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Now
Iraq: "At a Minimum
Negligence in the Commission of a Fraud"
By KEVIN ZEESE
Michael Isikoff is a reporter for Newsweek
and co-author of Hubris:
the Inside Story of Spin, Scandal and the Selling of t he Iraq
War. Hubris describes the build-up to the Iraq War and
details the manipulation of intelligence, the failure of Congressional
leaders and the media, as well as detailing Richard Armitage's
central role in the Valerie Plame leak.
Michael Isikoff joined the
Washington Post in 1981, where he covered the Justice Department,
the Iran-Contra Affair, and Latin American drug operations. Isikoff
joined Newsweek as an Investigative Correspondent in June 1994
and has written extensively on the U.S. government's war on terrorism,
the Abu Ghraib scandal, campaign-finance and congressional ethics
abuses, presidential politics, the Enron scandal and other national
issues. Isikoff's June 2002 Newsweek cover story on U.S. intelligence
failures that preceded the 9-11 terror attacks, along with a
series of related articles, was honored with the Investigative
Reporters and Editors top prize for investigative reporting in
magazine journalism. He is also the co-author of the weekly online
Web column "Terror Watch," which won the 2005 award
from the Society of Professional Journalists for best investigative
reporting online. Michael Isikoff is the author of "Uncovering
Clinton: A Reporter's Story," a book that chronicled
his own reporting of the Lewinsky story.
Kevin Zeese: Your book leads
to the conclusion that the people involved in developing intelligence
-- even those at the top of the chain in the White House -- should
have known that the intelligence was false, exaggerated and cherry
picked to reach the result wanted by the administration, i.e.
to provide justification for the invasion and regime change in
Iraq. Is that how you meant the reader to react to your review?
Michael Isikoff: I really think
the facts speak for themselves at this point. It is unquestionably
true that the Bush administration took the country to war on
what has turned out to be thoroughly false, and in some cases,
fraudulent intelligence. What we do in Hubris is show
precisely how that happened and demonstrate, rather conclusively
I think, that there were ample grounds to doubt many of the most
dramatic claims-that Iraq was rebuilding its nuclear program,
for example, or had ties to Al Qaeda. In civil cases, somebody
can be successfully sued not just for knowing they sell you a
false bill of goods; but if they "should have known."
That's, at a minimum, what happened here-- negligence in the
commission of a fraud.
KZ: Your book also leads
to the conclusion that people in the chain of intelligence were
afraid of telling the truth and the administration pressured
those analysts whose findings were inconsistent with the conclusion
that was desired by the administration, e.g. the aluminum tubes
supposedly for nuclear weapons. And, in other cases they seemed
to miss obvious indications that intelligence was wrong, e.g.
the Niger documents. And in still other cases when key claims
were doubted by senior intelligence officials they were suppressed
and ignored, e.g. Wilson on Iraqi nuclear program and on Saddam
being an immediate threat. It seems like the administration manipulated
and cowered the intelligence community. Is this an accurate reading?
How did they do this? And, how do we prevent this in the future?
MI: There were far more doubts
and dissents expressed within the CIA, the State Department,
the Energy Department, even the Pentagon about many elements
of the administration's case than has been publicly understood.
We interview many of those dissenters who spoke to us for the
first time and expressed their own anguish about what happened.
Listening to some of them was quite poignant. Paul Pillar, for
example, the senior CIA officer who participated in the drafting
of a misleading CIA "white paper" about Iraqi WMD is
anguished to this day about his role, telling us how he wishes
he had mustered up the courage to tell administration officials,
"Hell no! I'm not going to do that." But policymakers
didn't want to hear what he and others had to say anyway-- indeed
they actively suppressed the dissents-because it was clear very
early on what the president and vice president wanted to hear.
KZ: How often to Cheney
visit the CIA and what was the purpose of those visits?
MI: He visited on multiple
occasions and, as we write in the book when we reconstruct one
of these visits, thoroughly intimidated agency analysts, making
it quite clear what he believed the intelligence really showed-even
though he was flat wrong.
KZ: How did the media fail
to get it right during the build-up to war?
MI: That is a complex question,
but we spend some time showing exactly how some news organizations,
particularly the New York Times and its then star reporter Judy
Miller, recycled the claims of fabricators and con men in order
to build the case for war. Some news organizations, on the other
hand, did question elements of the administration's case. In
April, 2002, I wrote a story in Newsweek debunking the false
claim that 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta had met in Prague with
an Iraqi intelligence agent. I showed that both the FBI and the
CIA had by then concluded that the visit probably never took
place. Yet Cheney continued to repeat the allegation anyway for
more than a year after that. Stories that challenged the administration's
arguments never got the traction they should have.
KZ: Further, congressional
leaders from the president's own party doubted the case for war
and questioned top secret briefings. Indeed, the House Majority
Leader, Dick Armey, a loyal, conservative Republican, directly
doubted Vice President Dick Cheney and warned of a quagmire.
How widespread were these concerns? How did the administration
ignore these Allies?
MI: The Armey story is one
of the most amazing ones we tell in the book. Here you have the
House Majority Leader, the number two Republican in the House,
a strong and loyal conservative who was convinced the war was
a giant mistake. He even warns Bush that he will get stuck in
a "quagmire" that will derail his domestic agenda for
the rest of his presidency. When he gets briefed by Cheney, he
thinks the intelligence is flimsy; had he been shown the same
intel by Clinton or Gore, he tells us, he would have told them
it was "bullshit." But because he was pressured by
Cheney to keep quiet, he went along-much to his later regret.
Sadly, there were quite a few other members of Congress who went
along despite their own doubts. We show how Bush consciously
used the upcoming 2002 congressional elections to whipsaw the
Democrats into backing his war resolution. (That, by the way,
does not absolve leading Democrats like Hillary Clinton and John
Kerry, from going along by the way.)
KZ: Your book chronicles
how we got into the Iraq quagmire but it does not explain why.
You describe the hatred Bush seems to have for Saddam - but that
does not seem to be a reason to go to war. Is the Iraq War an
outgrowth of Jimmy Carter's doctrine that the U.S. will use military
force to ensure access to Middle East oil? Or, a continuation
(on sterioids) of Clinton's doctrine of regime change in Iraq?
Author Antonia Juhasz, "The Bush Agenda" describes
the invasion and occupation as a corporate takeover of Iraq?
Of course, the U.S. could buy oil on the open market, but invading
assures U.S. oil companies reaping the profit of oil sales and
ensures access as oil availability shrinks. Why do you think
we went to war with Iraq?
MI: There is no easy answer
to the question of why we went to war. As we show, Bush really
did have this personal and very visceral antipathy to Saddam.
It was startling to hear, as our sources related to us, how the
president would explode with expletive-ridden tirades when the
issue of Saddam came up. . (I still find pretty eye-popping the
scene where the president flips his middle finger just a few
inches from Tom Daschle's face when the subject of Saddam was
raised.) But that is only part of the story. You have the machinations
of the neoconservatives like Wolfowitz and Perle who had been
promoting the idea of overthrowing Saddam for years. You had
Cheney and Rumsfeld who wanted to reassert American strategic
power. You had the whole post 9/11 emotional mood of the country.
l personally don't find the oil argument terribly persuasive-other
than on the most basic level: we care a lot more about that part
of the world because it sits on a huge chunk of the world's oil
supplies.
KZ: Now that the Democrats
have control of the House and the Senate and all the investigatory
powers that go with majority control, where do you suggest the
Democrats investigate in relationship to Iraq, Iran and contracts
relating to Iraq?
MI: There are tons to investigate.
The question is how much willpower there will be in Congress
to do so. If I were to make recommendations, I would tell them
to start by reading the shocking story about Ibn Shaiykh al-Libi
in Chapter 7 of our book. He was the alleged Al Qaeda guy who
made up the story about Osama bin Laden sending operatives to
Iraq for training in chemical and biological weapons because
the CIA "rendered " him to Egypt for brutal interrogations
by the Egyptian security services. Al-Libi's bogus, torture-induced
story was repeated at great length by Secretary of State Powell
at the Security Council. Yet after the war, when al-Libi was
returned to U.S. custody, he recanted the whole thing, saying
he only told his interrogators what he thought they wanted to
hear. Al-Libi has since disappeared. There have been some media
reports that he has been rendered back to his native Libya, but
the U.S. government will not say one word about what happened
to him or the circumstances of his interrogations that produced
his false claims. If I were conducting an oversight hearing,
I would start with the al-Libi story because it merges two huge
areas that need scrutiny: the use of intelligence in the run-up
to war and the treatment of high value detainees in what may
turn out to be clear violations of the Geneva Conventions.
There is, of course, much more.
I would urge everybody to read Hubris
and make up their own list.
CounterPunch
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CounterPunch Editors Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St Clair
are available to speak forcefully on ALL the burning issues,
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