Nuclear lies of the Dark Lord and his boss

Bob Woodward is now, sadly, exposed as being another "media whore", a celebrity more than a journalist.  A very sad comedown.   But, as I've mentioned before, Woodward's sad role these past few years as a Bush administration flak - even helping them to try to play down the CheneyGate leaking scandal - gives an interesting twist to his generally Bush-friendly book Plan of Attack (2004).   There are parts in it where he seems to let his administration friends make thinly-disguised propaganda for themselves.  But because he was bending over backwards to make Bush and his fellow war planners look accomplished, visionary and heroic, the parts that don't fit that picture gain an extra credibility as "evidence against interest".   He recounts, for instance, Dark Lord Cheney's speech of 08/26/02, the text of which is available at the White House Web site: Vice President Speaks at VFW 103rd National Convention.  This is the speech where Cheney started actively making his public case for preventive war against Iraq.  He outlined his own vision of permanent war:

Under the Bush Doctrine, a regime that harbors or supports terrorists will be regarded as hostile to the United States.

The Taliban has already learned that lesson, but Afghanistan was only the beginning of a lengthy campaign. Were we to stop now, any sense of security we might have would be false and temporary. There is a terrorist underworld out there, spread among more than 60 countries. The job we have will require every tool at our means of diplomacy, of finance, of intelligence, of law enforcement, and of military power. But we will, over time, find and defeat the enemies of the United States.

It's worth taking a look at some detail at the way Dark Lord of Torture framed his case for preventive war against Iraq:

Nine-eleven and its aftermath awakened this nation to danger, to the true ambitions of the global terror network, and to the reality that weapons of mass destruction are being sought by determined enemies who would not hesitate to use them against us.

It is a certainty that the al Qaeda network is pursuing such weapons, and has succeeded in acquiring at least a crude capability to use them. We found evidence of their efforts in the ruins of al Qaeda hideouts in Afghanistan. And we've seen in recent days additional confirmation in videos recently shown on CNN - pictures of al Qaeda members training to commit acts of terror, and testing chemical weapons on dogs. Those terrorists who remain at large are determined to use these capabilities against the United States and our friends and allies around the world.

As we face this prospect, old doctrines of security do not apply. In the days of the Cold War, we were able to manage the threat with strategies of deterrence and containment. But it's a lot tougher to deter enemies who have no country to defend. And containment is not possible when dictators obtain weapons of mass destruction, and are prepared to share them with terrorists who intend to inflict catastrophic casualties on the United States.

The case of Saddam Hussein, a sworn enemy of our country, requires a candid appraisal of the facts. After his defeat in the Gulf War in 1991, Saddam agreed under to U.N. Security Council Resolution 687 to cease all development of weapons of mass destruction. He agreed to end his nuclear weapons program. He agreed to destroy his chemical and his biological weapons. He further agreed to admit U.N. inspection teams into his country to ensure that he was in fact complying with these terms.

In the past decade, Saddam has systematically broken each of these agreements. The Iraqi regime has in fact been very busy enhancing its capabilities in the field of chemical and biological agents. And they continue to pursue the nuclear program they began so many years ago. These are not weapons for the purpose of defending Iraq; these are offensive weapons for the purpose of inflicting death on a massive scale, developed so that Saddam can hold the threat over the head of anyone he chooses, in his own region or beyond.

On the nuclear question, many of you will recall that Saddam's nuclear ambitions suffered a severe setback in 1981 when the Israelis bombed the Osirak reactor. They suffered another major blow in Desert Storm and its aftermath.

But we now know that Saddam has resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons. Among other sources, we've gotten this from the firsthand testimony of defectors - including Saddam's own son-in-law, who was subsequently murdered at Saddam's direction. Many of us are convinced that Saddam will acquire nuclear weapons fairly soon. (my emphasis)

We see several key elements in just those paragraphs.  There is the heavy association of Al Qaeda with Iraq.  This association was sometimes made with phony claims of direct contacts.  But it was usually made the way the Dark Lord did it that day, with heavily emotional association.

Notice how definitive Cheney was: we now know that Saddam has resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons.  Of course, today we know that he had not.

But today, this same Cheney and all the other Party faithful are claiming that the Democrats and every intelligence agency in the world agreed with them on Iraq.  Not on this nuclear program claim.  This was a claim that the Torture Administration sold to the public and to Congress.  But did they even believe it?

The Iraqi defector who Cheney cited was General Hussein Kamel, who defected to Jordan in 1995. Kamel had been chief of all of Iraq's weapons programs.  Iraq enticed  him to return in 1996, and he was promptly executed.  In his book Disarming Iraq (2004), UN weapons inspector Hans Blix described Kamel's defection.  He doesn't mention what Kamel may have told his debriefers about a revived nuclear weapons project.  But he does include a particular piece of information that the administration didn't care to share with the public:

During debriefings in Jordan, he claimed that all chemical and biological weapons had been destroyed on his orders in 1991.  The statement was certainly significant, but without any corroborating evidence it could not be given credibility.  More imporatnt was that the regime in Iraq chose to make available to UNSCOM and the IAEA a vast trove of documents related to prohibited weapons programs, documents it claimed that Kamel had hidden on this property, which was referred to by the media as the "chicken farm." (my emphasis)

The documents included evidence that, among otherthings:

[I]n August 1990 Kamel had ordered a crash program to make a nuclear weapon, using fissionable material from research reactor fuel that was under IAEA safeguards.  That program had failed. ...

[Cheney] did not mention that in his debreifing in Amman in 1995, General Hussein Kamel had said that he had ordered the destruction of all weapons of mass destruction in 1991.  He also ignored the fact that hardly any weapons had been found at non-declared installations.

Blix had been director general of the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Commission) during the post-Gulf War inspections up until 1997, when he retired from that post.  During those inspections:

Early in the period, the IAEA secured the removal from Iraq of all fissionable material, which was flown to Russia.  The agency further supervised the destruction of many large installations that had been used in the Iraqi weapons programs.  Most of this was accomplished before the end of 1992.

He summarizes the conclusions of the IAEA's report to the UN Security Council of 10/08/97 on Iraq's nuclear program:

There was general agreement among governments at the time that there were no significant further "disarmament" matters to clear up in the nuclear dossier, only some "questions" to clarify.

The Dark Lord in his August 26 speech expressed his disdain for nuclear inspections, bringing up a point which would later be repeated over and over, and which has become part of the mythology that the Freeper crowd takes for reality:

Prior to the Gulf War, America's top intelligence analysts would come to my office in the Defense Department and tell me that Saddam Hussein was at least five or perhaps even 10 years away from having a nuclear weapon. After the war we learned that he had been much closer than that, perhaps within a year of acquiring such a weapon.

Blix says of this criticism that there is a critical element missing:

[W]hile the [IAEA] "missed" the Iraqi nuclear enrichment and weapons program when it operated the traditional safeguards system under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty before April 1991, it did a perfectly creditable job as the Security Council's nuclear inspection tool after that date. (my emphasis)

The post-Gulf War inspections regime imposed on Iraq was far more "intrusive" that what Blix calls the traditional safeguards system. So Cheney's comparison was dishonest, althoug Republican comma-dancers would claim it wasn't technically a lie.  (The worldwide NPT inspections methods were also strengthened in later years.)  

Cheney's speech was understood for what it was on its face: a rejection of the whole concept of using inspectors before going to war.

Against that background, a person would be right to question any suggestion that we should just get inspectors back into Iraq, and then our worries will be over. Saddam has perfected the game of cheat and retreat, and is very skilled in the art of denial and deception. A return of inspectors would provide no assurance whatsoever of his compliance with U.N. resolutions. On the contrary, there is a great danger that it would provide false comfort that Saddam was somehow "back in his box."

Meanwhile, he would continue to plot. Nothing in the last dozen years has stopped him -- not his agreements; not the discoveries of the inspectors; not the revelations by defectors; not criticism or ostracism by the international community; and not four days of bombings by the U.S. in 1998. What he wants is time and more time to husband his resources, to invest in his ongoing chemical and biological weapons programs, and to gain possession of nuclear arms. ...

[Then follows hair-raising and harebrained rhetoric about how Saddam's Iraq could quickly become a worldwide nuclear threat.]

Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us. And there is no doubt that his aggressive regional ambitions will lead him into future confrontations with his neighbors - confrontations that will involve both the weapons he has today, and the ones he will continue to develop with his oil wealth. (my emphasis)

Were really no doubts?  Court historian Woodward describes a Congressional briefing Bush held on 09/04/02, a few daysafter Cheney's "no doubt" speech and also after a follow-up speech he did on August 29. 

Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan and chairman of the Armed Services Committee, asked if Saddam Hussein was deterrable, containable.  "The military has deep concerns [about invading Iraq]," he said, suggesting lots of senior officers were hesitant.

"It would be nice if they expressed their reservations to the president rather than just someone in the Senate," Bush said, looking angry.

Woodward did not report what kind of impression Bush's reference to Sen. Levin as "just someone in the Senate" left on the group.

Rummy did his own briefing for Senators later the same day.  Relying on a report prepared by Christine Ciccone, who worked for a member of the now-notorious White House Information Group (WHIG) that was set up to market the Iraq War, Woodward writes:

Senator Dianne Feinstein, the California Democrat who was on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said at the session that she had worked over the congressional recess on the intelligence issues and had received numerous briefings. "She strongly believes from those briefings, " Ciccone reported, "there is no new evidence of Saddam having nuclear devices, and her conclusion is there is no imminent threat."  According to the [Ciccone] Note, Feinstein "does not believe we are prepared to kill innocent people which will be impossible to avoid because we will be going from mosque to mosque looking for the terrorists, etc." (my emphasis)

Just nine days after the "no doubt" speech, the administration couldn't come up with any new intelligence information for Congress to back up Cheney's lying words.  Accoding to Woodward, even Texas Republican Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison "agreed with everything Feinstein had said."

Two days later, on 09/06/02, Gen. Tommy Franks breifed "Bush and the NSC" [Condi, Condi and presumably others of her staff like Stephen Hadley, although Woodward does not specify any of the the other participants except Bush].  After talking about Special Ops teams and Scud missiles:

But General Franks had something important to add.  "Mr. President," he said, "we'vebeen looking for Scud missiles and other weapons of mass destruction for ten years and haven't found any yet, so I can't tell you that I know that there are any specific weapons anywhere.  I haven't seen Scud one."

... Franks believed that Saddam did, in fact, have WMD, specifically weaponized chemicals.  Intelligence officials from other countries had told him they believed Saddam had some weaponized biologicals.  ...  There were many suspected WMD sites that were clearly military installations that he would target.  But suspicion is not knowledge.  (my emphasis)

Eleven days after the Dark Lord's "no doubt" speech, Gen. Franks clearly expressed doubt directly to the President and (presumably) Condi, Condi.

That same day, On September 6, the Christian Science Monitor published a cautionary article on the misuse of intelligence, referring back to the Gulf War of 1991: In war, some facts less factual: Some US assertions from the last war on Iraq still appear dubious by Scott Peterson.

"My concern in these situations, always, is that the intelligence that you get is driven by the policy, rather than the policy being driven by the intelligence," says former US Rep. Lee Hamilton (D) of Indiana, a 34-year veteran lawmaker until 1999, who served on numerous foreign affairs and intelligence committees, and is now director of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington. The Bush team "understands it has not yet carried the burden of persuasion [about an imminent Iraqi threat], so they will look for any kind of evidence to support their premise," Mr. Hamilton says. "I think we have to be skeptical about it."

Peterson's article discussed how the St. Petersburg Times in September 1990, in those pre-blog days when most papers weren't even available on the Internet yet, published satellite photographs challenging the claims made by then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney that the Iraqi troops in Kuwait were massing near Saudi Arabia, possibly in preparation for an attack:

"It was a pretty serious fib," says Jean Heller, the Times journalist who broke the story. ...

Shortly before US strikes beganin the Gulf War, for example, the St. Petersburg Times asked two experts to examine the satellite images of the Kuwait and Saudi Arabia border area taken in mid-September 1990, a month and a half after the Iraqi invasion. The experts, including a former Defense Intelligence Agency analyst who specialized in desert warfare, pointed out the US build-up -  jet fighters standing wing-tip to wing-tip at Saudi bases - but were surprised to see almost no sign of the Iraqis.

"That [Iraqi buildup] was the whole justification for Bush sending troops in there, and it just didn't exist," Ms. Heller says. Three times Heller contacted the office of Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney (now vice president) for evidence refuting the Times photos or analysis - offering to hold the story if proven wrong.

The official response: "Trust us." To this day, the Pentagon's photographs of the Iraqi troop buildup remain classified.

A pretty serious fib indeed.  But not the worst one to come from Dark Lord Cheney and the Bush dynasty.

History was repeating itself in that way at the time the Monitor published that article.

On September 8, the Dark Lord went on "Meet the Press" and held forth again, as reported in Aides Ignored CIA Caveats on Iraq: Clear-Cut Assertions Were Made Before Arms Assessment Was Completed by Walter Pincus and Dana Priest Washington Post 02/07/04.

On Sept. 8, 2002, Cheney said of Hussein on NBC's "Meet the Press": "We do know, with absolute certainty, that he is using his procurement system to acquire the equipment he needs in order to enrich uranium to build a nuclear weapon." Cheney was referring to the aluminum tubes that some analysts believed could be used for a centrifuge to help make nuclear materials; others believed they were for an antiaircraft rocket.

Pincus and Priest notice that this "certainty" was not part of the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) that the CIA had just provided the administration.

On September 12, the day after the first anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, Bush spoke to the UN: President's Remarks at the United Nations General Assembly White House Web site.

There he said:

We know that Saddam Hussein pursued weapons of mass murder even when inspectors were in his country. Are we to assume that he stopped when they left? The history, the logic, and the facts lead to one conclusion: Saddam Hussein's regime is a grave and gathering danger. ...

Delegates to the General Assembly, we have been more than patient. We've tried sanctions. We've tried the carrot of oil for food, and the stick of coalition military strikes. But Saddam Hussein has defied all these efforts and continues to develop weapons of mass destruction. (my emphasis)

Even at that time, experts in the field were dubious of the administration's very confident claims, including elaborations in a supporting paper released on the same day as Bush' UN speech: Observers: Evidence For War Lacking by Dana Priest and Joby Warrick Washington Post 09/13/02.

The White House document released yesterday as evidence that it is time to overthrow Saddam Hussein is a concise summary of his regime's abuses of Iraqis and its past use or possession of chemical and biological agents.

But it contains little new information -- and no bombshells -- showing that Hussein is producing new weapons of mass destruction or has joined with terrorists to threaten the United States or its interests abroad.

Administration officials, seeking to persuade the public, Congress and foreign allies that it is time to go to war, had indicated recently that their strongest case rested on evidence of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction program and its efforts to develop ballistic missiles to launch them beyond its borders.

But experts on Iraq's weaponry say that on this subject the report, with few exceptions, recycles a mix of dated and largely circumstantial evidence that Hussein may be hiding the ingredients for these weapons and is seeking to develop a nuclear capability and to weaponize chemical and biological agents. ...

President Bush has been under pressure toreveal why he is pressing for a war with Iraq in the nearfuture, and many analysts believed the document would make his case with new information of a more urgent nature. The absence of evidence, they say, suggests Bush will rely on what he believes are Hussein's intentions and potential actions, rather than on concrete, current activities.

"This is a glorified press release that doesn't come close to the information the U.S. government made available on Soviet military power when we were trying to explain the Cold War," said Anthony Cordesman, a Middle East expert who has participated in many major studies of Iraq's capabilities. "It's clumsy and shallow when what we need is sophisticated and in-depth . . . as an overall grade, I'd give it a D-minus."

No, I just don't think everybody fell for the Republicans' WMD scam.