writes, "Thus did Daschle implicitly challenge the truthfulness of the vice president about investigating the events culminating in the catastrophic terrorist attack on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon." As usual, though, the American press ignores Daschle's discrediting of Cheney, giving, in Mintz's words, "another big press pass to George W. Bush and Dick Cheney." Cheney also tells Russert that the administration has "irrefutable proof" that Iraq has an active and escalating nuclear weapons program; Russert accepts Cheney's specious claims without question. (Alternet, Mother Jones)
• September 20: The Bush administration rewrites the US national security doctrine to allow for pre-emptive military strikes against perceived threats from other countries or terrorist organizations, without waiting for actual moves against the US. "The advocacy of anticipatory self-defense is nothing short of a revolution in US foreign policy," writes Princeton professor Bernard Chazelle. Yale history professor John Gaddis calls it "the most important reformulation of US grand strategy in over half-a-century." Chazelle notes, "Recent presidents considered —- and swiftly rejected —-preemptive attacks, following Truman's advice that 'you don't prevent anything by war... except peace.' The doctrine flies in the face of international and US law." Chazelle continues, "Aside from legal considerations, what are the practical ramifications of the Strategy? It is obviously a major destabilizing factor for dueling countries, eg, India vs Pakistan or China vs Taiwan. If X feels threatened by Y, it might be tempted by the use of preemptive self-defense. This alone might cause Y to feel threatened by X and, in turn, consider a preemptive strike on X. But, of course, this would only add to X's original mistrust, thus fueling a self-reinforcing feedback loop of mutual suspicion. he Strategy also encourages dictatorships everywhere to follow the North Korea model and speed up the development of nuclear weapons in order to deter a US invasion." (State Department, Bernard Chazelle)
• September 20: A previously unreleased 1995 letter from the Centers for Disease Control lists all the biological materials sent to Iraq's scientists for 10 years. During the 1980s, the CDC supplied Iraqi scientists with nearly two dozen viral and bacterial samples in the 1980s, including the plague, West Nile, and dengue fever. The letter, written in 1995 by then-CDC director David Satcher, was in response to a congressional inquiry. "We were freely exchanging pathogenic materials with a country that we knew had an active biological warfare program," says James Tuite, a former Senate investigator who helped publicize Gulf War Syndrome. "The consequences should have been foreseen." (Business Week [includes image of original letter])
• September 20: Dick Cheney tells an audience at a Casper, Wyoming fund-raiser, "We now have irrefutable evidence that [Saddam Hussein] has once again set up and reconstituted his program to take uranium, to enrich it to a sufficiently high grade, so that it will function as the base material as a nuclear weapon.... There's no doubt about what he's attempting. And there's no doubt about the fact that the level of effort has escalated in recent months." Cheney is perfectly aware that the administration has no such evidence. (Frank Rich [PDF file])
• September 21: Time magazine runs an article by George H.W. Bush and Brent Scowcroft entitled "Reasons Not to Invade Iraq," an influential article that infuriates the younger Bush. Shortly afterwards, the article is yanked from the Time Web site. The impact of that article is discussed elsewhere in this site. (Time/The Memory Hole)

"We need an energy bill that encourages consumption." -- George W. Bush, September 23, 2002

• September 23: The Senate passes a resolution authorizing a bipartisan commission to investigate the 9/11 bombings on a 90-8 vote. Bush and Cheney have realized since their public declaration of support on June 6 that such a commission is inevitable; to ensure that the commission is strictly limited in its efforts, they insist on imposing a deadline of 12 months for the commission to operate, on crippling the commission's subpoena power, on the right to name the person who will chair the commission, the authority to publish some or none of the commission's report, and on a budget of $3 million (the investigation into the explosion of the USS Challenger received $50 million, and the Whitewater investigation cost more than that). (Mark Crispin Miller)
• September 23: Bush says, in a speech in New Jersey, that Democrats in the Senate are "not interested in the security of the American people." Bush is referring to the ongoing struggle over legislation creating the Department of Homeland Security; Senate Democrats want to continue the traditional workplace protection practices for prospective DHS employees, while Bush wants the new employees to have no such protections. Two days later, the normally soft-spoken majority leader, Tom Daschle, cites Bush's remark and shouts, "This is outrageous! Outrageous!" (Michael Isikoff and David Corn)
• September 24: British PM Tony Blair releases a 55-page dossier purporting to prove that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction. One of its most sensational claims is that Iraq's weapons are "deployable within 45 minutes," a claim CIA director George Tenet privately dismisses as "sh*t." The dossier is later proven to be largely falsified and "sexed up." Blair has recently spoken with Bush, who asserts that both he and Blair need "to disclose what we knew or as much as we could of what we knew." Blair, in compliance with Bush's wishes, releases a dossier dramatizing the Iraqi WMD "threat." Blair himself asserts in the foreward to the dossier that "the assessed intelligence has established beyond doubt that Saddam...continues in his efforts to develop nuclear weapons." The "evidence" of Iraq's nuclear ambitions is comprised of the single Italian intelligence report from October 2001 that alleges, without any proof, that the 1999 visit of an Iraqi ambassador to Niger was for the purchase of "yellowcake" uranium, a purchase that former US ambassador Joseph Wilson debunked in February 2002. (See the related items on this and other pages for far more details.) In fact, the CIA intervened in the reporting done in the British dossier, resulting in neither Niger nor the Italian intelligence agency (SISMI) being specifically named. By this point Bush and his officials are routinely throwing around the phrase, "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud," a direct and highly effective effort at fearmongering not only among American citizens, but among reluctant Congressional members debating whether or not to vote for giving Bush the authority to wage war against Iraq.
• Naturally, the White House celebrates the dossier as tangible proof of Iraq's WMDs, and the American and British news media follows suit; one British tabloid runs a headling screaming "Brits 45 Mins from Doom," with an accompanying article warning that British troops in Cyprus could be obliterated by Saddam Hussein any time the dictator chooses. The White House also uses the British dossier to give credence to the allegations about the Iraq-Niger uranium deal, though the CIA and other US intelligence agencies, along with the French DGSE, have already shown the deal to be fantasy. White House press spokesman Ari Fleischer says that the dossier proves beyond doubt that Hussein has WMDs, he can launch those WMDs within 45 minutes, and that Iraq has attempted to purchase uranium from Africa for the purposes of building nuclear weapons. "That was new information," he tells the press. "We agree with their findings."
• Bush uses the dossier as a rationale to ratchet up his rhetoric against Hussein and Iraq to previously unheard-of levels in the coming days and weeks, and the Niger charge will, for a time, become a cornerstone of his and his officials' allegations that Iraq is a deadly danger that must immediately be curbed. (MidEast Web, Seymour Hersh, Michael Isikoff and David Corn)
• September 24: CIA director George Tenet and CIA official Robert Walpole, in charge of the agency's work on the world's nuclear weapons, brief members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Tenet alarms the committee members with frightening tales of aluminum tubes for nuclear weapons construction, mobile biological laboratories, and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) that could be outfitted with chemical or biological weapons, saying in part, "The suitability of the [aluminum] tubes for that purpose had been disputed, but this time the argument that Iraq had a nuclear program under way was buttressed by a new and striking fact: the CIA had recently received intelligence showing that, between 1999 and 2001, Iraq had attempted to buy five hundred tons of uranium from Niger, one of the world's largest producers."
• One member, Democrat Joseph Biden, comes out of the meeting believing that Tenet has asserted that Iraq's UAVs "could be put on oil tankers off the coast of the United States and [flown] into Philadelphia or Charleston carrying chemical and biological weapons and hit with devastating effects." But Biden and his colleagues can't get Tenet to give any specifics about the sourcing of these claims. Biden asks Tenet what kind of "technically collected" evidence the CIA has of Iraq's WMDs, what physical proof. Tenet replies, "None, Senator." One aide present at the meeting remembers his shock at Tenet's admission: "[T]hat answer will ring in my ears as long as I live." Biden, clearly disturbed, asks, "George, do you want me to clear the staff out of the room?" -- to give Tenet an opportunity to share highly classified material with the senators after the staffers have departed. "There's no reason to, Senator," Tenet replies. He really has nothing. Tenet insists that the CIA has plenty of human intelligence sources -- strong reporting from Iraqi defectors (all from Ahmad Chalabi's INC, though Biden and the others do not know this). Shortly thereafter, Tenet leaves, saying he has to attend his son's basketball game. Several senators leave behind Tenet.
• But the meeting isn't over. Carl Ford, the State Department's chief intelligence officer, testifies next on the shaky and ill-founded evidence supporting the aluminum tubes' usefulness for nuclear weapons construction. Ford is joined in his skepticism by the Energy Department's Rhys Williams. But more and more senators are leaving the hearings. "These dissents were not front and center," one staffer recalls.
• The committee's scientific advisor, Peter Zimmerman, leaves the meeting outraged. Zimmerman, a former Pentagon contractor and an expert in nuclear technology, has long been skeptical of the aluminum tubes claims. After the meeting, he confronts Walpole, demanding to see the sample aluminum tube Walpole used for evidence just minutes before. Zimmerman thinks it looks like an aluminum sewer pipe. He grills Walpole on technical details; none of Walpole's answers are convincing. Walpole doesn't know what he is talking about, Zimmerman concludes. And Tenet was equally unconvincing. "I remember going home that night," Zimmerman recalls, "and practically putting my fist through the wall half a dozen times. I was as frustrated as I've ever been. I remember saying to my wife, 'They're going to war and there's not a damn piece of evidence to substantiate it.'" (Michael Isikoff and David Corn, Frank Rich [PDF file])
• September 25: Condoleezza Rice claims, "There clearly are contacts between al-Qaeda and Iraq. [Hussein is supplying] training to al-Qaeda in chemical weapons development. ...There clearly is testimony that some of the contacts have been important contacts and that there's a relationship there." She refuses to give any hard evidence. On the same day, Bush warns of the danger that "al-Qaeda becomes an extension of Saddam's madness. ...You can't distinguish between al-Qaeda and Saddam when you talk about the war on terror." Bob Graham of the Senate Intelligence Committee disagrees, saying that he's seen no information linking Saddam to al-Qaeda. (The New Republic, Mother Jones, Michael Isikoff and David Corn)
• September 25: Conservative columnist Ann Coulter writes: "We hate them. Americans don't want to make Islamic fanatics love us. We want to make them die. There's nothing like horrendous physical pain to quell anger. Japanese Kamikaze pilots hated us once, too. A couple of well-aimed nuclear weapons got their attention. Now they are gentle little lambs." (Intervention Magazine)
• September 26: In a speech from the White House Rose Garden, Bush claims that "the Iraqi regime possesses chemical and biological weapons. ...Each passing day could be the one on which the Iraqi regime gives anthrax or VX -- nerve gas -- or someday a nuclear weapon to a terrorist ally." Bush fails to mention a DIA report on his desk that says there is no such evidence for these claims. Later that day, as noted below, Bush justifies the upcoming invasion of Iraq by saying of Hussein, "After all, this is a guy who tried to kill my dad." He continues to escalate his belligerent rhetoric, thundering that there will be "no discussion, no debate, no negotiation" with Iraq.
• The evidence for the alleged 1993 assassination attempt against George H.W. Bush by the Iraqis is circumstantial at best. It comes from a single source, Wali al-Ghazali, who was arrested along with four colleagues and a car bomb, and who confessed to the assassination plot after four days in Kuwaiti custody. Amnesty International believed al-Ghazali might have been tortured. A classified CIA report, leaked in 1993 to the Boston Globe, is skeptical of the Kuwaiti claims, and says that Kuwaiti intelligence might have "cooked the books." No testimony or documents ever tied the Hussein regime to the plot. The US ambassador to Kuwait at the time, Edward Gnehm, said that "I had no evidence of any direct order" by Hussein, though Gnehm did endorse the Kuwaiti report on the plot. The CIA did find that the car bomb matched the design of similar bombs used by some Iraqis. Bill Clinton deemed the evidence strong enough to launch an attack on the headquarters of Iraqi intelligence, the Mukhabarat, in June 1993. Bush's citation of the supposed assassination attempt makes some members of Congress distinctly uncomfortable. "I just cringed," recalls then-House Majority Leader Dick Armey. "Wow," Armey says to his wife after he reads Bush's remarks, "I hope that's not what this is all about." (Mother Jones, Michael Isikoff and David Corn)
• September 26: Donald Rumsfeld claims to have "bulletproof" evidence of Iraq's WMD program and Iraq's ties to al-Qaeda, though he refuses to share his evidence with the public. According to Rumsfeld, "We have what we believe to be credible evidence that Iraq and al-Qaeda have discussed safe haven opportunities in Iraq, reciprocal non-aggression discussions. We have what we consider to be credible evidence that al-Qaeda leaders have sought contacts in Iraq who could help them acquire weapons of -- weapons of mass destruction capabilities. We do have -- I believe it's one report indicating that Iraq provided unspecified training relating to chemical and/or biological matters for al-Qaeda members. There is, I'm told, also some other information of varying degrees of reliability that supports to conslution of their cooperation." The next day, Senate Intelligence Committee chairman Bob Graham says he has seen nothing in classified intelligence reports to suggest a connection between Iraq and al-Qaeda.
• Rumsfeld's stern but false allegations are based on the testimony of one man, a captured al-Qaeda commander named Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi. Al-Libi was captured in November 2001 (see the item documenting al-Libi's capture and interrogation), tortured, and squeezed for information that the FBI and DIA both believe doubtful at best. But al-Libi's confession of training of al-Qaeda operatives in chemical and biological weapons by Iraqi government officials gives Rumsfeld what he needs. Al-Libi's testimony -- which he later disavows -- will become the linchpin for one of the key arguments used by Rumsfeld, Bush, Powell, and others to justify invading Iraq. (The New Republic, Working for Change, David Corn, Michael Isikoff and David Corn, Frank Rich [PDF file]
• September 26: A leaked August 16, 2002 report from Defense Secretary Rumsfeld's influential Defense Science Board is exposed by the Los Angeles Times. The board "recommends creation of a super-intelligence support [agency], an organization it dubs the Proactive, Preemptive Operations Group (P2OG), to bring together CIA and military covert action, information warfare, intelligence, and cover and deception. Among other things, this body would launch secret operations aimed at 'stimulating reactions' among terrorists and states possessing weapons of mass destruction -- that is, for instance, prodding terrorist cells into action and exposing themselves to 'quick-response' attacks by US forces. Such tactics would hold 'states/sub-state actors accountable' and 'signal to harboring states that their sovereignty will be at risk." An editorial in the Moscow Times comments: "In other words -- and let's say this plainly, clearly and soberly, so that no one can mistake the intention of Rumsfeld's plan -- the United States government is planning to use 'cover and deception' and secret military operations to provoke murderous terrorist attacks on innocent people." It is further suggested terrorism could be instigated in countries the US wants to gain control over. (CCR)
• September 26: Russia is so concerned about an American takeover of the Iraqi oil fields that is is secretly negotiating with Iraqi opposition leaders to protect its interests in the country. (Independent/Common Dreams)
• September 26: Bush tells an audience that the enmity he feels towards Saddam Hussein is personal: "There's no doubt his hatred is mainly directed towards us. There's no doubt he can't stand us. After all, this is the guy that tried to kill my dad at one time." Besides the fact that Hussein's enmity towards the US is problematic -- the US is, after all, the entity that placed him in power and supported him all through the Iran-Iraq war -- the evidence that Iraq participated in the plot to assassinate George H.W. Bush is thin and has long suspected of being a Kuwaiti fabrication, though circumstantial evidence of its reality does exist. However, the allegation fits neatly in with the storyline concocted by the administration, and therefore, as far as Bush is concerned, whether it's factual or not is irrelevant. (Mark Crispin Miller)
• September 27: A peaceful anti-war protest in Phoenix is disrupted by police, who suddenly charge the crowd and arrest seven, including a legal observer for the ACLU. Apparently the police were angered by the fact that the ACLU observer is taking pictures. (Mark Crispin Miller)
• September 28: President Bush asserts in his weekly radio address, "The Iraqi regime possesses biological and chemical weapons, is rebuilding the facilities to make more, and according to the British government, could launch a biological or chemical attack in as little as 45 minutes after the order is given." Naturally, Bush possesses no proof of any of his assertions; the British 45-minute claim is spectacularly debunked months later. In addition, he continues to claim, without any basis in fact, that links exist between Hussein and al-Qaeda: "The regime has longstanding and continuing ties to terrorist groups, and there are al-Qaeda terrorists inside Iraq." While the statement is technically correct -- there are al-Qaeda terrorists inside Iraq, in the Kurdish-controlled north, outside of Hussein's control -- the implication of ties between the Hussein regime and al-Qaeda is false. He also reiterates the false claim of an Iraqi nuclear program. (Bush on Iraq, Mother Jones, David Corn)
• September 29: After returning from a fact-finding trip to Iraq, Democratic Representatives Jim McDermott and David Bonior say that Iraq seems willing to cooperate with UN inspectors, and that they should be given the chance to do so. "Otherwise, you just are trying to provoke them into war," says McDermott. McDermott also states his belief that the Bush administration will lie to justify an armed invasion of Iraq: "I believe they [the Bush administration] sometimes give out misinformation. ...It would not surprise me if they came with information that is not provable and they shifted -- first they said it was Al Qaeda. Then they said it was weapons of mass destruction. Now they're going back and saying it's Al Qaeda again. When will that stop? Why don't they let the inspectors come so that we can disarm Saddam Hussein? ...I think the President would mislead the American people." That same day McDermott tells reporters, "The President of the United States will lie to the American people in order to get us into this war." Bonior says that Iraq has already been "devastated" by the US and a military invasion would have terrible consequences for both Iraq and the US; he says, "Let Hans Blix do his job." Bonior goes on to talk about the horrific consequences of using uranium-based weapons on Iraq in 1991: "When women in Baghdad ask about children, they used to ask, 'Is it a boy or girl?' Now they ask, 'Is it normal or abnormal?' It's a horrendous, barbaric thing that's happened and the country needs to know about that. The world community needs to know about it." McDermott and Bonior are lambasted by Republicans and the American press for "blaming America first" for Iraq's misdeeds, with pundit George Will accusing McDermott of "slander" and calling both senators "collaborators," and Bill O'Reilly chiming in with accusations that they are providing Hussein "aid and comfort;" future events will show them to be accurate in their assessments. (RNC, Creators Syndicate/Working for Change)
• September 29: Columnist Jay Bookman writes, "As it turns out, this is not really about Iraq. It is not about weapons of mass destruction, or terrorism, or Saddam, or U.N. resolutions. This war, should it come, is intended to mark the official emergence of the United States as a full-fledged global empire, seizing sole responsibility and authority as planetary policeman.... Having conquered Iraq, the United States will create permanent military bases in that country from which to dominate the Middle East, including neighboring Iran." (Atlanta Journal-Constitution/Buzzflash)
• Late September: Donald Rumsfeld meets with his chief war planner, General Tommy Franks, along with Franks's operations director, Major General Victor Renuart, and Rumsfeld's undersecretary for policy, Douglas Feith, a protege of neoconservative war hawk Richard Perle. Rumsfeld asserts that Defense, not State, should handle postwar Iraq, and says that he believes Defense will ultimately be put in charge. Feith agrees and asks for his section to lead the postwar effort; Rumsfeld agrees. Feith presents Rumsfeld with a large notebook full of notes from meetings he has had with national security advisor Condoleezza Rice's deputy, Stephen Hadley, and other deputies; Rumsfeld tells Feith to copy the notes to Rice. Rumsfeld says he wants the postwar and reconstruction operations to be planned well in advance: "We do not want to be in a position where the failure of somebody to do those things ties our forces down indefinitely the way they seem to be tied down in Bosnia indefinitely." After the meeting, Renuart asks Franks if he heard correctly -- if Feith's office, in the parlance "OSD Policy" -- "has responsibility for planning post-conflict and our responsibility is security. And we don't own the reconstruction staff." Franks agrees. "I think we just dodged a big bullet," Renuart observes. Feith immediately begins policy guidance for the aftermath of the Iraq invasion., establishing working groups and creating specific cells to examine issues such as energy, stability, and sovereignty. For his part, Rumsfeld agrees to create an office specifically for reconstruction and humanitarian assistance, though he waffles on its creation, eventually putting it off because they want to maintain the fiction that Saddam Hussein still has the option to avoid the invasion by cooperating with the UN.
• Also in late September, Army Major General James "Spider" Marks is given the assignment to handle intelligence operations for the US invasion forces. Marks will serve directly under the ground commander, Lieutenant General David McKiernan. One of Marks's premier tasks will be to find the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction; at this time, he accepts as an article of faith that the WMDs do indeed exist, largely because he can't imagine Dick Cheney, among others, would make such blanket assertions of their reality if US intelligence hadn't confirmed their existence. Marks will be deeply and bitterly disappointed. (Bob Woodward
• Late September: Bush's resolution for Congress to authorize military action against Iraq is in difficulty. The administration has already trimmed language from the resolution stating that the US will invade to ensure stability in the Middle East. Now they face an alternative Senate resolution, crafted by Democrat Joe Biden and Republican Chuck Hagel, that would authorize Bush to only invade Iraq in order to destroy Iraq's WMDs, and require UN approval for that. If the UN refused, Bush would have to come back to Congress and prove that the situation was so "grave" that only military action could eliminate the threat. Biden later says he and Hagel are getting backdoor advice and encouragement from Colin Powell and Richard Armitage. Bush, predictably, is furious. "I don't want a resolution such as this that ties my hands," he tells Republican senator Trent Lott, and demands of Lott, "Derail the Biden legislation and make sure it never sees the light of day."
• But it is not Lott, but Democratic House Minority Leader Richard Gephardt who scuttles the legislation. Gephardt is a cautious supporter of the proposal, and, though he later recalls that he wasn't comfortable with the resolution, feels that he, and the country, have few options. Democrats are in the minority in the House; the House Republicans can pass the resolution at any time, with the support of a number of Democrats. Gephardt instead tries to negotiate with the White House for small, relatively insignificant language changes, and soon finds the White House digging its feet in. "At some point, the White House said, 'This is as good as it gets,'" Gephardt later recalls. "And I became convinced we couldn't get more. You had to make a decision whether you were for giving the president the authority or not. Everything else was window dressing." Many Democrats, including Biden, believe that Gephardt's decision is in part influenced by his own presidential ambitions. Gephardt has already made it clear he was running for office in 2004, and, like other Democratic presidential hopefuls (particularly Senator John Kerry), he has a problem in his voting record: Gephardt, like Kerry, had voted against the 1991 Persian Gulf War. If Gephardt (and Kerry) casts his vote against this war resolution, Republicans would attack him for being soft on national security. Gephardt capitulates. On October 2, Bush holds a ceremony in the Rose Garden with a group of senators and representatives to announce that the resolution has been finalized. Gephardt is among the Congressional leaders standing closest to Bush. He knows his decision will anger many of his fellow Democrats. "His message for us was implicit," Gephardt's colleague Jim McGovern recalls. "He did not want the Democrats to be blamed for the next attack." Fellow House Democrat Henry Waxman recalls that Gephardt's argument is simple: "'Don't even try to fight the White House -- keep it from becoming an issue in the election.' He was thinking about running for president, and he decided to be for it."
• Gephardt's surrender kills Biden's Senate resolution and guarantees a victory for Bush. When Biden consults with Senate Republicans, they all say the same thing: how can we be to the left of Dick Gephardt? "I was angry," Biden recalls. "I was frustrated. But I never second-guess another man's political judgment." (Michael Isikoff and David Corn)
• Late September: Tyler Drumheller, the chief of the CIA's Directorate of Operations European Division, goes to Washington to meet with a senior German intelligence (BND) chief. Drumheller's boss, James Pavitt, wants Drumheller to find out more about the Iraqi defector codenamed "Curveball." No one in the CIA has ever spoken with Curveball, who is the sole source for the intelligence about Saddam Hussein's mobile biological labs; the CIA's information comes from the BND. Pavitt wants to arrange for CIA agents to interview Curveball themselves. The BND official refuses, saying there would be no point. "You don't want to see him," he tells Drumheller. "The guy's crazy. ...We think he's had a nervous breakdown. We think he's a fabricator." Officially, the BND official tells Drumheller, Curveball is still considered a credible source, and the agency will deny any misgivings about the source. Drumheller is taken aback, realizing that Curveball could be a time bomb that could backlash badly on the agency and the Bush administration.
• Curveball was once considered a prime source of inside information on Iraq's WMD programs. A chemical engineer, he had sought asylum in Germany in 1999 with his family, telling authorities that he had embezzled money from the Iraqi government and would certainly be imprisoned or killed if he stayed in Iraq. He was given asylum and classified as an exile. Soon after, he changed his story, and began regaling BND agents about his experience working on mobile bioweapons labs, saying that Hussein had been working on germ warfare weapons since 1997. The BND shared the information with the DIA, which in turn spread the information throughout the US intelligence community. Between January 2000 through September 2001, almost a hundred secret intelligence reports circulated through the community and through the White House, based on Curveball's claims. The claims became linchpins for the Bush administration's claims of Iraq's WMDs. As Curveball continued to spill his information to the Germans, his claims became more widespread and more specific. By October 2001, the CIA's WINPAC, the group specializing in WMD information, was using Curveball's claims to assert definitively that Iraq had "mobile BW agent production plants." White House officials embraced the reports. "We really thought the trailers were the smoking gun," an NSC staffer recalls. "When I saw that, I thought, 'We got him' [Hussein]. We were like, 'The b*stard, we nailed his *ss.' And finally, the agency was giving us something concrete."
• But the information retrieval process with Curveball was tortuous and fraught with opportunities for misunderstanding. Curveball's statements were translated from Arabic into German, and then into English for American consumption. And the DIA never got the raw interview transcripts, but just the German translations. Reporters Michael Isikoff and David Corn write, "[T]he US intelligence community was depending on double translations from a source they couldn't personally evaluate." But the DIA accepted Curveball's assertions without question. "The whole handling of Curveball was a farce," recalls a CIA agent in the Counterproliferation Devision (CPD) who monitored the Curveball information. "But it was a DIA operation. Our attitude was, it's their problem." In other words, no one was bothering to ascertain if Curveball was credible. The CIA accepted the DIA's word on the subject, the DIA accepted the BND's claims, and the BND wasn't sharing its qualms and misgivings about Curveball with the Americans.
• In May 2000, a Defense Department physician detailed to the CPD briefly met the Iraqi. The physician, one of the intelligence community's leading experts on bioweapons, was sent to Germany to see if Curveball had been exposed to any biological agents or had been vaccinated. He took a blood sample from the defector and departed; his contact with Curveball was brief and very limited. But his report was disturbing. For one, Curveball, who insisted on giving his information in Arabic, spoke English after all. The Germans had insisted that Curveball spoke only Arabic, and said that is one reason why US intelligence agents could not question the defector directly. Secondly, the physician noticed that Curveball smelled of liquor and seemed hungover, leading him to speculate about Curveball possibly being a drunk. In 2001, the CIA's Berlin station chief sent an alarming message to Washington: Curveball was "out of control" and couldn't be located. And in April 2002, Britain's MI6, which was also receiving the Curveball material, told the CIA that it had found inconsistencies in Curveball's reporting. The British were "not convinced that Curveball is a wholly reliable source" and that elements of [Curveball's] behavior strike us as typical of individuals we would normally assess as fabricators." But, like the BND, MI6 continued to officially back Curveball. As a result, so did both the CIA and DIA. His reports on mobile bioweapons labs continued to circulate. "We were watching the whole Curveball thing in horror," recalls the CPD staffer. "We knew it was bad from the start. We felt powerless, but we also wondered if maybe we didn't know everything. In the aftermath of 9/11, could you afford to be negligent and dismiss a potential source as just another screwball? Most of our sources were strange in one way or another. Still, we couldn't believe this kept going on and on."
• By the time Drumheller meets with the BND chief, the CIA is severely worried about Curveball's veracity and reliability. Drumheller reports the BND chief's assessment that Curveball was a fabricator to Pavitt, as well as Alan Foley, the head of WINPAC. Drumheller also begins looking into Curveball's files, delegating his deputy to assess Curveball's credibility. She soon reports, "This is a problem, boss." Curveball's information had just been accepted for inclusion in the National Intelligence Estimate then being drafted in response to a request from the Senate Intelligence Committee. Drumheller thinks to himself that they have to have better intelligence than just this. But they did not. (Michael Isikoff and David Corn)
• Late September: At a breakfast meeting with a few Congressional leaders, Bush reacts angrily to the suggestion of a diplomatic resolution to the Iraq situation. Hussein holds nothing but contempt for the United States, Bush snarls; there is no use even talking to him. "Do you want to know what the foreign policy of Iraq is to the United States?" he shrills. Bush answers his own question by popping up his middle finger and thrusting it in the face of Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle. "F*ck the United States!" he cries. "That's what it is -- and that's why we're going to get him!" (Michael Isikoff and David Corn)
• Late September: Dick Cheney invites House Majority Leader Dick Armey to Cheney's small office in the Capitol Building, to try to sell the reluctant Armey on the need to invade Iraq, and to vote on Bush's resolution authorizing military force. "Trust me on this, Dick," Cheney says, "when I get done with this briefing you're going to be with me." Armey later recalls that Cheney's choice of words is odd: "He didn't say, 'You're going to be with us.' He didn't say, 'You're going to be with the president.' He said, 'You're going to be with me.'" Cheney and a gaggle of aides walk Armey through their entire carefully constructed tissue of facts, half-truths, unsupported suppositions, and outright lies, featuring the notorious aluminum tubes, photos of supposed nuclear weapons sites, drawings of mobile biological weapons labs, photos of unmanned aerial vehicles, and tales of "associations" and "relationships" between Hussein and al-Qaeda. Armey isn't convinced; the photos of buildings could have meant anything, the assertions have little support, and he is ultimately left with nothing but Cheney's word as to the state of affairs. "It wasn't very convincing," Armey recalls later. "If I'd gotten the same briefing from President Clinton or Al Gore, I probably would have said, 'Ah, bullsh*t.' But you don't do that with your own people." He assumes Cheney is telling the truth; it never occurs to him that Cheney is lying. When Armey leaves the briefing, he has not yet committed to voting for the resolution to authorize Bush to send troops into Iraq, but he is coming around.
• Armey is finally persuaded by his own aides. His chief of staff says bluntly, "This war is going to happen with or without you." Armey recalls that he could "participate in the process and give it guidance, or I could be a cranky voice on the outside and lose control." Not only does Armey agree to support the resolution, he agrees to introduce it on the floor of the House.
• At the same time, Congressional Democrats are deeply divided. Antiwar Democrats are passionate in their arguments against voting for the resolution. They find the administration's briefings offensive and condescending. "There was one run by Rumsfeld and Powell," recalls representative Bob Filner. "They treated us like kids. They had all these military people standing around. It gave the thing an aura of authority. You'd feel stupid challenging them. They brought in one of those aluminum tubes. It was nothing. My attitude was, 'You're taking us to war on that little tube?' I got up and walked out." Filner's colleague Jim McGovern agrees, recalling, "Here were Tenet, Rumsfeld, Powell, various undersecretaries. They would never get into the nitty-gritty of the reliability of their sources. It would be 'A source said this or that.' Well, who is this source? Why do we believe this source?" But other Democrats are leaning towards supporting the war. Democratic leaders hold their own briefings for their members, often conducted by the party's foreign policy experts, those who had served in the Clinton administration. The briefings are very influential. Richard Holbrooke, Clinton's UN ambassador, reminds the Democrats that Clinton had changed US policy from containment to regime change, and calls Hussein the most dangerous man in the world. Former CIA analyst and NSC staffer Kenneth Pollack gives dire warnings about Hussein's nuclear capabilities. Clinton's top Middle East negotiator, Dennis Ross, says the Iraqi people would celebrate Hussein's overthrow. And former secretary of state Madeline Albright concurs, saying that Hussein is moving towards developing a nuclear bomb and warning that containment is no longer an option. Later, these former Clinton advisors would back and fill about their support for the war, but now, their opinions and statements work to sway numerous wobbly Democrats.
• For many of the Democrats, the most persuasive of their briefers is nuclear inspections expert David Kay. During his stint with the UN inspections teams in the 1990s, Kay had confronted Iraqi experts over their weapons platforms, and challenged them on their evasions and misdirections. Kay is convincing in his assertions that the Iraqis cannot be trusted to tell the truth about their capabilities and intentions, and says the only way to ensure Hussein never builds a nuclear bomb is to overthrow him. Anything else wouldn't be a guarantee of success. "What mattered most to me was the fear of nuclear weapons," recalls House Democrat Henry Waxman, who ends up voting for the resolution in October. "[T]hose people were influential." (Michael Isikoff and David Corn)

 

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