Iraq:
“At A Minimum Negligence
In The Commission Of A Fraud”
By Kevin Zeese
22 November,2006
Countercurrents.org
The interview below is of Michael
Isikoff, the co-author of "Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal,
and the Selling of the Iraq War." His co-author is David Corn of
the Nation. Hubris describes the build-up to the Iraq War and details
the manipulation of intelligence, the failure of Congressional leaders
and the media, as well as detailing Richard Armitage's central role
in the Valerie Plame leak. Hubris can be purchased in stores throughout
the country or on-line at: http://www.amazon.com/Hubris-Inside-
Story-Scandal-Selling/dp/0307346811
Michael Isikoff joined the
Washington Post in 1981, where he covered the Justice Department, the
Iran-Contra Affair, and Latin American drug operations. Isikoff joined
Newsweek as an Investigative Correspondent in June 1994 and has written
extensively on the U.S. government’s war on terrorism, the Abu
Ghraib scandal, campaign-finance and congressional ethics abuses, presidential
politics, the Enron scandal and other national issues. Isikoff's June
2002 Newsweek cover story on U.S. intelligence failures that preceded
the 9-11 terror attacks, along with a series of related articles, was
honored with the Investigative Reporters and Editors top prize for investigative
reporting in magazine journalism. He is also the co-author of the weekly
online Web column “Terror Watch,” which won the 2005 award
from the Society of Professional Journalists for best investigative
reporting online. Michael Isikoff is the author of “Uncovering
Clinton: A Reporter's Story,” a book that chronicled his own reporting
of the Lewinsky story.
Kevin Zeese:
Your book leads to the conclusion that the people involved in developing
intelligence -- even those at the top of the chain in the White House
-- should have known that the intelligence was false, exaggerated and
cherry picked to reach the result wanted by the administration, i.e.
to provide justification for the invasion and regime change in Iraq.
Is that how you meant the reader to react to your review?
Michael Isikoff:
I really think the facts speak for themselves at this point. It is unquestionably
true that the Bush administration took the country to war on what has
turned out to be thoroughly false, and in some cases, fraudulent intelligence.
What we do in Hubris is show precisely how that happened and demonstrate,
rather conclusively I think, that there were ample grounds to doubt
many of the most dramatic claims—that Iraq was rebuilding its
nuclear program, for example, or had ties to Al Qaeda. In civil cases,
somebody can be successfully sued not just for knowing they sell you
a false bill of goods; but if they “should have known.”
That’s, at a minimum, what happened here-- negligence in the commission
of a fraud.
KZ: Your
book also leads to the conclusion that people in the chain of intelligence
were afraid of telling the truth and the administration pressured those
analysts whose findings were inconsistent with the conclusion that was
desired by the administration, e.g. the aluminum tubes supposedly for
nuclear weapons. And, in other cases they seemed to miss obvious indications
that intelligence was wrong, e.g. the Niger documents. And in still
other cases when key claims were doubted by senior intelligence officials
they were suppressed and ignored, e.g. Wilson on Iraqi nuclear program
and on Saddam being an immediate threat. It seems like the administration
manipulated and cowered the intelligence community. Is this an accurate
reading? How did they do this? And, how do we prevent this in the future?
MI: There
were far more doubts and dissents expressed within the CIA, the State
Department, the Energy Department, even the Pentagon about many elements
of the administration’s case than has been publicly understood.
We interview many of those dissenters who spoke to us for the first
time and expressed their own anguish about what happened. Listening
to some of them was quite poignant. Paul Pillar, for example, the senior
CIA officer who participated in the drafting of a misleading CIA “white
paper” about Iraqi WMD is anguished to this day about his role,
telling us how he wishes he had mustered up the courage to tell administration
officials, “Hell no! I’m not going to do that.” But
policymakers didn’t want to hear what he and others had to say
anyway-- indeed they actively suppressed the dissents—because
it was clear very early on what the president and vice president wanted
to hear.
KZ: How
often to Cheney visit the CIA and what was the purpose of those visits?
MI: He visited
on multiple occasions and, as we write in the book when we reconstruct
one of these visits, thoroughly intimidated agency analysts, making
it quite clear what he believed the intelligence really showed—even
though he was flat wrong.
KZ: How
did the media fail to get it right during the build-up to war?
MI: That
is a complex question, but we spend some time showing exactly how some
news organizations, particularly the New York Times and its then star
reporter Judy Miller, recycled the claims of fabricators and con men
in order to build the case for war. Some news organizations, on the
other hand, did question elements of the administration’s case.
In April, 2002, I wrote a story in Newsweek debunking the false claim
that 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta had met in Prague with an Iraqi intelligence
agent. I showed that both the FBI and the CIA had by then concluded
that the visit probably never took place. Yet Cheney continued to repeat
the allegation anyway for more than a year after that. Stories that
challenged the administration’s arguments never got the traction
they should have.
KZ: Further,
congressional leaders from the president's own party doubted the case
for war and questioned top secret briefings. Indeed, the House Majority
Leader, Dick Armey, a loyal, conservative Republican, directly doubted
Vice President Dick Cheney and warned of a quagmire. How widespread
were these concerns? How did the administration ignore these Allies?
MI: The
Armey story is one of the most amazing ones we tell in the book. Here
you have the House Majority Leader, the number two Republican in the
House, a strong and loyal conservative who was convinced the war was
a giant mistake. He even warns Bush that he will get stuck in a “quagmire”
that will derail his domestic agenda for the rest of his presidency.
When he gets briefed by Cheney, he thinks the intelligence is flimsy;
had he been shown the same intel by Clinton or Gore, he tells us, he
would have told them it was “bullshit.” But because he was
pressured by Cheney to keep quiet, he went along—much to his later
regret. Sadly, there were quite a few other members of Congress who
went along despite their own doubts. We show how Bush consciously used
the upcoming 2002 congressional elections to whipsaw the Democrats into
backing his war resolution. (That, by the way, does not absolve leading
Democrats like Hillary Clinton and John Kerry, from going along by the
way.)
KZ: Your
book chronicles how we got into the Iraq quagmire but it does not explain
why. You describe the hatred Bush seems to have for Saddam - but that
does not seem to be a reason to go to war. Is the Iraq War an outgrowth
of Jimmy Carter's doctrine that the U.S. will use military force to
ensure access to Middle East oil? Or, a continuation (on sterioids)
of Clinton's doctrine of regime change in Iraq? Author Antonia Juhasz,
"The Bush Agenda" (see: http://democracyrising.us/content/view/483/151/)
describes the invasion and occupation as a corporate takeover of Iraq?
Of course, the U.S. could buy oil on the open market, but invading assures
U.S. oil companies reaping the profit of oil sales and ensures access
as oil availability shrinks. Why do you think we went to war with Iraq?
MI: There
is no easy answer to the question of why we went to war. As we show,
Bush really did have this personal and very visceral antipathy to Saddam.
It was startling to hear, as our sources related to us, how the president
would explode with expletive-ridden tirades when the issue of Saddam
came up. . (I still find pretty eye-popping the scene where the president
flips his middle finger just a few inches from Tom Daschle’s face
when the subject of Saddam was raised.) But that is only part of the
story. You have the machinations of the neoconservatives like Wolfowitz
and Perle who had been promoting the idea of overthrowing Saddam for
years. You had Cheney and Rumsfeld who wanted to reassert American strategic
power. You had the whole post 9/11 emotional mood of the country. I
personally don’t find the oil argument terribly persuasive—other
than on the most basic level: we care a lot more about that part of
the world because it sits on a huge chunk of the world’s oil supplies.
KZ: Now
that the Democrats have control of the House and the Senate and all
the investigatory powers that go with majority control, where do you
suggest the Democrats investigate in relationship to Iraq, Iran and
contracts relating to Iraq?
MI: There
are tons to investigate. The question is how much willpower there will
be in Congress to do so. If I were to make recommendations, I would
tell them to start by reading the shocking story about Ibn Shaiykh al-Libi
in Chapter 7 of our book. He was the alleged Al Qaeda guy who made up
the story about Osama bin Laden sending operatives to Iraq for training
in chemical and biological weapons because the CIA “rendered “
him to Egypt for brutal interrogations by the Egyptian security services.
Al-Libi’s bogus, torture-induced story was repeated at great length
by Secretary of State Powell at the Security Council. Yet after the
war, when al-Libi was returned to U.S. custody, he recanted the whole
thing, saying he only told his interrogators what he thought they wanted
to hear. Al-Libi has since disappeared. There have been some media reports
that he has been rendered back to his native Libya, but the U.S. government
will not say one word about what happened to him or the circumstances
of his interrogations that produced his false claims. If I were conducting
an oversight hearing, I would start with the al-Libi story because it
merges two huge areas that need scrutiny: the use of intelligence in
the run-up to war and the treatment of high value detainees in what
may turn out to be clear violations of the Geneva Conventions. There
is, of course, much more. I would urge everybody to read Hubris and
make up their own list.
Kevin Zeese
is Executive Director of Democracy Rising (www.DemocracyRising.US)
and a co-founder of VotersForPeace (www.VotersForPeace.US).
Leave
A Comment
&
Share Your Insights