MARCH 15, 2018
by MEL GOODMAN
As we approach the fifteenth
anniversary of the unwarranted invasion of Iraq, which we are still paying for
in so many ways, it is important to remember the misuse of intelligence that
provided a false justification for war. It is particularly important to
do so at this time because President Donald Trump has talked about a military
option against North Korea or Iran (or Venezuela for that matter). Since
there is no cause to justify such wars, it is quite likely that politicized
intelligence would once again be used to provide a justification for audiences
at home and abroad.
In 2002 and 2003, the White
House, the Department of Defense, and the Central Intelligence Agency
collaborated in an effort to describe the false likelihood of a nuclear weapons
program that had to be stopped. In the words of Bush administration officials,
the United States was not going to allow the “smoking gun to be a mushroom
cloud.” On September 8, 2002, Vice President Cheney and national security
adviser Condi Rice used that phrase on CNN and NBC’s “Meet the Press,”
respectively, to argue that Saddam Hussein was “using his procurement system to
acquire the equipment he needs to enrich uranium to build a nuclear weapon.”
In October 2002, the CIA
orchestrated a national intelligence estimate to argue falsely that Iraq was
acquiring uranium from Niger for use in a nuclear weapon. Senior
officials throughout the intelligence community knew that the so-called Niger
report was a fabrication produced by members of the Italian military
intelligence service, and several intelligence officials informed Congressional
and White House officials that they doubted the reports of Iraqi purchases of
uranium from Niger. Nevertheless, the national intelligence estimate spun
a fictitious tale of a clear and present danger based on false reports of
alleged stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons; nuclear weapons;
unmanned aerial vehicles; and ties between Iraq and al Qaeda that were
nonexistent.
In December 2002, President
George W. Bush found the CIA’s case for war inadequate and asked for “something
that Joe Public would understand or gain a lot of confidence from.” Bush
turned to CIA director George Tenet and remarked, “I’ve been given all this
intelligence about Iraq having WMD and this is the best we’ve got?”
Instead of being truthful, Tenet replied, “Don’t worry, it’s a slam
dunk!” Several days later, Alan Foley, the chief of the Weapons
Intelligence, Proliferation and Arms Control Staff, told his analysts to
prepare a briefing for the president. “If the president wants
intelligence to support a decision to go to war,” Foley said, “then it is up to
the agency to provide it.” In early January, CIA Deputy Director John
McLaughlin gave the phony “slam dunk” briefing at the White House.
The Pentagon’s Office of
Special Plans distributed the unsubstantiated and flawed intelligence that not
even the CIA would vouch for. The Undersecretary of Defense for Policy
Douglas Feith supplied bogus intelligence to the White House on Iraqi WMD and
links to terrorist organizations to make the case for war, and then “leaked” this
intelligence to key journalists such as Judith Miller at The New York
Times. Miller had a front page article in the Times on September 8,
2002, citing administration officials claiming that Saddam was seeking
“specially designed” aluminum tubes to enrich uranium, the so-called “smoking
gun.” Several days later, President Bush inserted the Times’ claim
in his speech to the United Nations General Assembly.
The aluminum tube issue was
central to Secretary of State Colin Powell’s speech to the UN in February 2003,
which was based on the phony CIA estimate from October 2002. As Powell’s
chief of staff, Lawrence Wilkerson wrote in The New York Times in
February 2018, the secretary’s “gravitas was a significant part of the Bush
administration’s two-year-long effort to get Americans on the war wagon.
It was CIA Deputy Director McLaughlin who lied to Secretary of State Powell
about the reliability of the intelligence in Powell’s speech. McLaughlin was
the central advocate for the phony intelligence on mobile biological
laboratories that ended up in that speech.
President Bush would have gone
to war with or without intelligence, and once again we are confronted by a
president who might consider going to war with or without intelligence. Fifteen
years ago, we had a CIA director from Capitol Hill who was loyal to the
president and unwilling to tell truth to power. Once again, we have a CIA
director, Gina Haspel, who is a White House loyalist and cannot be counted on
to tell truth to power. She was one of the Agency’s leading cheerleaders
for torture and abuse, and sent the message that order the destruction of the
torture tapes. And former CIA director Mike Pompeo, a neoconservative
hardliner, is now secretary of state, who earned his new position by being a
total loyalist who would never tell truth to power. Is there a voice for
moderation left in the White House?
Bush’s war destabilized the
entire Middle East. Any Trump war could lead to the use of nuclear
weapons that would destabilize the entire world.
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