Whitewashing
War Based On Lies
By Bill Van Auken
02 April 2005
World
Socialist Web
The
report released Thursday by the White House-appointed Commission on
the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons
of Mass Destruction was entirely predictable. It follows the same pattern
as the whitewashes performed last year for the Bush administration by
the 9/11 Commission and the Senate Intelligence Committee.
Like those earlier
investigations, the WMD panels document serves up recommendations
promoting an intensification of militarism abroad and police-state measures
at home.
This so-called independent
commission was handpicked by Bush and directed to concern itself solely
with intelligence failures concerning the war in Iraq. It
was constituted a little over a year ago for the political purpose of
countering incontrovertible evidence that the Bush administration went
to war against Iraq on the basis of lies.
Presenting the report
at a White House press conference Thursday, Bush read out a prepared
statement praising the very intelligence community that, according to
the document, had been dead wrong in almost all of its pre-war
judgments about Iraqs weapons of mass destruction. After
completing his statement, Bush turned on his heels and walked through
a door that shut behind him.
The gesture was
unmistakable: as far as the administration was concerned, the controversy
over non-existent Iraqi weapons of mass destruction was now closed.
Bush concluded his
remarks by declaring, ...in an age in which we are at war, the
consequences of underestimating a threat could be tens of thousands
of innocent lives. He continued: And my administration will
continue to make intelligence reforms that will allow us to identify
threats before they fully emerge so we can take effective action to
protect the American people.
Yet, if one were
to take the report at face value, the lesson would be that the consequences
of overestimating a threat have already included the destruction of
the lives of tens of thousands of Iraqis and over 1,700 US, British
and other foreign troops. For both the Iraqi and American people, moreover,
the result of acting on unfounded threats before they fully emergedthe
policy of preventive warhas proven an unmitigated disaster.
The issue in the
Iraq war, however, was not one of false estimations in either direction,
but rather the deliberate deception of the American people on a massive
scale for the purpose of executing plans for conquering Iraq that had
been drawn up well before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001,
and even before the Bush administration took office.
Scathing
is the adjective that the media has invariably used in describing the
assessment in the 618-page public version of the report of the performance
of the Central Intelligence Agency and other US intelligence organizations
in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq. What has drawn less attention
is how the panels slavish defense of the Bush administration has
left the US president and all of his senior advisors unscathed.
Over a dozen times
in the document, the commission dismisses charges that the false intelligence
used to justify the war on Iraq was the product of political pressure
or outright fabrication on the part of the White House and the Pentagons
civilian leadership. Yet the charges themselves are referred to only
in a footnote that lists a series of news stories detailing instances
in which such pressure was more than evident.
These includes the
attempts by Vice President Dick Cheney to extort damning evidence against
Iraq by browbeating CIA analysts, and the retaliation against Joseph
Wilsonwho blew the whistle on the phony intelligence concerning
alleged Iraqi uranium purchases in Nigerby exposing his wife as
a covert CIA agent. Also listed are articles that quoted CIA and State
Department officials saying that they were coerced into producing intelligence
that indicted Iraq on weapons violations.
Dismissing all of
the evidence, the report states baldly: The Commission found no
evidence of political pressure to influence the Intelligence Communitys
pre-war assessments of Iraqs weapons programs...We conclude that
it was the paucity of intelligence and poor analytical tradecraft, rather
than political pressure, that produced the inaccurate pre-war intelligence
assessments.
Cheney, who by all
accounts led the administrations drive to fabricate and disseminate
such information, is mentioned precisely two times in the report, one
of them in a footnote. In presenting the document, the panels
co-chairs Laurence Silberman and Charles Robb acknowledged that they
had spoken to him only twicetogether with President Bush.
Silberman stressed
that the panel had discussions with the president, and then
added, We didnt interview the president, nor did we interview
the vice president.
In other words,
they only discussed the commissions goals. Neither Bush nor Cheney
were questioned about their responsibility for generating the phony
intelligence that was used as the pretext for an unprovoked and illegal
war.
None of this can
come as a surprise given the commissions makeup. It was constituted
in February 2004, shortly after David Kay, who for the previous eight
months had headed the US search in Iraq for nuclear, chemical and biological
weapons, resigned as head of the Iraq Survey Group. He admitted that
no WMD had been found and that, in his opinion, there had been none
in Iraq when the US invaded.
The alleged existence
of such weapons, and the supposed threat that they would be handed off
to terrorists and used against the US, constituted the principal rationale
advanced by the Bush administration for launching the war.
Heading the commission
was Silberman, a senior US Appeals Court Judge and a veteran of dirty
jobs on behalf of the Republican right going back to the Nixon administration.
In 1980, he was one of the Republican political operatives who participated
in talks with representatives of the Iranian government, which was then
holding 55 American hostages. It has been widely charged that the aim
of these talks was to preclude the release of the hostages until after
that years presidential electiona political dirty trick
aimed at undermining the reelection campaign of the incumbent president,
Democrat Jimmy Carter, and ensuring the victory of his opponent, Ronald
Reagan.
Reagan rewarded
Silberman with an appointment to the US Appeals Court, where he acted
to overturn the convictions of Lt. Col. Oliver North and Adm. John Pointdexter
for their criminal roles in the Iran-Contra conspiracy. He also intervened
from the bench to squelch the investigation into Iran-Contra.
According to David
Brock, former right-wing publicist and author of the political exposé
Blinded by the Right, during the drive to impeach President Bill Clinton,
Silberman was working behind the scenes to encourage attacks on the
president, while ruling against him from the bench.
When Silberman was
tapped to head Bushs WMD panel, author and former Nixon staff
member Kevin Phillips commented, In the past, Silberman has been
more involved with cover-ups in the Middle East than with any attempts
to unravel them.
Co-chair Charles
Robb, a prominent member of the right-wing Democratic Leadership Council,
was an early advocate of regime change in Iraq and a supporter
of the war launched by the Bush administration.
Serving as executive
director of the panel was retired vice admiral John Redd, who took up
his post after returning from Baghdad, where he had worked as a senior
deputy to L. Paul Bremer, the head of the US occupation authority in
Iraq.
The commissions
14-month investigation, carried out entirely in secret, has revealed
nothing new, at least in the unclassified version of the report. In
some instances where it delves in detail into the so-called intelligence
failures, the level of argumentation approaches the ludicrous. Such
is the case in its treatment of Curveball, the code name
given to an Iraqi defector who fabricated a story that was the source,
the report says, of virtually all of the Intelligence Communitys
information about Iraqs alleged mobile biological weapons facilities.
The inventions of
Curveball featured prominently in the speech delivered by
then-US Secretary of State Colin Powell to the United Nations Security
Council in February 2003, on the eve of the Iraq invasion.
The report states:
It is at bottom a story of how Defense Department collectors abdicated
their responsibility to vet a critical source; of Central Intelligence
Agency analysts who placed undue emphasis on the sources reporting
because the tales he told were consistent with what they already believed;
and, ultimately, of Intelligence Community leaders who failed to tell
policymakers about Curveballs flaws in the weeks before the war.
This accounts
distortions and omissions make it every bit as lying as Curveballs
tale about mobile weapons labs. The Pentagon collectors
did not abdicate their responsibility. They were directed
to produce just such material to make the case for war.
Nowhere does the
panels report refer to the creation of the Office of Special Plans
by the wars architects in the Defense Departments civilian
leadership. This office was a separate in-house intelligence agency
tasked with spreading the most lurid possible accounts of Iraqi weapons
and supposed terrorist ties. The purpose of the unit was precisely to
circumvent the vetting carried out at the CIA.
According to multiple
accounts, those in the CIA who objected to such intelligence
were subjected to immense pressure by the administration.
As for Curveballs
own motives, the panel merely brands him a fabricator. That
he was also the brother of a senior aide to Ahmed Chalabi, the leader
of the exile Iraqi National Congress (INC), goes unmentioned. The report
does acknowledge that the sole corroboration of his claims came from
another source within the INC. But it then states, incredibly, that
not only was Curveballs reporting not influenced by, controlled
by, or connected to the INC, but that INC sources had a
minimal impact on pre-war assessments.
The real relationship
was that the INC functioned as a paid agent of the US government, providing
the false intelligence that the administration wanted to justify the
war. The Pentagons Office of Special Plans served as a conduit
for this material, funneling it to the administration and the media
in the period leading up to the war.
To the extent that
the report issues recommendations, none are aimed at holding anyone
accountable for the so-called intelligence failure. Rather,
they are designed to further centralize the vast US intelligence apparatus,
creating a more ominous instrument for militarism and repression.
The report calls
for granting greater powers to Bushs nominee for director of national
intelligence, John Negroponte, one of the former organizers of the illegal
CIA war against Nicaragua. It further advocates the formation of a National
Security Service within the Federal Bureau of Investigation, merging
the FBIs counter-terrorism, counter-intelligence and intelligence
arms, and placing the new unit under the direction of the director of
national intelligence. It also proposes the consolidation of the agencys
Office of Intelligence Policy Review with its counterterrorism and counterespionage
sections, under the direction of a new assistant attorney general for
national security.
Like the 9/11 commission,
the panel calls for closer coordination between the FBI and the CIA.
Together, these
proposals amount to the framework for an American secret police, overturning
restraints and protections against domestic spying and state provocation
that were instituted after revelations of FBI and CIA abuses in the
1960s and 1970s.
Several sections
of the report submitted to the Bush administration were censored from
the declassified version. These include assessments of US intelligence
capabilities in relation to the nuclear programs of North Korea and
Iran. Even the most general conclusions in this area were classified.
Finally, the report
includes a single paragraph printed in a shaded blue box on the subject
of covert action. It notes that when the threats of
proliferation and terrorism loom large, covert action may play an increasingly
important role.
It continues: The
Commission conducted a careful study of US covert action capabilities,
with attention to the changing security landscape and the special category
of missions that involve both CIA and Special Operations Forces. Because
even the most general statements about the Intelligence Communities
capabilities in this area are classified, the Commissions assessments
and four specific findings cannot be discussed in this report.
The classification
of these sections of the report serves as a warning of new acts of military
aggression that are already in an advanced state of preparation. The
changing security landscape and special category of missions conducted
by the CIA and Special Forces have already been exposed before the world
in the form of assassinations, kidnappings and rendition
of detainees to regimes that practice torture.
That the administration
was able to issue a report so packed with crude falsifications and howling
contradictions testifies to the lack of any serious opposition to its
policies in general, and the war in Iraq in particular, on the part
of the Democratic Party. The positions of Robb, the panels co-chair,
predominate within the Democratic Party leadership. They, like Bush,
are prepared to close the door on the WMD question and on any attempt
to hold accountable those who, in planning and launching an unprovoked
war based on lies, committed war crimes.