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The truth, the whole truth
and nothing but ...
By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON - When all three major US
newsweeklies - Time, Newsweek and US News & World
Report - run major features on the same day on possible
government lying, you can bet you have the makings of a
major scandal.
And when the two most important
outlets of neo-conservative opinion - The Weekly
Standard and The Wall Street Journal - come out on the
same days with lead editorials spluttering outrage about
suggestions of government lying, you can bet that things
are going to get very hot as summer approaches in
Washington.
The controversy over whether the
administration of President George W Bush either
exaggerated or lied about evidence that it said it had
about the existence of weapons of mass destruction (WMD)
in Iraq before the US-led invasion has mushroomed over
the past week.
"This is potentially very
serious," said one Congressional aide. "If it's shown we
went to war because of intelligence that was 'cooked' by
the administration, heads will have to roll, and not
just little heads, big ones."
The administration
was already on the defensive last week as the
controversy took off in Europe, particularly in Britain
where Prime Minister Tony Blair found himself assailed
from all directions for either willfully exaggerating
the intelligence himself or being "suckered", as his
former foreign minister Robin Cook called it this
weekend, by Washington's neo-conservative hawks, who
started agitating for war even before the dust settled
in lower Manhattan after the September 11, 2001
terrorist attacks.
Matters took a turn for the
worse when the London Guardian reported the existence of
a transcript, obviously leaked from a senior British
official, of an exchange at the Waldorf Hotel in New
York between US Secretary of State Colin Powell and
British Foreign Minister Jack Straw just before Powell's
presentation of the evidence against Iraq before the
United Nations Security Council February 5.
It
quotes Powell, whose forceful case to the council was
decisive in persuading US public opinion that Baghdad
represented a serious threat, as being "apprehensive"
about the evidence presented to him by the intelligence
agencies. He reportedly expressed the hope that the
actual facts, when they came out, would not "explode in
their faces". (At a Rome press conference on Monday,
Powell insisted that he considered the evidence
"overwhelming" when he spoke before the council.)
But it appears that Powell's musing was
accurate, as, after almost two months in uncontested
control of Iraq, US troops and investigators have failed
to come up with concrete evidence of an Iraqi WMD
program, let alone an actual weapon.
The
scenario of an uneasy Powell received a major boost in
the accounts of the three newsweeklies. US News
reported, for example, that during a rehearsal of
Powell's presentation at Central Intelligence Agency
(CIA) headquarters on February 1, the normally
mild-mannered retired general at one point "tossed
several pages in the air. 'I'm not reading this', he
declared. 'This is bullshit'."
The same magazine
also reported that the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA)
formally concluded that "there is no reliable
information on whether Iraq is producing and stockpiling
chemical weapons" in September 2002, just as Pentagon
chief Donald Rumsfeld was telling Congress that the
Baghdad "regime has amassed large, clandestine
stockpiles of chemical weapons, including VX, sarin,
cyclosarin and mustard gas".
The accounts of
Newsweek and Time were similarly damning. One "informed
military source" told Newsweek that when the US Central
Command (CENTCOM) asked the CIA for specific WMD targets
that should be destroyed in the first stages of the
invasion, the agency only complied reluctantly. But what
it provided "was crap", a CENTCOM planner told the
magazine, consisting mainly of buildings that were
bombed in the first Gulf War in 1991.
If true,
that contradicts a series of bald assertions by
administration officials and their supporters over the
last nine months. "Simply stated," Vice President Dick
Cheney declared in the first call to arms last August,
"there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons
of mass destruction".
"We know where [the WMD]
are," declared Rumsfeld in a television interview March
30, well into the first week of the war. "They're in the
area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and
north somewhat." He has since retreated from that
certainty, suggesting last week that the Iraqis "may
have had time to destroy them, and I don't know the
answer".
There is also growing doubt about the
evidence that Bush himself touted this weekend as proof
- two truck trailers described by officials as mobile
weapons-productions labs. According to a CIA report
noted in the Slate Internet magazine, key equipment for
growing, sterilizing and drying bacteria was not present
in either trailer. Iraqi officials have said that the
trailers were used to produce hydrogen for artillery
weather balloons.
Matthew Meselson, a Harvard
University expert on biological weapons who 20 years ago
single-handedly debunked reports by senior Ronald Reagan
administration officials - several of whom hold relevant
positions in the Bush government - about the use by
Soviet allies of mycotoxins against rebels in Laos and
Afghanistan, has also expressed doubts about the
trailers' purpose, and called for the CIA to hand over
the evidence to independent scientists to make an
assessment.
Retired intelligence officials from
both the CIA and the DIA are also coming out with
ever-stronger statements accusing the intelligence
community of twisting and exaggerating the evidence to
justify war. They say that both agencies were
intimidated by the political pressure exerted, in
particular by neo-conservative hawks under Cheney and
Rumsfeld, who even established a special unit in the
defense secretary's office to determine what
intelligence was "missing".
Much of the evidence
on which the WMD case was based came from defectors
supplied by the Iraqi National Congress (INC), an exile
group headed by Ahmed Chalabi that has been championed
by the neo-conservatives - including Deputy Defense
Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, Cheney chief of staff I Lewis
Libby and Defense Policy Board members Richard Perle,
Kenneth Adelman and James Woolsey - for more than a
decade.
Retired senior CIA, DIA and State
Department intelligence officers, including the CIA's
former counter-terrorism chief Vince Cannistraro and the
DIA's former chief of Middle East intelligence W Patrick
Lang, have also spoken bluntly to reporters about what
they call the administration's corruption of the
intelligence process to justify war.
Both the
CIA and State Department have long distrusted the INC
and Chalabi, in particular, although he remains the
Pentagon's favorite for leading an interim government in
Baghdad.
All of this has outraged the
administration, which insists that the intelligence
community was united in its assessment about the
existence of WMD, and its neo-conservative defenders.
The Wall Street Journal on Monday accused the "French
and the European left" of trying to tarnish the US
victory and charged that discontent among CIA analysts
was spurred by resentment of Rumsfeld.
But even
the Journal appeared to be moving away from its previous
position that Iraq's alleged WMD constituted a threat to
the US and its allies. "Whether or not WMD is found
takes nothing away from the Iraq war victory," it said,
citing the gains made in human rights by Saddam
Hussein's demise.
Nonetheless, what the
administration knew about WMD and when it knew it - to
paraphrase the famous Watergate questions - are now
claiming the limelight, to the administration's clear
discomfort. On Sunday, the powerful chairman of the
Senate Foreign Relations Committee said that he hoped to
begin hearings - with the Select Committee on
Intelligence - before the July 4 recess, while the
ranking member of the House of Representatives
Intelligence Committee has asked the CIA to produce a
report by July 1 reconciling its pre-war assessments
with actual findings on the ground.
(Inter Press
Service) |
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