The
new Pentagon papers A high-ranking military
officer reveals how Defense Department extremists
suppressed information and twisted the truth
to drive the country to war.
Salon
Editor's Note: Our new Washington bureau brings
you this report from within the belly of the
Bush administration beast -- an eyewitness
account of how radical ideologues hijacked
the American government along the road to
war in Iraq. Salon usually requires readers
to watch a short ad or subscribe in order
to view a complete article, but we thought
this story was just too important -- so we're
giving you full access without further ado.
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In
July of last year, after just over 20 years
of service, I retired as a lieutenant colonel
in the U.S. Air Force. I had served as a communications
officer in the field and in acquisition programs,
as a speechwriter for the National Security
Agency director, and on the Headquarters Air
Force and the office of the secretary of defense
staffs covering African affairs. I had completed
Air Command and Staff College and Navy War
College seminar programs, two master's degrees,
and everything but my Ph.D. dissertation in
world politics at Catholic University. I regarded
my military vocation as interesting, rewarding
and apolitical. My career started in 1978
with the smooth seduction of a full four-year
ROTC scholarship. It ended with 10 months
of duty in a strange new country, observing
up close and personal a process of decision
making for war not sanctioned by the Constitution
we had all sworn to uphold. Ben Franklin's
comment that the Constitutional Convention
of 1787 in Philadelphia had delivered "a republic,
madam, if you can keep it" would come to have
special meaning.
In
the spring of 2002, I was a cynical but willing
staff officer, almost two years into my three-year
tour at the office of the secretary of defense,
undersecretary for policy, sub-Saharan Africa.
In April, a call for volunteers went out for
the Near East South Asia directorate (NESA).
None materialized. By May, the call transmogrified
into a posthaste demand for any staff officer,
and I was "volunteered" to enter what would
be a well-appointed den of iniquity.
The
education I would receive there was like an
M. Night Shyamalan movie -- intense, fascinating
and frightening. While the people were very
much alive, I saw a dead philosophy -- Cold
War anti-communism and neo-imperialism --
walking the corridors of the Pentagon. It
wore the clothing of counterterrorism and
spoke the language of a holy war between good
and evil. The evil was recognized by the leadership
to be resident mainly in the Middle East and
articulated by Islamic clerics and radicals.
But there were other enemies within, anyone
who dared voice any skepticism about their
grand plans, including Secretary of State
Colin Powell and Gen. Anthony Zinni.
From
May 2002 until February 2003, I observed firsthand
the formation of the Pentagon's Office of
Special Plans and watched the latter stages
of the neoconservative capture of the policy-intelligence
nexus in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq.
This seizure of the reins of U.S. Middle East
policy was directly visible to many of us
working in the Near East South Asia policy
office, and yet there seemed to be little
any of us could do about it.
I
saw a narrow and deeply flawed policy favored
by some executive appointees in the Pentagon
used to manipulate and pressurize the traditional
relationship between policymakers in the Pentagon
and U.S. intelligence agencies.
I
witnessed neoconservative agenda bearers within
OSP usurp measured and carefully considered
assessments, and through suppression and distortion
of intelligence analysis promulgate what were
in fact falsehoods to both Congress and the
executive office of the president.
While
this commandeering of a narrow segment of
both intelligence production and American
foreign policy matched closely with the well-published
desires of the neoconservative wing of the
Republican Party, many of us in the Pentagon,
conservatives and liberals alike, felt that
this agenda, whatever its flaws or merits,
had never been openly presented to the American
people. Instead, the public story line was
a fear-peddling and confusing set of messages,
designed to take Congress and the country
into a war of executive choice, a war based
on false pretenses, and a war one year later
Americans do not really understand. That is
why I have gone public with my account.
To
begin with, I was introduced to Bill Luti,
assistant secretary of defense for NESA. A
tall, thin, nervously intelligent man, he
welcomed me into the fold. I knew little about
him. Because he was a recently retired naval
captain and now high-level Bush appointee,
the common assumption was that he had connections,
if not capability. I would later find out
that when Dick Cheney was secretary of defense
over a decade earlier, Luti was his aide.
He had also been a military aide to Speaker
of the House Newt Gingrich during the Clinton
years and had completed his Ph.D. at the Fletcher
School at Tufts University. While his Navy
career had not granted him flag rank, he had
it now and was not shy about comparing his
place in the pecking order with various three-
and four-star generals and admirals in and
out of the Pentagon. Name dropping included
references to getting this or that document
over to Scooter, or responding to one of Scooter's
requests right away. Scooter, I would find
out later, was I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, the
vice president's chief of staff.
Co-workers
who had watched the transition from Clintonista
to Bushite shared conversations and stories
indicating that something deliberate and manipulative
was happening to NESA. Key professional personnel,
longtime civilian professionals holding the
important billets in NESA, were replaced early
on during the transition. Longtime officer
director Joe McMillan was reassigned to the
National Defense University. The director's
job in the time of transition was to help
bring the newly appointed deputy assistant
secretary up to speed, ensure office continuity,
act as a resource relating to regional histories
and policies, and help identify the best ways
to maintain course or to implement change.
Removing such a critical continuity factor
was not only unusual but also seemed like
willful handicapping. It was the first signal
of radical change.
At
the time, I didn't realize that the expertise
on Middle East policy was not only being removed,
but was also being exchanged for that from
various agenda-bearing think tanks, including
the Middle East Media Research Institute,
the Washington Institute for Near East Policy,
and the Jewish Institute for National Security
Affairs. Interestingly, the office director
billet stayed vacant the whole time I was
there. That vacancy and the long-term absence
of real regional understanding to inform defense
policymakers in the Pentagon explains a great
deal about the neoconservative approach on
the Middle East and the disastrous mistakes
made in Washington and in Iraq in the past
two years.
I
soon saw the modus operandi of "instant policy"
unhampered by debate or experience with the
early Bush administration replacement of the
civilian head of the Israel, Lebanon and Syria
desk office with a young political appointee
from the Washington Institute, David Schenker.
Word was that the former experienced civilian
desk officer tended to be evenhanded toward
the policies of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon
of Israel, but there were complaints and he
was gone. I met David and chatted with him
frequently. He was a smart, serious, hardworking
guy, and the proud author of a book on the
chances for Palestinian democracy. Country
desk officers were rarely political appointees.
In my years at the Pentagon, this was the
only "political" I knew doing that type of
high-stress and low-recognition duty. So eager
was the office to have Schenker at the Israel
desk, he served for many months as a defense
contractor of sorts and only received his
"Schedule C" political appointee status months
after I arrived.
I
learned that there was indeed a preferred
ideology for NESA. My first day in the office,
a GS-15 career civil servant rather unhappily
advised me that if I wanted to be successful
here, I'd better remember not to say anything
positive about the Palestinians. This belied
official U.S. policy of serving as an honest
broker for resolution of Israeli and Palestinian
security concerns. At that time, there was
a great deal of talk about Bush's possible
support for a Palestinian state. That the
Pentagon could have implemented and, worse,
was implementing its own foreign policy had
not yet occurred to me.
Throughout
the summer, the NESA spaces in one long office
on the fourth floor, between the 7th and 8th
corridors of D Ring, became more and more
crowded. With war talk and planning about
Iraq, all kinds of new people were brought
in. A politically savvy civilian-clothes-wearing
lieutenant colonel named Bill Bruner served
as the Iraq desk officer, and he had apparently
joined NESA about the time Bill Luti did.
I discovered that Bruner, like Luti, had served
as a military aide to Speaker Gingrich. Gingrich
himself was now conveniently an active member
of Bush's Defense Policy Board, which had
space immediately below ours on the third
floor.
I
asked why Bruner wore civilian attire, and
was told by others, "He's Chalabi's handler."
Chalabi, of course, was Ahmad Chalabi, the
president of the Iraqi National Congress,
who was the favored exile of the neoconservatives
and the source of much of their "intelligence."
Bruner himself said he had to attend a lot
of meetings downtown in hotels and that explained
his suits. Soon, in July, he was joined by
another Air Force pilot, a colonel with no
discernible political connections, Kevin Jones.
I thought of it as a military-civilian partnership,
although both were commissioned officers.
Among
the other people arriving over the summer
of 2002 was Michael Makovsky, a recent MIT
graduate who had written his dissertation
on Winston Churchill and was going to work
on "Iraqi oil issues." He was David Makovsky's
younger brother. David was at the time a senior
fellow at the Washington Institute and had
formerly been an editor of the Jerusalem Post,
a pro-Likud newspaper. Mike was quiet and
seemed a bit uncomfortable sharing space with
us. He soon disappeared into some other part
of the operation and I rarely saw him after
that.
In
late summer, new space was found upstairs
on the fifth floor, and the "expanded Iraq
desk," now dubbed the "Office of Special Plans,"
began moving there. And OSP kept expanding.
Another
person I observed to appear suddenly was Michael
Rubin, another Washington Institute fellow
working on Iraq policy. He and Chris Straub,
a retired Army officer who had been a Republican
staffer for the Senate Intelligence Committee,
were eventually assigned to OSP.
John
Trigilio, a Defense Intelligence Agency analyst,
was assigned to handle Iraq intelligence for
Luti. Trigilio had been on a one-year career-enhancement
tour with the office of the secretary of defense
that was to end in August 2002. DIA had offered
him routine intelligence positions upon his
return from his OSD sabbatical, but none was
as interesting as working in August 2002 for
Luti. John asked Luti for help in gaining
an extension for another year, effectively
removing him from the DIA bureaucracy and
its professional constraints.
Trigilio
and I had hallway debates, as friends. The
one I remember most clearly was shortly after
President Bush gave his famous "mushroom cloud"
speech in Cincinnati in October 2002, asserting
that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction
as well as ties to "international terrorists,"
and was working feverishly to develop nuclear
weapons with "nuclear holy warriors." I asked
John who was feeding the president all the
bull about Saddam and the threat he posed
us in terms of WMD delivery and his links
to terrorists, as none of this was in secret
intelligence I had seen in the past years.
John insisted that it wasn't an exaggeration,
but when pressed to say which actual intelligence
reports made these claims, he would only say,
"Karen, we have sources that you don't have
access to." It was widely felt by those of
us in the office not in the neoconservatives'
inner circle that these "sources" related
to the chummy relationship that Ahmad Chalabi
had with both the Office of Special Plans
and the office of the vice president.
The
newly named director of the OSP, Abram Shulsky,
was one of the most senior people sharing
our space that summer. Abe, a kindly and gentle
man, who would say hello to me in the hallways,
seemed to be someone I, as a political science
grad student, would have loved to sit with
over coffee and discuss the world's problems.
I had a clear sense that Abe ranked high in
the organization, although ostensibly he was
under Luti. Luti was known at times to treat
his staff, even senior staff, with disrespect,
contempt and derision. He also didn't take
kindly to staff officers who had an opinion
or viewpoint that was off the neoconservative
reservation. But with Shulsky, who didn't
speak much at the staff meetings, he was always
respectful and deferential. It seemed like
Shulsky's real boss was somebody like Douglas
Feith or higher.
Doug
Feith, undersecretary of defense for policy,
was a case study in how not to run a large
organization. In late 2001, he held the first
all-hands policy meeting at which he discussed
for over 15 minutes how many bullets and sub-bullets
should be in papers for Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
A year later, in August of 2002, he held another
all-hands meeting in the auditorium where
he embarrassed everyone with an emotional
performance about what it was like to serve
Rumsfeld. He blithely informed us that for
months he didn't realize Rumsfeld had a daily
stand-up meeting with his four undersecretaries.
He shared with us the fact that, after he
started to attend these meetings, he knew
better what Rumsfeld wanted of him. Most military
staffers and professional civilians hearing
this were incredulous, as was I, to hear of
such organizational ignorance lasting so long
and shared so openly. Feith's inattention
to most policy detail, except that relating
to Israel and Iraq, earned him a reputation
most foul throughout Policy, with rampant
stories of routine signatures that took months
to achieve and lost documents. His poor reputation
as a manager was not helped by his arrogance.
One thing I kept hearing from those defending
Feith was that he was "just brilliant." It
was curiously like the brainwashed refrain
in "The Manchurian Candidate" about the programmed
sleeper agent Raymond Shaw, as the "kindest,
warmest, bravest, most wonderful human being
I've ever known."
I
spent time that summer exploring the neoconservative
worldview and trying to grasp what was happening
inside the Pentagon. I wondered what could
explain this rush to war and disregard for
real intelligence. Neoconservatives are fairly
easy to study, mainly because they are few
in number, and they show up at all the same
parties. Examining them as individuals, it
became clear that almost all have worked together,
in and out of government, on national security
issues for several decades. The Project for
the New American Century and its now famous
1998 manifesto to President Clinton on Iraq
is a recent example. But this statement was
preceded by one written for Benyamin Netanyahu's
Likud Party campaign in Israel in 1996 by
neoconservatives Richard Perle, David Wurmser
and Douglas Feith titled "A Clean Break: Strategy
for Securing the Realm."
David
Wurmser is the least known of that trio and
an interesting example of the tangled neoconservative
web. In 2001, the research fellow at the American
Enterprise Institute was assigned to the Pentagon,
then moved to the Department of State to work
as deputy for the hard-line conservative undersecretary
John Bolton, then to the National Security
Council, and now is lodged in the office of
the vice president. His wife, the prolific
Meyrav Wurmser, executive director of the
Middle East Media Research Institute, is also
a neoconservative team player.
Before
the Iraq invasion, many of these same players
labored together for literally decades to
push a defense strategy that favored military
intervention and confrontation with enemies,
secret and unconstitutional if need be. Some
former officials, such as Richard Perle (an
assistant secretary of defense under Reagan)
and James Woolsey (CIA director under Clinton),
were granted a new lease on life, a renewed
gravitas, with positions on President Bush's
Defense Policy Board. Others, like Elliott
Abrams and Paul Wolfowitz, had apparently
overcome previous negative associations from
an Iran-Contra conviction for lying to the
Congress and for utterly miscalculating the
strength of the Soviet Union in a politically
driven report to the CIA.
Neoconservatives
march as one phalanx in parallel opposition
to those they hate. In the early winter of
2002, a co-worker U.S. Navy captain and I
were discussing the service being rendered
by Colin Powell at the time, and we were told
by the neoconservative political appointee
David Schenker that "the best service Powell
could offer would be to quit right now." I
was present at a staff meeting when Bill Luti
called Marine Gen. and former Chief of Central
Command Anthony Zinni a "traitor," because
Zinni had publicly expressed reservations
about the rush to war.
After
August 2002, the Office of Special Plans established
its own rhythm and cadence separate from the
non-politically minded professionals covering
the rest of the region. While often accused
of creating intelligence, I saw only two apparent
products of this office: war planning guidance
for Rumsfeld, presumably impacting Central
Command, and talking points on Iraq, WMD and
terrorism. These internal talking points seemed
to be a mélange crafted from obvious past
observation and intelligence bits and pieces
of dubious origin. They were propagandistic
in style, and all desk officers were ordered
to use them verbatim in the preparation of
any material prepared for higher-ups and people
outside the Pentagon. The talking points included
statements about Saddam Hussein's proclivity
for using chemical weapons against his own
citizens and neighbors, his existing relations
with terrorists based on a member of al-Qaida
reportedly receiving medical care in Baghdad,
his widely publicized aid to the Palestinians,
and general indications of an aggressive viability
in Saddam Hussein's nuclear weapons program
and his ongoing efforts to use them against
his neighbors or give them to al-Qaida style
groups. The talking points said he was threatening
his neighbors and was a serious threat to
the U.S., too.
I
suspected, from reading Charles Krauthammer,
a neoconservative columnist for the Washington
Post, and the Weekly Standard, and hearing
a Cheney speech or two, that these talking
points left the building on occasion. Both
OSP functions duplicated other parts of the
Pentagon. The facts we should have used to
base our papers on were already being produced
by the intelligence agencies, and the war
planning was already done by the combatant
command staff with some help from the Joint
Staff. Instead of developing defense policy
alternatives and advice, OSP was used to manufacture
propaganda for internal and external use,
and pseudo war planning.
As
a result of my duties as the North Africa
desk officer, I became acquainted with the
Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) support
staff for NESA. Every policy regional director
was served by a senior executive intelligence
professional from DIA, along with a professional
intelligence staff. This staff channeled DIA
products, accepted tasks for DIA, and in the
past had been seen as a valued member of the
regional teams. However, as the war approached,
this type of relationship with the Defense
Intelligence Agency crumbled.
Even the most casual observer could note the
tension and even animosity between "Wild Bill"
Luti (as we came to refer to our boss) and
Bruce Hardcastle, our defense intelligence
officer (DIO). Certainly, there were stylistic
and personality differences. Hardcastle, like
most senior intelligence officers I knew,
was serious, reserved, deliberate, and went
to great lengths to achieve precision and
accuracy in his speech and writing. Luti was
the kind of guy who, in staff meetings and
in conversations, would jump from grand theory
to administrative minutiae with nary a blink
or a fleeting shadow of self-awareness.
I
discovered that Luti and possibly others within
OSP were dissatisfied with Hardcastle's briefings,
in particular with the aspects relating to
WMD and terrorism. I was not clear exactly
what those concerns were, but I came to understand
that the DIA briefing did not match what OSP
was claiming about Iraq's WMD capabilities
and terrorist activities. I learned that shortly
before I arrived there had been an incident
in NESA where Hardcastle's presence and briefing
at a bilateral meeting had been nixed abruptly
by Luti. The story circulating among the desk
officers was "a last-minute cancellation"
of the DIO presentation. Hardcastle's intelligence
briefing was replaced with one prepared by
another Policy office that worked nonproliferation
issues. While this alternative briefing relied
on intelligence produced by DIO and elsewhere,
it was not a product of the DIA or CIA community,
but instead was an OSD Policy "branded" product
-- and so were its conclusions. The message
sent by Policy appointees and well understood
by staff officers and the defense intelligence
community was that senior appointed civilians
were willing to exclude or marginalize intelligence
products that did not fit the agenda.
Staff
officers would always request OSP's most current
Iraq, WMD and terrorism talking points. On
occasion, these weren't available in an approved
form and awaited Shulsky's approval. The talking
points were a series of bulleted statements,
written persuasively and in a convincing way,
and superficially they seemed reasonable and
rational. Saddam Hussein had gassed his neighbors,
abused his people, and was continuing in that
mode, becoming an imminently dangerous threat
to his neighbors and to us -- except that
none of his neighbors or Israel felt this
was the case. Saddam Hussein had harbored
al-Qaida operatives and offered and probably
provided them with training facilities --
without mentioning that the suspected facilities
were in the U.S./Kurdish-controlled part of
Iraq. Saddam Hussein was pursuing and had
WMD of the type that could be used by him,
in conjunction with al-Qaida and other terrorists,
to attack and damage American interests, Americans
and America -- except the intelligence didn't
really say that. Saddam Hussein had not been
seriously weakened by war and sanctions and
weekly bombings over the past 12 years, and
in fact was plotting to hurt America and support
anti-American activities, in part through
his carrying on with terrorists -- although
here the intelligence said the opposite. His
support for the Palestinians and Arafat proved
his terrorist connections, and basically,
the time to act was now. This was the gist
of the talking points, and it remained on
message throughout the time I watched the
points evolve.
But
evolve they did, and the subtle changes I
saw from September to late January revealed
what the Office of Special Plans was contributing
to national security. Two key types of modifications
were directed or approved by Shulsky and his
team of politicos. First was the deletion
of entire references or bullets. The one I
remember most specifically is when they dropped
the bullet that said one of Saddam's intelligence
operatives had met with Mohammad Atta in Prague,
supposedly salient proof that Saddam was in
part responsible for the 9/11 attack. That
claim had lasted through a number of revisions,
but after the media reported the claim as
unsubstantiated by U.S. intelligence, denied
by the Czech government, and that Atta's location
had been confirmed by the FBI to be elsewhere,
that particular bullet was dropped entirely
from our "advice on things to say" to senior
Pentagon officials when they met with guests
or outsiders.
The
other change made to the talking points was
along the line of fine-tuning and generalizing.
Much of what was there was already so general
as to be less than accurate.
Some
bullets were softened, particularly statements
of Saddam's readiness and capability in the
chemical, biological or nuclear arena. Others
were altered over time to match more exactly
something Bush and Cheney said in recent speeches.
One item I never saw in our talking points
was a reference to Saddam's purported attempt
to buy yellowcake uranium in Niger. The OSP
list of crime and evil had included Saddam's
attempts to seek fissionable materials or
uranium in Africa. This point was written
mostly in the present tense and conveniently
left off the dates of the last known attempt,
sometime in the late 1980s. I was surprised
to hear the president's mention of the yellowcake
in Niger in his 2003 State of the Union address
because that indeed was new and in theory
might have represented new intelligence, something
that seemed remarkably absent in any of the
products provided us by the OSP (although
not for lack of trying). After hearing of
it, I checked with my old office of Sub-Saharan
African Affairs -- and it was news to them,
too. It also turned out to be false.
It
is interesting today that the "defense" for
those who lied or prevaricated about Iraq
is to point the finger at the intelligence.
But the National Intelligence Estimate, published
in September 2002, as remarked upon recently
by former CIA Middle East chief Ray McGovern,
was an afterthought. It was provoked only
after Sens. Bob Graham and Dick Durban noted
in August 2002, as Congress was being asked
to support a resolution for preemptive war,
that no NIE elaborating real threats to the
United States had been provided. In fact,
it had not been written, but a suitable NIE
was dutifully prepared and submitted the very
next month. Naturally, this document largely
supported most of the outrageous statements
already made publicly by Bush, Cheney, Rice
and Rumsfeld about the threat Iraq posed to
the United States. All the caveats, reservations
and dissents made by intelligence were relegated
to footnotes and kept from the public. Funny
how that worked.
Starting
in the fall of 2002 I found a way to vent
my frustrations with the neoconservative hijacking
of our defense policy. The safe outlet was
provided by retired Col. David Hackworth,
who agreed to publish my short stories anonymously
on his Web site Soldiers for the Truth, under
the moniker of "Deep Throat: Insider Notes
From the Pentagon." The "deep throat" part
was his idea, but I was happy to have a sense
that there were folks out there, mostly military,
who would be interested in the secretary of
defense-sponsored insanity I was witnessing
on almost a daily basis. When I was particularly
upset, like when I heard Zinni called a "traitor,"
I wrote about it in articles like this one.
In
November, my Insider articles discussed the
artificial worlds created by the Pentagon
and the stupid naiveté of neocon assumptions
about what would happen when we invaded Iraq.
I discussed the price of public service, distinguishing
between public servants who told the truth
and then saw their careers flame out and those
"public servants" who did not tell the truth
and saw their careers ignite. My December
articles became more depressing, discussing
the history of the 100 Years' War and "combat
lobotomies." There was a painful one titled
"Minority Reports" about the necessity but
unlikelihood of a Philip Dick sci-fi style
"minority report" on Feith-Wolfowitz-Rumsfeld-Cheney's
insanely grandiose vision of some future Middle
East, with peace, love and democracy brought
on through preemptive war and military occupation.
I
shared some of my concerns with a civilian
who had been remotely acquainted with the
Luti-Feith-Perle political clan in his previous
work for one of the senior Pentagon witnesses
during the Iran-Contra hearings. He told me
these guys were engaged in something worse
than Iran-Contra. I was curious but he wouldn't
tell me anything more. I figured he knew what
he was talking about. I thought of him when
I read much later about the 2002 and 2003
meetings between Michael Ledeen, Reuel Marc
Gerecht and Iranian arms dealer Manucher Ghorbanifar
-- all Iran-Contra figures.
In
December 2002, I requested an acceleration
of my retirement to the following July. By
now, the military was anxiously waiting under
the bed for the other shoe to drop amid concerns
over troop availability, readiness for an
ill-defined mission, and lack of day-after
clarity. The neocons were anxiously struggling
to get that damn shoe off. That other shoe
fell with a thump, as did the regard many
of us had held for Colin Powell, on Feb. 5
as the secretary of state capitulated to the
neoconservative line in his speech at the
United Nations -- a speech not only filled
with falsehoods pushed by the neoconservatives
but also containing many statements already
debunked by intelligence.
War
is generally crafted and pursued for political
reasons, but the reasons given to the Congress
and to the American people for this one were
inaccurate and so misleading as to be false.
Moreover, they were false by design. Certainly,
the neoconservatives never bothered to sell
the rest of the country on the real reasons
for occupation of Iraq -- more bases from
which to flex U.S. muscle with Syria and Iran,
and better positioning for the inevitable
fall of the regional ruling sheikdoms. Maintaining
OPEC on a dollar track and not a euro and
fulfilling a half-baked imperial vision also
played a role. These more accurate reasons
for invading and occupying could have been
argued on their merits -- an angry and aggressive
U.S. population might indeed have supported
the war and occupation for those reasons.
But Americans didn't get the chance for an
honest debate.
President
Bush has now appointed a commission to look
at American intelligence capabilities and
will report after the election. It will "examine
intelligence on weapons of mass destruction
and related 21st century threats ... [and]
compare what the Iraq Survey Group learns
with the information we had prior..." The
commission, aside from being modeled on failed
rubber stamp commissions of the past and consisting
entirely of those selected by the executive
branch, specifically excludes an examination
of the role of the Office of Special Plans
and other executive advisory bodies. If the
president or vice president were seriously
interested in "getting the truth," they might
consider asking for evidence on how intelligence
was politicized, misused and manipulated,
and whether information from the intelligence
community was distorted in order to sway Congress
and public opinion in a narrowly conceived
neoconservative push for war. Bush says he
wants the truth, but it is clear he is no
more interested in it today than he was two
years ago.
Proving
that the truth is indeed the first casualty
in war, neoconservative member of the Defense
Policy Board Richard Perle called this February
for "heads to roll." Perle, agenda setter
par excellence, named George Tenet and Defense
Intelligence Agency head Vice Adm. Lowell
Jacoby as guilty of failing to properly inform
the president on Iraq and WMD. No doubt, the
intelligence community, susceptible to politicization
and outdated paradigms, needs reform. The
swiftness of the neoconservative casting of
blame on the intelligence community and away
from themselves should have been fully expected.
Perhaps Perle and others sense the grave and
growing danger of political storms unleashed
by the exposure of neoconservative lies. Meanwhile,
Ahmad Chalabi, extravagantly funded by the
neocons in the Pentagon to the tune of millions
to provide the disinformation, has boasted
with remarkable frankness, "We are heroes
in error," and, "What was said before is not
important."
Now
we are told by our president and neoconservative
mouthpieces that our sons and daughters, husbands
and wives are in Iraq fighting for freedom,
for liberty, for justice and American values.
This cost is not borne by the children of
Wolfowitz, Perle, Rumsfeld and Cheney. Bush's
daughters do not pay this price. We are told
that intelligence has failed America, and
that President Bush is determined to get to
the bottom of it. Yet not a single neoconservative
appointee has lost his job, and no high official
of principle in the administration has formally
resigned because of this ill-planned and ill-conceived
war and poorly implemented occupation of Iraq.
Will
Americans hold U.S. policymakers accountable?
Will we return to our roots as a republic,
constrained and deliberate, respectful of
others? My experience in the Pentagon leading
up to the invasion and occupation of Iraq
tells me, as Ben Franklin warned, we may have
already failed. But if Americans at home are
willing to fight -- tenaciously and courageously
-- to preserve our republic, we might be able
to keep it.
salon.com
-------links
used in article
pg
4: Staff officers would always request OSP's
most current Iraq, WMD and terrorism talking
points. On occasion, these weren't available
in an approved form and awaited Shulsky's
approval. The talking points were a series
of bulleted statements, written persuasively
and in a convincing way, and superficially
they seemed reasonable and rational. Saddam
Hussein had gassed his neighbors, abused his
people, and was continuing in that mode, becoming
an imminently dangerous threat to his neighbors
and to us -- except that none of his neighbors
or Israel felt this was the case. Saddam Hussein
had harbored al-Qaida operatives and offered
and probably provided them with training facilities
-- without mentioning that the suspected facilities
were in the U.S./Kurdish-controlled part of
Iraq. Saddam Hussein was pursuing and had
WMD of the type that could be used by him,
in conjunction with al-Qaida and other terrorists,
to attack and damage American interests, Americans
and America -- except the intelligence didn't
really say that. Saddam Hussein had not been
seriously weakened by war and sanctions and
weekly bombings over the past 12 years, and
in fact was plotting to hurt America and support
anti-American activities, in part through
his carrying on with terrorists -- although
here the intelligence said the opposite. His
support for the Palestinians and Arafat proved
his terrorist connections, and basically,
the time to act was now. This was the gist
of the talking points, and it remained on
message throughout the time I watched the
points evolve.
But evolve they did, and the subtle changes
I saw from September to late January revealed
what the Office of Special Plans was contributing
to national security. Two key types of modifications
were directed or approved by Shulsky and his
team of politicos. First was the deletion
of entire references or bullets. The one I
remember most specifically is when they dropped
the bullet that said one of Saddam's intelligence
operatives had met with Mohammad Atta in Prague,
supposedly salient proof that Saddam was in
part responsible for the 9/11 attack. That
claim had lasted through a number of revisions,
but after the media reported the claim as
unsubstantiated by U.S. intelligence, denied
by the Czech government, and that Atta's location
had been confirmed by the FBI to be elsewhere,
that particular bullet was dropped entirely
from our "advice on things to say" to senior
Pentagon officials when they met with guests
or outsiders.
The other change made to the talking points
was along the line of fine-tuning and generalizing.
Much of what was there was already so general
as to be less than accurate.
Some bullets were softened, particularly statements
of Saddam's readiness and capability in the
chemical, biological or nuclear arena. Others
were altered over time to match more exactly
something Bush and Cheney said in recent speeches.
One item I never saw in our talking points
was a reference to Saddam's purported attempt
to buy yellowcake uranium in Niger. The OSP
list of crime and evil had included Saddam's
attempts to seek fissionable materials or
uranium in Africa. This point was written
mostly in the present tense and conveniently
left off the dates of the last known attempt,
sometime in the late 1980s. I was surprised
to hear the president's mention of the yellowcake
in Niger in his 2003 State of the Union address
because that indeed was new and in theory
might have represented new intelligence, something
that seemed remarkably absent in any of the
products provided us by the OSP (although
not for lack of trying). After hearing of
it, I checked with my old office of Sub-Saharan
African Affairs -- and it was news to them,
too. It also turned out to be false.
It is interesting today that the "defense"
for those who lied or prevaricated about Iraq
is to point the finger at the intelligence.
But the National Intelligence Estimate, published
in September 2002, as remarked
upon recently by former CIA Middle East
chief Ray McGovern, was an afterthought. It
was provoked only after Sens. Bob Graham and
Dick Durban noted in August 2002, as Congress
was being asked to support a resolution for
preemptive war, that no NIE elaborating real
threats to the United States had been provided.
In fact, it had not been written, but a suitable
NIE was dutifully prepared and submitted the
very next month. Naturally, this document
largely supported most of the outrageous statements
already made publicly by Bush, Cheney, Rice
and Rumsfeld about the threat Iraq posed to
the United States. All the caveats, reservations
and dissents made by intelligence were relegated
to footnotes and kept from the public. Funny
how that worked.
Starting in the fall of 2002 I found a way
to vent my frustrations with the neoconservative
hijacking of our defense policy. The safe
outlet was provided by retired Col.
David Hackworth, who agreed to publish
my short stories anonymously on his Web site
Soldiers for the Truth, under the moniker
of "Deep Throat: Insider Notes From the Pentagon."
The "deep throat" part was his idea, but I
was happy to have a sense that there were
folks out there, mostly military, who would
be interested in the secretary of defense-sponsored
insanity I was witnessing on almost a daily
basis. When I was particularly upset, like
when I heard Zinni called a "traitor," I wrote
about it in articles like this
one.
In November, my Insider articles discussed
the artificial
worlds created by the Pentagon and the
stupid naiveté
of neocon assumptions about what would
happen when we invaded Iraq. I discussed the
price
of public service, distinguishing between
public servants who told the truth and then
saw their careers flame out and those "public
servants" who did not tell the truth and saw
their careers ignite. My December articles
became more depressing, discussing the history
of the 100 Years' War and "combat
lobotomies." There was a painful one titled
"Minority
Reports" about the necessity but unlikelihood
of a Philip Dick sci-fi style "minority report"
on Feith-Wolfowitz-Rumsfeld-Cheney's insanely
grandiose vision of some future Middle East,
with peace, love and democracy brought on
through preemptive war and military occupation.
Clinton
letter referenced on pg. 3
http://www.newamericancentury.org/iraqclintonletter.htm


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