Category Archives: Weapons of Mass Destruction

Inspect This

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George W. Bush did something brilliant in 2002 that he doesn’t talk about now. In fact, he and his supporters try to pretend it never happened.

The “something” was getting UN weapons inspectors back into Iraq. As a result of George W. Bush’s saber rattling, in September 2002 Saddam Hussein had agreed to allow inspections for the first time since 1998. In August 1998 Saddam Hussein suspended cooperation with the weapons inspection teams. The inspectors left the country in December 1998 hours before the United States and United Kingdom began three days of air strikes.

In our current argument about whether “everybody was wrong” about Saddam Hussein’s WMDs, there’s hardly ever a mention of the weapons inspections. Considering that the UN inspectors were the ones with the most up-to-date information at the time of the invasion in March 2003, I think it’s important to look at what the UN believed in the run-up to the war..

And the fact is that the UN didn’t agree with Bush at all. Continue reading →

The Empire Strikes Back

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The White House posted a rebuttal to yesterday’s Washington Post article, “Asterisks Dot White House’s Iraq Argument” by Dana Milbank and Walter Pincus.

It’s late and I’m not up to deconstructing the White House effort at this hour. I see Stirling Newberry, Matthew Yglesias, and World o’ Crap have already done the job, fortunately.

But I’m pleased the Bushies are responding directly and openly, if not factually, to criticism instead of just spreading rumors that Dana Milbank is a cross-dresser. Karl Rove must still be preoccupied.

Help Lorie Byrd

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Lorie Byrd of the rightie blog PoliPundit writes,

Chris Matthews spent the last few minutes of the program talking about how important it is to find out whether or not the President and Vice President lied about pre-war intelligence and how important it is that the Senate investigate this. He said that the administration promised us that there would be WMD found, that Saddam had a nuclear weapons program, that we would be greeted as liberators, that the war would cost nothing because it would be paid for entirely by Iraqi war revenue and that if we invaded Iraq we would have cheap gas. Then he went on to declare that nothing we were promised was true.

I am sorry but I missed those “promises.”

This is the sort of thing I love to plunge into, but I’ve got a lot of chores scheduled for today and I’m already into the planning phase of another post. But if some of you readers want to help, pick one or more of the promises and find a link that documents where Bush and/or Cheney made the promise. Thanks much!

Update: See “So you want details about who lied” by retired Air Force major James Bruner in today’s Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

Update update: PoliPundit Readers: I know you are all eager to explain to me that Bill Clinton believed Saddam Hussein had WMDs in 1998. Please note that (1) only a flaming idiot starts a war in 2003 based on what somebody thought in 1998; and (2) in February 2003, a month before the invasion, UN weapons inspectors in Iraq were publicly stating that US intelligence on Iraq WMDs was “garbage.”

Yes, they said “garbage.” They said other things too, I understand, that couldn’t be printed. You can read about this here.

People of Faith

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Righties are nearly giddy with joy at yesterday’s combative Veterans Day address by George W. Bush. Dear Leader is finally fighting back, and now the sun will shine and birds will chirp and all the awful bad poll numbers will go away.

At the rightie blog PoliPundit, Lorie Byrd wrote,

I agree with Michelle [Malkin] that the outrageous allegations of “lying” and “misleading” into war should have been addressed sooner. At one time I thought maybe it was better that Bush not personally respond, but that others do it for him. And many did a good job. As time passed though, and those allegations got repeated enough, with the media never questioning their validity, but merely parroting them over and over again, they gained an air of credibility about them. That is all that the public has heard in the mainstream media for two years now. Many have accepted those allegations as truth. I am very impatient. I could not have waited as long as Bush has to come out swinging. Maybe, though, if the President and his people come out forcefully enough now, armed with unassailable facts, they might be able to make a stronger argument than they would have if they were playing defense. I have been begging for this for a while now and would have liked to have seen it sooner, but it will be interesting to see if the President’s timing and method of action are effective.

Michelle also described Norman Podhoretz’s essay which was linked here as “the clear catalyst for Bush’s speech.”

“Outrageous” allegations? One wonders if righties understand what truth is.

Let’s say you ask me, “Have you seen Jane lately? How is she?” and I respond truthfully that I saw her last week and she was fine, you would naturally assume that Jane is fine. But if I knew for a fact that last night Jane was run over by a train and is being refrigerated at the county morgue, and didn’t bother to pass along that little detail, then my response would not have been honest.

But this is essentially the rightie approach to “truth.” For example, in the essay linked above Podhoretz writes,

And even Hans Blix–who headed the UN team of inspectors trying to determine whether Saddam had complied with the demands of the Security Council that he get rid of the weapons of mass destruction he was known to have had in the past–lent further credibility to the case in a report he issued only a few months before the invasion:

    The discovery of a number of 122-mm chemical rocket warheads in a bunker at a storage depot 170 km southwest of Baghdad was much publicized. This was a relatively new bunker, and therefore the rockets must have been moved there in the past few years, at a time when Iraq should not have had such munitions. . . . They could also be the tip of a submerged iceberg. The discovery of a few rockets does not resolve but rather points to the issue of several thousands of chemical rockets that are unaccounted for.

Blix now claims that he was only being “cautious” here, but if, as he now also adds, the Bush administration “misled itself” in interpreting the evidence before it, he at the very least lent it a helping hand.

Blix may very well have said all those things. But Podhoretz leaves out the inconvenient little detail that at the eve of the invasion Blix was begging the White House to at least postpone the invasion and give the inspectors more time, because they were not finding WMDs and doubted, at the very least, they were there.

Podhoretz’s whole essay is like that; it’s all spin and talking points. It is literally factual and deeply dishonest at the same time.

Dana Milbank and Walter Pincus write in today’s Washington Post:

President Bush and his national security adviser have answered critics of the Iraq war in recent days with a two-pronged argument: that Congress saw the same intelligence the administration did before the war, and that independent commissions have determined that the administration did not misrepresent the intelligence.

Neither assertion is wholly accurate.

The administration’s overarching point is true: Intelligence agencies overwhelmingly believed that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, and very few members of Congress from either party were skeptical about this belief before the war began in 2003. Indeed, top lawmakers in both parties were emphatic and certain in their public statements.

But Bush and his aides had access to much more voluminous intelligence information than did lawmakers, who were dependent on the administration to provide the material. And the commissions cited by officials, though concluding that the administration did not pressure intelligence analysts to change their conclusions, were not authorized to determine whether the administration exaggerated or distorted those conclusions.

National security adviser Stephen J. Hadley, briefing reporters Thursday, countered “the notion that somehow this administration manipulated the intelligence.” He said that “those people who have looked at that issue, some committees on the Hill in Congress, and also the Silberman-Robb Commission, have concluded it did not happen.”

But the only committee investigating the matter in Congress, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, has not yet done its inquiry into whether officials mischaracterized intelligence by omitting caveats and dissenting opinions. And Judge Laurence H. Silberman, chairman of Bush’s commission on weapons of mass destruction, said in releasing his report on March 31, 2005: “Our executive order did not direct us to deal with the use of intelligence by policymakers, and all of us were agreed that that was not part of our inquiry.”

President Bush’s speech yesterday was one miscarriage of truth after another.

Bush, in Pennsylvania yesterday, was more precise, but he still implied that it had been proved that the administration did not manipulate intelligence, saying that those who suggest the administration “manipulated the intelligence” are “fully aware that a bipartisan Senate investigation found no evidence of political pressure to change the intelligence community’s judgments.”

In the same speech, Bush asserted that “more than 100 Democrats in the House and the Senate, who had access to the same intelligence, voted to support removing Saddam Hussein from power.” Giving a preview of Bush’s speech, Hadley had said that “we all looked at the same intelligence.”

But Bush does not share his most sensitive intelligence, such as the President’s Daily Brief, with lawmakers. Also, the National Intelligence Estimate summarizing the intelligence community’s views about the threat from Iraq was given to Congress just days before the vote to authorize the use of force in that country.

In addition, there were doubts within the intelligence community not included in the NIE. And even the doubts expressed in the NIE could not be used publicly by members of Congress because the classified information had not been cleared for release. For example, the NIE view that Hussein would not use weapons of mass destruction against the United States or turn them over to terrorists unless backed into a corner was cleared for public use only a day before the Senate vote.

As Chuck at Just a Bump in the Beltway said,

Anyone see a pattern here? Much like the Patriot Act and other controversial activities, the White House and its allies repeatedly waited util the last second to present confusing and sometimes incomplete information to Congress and rammed through a vote on it right away.

Milbank and Pincus continue,

Bush, in his speech Friday, said that “it is deeply irresponsible to rewrite the history of how that war began.” But in trying to set the record straight, he asserted: “When I made the decision to remove Saddam Hussein from power, Congress approved it with strong bipartisan support.”

The October 2002 joint resolution authorized the use of force in Iraq, but it did not directly mention the removal of Hussein from power.

The resolution voiced support for diplomatic efforts to enforce “all relevant Security Council resolutions,” and for using the armed forces to enforce the resolutions and defend “against the continuing threat posed by Iraq.”

In other words, in “trying to set the record straight,” Bush lied about the record.

Hadley, in his remarks, went further. “Congress, in 1998, authorized, in fact, the use of force based on that intelligence,” he said. “And, as you know, the Clinton administration took some action.”

But the 1998 legislation gave the president authority “to support efforts to remove the regime of Saddam Hussein” by providing assistance to Iraqi opposition groups, including arms, humanitarian aid and broadcasting facilities.

President Bill Clinton ordered four days of bombing of Iraqi weapons facilities in 1998, under the 1991 resolution authorizing military force in response to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. Describing that event in an interview with CBS News yesterday, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said: “We went to war in 1998 because of concerns about his weapons of mass destruction.”

I believe Condi has equated Clinton’s bombing with “going to war” before. Never mind that the “Clinton did it too” defense sounds a tad juvenile — I wasn’t the only one who threw eggs at Mr. Johnson’s car! Billy did it, too! — it is ludicrous on its face to equate Clinton’s bombing with “going to war.”

But to righties, that does’t matter. The hard-core rightie faithful, which includes most rightie bloggers, will grasp at any verbiage that comes out of a White House officials’ mouth as “unassailable facts” that repudiate the lies of the trickster left. That’s because any challenge to the fantasy world they live in scares the piss out of them. It is absolutely futile to try to reason with most of them, because they’ll turn purple and start screaming before you can finish a sentence. But it is vital for all of us to keep setting the record straight, so that Americans who are capable of appreciating the truth get to hear the truth.

Hypocrite in Chief

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Throughout history, tyrants and would-be tyrants have always claimed that murder is justified to serve their grand vision. And they end up alienating decent people across the globe.

This is from President Bush’s Veteran’s Day address. And I bet he said it with a straight face.

Other howlers:

My administration remains firmly committed to serving America’s veterans.

(APPLAUSE)

Since I took office, my administration has increased spending for veterans by $24 billion, an increase of 53 percent.

In the first four years as president, we increased spending for veterans more than twice as much as the previous administration did in eight years. And I want to thank the members of the Congress and the Senate for joining me in the effort to support our veterans.

For some accounts of the many ways the Bush Administration has tried to screw both veterans and active-duty military, go here, here, and here. This very week, Republicans in Congress were pushing for $600 million in cuts to veteran’s benefits, which would deny health care to 100,000 veterans.

Is the President lying when he says he increased spending? Not necessarily. He has had to spend more because of the carnage created by his policies.

Then Bush wanders into the topic of radical Islamic terrorism. Catch this “transition”:

Islamic radicalism is more like a loose network with many branches than an army under a single command. Yet these operatives fighting on scattered battlefields share a similar ideology and vision for our world.

We know the vision of the radicals because they have openly stated it in videos and audio tapes and letters and declarations and on Web sites.

First, these extremists want to end American and Western influence in the broader Middle East, because we stand for democracy and peace and stand in the way of their ambitions.

Al Qaida’s leader, Osama bin Laden, has called on Muslims to dedicated, quote, “their resources, their sons and money to driving the infidels out of our lands.”

The tactics of Al Qaida and other Islamic extremists have been consistent for a quarter of a century.

They hit us and they expect us to run.

We didn’t run, exactly, but we did allow the people who “hit us” to get away while we invaded someone else.

Last month, the world learned of a letter written by Al Qaida’s number two man, a guy named Zawahiri. And he wrote this letter to his chief deputy in Iraq, the terrorist Zarqawi.

In it, Zawahiri points to the Vietnam War as a model for Al Qaida. This is what he said: “The aftermath of the collapse of American power in Vietnam and how they ran and left their agents is noteworthy.”

See how slick he is? We go from the terrorists who attacked us on 9/11 to Iraq, without a blink. He doesn’t come out and say “Iraq was involved in September 11,” but anyone listening to this speech who didn’t know better would infer that it did. This is, I’m sure, what the speechwriter intended.

The terrorists witnessed a similar response after the attacks on American troops in Beirut in 1983 and Mogadishu in 1993.

They believe that America can be made to run again, only this time on a larger scale, with greater consequences.

Secondly, the militant network wants to use the vacuum created by an American retreat to gain control of a country, a base from which to launch attacks and conduct their war against non-radical Islam governments.

I’m sure that is what they want, but never forget it was the Bush White House who made this possible. Removing Saddam Hussein from power played right into Osama bin Laden’s plans. See also testimony here on the fact that Saddam Hussein, bad guy though he certainly was, was at least not allowing al Qaeda to train in areas under his control.

But, thanks to Bush, they are training in some of those places now.

And let us not forget that the Bushies deliberately allowed Abu Musab al-Zarqawi to escape on at least three occasions.

Bush continues,

In his recent letter, Zawahiri writes that Al Qaida views Iraq as, quote, “the place of the greatest battle.”

The terrorists regard Iraq as the central front in their war against humanity. We must recognize Iraq as the central front in our war against the terrorists.

The “front” appears to be bleeding over into Jordan, but let’s go on … The “great battle” of Iraq is a living monument to the failure of the Bush Administration to respond correctly to September 11. We shouldn’t be fighting there at all. The organization responsible for September 11 primarily was in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and it operated only in those parts of Iraq that Saddam Hussein did not control. We held back in Afghanistan because the Bushies already were preparing to invade Iraq. We let Osama bin Laden get away, and then we fulfilled his dearest wish and invaded another Muslim country that was no danger to us. We might as well have sent Halliburton to Osama with orders to build his training camps.

Then Bush whines on for a bit about how Syria had better watch its butt — like they have reason to be afraid of us now — then he complains about

elements of the Arab news media that incite hatred and anti-Semitism, that feed conspiracy theories and speak of a so-called American war on Islam, with seldom a worry about American action to protect Muslims in Afghanistan and Bosnia and Somalia and Kosovo and Kuwait and Iraq, or seldom a word about our generous assistance to Muslims recovering from national disasters in places like Indonesia and Pakistan.

Our government denies that U.S. military used white phosphorous against Iraqi civilians, but the Army’s own arguments are contradictory. The military denied bombing a wedding last year, also. And read this recent Fareed Zakaria column, which begins, “Ask any American soldier in Iraq when the general population really turned against the United States and he will say, ‘Abu Ghraib.'”

Stuff like this happens in war, which is why it’s a bit irrational to invade people who were no threat to you and then expect them to love you for it. It’s your actions, not your good intentions, that people notice.

Stephen Zunes wrote for ZNet:

What Bush fails to note is that much of the suffering and frustration felt by the Iraqi people is a direct result of U.S. policy. Not only did the Iraqi people suffer under decades of Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship (which was backed by the United States during the peak of his repression in the 1980s), the U.S. led one of most intense bombing campaigns in world history against Iraq in 1991, resulting in severe damage to the civilian infrastructure. This was followed by a dozen years of crippling U.S.-led economic sanctions that resulted in the deaths hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, mostly children, from malnutrition and preventable diseases. As a result of the U.S. invasion, at least 20,000 civilians have died violent deaths, the country is facing a low-level civil war and an unprecedented crime wave, basic utilities have yet to be restored on a regular basis, unemployment is at an all-time high, there are mounting ethnic tensions which threaten to tear the country apart, priceless national artifacts have been stolen or destroyed from museums and archeological sites, and infant mortality is way up.

Bush continues,

Some have also argued that extremists have been strengthened by our actions in Iraq, claiming that our presence in that country has somehow caused or triggered the rage of radicals.

I would remind them that we were not in Iraq on September the 11th, 2001.

This is nearly word-for-word from a speech Bush made on October 6, of which Fred Kaplan wrote,

This is mere playing with words. Notice: First, he cites the claim that the U.S. occupation has “strengthened” the extremists; then he dismisses some straw man’s contention that our presence has “caused or triggered” the radicals’ rage. The fact that 9/11 preceded the invasion of Iraq is irrelevant to the point that he started to counter—that the occupation “strengthened” the insurgency. This point is incontestable. (On the most basic level, before the invasion, there was no insurgency and no al-Qaida presence in Iraq, except for a training camp run by Zarqawi—and that was in the Kurdish-controlled northern enclave, which Bush could have bombed, and was encouraged by the Joint Chiefs to bomb, at any time.) More important, to evade the point is to misunderstand this phase of the war—and, therefore, to misjudge how to win it.

[Update: This wasn’t the only section of today’s speech lifted from the October 6 speech; see Sadly, No.]

Bush continues,

No act of ours invited the rage of killers and no concession, bribe or act of appeasement would change or limit their plans for murder.

On the contrary, they target nations whose behavior they believe they can change through violence.

Isn’t that the excuse we’re making for invading Iraq–that we could change them by force into becoming a pro-western democracy?

Come to think of it, that makes about as much sense as the sound of one hand clapping. A war koan!

Against such an enemy, there is only one effective response: We will never back down, we will never give in, we will never accept anything less than complete victory.

That sounds grand, but as Fred Kaplan points out Bush has yet to explain what he means by “victory” and how he plans to get there.

Then he goes on about awful things Islamic terrorists have done. And these are, indeed, awful things. Islamic terrorists are nasty and dangerous and up to no good. It would be really nice if we had some effective policies to counter them, instead of Bush’s policies, which empower Islamic terrorism and make it stronger.

Here’s the part of the speech getting headlines:

Some Democrats and anti-war critics are now claiming we manipulated the intelligence and misled the American people about why we went to war.

These critics are fully aware that a bipartisan Senate investigation found no evidence of political pressure to change the intelligence community’s judgments related to Iraq’s weapons programs.

That’s because the bipartisan Senate investigation didn’t look for evidence of political pressure to change the intelligence community’s judgments related to Iraq’s weapons programs. From Media Matters:

In fact, there has been no official investigation into whether the Bush administration “lied about intelligence [or] distorted intelligence … to produce assessments that would support a supposedly pre-baked decision to invade Iraq.”

The first phase of the Senate Intelligence report determined, by the unanimous 17-0 vote that Garrett referenced, that intelligence assessments were not tainted by “pressure” that analysts received from policymakers, but it did not investigate whether the Bush administration misused that intelligence. The committee postponed analysis of the latter, more volatile question until after the 2004 presidential election, pledging to include it in phase two of the report. The Robb-Silberman report similarly excluded examination of the use of intelligence, noting: “[W]e were not authorized to investigate how policymakers used the intelligence assessments they received from the Intelligence Community.”

Can we say that righties by nature are congential liars? I think we can.

They also know that intelligence agencies from around the world agreed with our assessment of Saddam Hussein.

Well, not about the aluminum tubes, or buying yellowcake in Africa, and in March 2003 the UN weapons inspectors were begging Bush for more time because they weren’t finding WMDs …

They know the United Nations passed more than a dozen resolutions, citing his development and possession of weapons of mass destruction.

The UN wasn’t keen on us invading, either.

Many of these critics supported my opponent during the last election, who explained his position to support the resolution in the Congress this way: “When I vote to give the president of the United States the authority to use force, if necessary, to disarm Saddam Hussein, it is because I believe that a deadly arsenal of weapons of mass destruction in his hands is a threat and a grave threat to our security.”

That’s why more than 100 Democrats in the House and the Senate, who had access to the same intelligence, voted to support removing Saddam Hussein from power.

The newest offensive in the War on Terra is on reality itself. Those 100 Democrats did not have access to the same intelligence; they had access to intelligence cherry-picked and massaged by the Bushies.

To his credit, Bush took the time to say that the enemy is not Islam, but extremists. And then finally, near the end, we get to the quote at the top of this post — “tyrants and would-be tyrants have always claimed that murder is justified to serve their grand vision. And they end up alienating decent people across the globe.” In this case it’s the neocons’ grand vision, and the United States government trying to simultaneous claim that we don’t murder and torture innocent people but, by the way, we need to have a free hand to murder and torture people just in case.

And they’re ending up alienating decent people across the globe.

The Fruits of Torture

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Via Dr. Atrios, here’s an update to the last post, which describes how a Mr. Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi gave testimony about al Qaeda-Iraq collusion that the Defense Intelligence Agency strongly suspected wasn’t true, but the Bush Administration charged ahead and based arguments for invading Iraq on his bogus testimony anyway —

Michael Hirsh, John Barry and Daniel Klaidman wrote about Libi in the June 21, 2004, issue of Newsweek:

Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi was America’s first big trophy in the war on terror: a senior Qaeda operative captured amid the fighting in Afghanistan. What is less known is that al-Libi, who ran Qaeda training camps, quickly became the subject of a bitter feud between the FBI and the CIA over how to interrogate terror suspects.

Uh-oh.

At the time of al-Libi’s capture on Nov. 11, 2001, the questioning of detainees was still the FBI’s province. For years the bureau’s “bin Laden team” had sought to win suspects over with a carrots-and-no-sticks approach: favors in exchange for cooperation. One terrorist, in return for talking, even wangled a heart transplant for his child.

With al-Libi, too, the initial approach was to read him his rights like any arrestee, one former member of the FBI team told NEWSWEEK. “He was basically cooperating with us.” But this was post-9/11; President Bush had declared war on Al Qaeda, and in a series of covert directives, he had authorized the CIA to set up secret interrogation facilities and to use new, harsher methods. The CIA, says the FBI source, was “fighting with us tooth and nail.” …

…Al-Libi’s capture, some sources say, was an early turning point in the government’s internal debates over interrogation methods. FBI officials brought their plea to retain control over al-Libi’s interrogation up to FBI Director Robert Mueller. The CIA station chief in Afghanistan, meanwhile, appealed to the agency’s hawkish counterterrorism chief, Cofer Black. He in turn called CIA Director George Tenet, who went to the White House. Al-Libi was handed over to the CIA. “They duct-taped his mouth, cinched him up and sent him to Cairo” for more-fearsome Egyptian interrogations, says the ex-FBI official. “At the airport the CIA case officer goes up to him and says, ‘You’re going to Cairo, you know. Before you get there I’m going to find your mother and I’m going to f— her.’ So we lost that fight.” (A CIA official said he had no comment.)

Although the article doesn’t say exactly what was done to Libi, as explained in the previous post Libi told his interrogators a bunch of made up stories that the Bushies repeated to the American public as reasons we had to invade Iraq.

Kevin Drum calls this episode “one of the first test cases for Dick Cheney’s campaign to introduce torture as a standard interrogation technique overseas, replacing the FBI’s more mainstream methods.”

Kevin continues,

As Mark Kleiman points out, this is the pragmatic case against torture: not only is it wrong, but it doesn’t even provide reliable information anyway — and it makes Cheney’s relentless moral cretinism on the subject all the worse. Larry Wilkerson, who investigated this back when he was Colin Powell’s chief of staff, confirms that “there was a visible audit trail from the vice president’s office” that authorized the practices that led to the abuse of detainees, and Cheney continues to vigorously support the use of torture to this day, pressuring Congress behind closed doors not to pass John McCain’s anti-torture legislation.

Andrew Sullivan writes,

He’s still furiously lobbying Senators to protect his right to torture. A man who avoided service in Vietnam is lecturing John McCain on the legitimacy of torturing military detainees. But notice he won’t even make his argument before Senate aides, let alone the public. Why not? If he really believes that the U.S. has not condoned torture but wants to reserve it for exceptional cases, why not make his argument in the full light of day? You know: where democratically elected politicians operate.

Like cockroaches, Cheney and his minions are more active in the dark. I’m starting to wonder what would happen to them if they were drug out into the sunlight. Would they burst into flames?

Smokin’

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President Bush, Vice President Cheney, then Secretary of State Colin Powell, and other Bush Administration officials based many of their pre-Iraq War claims of ties between Iraq and al Qaeda on the testimony of a detainee who was known to be a fabricator.

Douglas Jehl writes in this Sunday’s New York Times,

A top member of Al Qaeda in American custody was identified as a likely fabricator months before the Bush administration began to use his statements as the foundation for its claims that Iraq trained Al Qaeda members to use biological and chemical weapons, according to newly declassified portions of a Defense Intelligence Agency document.

The newly declassified portions of the document were given to Jehl by Senator Carl Levin, the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee. It appears this revelation had something to do with Senator Reid’s parliamentary move that closed the Senate last week. Levin and Senator John D. Rockefeller, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, made a request to declassify the two paragraphs on October 18. In its response, the CIA said it found “no reason for it to remain classified.”

The story in brief: Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi was captured in Pakistan at the end of 2001. In February 2002, the Defense Intelligence Agency reported in the two paragraphs that Libi’s statements were highly improbable. The report said he was “‘intentionally misleading the debriefers’ in making claims about Iraqi support for Al Qaeda’s work with illicit weapons,” writes Jehl.

Yet administration officials merrily went ahead and repeated Libi’s stories in their speeches.

Among the first and most prominent assertions was one by Mr. Bush, who said in a major speech in Cincinnati in October 2002 that “we’ve learned that Iraq has trained Al Qaeda members in bomb making and poisons and gases.’’ …

… Mr. Powell relied heavily on accounts provided by Mr. Libi for his speech to the United Nations Security Council on Feb. 5, 2003, saying that he was tracing “the story of a senior terrorist operative telling how Iraq provided training in these weapons to Al Qaeda.’’

For more examples of Bush Administration statements based on Libi’s fabrications, see Think Progress.

At the time Powell made his speech, Jehl says, an unclassified statement by the CIA said Libi’s stories were credible. “But Mr. Levin said he had learned that a classified C.I.A. assessment at the time stated ‘the source was not in a position to know if any training had taken place.,’ Jehl writes.

One might conclude that someone in the CIA was being helpful to the White House cause and making sure that statements supporting the war made the rounds, while those not supporting the war were hidden out of sight.

And the DIA report would have circulated widely in government, Jehl says, and would have been available to the CIA, the White House, the Pentagon, and other agencies. However, neither the Senate Intelligence Committee report nor the September 11 Commission report, both issued in 2004, made any reference to the 2002 DIA report. “It remains unclear whether the D.I.A. document was provided to the Senate panel,” Jehl writes.

Libi recanted his stories in January 2004, which prompted the CIA to recall all intelligence reports based on his testimony. This fact was recorded in a footnote to the September 11 Commission report, but the original DIA report report is MIA from the 9/11 report.

Jehl continues,

The document provides the earliest and strongest indication of doubts voiced by American intelligence agencies about Mr. Libi’s credibility. Without mentioning him by name, President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Colin L. Powell, then secretary of state, and other administration officials repeatedly cited Mr. Libi’s information as “credible’’ evidence that Iraq was training Al-Qaeda members in the use of explosives and illicit weapons.

Senator Levin seems a tad miffed.

Mr. Levin said the new evidence of early doubts about Mr. Libi’s statements dramatized what he called the Bush administration’s misuse of prewar intelligence to try to justify the war in Iraq. That is an issue that Mr. Levin and other Senate Democrats have been seeking to emphasize, in part by calling attention to the fact that the Republican-led Senate intelligence committee has yet to deliver a promised report, first sought more than two years ago, on the use of prewar intelligence. …

… In an interview on Friday, Mr. Levin also called attention to a portion of the D.I.A. report that expressed skepticism about the idea of close collaboration between Iraq and Al Qaeda, an idea that was never substantiated by American intelligence but was a pillar of the administration’s prewar claims.

“Saddam’s regime is intensely secular and is wary of Islamic revolutionary movements,’’ the D.I.A. report said in one of two declassified paragraphs. “Moreover, Baghdad is unlikely to provide assistance to a group it cannot control.’’

Libi, who apparently has been in custody at Guantanamo since 2003, was of course not the only intelligence source later uncovered as a fibber. For example, an Iraqi exile code named “Curveball” was the primary source for the ephemeral mobile biological weapons labs. And there is Ahmed Chalabi, beloved of neocons, who has been accused of feeding the Pentagon all manner of misinformation.

So far, the White House has refused to comment, while Republicans are sticking to this weeks’ talking point that they weren’t the only ones to make mistakes in prewar assessments.

Jehl concludes,

The Senate intelligence committee is scheduled to meet beginning next week to review draft reports prepared as part of a long-postponed “Phase II’’ of the panel’s review of prewar intelligence on Iraq. At separate briefings for reporters on Friday, Republicans staff members said the writing had long been under way, while Senate Democrats on the committee claimed credit for reinvigorating the process, by forcing the closed session. They said that already nearly complete is a look at whether prewar intelligence accurately predicted the potential for an anti-American insurgency.

Other areas of focus include the role played by the Iraqi National Congress, that of the Pentagon in shaping intelligence assessments, and an examination of whether public statements about Iraq by members of the Bush and Clinton administrations, as well as members of Congress, were substantiated by intelligence available at the time.


Steve Soto of The Left Coaster writes,

When Harry Reid shut down the Senate earlier this week due to Pat Roberts and Bill Frist’s stonewalling of a Phase Two investigation over how the Bush Administration used intelligence in making its case for war, many of us wondered why now? What took you guys so long to use a procedural lever that you’ve had available to you all along that could have been employed before the election to raise the issue of Bush’s lies into a campaign issue? Was it a sudden re-growth of guts and balls that did this, or did the Democrats now come into possession of new information that was withheld from them before the election that gave them the club to force this issue out into the open now? We now know the answer, and it is the latter.

Moreover, Steve says, it puts Junior in a shitload of trouble.

… we now know that the Bush Administration also knew as far back as January 2003 that the Niger uranium claim was based on forgeries. We know that the Bush Administration was also told that the aluminum tubes story was bogus before the invasion as well. We now know that the claim that Saddam was assisting Al Qaeda was also a lie, and that the Administration knew this from Rummy himself as far back as February 2002. And we know that the IAEA was still on the ground in Iraq and had not confirmed any of Bush’s claims that Saddam had definitively stockpiled WMDs in violation of the two UN resolutions that Bush based his war upon.

And why exactly is this so important? Because take a look at the certification that Bush sent to Congress to start the war, which was required in the October 2002 war resolution, and then see that as we suspected over two and a half years ago, Bush has a big problem now …

This latest revelation means that at the time Bush justified the commencement of war against Iraq consistent with what was required under Public Law 107-243, he certified things not in evidence, and made claims to Congress (Saddam’s active operation of a WMD program and Saddam’s assistance to Al Qaeda) that he, Cheney, and Rummy already knew were false.

If Bush isn’t called to account for this, then there is no democracy in America any more.

[Cross-posted to The American Street.]

A Bigger Agenda?

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While I’m posting transcripts … this was on last night’s Countdown, which was guest hosted by Lisa Daniels:

DANIELS: Many thanks for joining us tonight. We appreciate it. Your article is so detailed, I‘m going to start off with a hard one. Can you sort of give us an abridged version of how the forged documents made it all the way into the president‘s speech without anybody throwing them out? Just boil it down for us.

PHILIP GIRALDI, FORMER CIA OFFICER: Well, basically, what happened was that the normal procedures whereby intelligence that comes into the United States government is checked over before it goes to the policymakers, this procedure was called vetting, was circumvented. And it was essentially circumvented as you described it by the Office of Special Plans in the Pentagon, which had been set up basically to circumvent that it felt was not answering the needs of the policymakers.

So it was kind of a circular process whereby the fabricated information was introduced into the system from the bottom, up to the top, without being checked out along the way.

DANIELS: Now, you make a very important allegation, a big allegation in your article that the Niger documents might have been forged in collusion with the Pentagon‘s Office of Special Plans which you in your article say would explain why the administration went after Ambassador Joe Wilson. What evidence do you have supporting that?

GIRALDI: Well, there‘s not a whole lot of solid evidence. But the fact is that if you consider people at the top level of the administration going after somebody who ostensibly was just a critic, it doesn‘t really make sense unless there was a much bigger agenda that was being hidden. And that‘s what I‘m suggesting.

And it is also true that the Italian who actually passed the documents that wound up in Washington, a guy named Rocco Martino, he later said to The Financial Times in London that he was engaged in what was a much bigger scheme that was a disinformation operation being carried out by the Italian government and also the American government.

DANIELS: But maybe it isn‘t bigger. Perhaps your critics would say, it is actually simple. I mean, are you sure that this isn‘t just one huge conspiracy theory that your article is sort of perpetuating?

GIRALDI: I don‘t think so. There‘s certainly considerable evidence that this was going on, that the intelligence was circumventing the system to create a case for war against Iraq which otherwise might not have been made.

And also, the whole question comes down to, was this bad intelligence?

I think everybody would agree that there was a lot of bad intelligence. Was it done through stupidity or through maliciousness? And this is really the question. Were people conscious that they were providing false and misleading intelligence or was it just a process that was something that was handled very clumsily?

DANIELS: Let me ask you this, Philip, do you think it is possible, feasible that the administration actually believed on some level that the documents were real?

GIRALDI: No. I don‘t think so. Because these documents went through several steps before they wound up at the administration and analysts at both CIA and NASA and the State Department pronounced them to be dubious.

The thing to bear in mind here is that unless accountability is established in this case, this kind of thing could happen again.

DANIELS: You know, we all remember when the former CIA Director George Tenet accepted responsibility for the uranium reference getting into the president‘s State of the Union Address. But from your research from your article, it almost appears that the CIA had very little to do with getting that faulty intelligence into the country, let alone into the speech.

GIRALDI: They were in fact completely out of the loop. That‘s a correct assessment, yes.

DANIELS: And why do you say that?

GIRALDI: Well, because the documents were not seen by people at CIA until very late in the process, after they were already in the hands of the policymakers at the National Security Council and in the vice president‘s office.

DANIELS: OK. So it‘s been nearly three years since it took for this truth, if it is the truth, to come out about the Niger documents. Why did it take so long?

GIRALDI: Well, I think there‘s a considerable reluctance on the part of both the media and the politicians to deal with issues that come out of Iraq. Essentially, the media did not fulfill its own responsibilities to be skeptical in the beginning. And the Democratic Party got on board of the Iraq war very quickly for its own reasons.

And as a result, I think that people in all areas are embarrassed now and are unwilling to confront the quite bad reality of what is Iraq.

DANIELS: Philip Giraldi, a contributing editor with The American Conservative magazine, also a former CIA agent. Thanks for your time. I‘m curious to see what the reaction will be to the article.

GIRALDI: Thank you very much.

Here is the article Giraldi wrote for The American Conservative, “Forging the Case for War.” Concluding paragraphs:

At this point, any American connection to the actual forgeries remains unsubstantiated, though the OSP at a minimum connived to circumvent established procedures to present the information directly to receptive policy makers in the White House. But if the OSP is more deeply involved, Michael Ledeen, who denies any connection with the Niger documents, would have been a logical intermediary in co-ordinating the falsification of the documents and their surfacing, as he was both a Pentagon contractor and was frequently in Italy. He could have easily been assisted by ex-CIA friends from Iran-Contra days, including a former Chief of Station from Rome, who, like Ledeen, was also a consultant for the Pentagon and the Iraqi National Congress.

It would have been extremely convenient for the administration, struggling to explain why Iraq was a threat, to be able to produce information from an unimpeachable “foreign intelligence source” to confirm the Iraqi worst-case.

The possible forgery of the information by Defense Department employees would explain the viciousness of the attack on Valerie Plame and her husband. Wilson, when he denounced the forgeries in the New York Times in July 2003, turned an issue in which there was little public interest into something much bigger. The investigation continues, but the campaign against this lone detractor suggests that the administration was concerned about something far weightier than his critical op-ed.

Obstruction

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Murray Waas writes,

Vice President Cheney and his chief of staff, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, overruling advice from some White House political staffers and lawyers, decided to withhold crucial documents from the Senate Intelligence Committee in 2004 when the panel was investigating the use of pre-war intelligence that erroneously concluded Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, according to Bush administration and congressional sources.

Hmm, wonder if Harriet Miers was one of those lawyers?

Among the White House materials withheld from the committee were Libby-authored passages in drafts of a speech that then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell delivered to the United Nations in February 2003 to argue the Bush administration’s case for war with Iraq, according to congressional and administration sources. The withheld documents also included intelligence data that Cheney’s office — and Libby in particular — pushed to be included in Powell’s speech, the sources said.

The Senate Intelligence Committee was looking into whether the CIA or other agencies had provided faulty intelligence to the Bush Administration as it prepared to go to war in Iraq. However, Waas writes,

… the committee deferred the much more politically sensitive issue as to whether the president and the vice president themselves, or other administration officials, misrepresented intelligence information to bolster the case to go to war. An Intelligence Committee spokesperson says the panel is still working on this second phase of the investigation.

Had the withheld information been turned over, according to administration and congressional sources, it likely would have shifted a portion of the blame away from the intelligence agencies to the Bush administration as to who was responsible for the erroneous information being presented to the American public, Congress, and the international community.

Waas writes that both Republicans and Democrats felt the investigation had been hampered by the White House’s refusal to hand over critical documents. It’s not too late for a do-over, I say.

Jesse Lee at the Stakeholder writes that this passage from the Waas article stuck out:

At the same time, however, administration officials said in interviews that they cannot recall another instance in which Cheney and Libby played such direct personal roles in denying foreign policy papers to a congressional committee, and that in doing so they overruled White House staff and lawyers who advised that the materials should be turned over to the Senate panel.

Jesse Lee comments:

Notice anybody missing from that equation? Did President Bush even know there was a debate? Did he know there were any debates about anything ever?

Maybe he was busy working out on his mountain bike.

Via Josh Marshall, Rep. Jerry Nadler is calling for expanding the Fitzgerald investigation “to look at a possible White House conspiracy to deceive Congress.”

Specifically, I’ve asked that Mr. Fitzgerald seek answers to three pressing questions: whether the CIA leak incident was part of a larger, deliberate effort to deceive Congress into authorizing war in Iraq, who exactly was involved, and whether any of their actions were criminal. If a larger, intentional effort was indeed underway – as evidence is tending to show that it was – that amounts to a criminal conspiracy.

President Bush may be spending the rest of his term huddled in a closet with his lucky pillow.

Home Alone

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Via Kos, we learn that the Miers nomination was withdrawn after GOP senators privately told Andy Card that she wouldn’t be confirmed. For once, Bush must have listened.

Actually, that’s twice, and in two days. Yesterday he caved on Davis-Bacon after Andy Card talked to “a caucus of pro-labor Republicans.” Karl Rove, I assume, is huddled with his lawyers.

Most of us concluded the Miers withdrawal was timed to distract attention away from possible indictments of White House officials, but Dan Froomkin has another thought–the withdrawal was timed to be overshadowed by indictments of White House officials. He writes,

As Candy Crowley suggested on CNN, if there are indeed indictments tomorrow, the Miers withdrawal will be quickly forgotten. That wipes the slate clean, more or less, and gives President Bush an opportunity to pivot away from the leak scandal with a new Supreme Court nomination sometime in the next week or two.

CNN’s Jeff Greenfield also noted that the Miers withdrawal headlines in tomorrow’s papers will be a nice gift to Bush’s conservative base — on the very day indictments presumably come down and Bush really needs his most ardent supporters firmly in his court.

News media is brimming with speculation about what Bush will do next. Will he fight the indictments? Will the next nominee to replace Sandra Day O’Connor be a clone of Jabba the Hutt? Or will he move more cautiously if he doesn’t have Karl Rove whispering in his ear? Experience suggests the former, but the latter wouldn’t surprise me. At his core, Bush is a weenie. He can act boldly when he knows his gang of toughs are backing him up. But his inner circle is shrinking down to the his most obsequious courtiers–people who flatter Dear Leader’s ego but may not be much use in a fight.

Paul Begala writes at TPM Cafe:

When he came to Washington, Mr. Bush surrounded himself with tough-minded people who seemed not to be afraid to stand up to him. But now his team is loaded with weak-kneed toadies, and Mr. Bush is home alone. Karl Rove, of course, is fending off a potential indictment …

… What of the rest of Team Bush? Karen Hughes is at the State Department, as is Condi Rice. Al Gonzalez has decamped for Justice, and fellow Austinite Margaret Spellings is at the Department of Education. Harriet Miers is fighting a losing battle to avoid becoming a permanent punch line. Ari Fleischer is selling books and dispensing sage advice to corporations. And Mary Matalin is busy raising her girls and rallying the troops from the outside.

The exodus and incapacity were inevitable; replacing Bush’s stand-up guys and gals with suck-ups and sycophants was not.

Myriad pundits have pointed out recently that Ronald Reagan pretty much replaced the White House staff to get his second term back on track, as did Bill Clinton in his second term. And both presidents brought in solid people who were not necessarily long-time associates. But Bush went the opposite route; he drove the solid people away and wrapped himself in sycophany. Begala continues,

Mr. Bush would do well to augment his current staff, a C-Team if ever there was one, with some stronger characters. But to read the Bush-Miers correspondence is to gain a disturbing insight into Mr. Bush’s personality: he likes having his ass kissed. Ms. Miers’ cards and letters to the then-Governor of Texas belong in the Brown-Nosers Hall of Fame. You can be sure the younger and less experienced Bush White House aides are even more obsequious. The last thing this President wants is the first thing he needs: someone to slap his spoiled, pampered, trust-funded, plutocratic, never-worked-a-day-in-his-life cheek and make him face the reality of his foul-ups.

And so they wait. And they sniff the royal throne. They tell the Beloved Leader he’s the victim of a partisan plot (although how the Bush CIA, which referred the Plame case for prosecution, became ground zero of Democratic liberalism escapes me). They assure him all is well. But all is not well. People are looking over their shoulders. The smart ones have stopped taking notes in meetings. The very smart ones have stopped using email for all but the most pedestrian communications. And the smartest ones have already obtained outside counsel.

This White House might be saved if the old Repubican establishment would take the president into hand and give him some direction. But that is unlikely to happen, because the Bushies have pretty much destroyed the old Republican establishment. Sidney Blumenthal writes, “There is no one left to rescue the Republican Party from George W. Bush. He is home alone.”

Now the old establishment is faded. Its remnants largely consist of his father’s superannuated retinue. Not even the old Texas establishment in the person of James A. Baker III, Bush’s father’s field marshal and the former secretary of state (among his many official posts), who managed the Florida contest that gave the presidency to the son, is welcome in this White House.

The Republican Party after Bush, minus its traditional establishment, threatens to become the party of its irreducible base, the party of the old Confederacy and the sparsely populated Rocky Mountain states. But this base, however loyal and obsequious to Bush, regardless of any crisis, does not offer statesmen to step in to handle his shaken White House.

A sharp reversal of policy and turnover in personnel are the only actions that may enable Bush to salvage the shipwreck of his presidency, as they did for Reagan. But bringing in the elders, even if they could be summoned, would be psychologically devastating to Bush, a humiliating admission that his long history of recklessness and failure, from the Texas Air National Guard to Harken Energy, with rescue only through the intervention of his father and his father’s friends, has reached its culmination.

Other presidents, including the aforementioned Reagan and Clinton, have dug themselves out of second-term slumps. But they have done so by taking charge and making changes. Frankly, I don’t think Bush has it in him to do that. I think he is far more likely to retrench and wrap himself even tighter in his comfort blanket of sycophancy. If there are indictments (tomorrow?), it will be interesting to see if he is proactive and asks for resignations, or if he passively allows staff members to figure out their own next steps.

As for the next Supreme Court nominee–Bush’s probably wishing he could clone John Roberts. He may go with someone he thinks would be easily confirmed. Or, he may nominate some drooling paleo-hominid to play to his base, because they’re about the only friends he’s got left. We’ll see.