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Smoking guns and mushroom
clouds
By Jason Leopold
Six
months before the United States was dead-set on invading
Iraq to rid the country of its alleged weapons of mass
destruction (WMD), experts in the field of nuclear
science warned officials in the George W Bush
administration that intelligence reports showing Iraq
was stockpiling chemical and biological weapons was
unreliable, and that the country did not pose an
imminent threat to its neighbors in the Middle East or
the US.
But the dissenters were told to keep
quiet by high-level administration officials in the
White House because the Bush administration had already
decided that military force would be used to overthrow
the regime of Iraq's Saddam Hussein, interviews and
documents reveal.
The most vocal opponent to
intelligence information supplied by the Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA) to the hawks in the Bush
administration about the so-called Iraqi threat to
national security was David Albright, a former United
Nations weapons inspector and the president and founder
of the Institute for Science and International Security
(ISIS), a Washington-based group that gathers
information for the public and the White House on
nuclear weapons programs.
With the likelihood of
finding WMD in Iraq becoming increasingly remote, new
information, such as documents and interviews provided
by Albright and other weapons experts, prove that the
White House did not suffer so much from an intelligence
failure on Iraq's WMD, but instead shows how the Bush
administration embellished reams of intelligence and
relied on murky intelligence in order to get Congress
and the public to back the war. That may explain why it
is becoming so difficult to find WMD: because it's
entirely likely that the weapons don't exist.
"A
critical question is whether the Bush administration has
deliberately misled the public and other governments in
playing a 'nuclear card' that it knew would strengthen
public support for war," Albright said in a March 10
assessment of the CIA's intelligence, which is posted on
the ISIS website.
John Dean, the former counsel
to president Richard Nixon, wrote in a column this week
that if President George W Bush mislead the public in
building a case for war in Iraq, largely because the WMD
have yet to be found and if Bush did distort
intelligence information to make a case for war, a case
for impeachment could be made, according to Dean.
"Presidential statements, particularly on
matters of national security, are held to an expectation
of the highest standard of truthfulness," Dean wrote
this week. "A president cannot stretch, twist or distort
facts and get away with it. President Lyndon Johnson's
distortions of the truth about Vietnam forced him to
stand down from reelection. President Richard Nixon's
false statements about Watergate forced his
resignation."
In September, USA Today reported
that "the Bush administration is expanding on and in
some cases contradicting US intelligence reports in
making the case for an invasion of Iraq, interviews with
administration and intelligence officials indicate.
Administration officials accuse Iraq of having ties to
al-Qaeda terrorists and of amassing weapons of mass
destruction despite uncertain and sometimes contrary
intelligence on these issues, according to officials,"
the paper reported. "In some cases, top administration
officials disagree outright with what the CIA and other
intelligence agencies report. For example, they repeat
accounts of al-Qaeda members seeking refuge in Iraq and
of terrorist operatives meeting with Iraqi intelligence
officials, even though US intelligence reports raise
doubts about such links. On Iraqi weapons programs,
administration officials draw the most pessimistic
conclusions from ambiguous evidence."
In secret
intelligence briefings last September on the Iraqi
threat, House Minority Whip Nancy Pelosi,
Democrat-California, said that administration officials
were presenting "embellishments" on information long
known about Iraq. A senior Bush administration official
conceded privately that there are large gaps in US
knowledge about Iraqi weapons programs, USA Today
reported.
The concerns jibe with warnings about
the CIA's intelligence information Albright first raised
last September, when the agency zeroed in on
high-strength aluminum tubes Iraq was trying to obtain
as evidence of the country's active near-complete
nuclear weapons program. The case of the tubes is
significant because Bush identified it during a speech
last year as evidence of Iraq's nuclear weapons program
and used it to rally the public and several UN countries
in supporting the war. But Albright said many officials
in the intelligence community knew the tubes weren't
meant to build a nuclear weapon.
"The CIA has
concluded that these tubes were specifically
manufactured for use in gas centrifuges to enrich
uranium," Albright said. "Many in the expert community
both inside and outside government, however, do not
agree with this conclusion. The vast majority of gas
centrifuge experts in this country and abroad who are
knowledgeable about this case reject the CIA's case and
do not believe that the tubes are specifically designed
for gas centrifuges. In addition, International Atomic
Energy Agency inspectors have consistently expressed
skepticism that the tubes are for centrifuges. After
months of investigation, the administration has failed
to prove its claim that the tubes are intended for use
in an Iraqi gas centrifuge program," Albright added.
"Despite being presented with evidence countering this
claim, the administration persists in making misleading
comments about the significance of the tubes."
Albright said that he tried to voice his
concerns about the intelligence information to White
House officials last year, but was rebuffed and told to
keep quiet. "I first learned of this case a year and a
half ago when I was asked for information about past
Iraqi procurements. My reaction at the time was that the
disagreement reflected the typical in-fighting between
US experts that often afflicts the intelligence
community. I was frankly surprised when the
administration latched onto one side of this debate in
September 2002. I was told that this dispute had not
been mediated by a competent, impartial technical
committee, as it should have been, according to accepted
practice," Albright said. "I became dismayed when a
knowledgeable government scientist told me that the
administration could say anything it wanted about the
tubes while government scientists who disagreed were
expected to remain quiet."
Albright said that
the Department of Energy, which analyzed the
intelligence information on the aluminum tubes and
rejected the CIA's intelligence analysis, is the only
government agency in the US that can provide expert
opinions on gas centrifuges (what the CIA alleged the
tubes were being used for) and nuclear weapons programs.
"For over a year and a half, an analyst at the CIA has
been pushing the aluminum tube story, despite consistent
disagreement by a wide range of experts in the United
States and abroad," Albright said. "His opinion,
however, obtained traction in the summer of 2002 with
senior members of the Bush administration, including the
president. The administration was forced to admit
publicly that dissenters exist, particularly at the
Department of Energy and its national laboratories."
But Albright said that the White House launched
an attack against experts who spoke critically of the
intelligence. "Administration officials try to minimize
the number and significance of the dissenters or
unfairly attack them," Albright said. "For example, when
Secretary [of State Colin] Powell mentioned the dissent
in his Security Council speech, he said: 'Other experts,
and the Iraqis themselves, argue that they are really to
produce the rocket bodies for a conventional weapon, a
multiple rocket launcher'. Not surprisingly, an effort
by those at the Energy Department to change Powell's
comments before his appearance was rebuffed by the
administration."
Moreover, former scientists who
worked on Iraq's nuclear weapons program and escaped the
country also disputed the CIA's intelligence of the
country's existing nuclear weapons program, saying that
it ended in 1991 after the first Gulf War. However, some
Iraq scientists who supplied the Pentagon with
information claim that Iraq's nuclear weapons program
continues, but none of these Iraqis have any direct
knowledge of any current banned nuclear programs. They
appear to all carry political baggage and biases about
going to war or overthrowing Saddam, and these biases
seem to drive their judgments about nuclear issues,
rendering their statements about current Iraqi nuclear
activities suspect, according to Albright, who said that
he was privy to much of the information being supplied
to the Bush administration and the CIA.
Another
example of disputed intelligence used by the Bush
administration to build its case for war is Iraq's
attempts to obtain uranium from Niger as evidence of
another secret nuclear weapons program. Bush in his
state of the union speech in January used this
information as an example of a "smoking gun" and the
imminent threat Iraq posed to the US. But the
information has since been widely discounted. "One
person who heard a classified briefing on Iraq in late
2002 said that there was laughter in the room when the
uranium evidence was presented," Albright said. "One of
[the] most dramatic findings, revealed on March 7, was
that the documents which form the basis for the reports
of recent uranium transactions between Niger and Iraq
are not authentic."
Iraq's attempts to acquire a
magnet production plant are likewise ambiguous. Powell
stated to the UN Security Council on February 5 that
this plant would produce magnets with a mass of 20 to 30
grams. He added: "That's the same weight as the magnets
used in Iraq's gas centrifuge program before the Gulf
War." One US official said that because the pieces are
so small, many end uses are possible, making it
impossible to link the attempted acquisition to an Iraqi
centrifuge program.
One piece of intelligence
information that seemed to go unnoticed by the media was
satellite photographs released by the White House last
October of a facility in Iraq called al-Furat to support
Bush's assertion that Iraq was making nuclear weapons
there. But Albright said that Iraq already admitted
making such weapons at al-Furat before the Gulf War and
that the site had long been dismantled.
In
addition to Albright, other military experts also were
skeptical of the intelligence information gathered by
the CIA. "Basically, cooked information is working its
way into high-level pronouncements and there's a lot of
unhappiness about it in intelligence, especially among
analysts at the CIA," said Vincent Cannistraro, the
CIA's former head of counter-intelligence, in an
interview with London's Guardian newspaper last October.
Cannistraro told the Guardian that hawks at the Pentagon
had deliberately skewed the flow of intelligence to the
top levels of the administration.
Last October,
Bush said that the Iraqi regime was developing unmanned
aerial vehicles [UAVs] which "could be used to disperse
chemical or biological weapons across broad areas".
"We're concerned that Iraq is exploring ways of using
these UAVs for missions targeting the United States,"
Bush said. While US military experts confirmed that Iraq
had been converting eastern European trainer jets into
UAVs, with a maximum range of a few hundred miles they
were no threat to targets in the US. "It doesn't make
any sense to me if he meant United States territory,"
said Stephen Baker, a retired US navy rear admiral who
assesses Iraqi military capabilities at the
Washington-based Center for Defense Information, also in
an interview with the Guardian last October.
In
true Bush fashion, however, the administration had long
believed that it is better to strike first and ask
questions later. When Senator Dianne Feinstein,
Democrat-California, who sits on the intelligence
committee, sent Bush a letter on September 17 last year
requesting that he urge the CIA to produce a National
Intelligence Estimate, a report that would have showed
exactly how much of a threat Iraq posed, National
Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice said in the
post-September 11, 2001 world, the US could not wait for
intelligence because Iraq was too much of a threat to
the US.
"We don't want the smoking gun to be a
mushroom cloud," Rice said.
(Copyright 2003,
Jason Leopold .) |
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