Justin Raimondo
Neocons Busted! - Dick Cheney is over
Fri Feb 6 15:08:56 2004
64.140.158.184

February 6, 2004
Neocons Busted!
Dick Cheney is over – and so are the neoconservatives who lied us into war
by Justin Raimondo
http://antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=1919

You have to give CIA director George Tenet credit: he managed to pack more obfuscations, evasions, and outright lies into what couldn't have been more than a half hour speech than one might have thought humanly possible.

The purpose of Tenet's peroration was to get the President, and also his own Agency, off the hook when it comes to the complete absence of "weapons of mass destruction" in Iraq. Either the President of the United States and his advisors made it all up out of whole cloth, or the intelligence they were being fed was faulty. The first conclusion is not allowable, and so the second conclusion was the Republican line by default – and that, from Tenet's point of view, wasn't good either, because it looked like the CIA was being set up to take the fall. Thus, the speech had to walk a very fine line between blaming the boss, and taking it on the chin, and, when all is said and done, one has to say: Good job, George!

That is, if we don't look too closely….

"The question being asked about Iraq in the starkest terms is, were we right or were we wrong? In the intelligence business, you are almost never completely wrong or completely right. That applies in full to the question of Saddam's weapons of mass destruction. And like many of the toughest intelligence challenges, when the facts of Iraq are all in, we will neither be completely right nor completely wrong."

Nobody's right, nobody's wrong, and we're just gonna have to make the most of it. It's something that a philosophy teacher might want to put forward in the classroom – especially in our modern universities, where concepts of right, wrong, and objective reality are definitely out of fashion. But is this radical subjectivism really suited to a foreign policy of hegemonic preemption, which assumes the right to strike at a potential threat?

Secondly, the question being asked is not, were we right or wrong, but, rather: why were we so wrong?

Tenet says that the intelligence assessment of Iraqi WMD drew from three information streams: history, the UN inspection team, and "other means," including not only satellite imagery but also information funneled in through foreign intelligence agencies.

Looking at the history of Iraq's WMD, Tenet claims we couldn't have drawn any other conclusion but that the Iraqi dictator was reconstituting his program:

"Everyone knew that Iraq had chemical and biological weapons in the 1980s and 1990s. Saddam Hussein used chemical weapons against Iran and his own people on at least 10 different occasions. He launched missiles against Iran, Saudi Arabia and Israel."

But that was more than a decade ago – before the crippling sanctions that decimated Iraq's military capabilities, as well as the civilian economy. Aside from that, however, Iraq, you'll remember, lost the war against Iran – in spite of our best efforts to help the Iraqi dictator prevail over Tehran. So much for the military value of Iraqi WMD.

It's true that, on Feb. 24, 1991, what the Pentagon's own propagandists called "a low-tech Scud ballistic missile armed with a conventional warhead" struck an American barracks in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, where twenty-eight soldiers died, and 98 were wounded. But that was at the height of Gulf War I, when the U.S. was invading Iraq and decimating its cities from the air – hardly a case of Saddam suddenly and inexplicably lashing out.

As for the equally low-tech Scuds he lobbed into Israel, these were unguided and flopped harmlessly to the ground, failing spectacularly in their mission of breaking apart the Anglo-American-Arab coalition assembled by Bush I. An article published by the official American Forces Press Service avers that "the Scud missiles in Hussein's arsenal were not much technologically beyond the Nazi V-2s."

How is a nation wielding World War II era weaponry a threat to America, with all its hi-tech super-duper military equipment – and a "defense" budget equaling more than the sum total of the top 25 spenders on God's green earth?

"By definition," said Tenet, "intelligence deals with the unclear, the unknown, the deliberately hidden." In analyzing his Georgetown remarks, it's best to keep that last phrase in mind.

The function of intelligence agencies worldwide, and down through the ages, has been to hide, rather than reveal. The problem however, is that it's becoming increasingly impossible to hide the truth in the age of instantaneous communications. Not only television, and other mass communications networks, but also the Internet make a policy of systematic lying virtually impossible to sustain. It used to be that war propaganda buried the truth for years, even decades, after the fact: now the machinations of the War Party are exposed practically before they are implemented.

As blogger Ken Layne famously put it: watch out, bud, because we can fact-check your ass.

"Our second stream of information," says Tenet, "was that the United Nations could not and Saddam would not account for all the weapons the Iraqis had: tons of chemical weapons precursors, hundreds of artillery shells and bombs filled with chemical or biological agents."

But where are these hundreds of bombs and shells? Where are the biological agents? They are nowhere to be seen: and that is the problem faced by this administration, and its apologists, which Tenet fails to surmount.

As Gertrude Stein said of her hometown of Oakland, California: There is no there there.

When Tenet says of the UN inspectors' work that "we did not take this data on face value," surely he is uttering a considerable understatement. The Americans disdained the repeated statements of Hans Blix that evidence of Iraqi WMD was thin to nonexistent. As war clouds darkened over the Middle Eastern horizon, Blix said he suspected Iraq had most likely destroyed its WMD shortly after Gulf War I – a statement that turned out to be right on the money. Yet Tenet claims:

"To conclude before the war that Saddam had destroyed his existing weapons, we would have had to ignore what the United Nations and allied intelligence said they could not verify."

But Blix and the UN pleaded with the Americans and their British allies to hold off for a while, to give the inspectors the time they needed to verify what turned out to be the truth. Saddam's last minute proposal to let the UN inspectors back in without conditions was brushed aside. The rush to war was not to be stopped.

"The third stream of information," according to Tenet, "came after the U.N. inspectors left Iraq in 1998. We gathered intelligence through human agents, satellite photos and communications intercepts. Other foreign intelligence services were clearly focused on Iraq and assisted in the effort."

Tenet's description of the various bits of evidence gathered up by purely technological means is baffling: if the incidents he recounts are true, then where's the beef? Why were the satellite photos wrong, or misleading? How is it that those intercepted communications haven't provided any leads in physically tracking down the missing WMD?

In getting down to brass tacks, Tenet essentially admits that arms inspector David Kay was absolutely right when he said "we were almost all wrong." He just says it in a more roundabout way:

"Our community said with high confidence that Saddam was continuing and expanding his missile programs, contrary to U.N. resolutions. He had missiles and other systems with ranges in excess of UN restrictions and he was seeking missiles with even longer ranges.

"What do we know today? Since the war we have found an aggressive Iraqi missile program concealed from the international community."

Iraq, we are told, would have made "improvements" if the war had not occurred, a prediction worthy of Nostradamus. Oh yes, and "Iraq had plans and advanced design work." Plenty of plans and programs, but no missiles. To date, not a single missile with a range beyond the permitted distance has been found.

There's no there there, is there?

This becomes even more apparent when Tenet gets to the rather sensitive topic of the unmanned aerial drones that George W. Bush declared to be a threat to the U.S. mainland. Tenet loyally echoes Bush's assessment, and goes on to ask:

"What do we know today? The Iraq Survey Group found that two separate groups in Iraq were working on a number of unmanned aerial vehicles designs that were hidden from the U.N. until Iraq's declaration in December of 2002. Now we know that important design elements were never fully declared.

"The question of intent, especially regarding the smaller unmanned aerial vehicle, is still out there. But we should remember that the Iraqis flight tested an aerial biological weapons spray system intended for a large unmanned aerial vehicle.

"A senior Iraqi official has now admitted that their two large unmanned vehicles, one developed in the early '90s and the other under development in late 2000, were intended for the delivery of biological weapons.

"My provisional bottom line today: We detected the development of prohibited and undeclared unmanned aerial vehicles. But the jury is still out on whether Iraq intended to use its newer, smaller unmanned aerial vehicle to deliver biological weapons."

This is utter nonsense. As the Associated Press reported last year:

"Huddled over a fleet of abandoned Iraqi drones, U.S. weapons experts in Baghdad came to one conclusion: Despite the Bush administration's public assertions, these unmanned aerial vehicles weren't designed to dispense biological or chemical weapons. The evidence gathered this summer matched the views of Air Force intelligence analysts who argued in a national intelligence assessment of Iraq before the war that the remotely piloted planes were unarmed reconnaissance drones."

The commander of the facility where the drones were found, and interviews with Iraqi scientists, yielded the same conclusions.

In spite of Colin Powell's extravagant fantasy, which had Iraqi drones spraying poison over American cities, the dissenting footnotes to the national intelligence assessment on Iraq turned out to have been right. The Defense Intelligence Agency agreed with their Air Force counterparts: those drones didn't have the capabilities to dispense WMD. They were strictly for reconnaissance. After American troops combed the conquered country, searching for an ex post facto rationalization for the war, these infamous drones were found in various stages of disrepair. Scientists were brought in to analyze the find, and their assessment was unequivocal:

"'We just looked at the UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) and said, "There's nothing here. There's no room to put anything in here,"' one of the scientists said. The wingspan on drones that Iraqis showed journalists in March measured 24.5 feet, and the aircraft were built like large, model airplanes."

There's no there there.

Tenet backs away completely from the nuclear issue, contending that the CIA never claimed Saddam had nukes to begin with, and conceding, in the end, that "we may have overestimated the progress Saddam was making." Again, Tenet's penchant for understatement is notable, especially considering National Security advisor Condoleeza Rice's dramatic assertion that

"The problem here is that there will always be some uncertainty about how quickly he [Saddam] can acquire nuclear weapons. But we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."

Nor did that stop Vice President Dick Cheney from going on Meet the Press and telling Tim Russert that Iraq could launch a nuclear attack:

Russert: "And even though the International Atomic Energy Agency said he does not have a nuclear program, we disagree?"

Cheney: "I disagree, yes. And you'll find the CIA, for example, and other key parts of our intelligence community disagree. Let's talk about the nuclear proposition for a minute. … We know that based on intelligence, that [Saddam] has been very, very good at hiding these kinds of efforts. He's had years to get good at it and we know he has been absolutely devoted to trying to acquire nuclear weapons. And we believe he has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons. I think Mr. ElBaradei, frankly, is wrong."

In this context, Tenet's statement that "most were convinced that he still had a program and if he obtained fissile material he could have a weapon within a year, but we detected no such acquisition" means: Don't blame us!

On the biological weapons front, it's the same story: the CIA initially distrusted reports of Iraq reconstituting its bio-chemical WMD, and, as it turned out, there were plenty of purported "plans," but, as Tenet lamely admits, no actual stocks of such weapons.

What's really interesting is that, aside from blaming, by implication, those administration officials, like Cheney and Rice, who clearly went overboard in an effort to ratchet up support for the war, Tenet also tries to shift the blame to those he calls "our foreign partners." Who are they? Tenet doesn't say, but begs us to understand "some of what was going on in the fall of 2002." According to the CIA chief:

"Several sensitive reports crossed my desk from two sources characterized by our foreign partners as established and reliable. The first from a source who had direct access to Saddam and his inner circle said Iraq was not in the possession of a nuclear weapon. However, Iraq was aggressively and covertly developing such a weapon. Saddam had recently called together his nuclear weapons committee, irate that Iraq did not yet have a weapon because money was no object and they possessed the scientific know-how….

"The same source said that Iraq was stockpiling chemical weapons and that equipment to produce insecticides under the oil-for-food program had been diverted to covert chemical weapons production. The source said that Iraq's weapons of last resort were mobile launchers armed with chemical weapons which would be fired at enemy forces in Israel…."

Now take a good guess as to the identity of our "foreign partner."

Reports that Israel was feeding the U.S. false information via the "Office of Special Plans" (OSP) – the nexus of the neoconservative cabal inside the administration – are varied and widespread. The Guardian's Julian Borger reports an Israeli equivalent of the OSP, that worked in tandem with its American counterpart, as does Robert Dreyfuss in The Nation. So does a first-hand observer on the scene at the Pentagon, former Lt. Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski, who recounts a chilling story of high-ranking Israelis ushered in the offices of high-ranking officials without having to sign in. As Dreyfuss reports:

"According to [a] former [U.S.] official, also feeding information to the Office of Special Plans was a secret, rump unit established last year in the office of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of Israel. This unit, which paralleled Shulsky's – and which has not previously been reported – prepared intelligence reports on Iraq in English (not Hebrew) and forwarded them to the Office of Special Plans. It was created in Sharon's office, not inside Israel's Mossad intelligence service, because the Mossad – which prides itself on extreme professionalism – had views closer to the CIA's, not the Pentagon's, on Iraq. This secretive unit, and not the Mossad, may well have been the source of the forged documents purporting to show that Iraq tried to purchase yellowcake uranium for weapons from Niger in West Africa, according to the former official."

The question of the OSP's key role in pushing us into this war was raised after the Georgetown philippic, when one of the students asked Tenet:

"Recent investigative reports, including a long piece in the journal Mother Jones, which came out this past January, detailed the creation of a Pentagon group a few weeks after September 11th which, as of January of 2002, became known as the Office of Special Programs [sic]. And it contained prominent neocons

• (Cont'd) I pointed out in my last column,... — Justin Raimondo, Fri Feb 6 15:16