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May
Day Edition
May 1, 2003
Not Worth the Paper
It's Written On?
Intelligence
Fiasco
By Veteran Intelligence
Professionals for Sanity
MEMORANDUM FOR: The President
FROM: Veteran Intelligence Professionals
for Sanity
SUBJECT: Intelligence Fiasco
We write to express deep concern over the growing
mistrust and cynicism with which many, including veteran intelligence
professionals inside and outside our movement, regard the intelligence
cited by you and your chief advisers to justify the war against
Iraq. The controversy over intelligence on Iraq has deep roots,
going back a decade. It came to a head over recent months as
intelligence was said to be playing a key role in support of
your administrationa's decision to make war on Iraq. And the
controversy has now become acute, since you have been backed
into the untenable position of assuming the former role of Saddam
Hussein in refusing to cooperate with UN inspectors. (Chief UN
nuclear inspector Mohamed ElBaradei noted earlier this week,
"We have years of experience and know every scientist worth
interviewing.") The implications not only for US credibility
abroad but also for the future of US intelligence are immense.
They need to be addressed without delay.
Prominent pundits (and, quite probably,
some of your own advisers) are now saying it does not matter
whether so-called "weapons of mass destruction" are
ever found in Iraq. Don't let them fool you. It matters a great
deal. The Wall Street Journal had it right in its page-one lead
article on April 8:
Officials Debate Involving the UN in
Verification: American forces in Iraq are rapidly confronting
two other tasks (besides hunting down Saddam Hussein) of enormous
importance: finding any weapons of mass destruction and convincing
the world the finds are real. The weapons search is a critical
one for the Bush administration, which went to war charging that
the Iraqi leader had hidden huge amounts of chemical and biological
weapons and could pass them on to terrorists. If the US doesn't
make any undisputed discoveries of forbidden weapons, the failure
will feed already-widespread skepticism abroad about the motives
for going to war."
The failure to find weapons of mass destruction
six weeks after US and UK forces invaded Iraq suggests either
that such weapons are simply not there, or that those eventually
found there will not be in sufficient quantity or capability
to support your repeated claim that Iraq posed a grave threat
to our countrya's security. Your opposition to inviting UN inspectors
into Iraq feeds the suspicion that you wish to avoid independent
verification; some even suggest that your administration wishes
to preserve the option of "planting" such weapons to
be "discovered" later. Sen. Carl Levin recently warned
that, if some are found "Many people around the world will
think we planted those weapons, unless the UN inspectors are
there with us."
Complicating matters still further, foreign
resistance is building to lifting the economic sanctions against
Iraq until the UN can certify that Iraq is free of weapons of
mass destruction. Russian President Vladimir Putin this week
joined others in insisting that only UN weapons inspectors can
reliably certify that. With considerable bite and sarcasm, he
asked Prime Minister Tony Blair on April 29, "Where are
these arsenals of weapons of mass destruction, if they were there?"
What is at play here is a policy and
intelligence fiasco of monumental proportions. It is essential
that you be able to separate fact from fiction "for your
own sake, and for the credibility of our countrya's intelligence
community. We urge you to do two things immediately:
(1) Invite UN inspectors to return to
Iraq without further delay; and
(2) Ask Gen. Brent Scowcroft, Chair of
your Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, to launch an immediate
inquiry into the performance of the CIA and other intelligence
agencies in providing the intelligence upon which you have based
your fateful decision for war against Iraq.
You may not realize the extent of the
current ferment within the Intelligence Community and particularly
the CIA. In intelligence, there is one unpardonable sin "cooking
intelligence to the recipe of high policy. There is ample indication
that this has been done with respect to Iraq. What remains not
entirely clear is who the cooks are and where they practice their
art. Are their kitchens only in the Pentagon, the National Security
Council, and the Vice Presidenta's office? There are troubling
signs, as will be seen below, that some senior officials of the
CIA may be graduates of the other CIA "the Culinary Institute
of America.
While there have been occasions in the
past when intelligence has been deliberately warped for political
purposes, never before has such warping been used in such a systematic
way to mislead our elected representatives into voting to authorize
launching a war. It is essential that all this be sorted out;
Gen. Scowcroft is uniquely qualified to lead such an investigation.
Some things are already quite clear to
us from our own sources and analysis. We present them below in
the hope that our findings will help get the investigation off
to a quick start.
Forgery
One of the many lawmakers who believe
they were deceived last summer and fall, Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA)
wrote you a letter on March 17, asking that you explain why "evidence"
that your administration knew to be forged was used with him
and others to garner votes for the war. Waxman was referring
to bogus correspondence purporting to show that Iraq was trying
to obtain in Africa uranium for nuclear weapons, and noted that
it was the perceived need to prevent Iraq from developing nuclear
weapons that provided "the most persuasive justification"
for war. The continued lack of any White House response to Waxmana's
letter can only feed the suspicion that there is no innocent
explanation and that the use of the forged material was deliberate.
Determined to find out what had happened,
Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV), vice-chair of the Senate intelligence
oversight committee, suggested that the committee ask the FBI
investigate, but committee chair Pat Roberts (R-OK) resisted
"giving a fresh meaning to the word "oversight."
Roberts said through a spokeswoman that it was "inappropriate
for the FBI to investigate at this point." Roberts then
declined to join Rockefeller in signing a letter to the FBI requesting
an investigation. Rockefeller sent one anyway but the response
he has just received from the Bureau was a brush-off. Unless
you give FBI Director Robert Mueller different instructions,
it appears doubtful that any genuine investigation will take
place.
Rep. Waxman is right to point out that
the specter of Saddam Hussein armed with nuclear weapons was
the crucial element that convinced many representatives and senators
to vote to give you the authority to use military force against
Iraq. It is now clear that bogus intelligence fed lawmakers'
fears before the vote on October 11, 2002.
NIC Memorandum: "Iraqa's Weapons
of Mass Destruction Programs"
On October 4, 2002, a week before Congress
voted on the war resolution, the National Intelligence Council,
an interagency body under the CIA Director as head of the entire
Intelligence Community, published an unclassified version of
a memorandum that had been briefed to Congressmen and Senators
over the previous weeks.
Among the key judgments: "Most analysts
assess Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program."
The clumsy clause conceals a crass cave-in.
The preponderant view, then as now, among nuclear scientists
and engineers of the Intelligence Community and the Department
of Energya's national laboratories is that Iraq had not been
able to reconstitute in any significant way the nuclear development
program dismantled by UN inspectors prior to 1998. The conclusions
of the vast majority of analysts dovetailed with the findings
repeatedly presented to the UN by International Atomic Energy
Agency Director Mohamed ElBaradei and his inspectors after their
inspection work at the turn of the year; i. e., that Iraq had
no nuclear program worthy of the name.
The NIC memoranduma's discussion of alleged
Iraqi attempts to reconstitute a nuclear weapons program does
not pass muster as rigorous analysis. The only data offered that
can remotely be called "evidence" is Iraqa's efforts
to obtain high-strength aluminum tubes. The NIC memorandum claims,
again, that "most intelligence specialists" believe
the rods were intended for use in uranium enrichment, while "some
believe that these tubes are probably intended for conventional
weapons programs."
The truth is just the opposite. Those
who posit a nuclear application are in the distinct minority
in the US and foreign intelligence, scientific, and engineering
community.
The rest of the "evidence"
adduced to support the existence of a "Nuclear Weapons Program"
includes Baghdada's failure to provide inspectors with all the
information sought, the fact Saddam Hussein held frequent meetings
with nuclear scientists, and the surmise that Baghdad "probably
uses some money from illicit oil sales to support its weapons
of mass destruction efforts." The memorandum concedes that
the IAEA "made significant strides toward dismantling Iraqa's
nuclear weapons program," but claims that, in the absence
of inspections since late 1998, "most analysts assess that
Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear program." "Most
analysts" in the Pentagon, perhaps; and in the Vice Presidenta's
office, surely; in the intelligence/scientific/engineering community,
no.
Addressing how soon Iraq could go nuclear,
the NIC memorandum states "Iraq is unlikely to produce indigenously
enough weapons-grade material for a deliverable nuclear weapon
until the last half of this decade." It goes on to say that
Iraq could produce a nuclear weapon "within a year,"
if it could acquire the necessary fissile material abroad.
In your speech of October 7, 2002, just
four days before the vote in Congress, your advisers had you
blur that distinction and raise the prospect that if Iraq could
"produce, buy, or steal" highly enriched uranium, it
could have a nuclear weapon in less than a year. You went on
to warn that "the smoking gun could come in the form of
a mushroom cloud." (The "mushroom cloud" specter
was again used on October 8 by National Security Adviser Condoleezza
Rice with Wolf Blitzer on national TV, and on October 9 by Assistant
Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs Victoria Clarke with
TV commentator Sam Donaldson.)
Interestingly, the NIC memorandum does
not include the information from the forgery purporting to show
that Iraq was trying to get uranium from Niger, although that
material had been around for at least several weeks. Since the
other "evidence," like the argument from aluminum rods,
was presented in such a way as to play up the threat from Iraq,
the absence of the forgery information is conspicuous. Its absence
may be explained by the reluctance of the purveyors of that information
to make available the actual source material, which representatives
of the various intelligence agencies preparing the NIC paper
would have required, and the consequent likelihood that the hoax
would be prematurely uncovered.
Whence the "Intelligence" on
Weapons of Mass Destruction?
Glen Rangwala, the Cambridge University
analyst who exposed the plagiarism by British intelligence of
"evidence" on Iraq from a graduate student in California,
suggests that much of the information on such weapons has come
from Ahmed Chalabia's Iraqi National Congress (INC), which has
received Pentagon money for intelligence gathering. "The
INC saw the demand and provided what was needed," says Rangwala.
"The implication is that they polluted the whole US intelligence
effort."
It is well known in intelligence circles
that Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz has overseen
the polluting of the stream of intelligence reporting on Iraq
with a flood of fabricated material from Chalabi, who has few
supporters and still fewer sources inside Iraq. When both the
CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency refused to give credence
to such reporting, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld set up his own
intelligence analysis unit headed by Rich Haver "a passed-over
but still ambitious aspirant to the post of CIA director. The
contribution of reporting from A(C)migrA(C)s has been highly
touted for months by Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, who seem unaware
of Machiavellia's warning that of all intelligence sources, exiles
are the least reliable.
In the face of like admonitions from
the Intelligence Community, Wolfowitz has chosen to take the
offensive. He has stated in public, for example, that CIA analysis
"is not worth the paper it is written on."
/s/
Richard Beske, San Diego
Kathleen McGrath Christison, Santa Fe
William Christison, Santa Fe
Raymond McGovern, Arlington, VA
Steering Group Veteran Intelligence Professionals
for Sanity. They can be reached at: rmcgovern@slschool.org
Today's
Features
Ashley
Smith
Under Uncle Sam's Thumb: a History
of Washington's Occupations
Steve
Perry
Bush's War Web Log 4/30
Gary
Leupp
Shooting Schoolboys: Preliminary Thoughts on the Fallujah Massacre
Robert
Jensen
Fighting Alienation in the USA
Wayne
Madsen
The Four Horsemen of Propaganda
Ahmad
Faruqui
Bush's Strategic Myopia About the Middle East
Gabriel
Kolko
Iraq, the US and the End of the European Coalition
Adolfo
Perez Esquivel
A Nobel Laureat's Letter to Bush:
"You Talk of Freedom; You Detest Freedom"
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