Bush keeps referring to the country's ability to gather quality
intelligence. What does it matter if he and his administration ignores it in
the drive to fulfill their agenda?
-----------------------------------------------------
Bush, Aides Ignored CIA Caveats on Iraq
Clear-Cut Assertions Were Made Before Arms Assessment Was Completed
By Walter Pincus and Dana Priest
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, February 7, 2004
In its fall 2002 campaign to win congressional support for a war against
Iraq, President Bush and his top advisers ignored many of the caveats and
qualifiers included in the classified report on Saddam Hussein's weapons
that CIA Director George J. Tenet defended Thursday.
In fact, they made some of their most unequivocal assertions about
unconventional weapons before the October 2002 National Intelligence
Estimate (NIE) was completed.
Iraq "is a grave and gathering danger," Bush told the United Nations on
Sept. 12, 2002. At the White House two weeks later -- after referring to a
British government report that Iraq could launch "a biological or chemical
attack in as little as 45 minutes after the order" is given -- he went on to
say, "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."
Three weeks later, on the day the NIE was delivered to Congress, Bush told
lawmakers in the White House Rose Garden that Iraq's current course was "a
threat of unique urgency."
On Thursday, summarizing the NIE's conclusions, Tenet said: "They never said
Iraq was an imminent threat."
The administration's prewar comments -- and the more cautious, qualified
phrasings of intelligence analysts -- are at the heart of the debate over
whether the faulty prewar claims resulted from bad intelligence or
exaggeration by top White House officials -- or both.
Former chief U.S. weapons inspector David Kay told senators last week that
caveats often fall by the wayside "the higher you go up" the bureaucratic
chain. At the top, he said, "you read the headlines, you read the summary,
you're busy, you've got other things to do."
Administration supporters say Bush, Vice President Cheney and others were
simply extrapolating from the comprehensive intelligence provided by Tenet's
intelligence community. Critics say Bush and his Cabinet had already decided
to go to war, regardless of what the intelligence efforts found.
The controversy, arising during the Democratic presidential primary
campaign, has taken on a partisan hue. Some Democrats, however, say they
perceived GOP partisanship earlier, when Republicans advocated an invasion
of Iraq before the 2002 congressional elections. Bush said on Sept.13, 2002,
that he did not think he could explain to voters the position of some
Democrats who said Congress should wait for the United Nations to authorize
the use of force before giving the president the authority he wanted.
Now that extended efforts to find weapons of mass destruction have proved
futile, some are asking why Bush, Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald H.
Rumsfeld used unequivocal rhetoric to describe the threat from Iraq when the
intelligence on the subject was much more nuanced and subjective.
For example, when Bush on Sept. 24, 2002, repeated the British claim that
Iraq's chemical weapons could be activated within 45 minutes, he ignored the
fact that U.S. intelligence mistrusted the source and that the claim never
appeared in the October 2002 U.S. estimate.
On Aug. 26, 2002, Cheney said: "Many of us are convinced that Saddam will
acquire nuclear weapons fairly soon." The estimate, several weeks later,
would say it would take as many as five years, unless Baghdad immediately
obtained weapons-grade materials.
In the same speech, Cheney raised the specter that Hussein would give
chemical or biological weapons to terrorists, a prospect invoked often in
the weeks to come. "Deliverable weapons of mass destruction in the hands of
a terror network, or a murderous dictator, or the two working together,
constitute as grave a threat as can be imagined," Cheney said.
It would be more than a month later that a declassified portion of the NIE
would show that U.S. intelligence analysts had forecast that Hussein would
give such weapons to terrorists only if Iraq were invaded and he faced
annihilation.
"The probability of him initiating an attack . . . in the foreseeable future
.. . . I think would be low," a senior CIA official told the Senate
intelligence committee during a classified briefing on the estimate on Oct.
2, 2002. The CIA released a partial transcript five days later after
committee Democrats complained that a published "white paper" on Iraq's
weapons had not given the public a fair reading of what the classified NIE
contained.
On Sept. 8, 2002, Cheney said of Hussein on NBC's "Meet the Press": "We do
know, with absolute certainty, that he is using his procurement system to
acquire the equipment he needs in order to enrich uranium to build a nuclear
weapon." Cheney was referring to the aluminum tubes that some analysts
believed could be used for a centrifuge to help make nuclear materials;
others believed they were for an antiaircraft rocket.
Such absolute certainty, however, did not appear in the estimate. Tenet said
Thursday that the controversy has yet to be cleared up.
On Sept. 19, 2002, Rumsfeld, speaking before the Senate Armed Services
Committee, said: "No terrorist state poses a greater or more immediate
threat to the security of our people than the regime of Saddam Hussein and
Iraq." The October estimate contained no similar language.
Speaking to the House Armed Services Committee on Sept. 18, 2002, Rumsfeld
described an immediate threat from biological weapons. Hussein, he said,
could deploy "sleeper cells armed with biological weapons to attack us from
within -- and then deny any knowledge or connection to the attacks."
While the intelligence community believed Hussein had biological agents such
as anthrax, and that they could be quickly produced and weaponized for
delivery by bombs, missiles or aerial sprayers, the October 2002 estimate
said: "We had no specific information on the types or quantities of weapons,
agents, or stockpiles at Baghdad's disposal."
Tenet's "provisional bottom line" on biological weapons, he said Thursday,
is that research and development efforts were underway in Iraq "that would
have permitted a rapid shift to agent production if seed stocks were
available. But we do not know if production took place -- and just as
clearly -- we have not yet found biological weapons."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A20194-2004Feb6.html
--
A pattern of deception
A hard truth appears to have escaped the notice of the public and received
scant attention from the media: Bush is the first president in American
history to use deceptive propaganda as his main means of communications in
selling his policies. His pattern of deception continues unabated and in
direct conflict with the notion of the public's informed consent that is
central to American democracy.
Walter Williams is professor emeritus at the University of Washington's
Evans School of Public Affairs.
http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/opinion/6378746.htm
.
|
