"I just wonder if they will ever tell us the truth." - Harold Casey, Louisville, KY, October 2004.
Daniel Benjamin in America in Iraq: Making bad connections Fort Wayne News-Sentinel 11/25/05 looks at the administration's current arguments that (1) everybody had the same intelligence and, hey, all these Democrats agreed with us; and, (2) our noble Christian president didn't "lie" about the (nonexistent) "weapons of mass destruction".
Benjamin's article doesn't articulate two of the problems I've described before that I see in the Democrats' responses. One is that the allegations about nuclear weapons programs were by far the most frightening, for both Congress and the public.
The other is that the October 2002 war resolution, which the administration is claiming endorsed everything they did in invading Iraq, just plainly did not give the administration a blank check to go to war with Iraq on its own discretion. And, in fact, the Bush administration violated both of the two required conditions in that resolution before military action would be allowed. I'm actually puzzled as to why Congressional Democrats and war critics generally aren't making more use of that argument, since it goes to the heart of Constitutional war powers.
But his piece is a good direct analysis of the two administration arguments. He argues that the argument over whether Bush himself technically told a "lie" is just silly comma-dancing.
And he also contends that, whatever the merits of the argument that intelligence analysts were subject to political pressure, the more important problem was the administration groupthink that led them to use in their decision-making only the intelligence that fit their own strong inclination to go to war against Iraq.
He recalls for us some of the many indications that we have that the administration had decided to go to war long before March of 2003, or even October of 2002:
The evidence includes comments that former Bush administration official Richard Haass made to the New Yorker in which he recounts meeting with Rice in July 2002 - more than eight months before the war started. Haass, who was then director of policy planning in the State Department, said Rice told him not to bother discussing the wisdom of confronting Iraq because, as she said, "that decision's been made. Don't waste your breath.''
If that decision had been made, it was done, as far as we know, before any comprehensive intelligence evaluation about Iraq was compiled. It is even possible that the decision had been made considerably earlier.
In the course of reporting a new book, "The Next Attack: The Failure of the Global War on Terror and a Strategy for Getting it Right," I learned from former senior government officials of a meeting that was held in January 2002 in the White House to jump-start planning for military action that would begin by April 15 of that year. That initial process, which appears to have been started by Cheney's office, was discontinued by Rice, who had initially not been informed about it. As one official who requested anonymity told me: "In that period, it really wasn't clear who was in charge."
But even those who believe the Bush administration did keep an open mind until the immediate run-up to the war must acknowledge that the White House was not interested in listening to all sides on how much of a threat Iraq posed.
I don't know if Benjamin is trying to minimize the issue of directly politicizing intelligence by politicians pressuring intelligence analysts, which clearly did happen and is a very serious problem. But regardless of that, I do think he's correct in saying that the unofficial groups that can be rightly called "lie factories" that the administration set up to bypass the established intelligence vetting processes and agencies are a more significant and serious problem.
One of those lie factories was this one:
The Counter-Terrorism Evaluation Group (CTEG, as it was called), was led by two well-known neoconservative political appointees, David Wurmser and Michael Maloof. The group trolled through the ocean of intelligence on al-Qaeda. It produced papers and briefings, but the conclusions - including that bin Laden and al-Qaeda were in cahoots - were never subjected to the same rigorous vetting by other intelligence agencies that all other major intelligence assessments are.
And he describes the effects as follows. In fact, the decision-making process of the Iraq War is a classic case of groupthink in action, and one that illustrates its dangers in a dramatic way:
Some administration officials had their minds made up before the facts were in. Even before the 2001 terrorist attacks, then-Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, in a meeting with counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke and others, argued that no terrorist group could pull off the bombings which Osama bin Laden's organization had accomplished before Sept. 11 without support from a state and indicated that he believed Iraq was the state behind the curtain.
After the Sept. 11 attacks, Wolfowitz told one of the Pentagon's top career counterterrorism officials (who spoke to me on the condition of anonymity) that the Iraqi government was behind the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993 - a position that had long been discredited by the intelligence community. [This is a crackpot theory associated with one of the kookier neocons, Laurie Mylroie.]
When the official told Wolfowitz that he did not agree, he said, "The light went out and he just wasn't interested. And that's how it was for everyone (working on counterterrorism). If you said you weren't convinced, you might as well have said, 'You guys are a bunch of liars.'"
"Wars are easy to get into, but hard as hell to get out of." - George McGovern and Jim McGovern 06/06/05
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