War Powers, War Lies: Part 15: Weapons of Mutual Deception
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War Powers, War Lies: A Series
Part 15: Weapons Of Mutual Deception
Published in the Maryland Daily Record June 30, 2006
During the waning days of the Soviet Union, an era of goldbricking employees and a valueless ruble, the rueful motto of the Socialist laborer was: “We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us.” The situation with Iraq’s supposed weapons of mass destruction was roughly the same: Saddam pretended to have weapons of mass destruction and we pretended to believe him.
Saddam’s pretense drew inspiration from three critical formative experiences (as Michael R. Gordon and Gen. Bernard E. Trainor tell us in their recent war history, Cobra II). In the Iranian war from 1980 to 1988, Saddam had used chemical weapons in huge quantities, and avoided being overrun by Iranian “human waves”; he partly credited with the “save” the over 100,000 chemical rounds he had used. When the Kurds rose up against Saddam in 1988, he had quelled them by killing 5000 of them at Kalabjah, using mustard gas, sarin, VX, and tabun. Kurdistan remained under his control. During the Gulf War, the U.S.-led coalition did not overthrow him or occupy Baghdad; he chalked this up to U.S. reluctance to expose its troops to the chemical weapons he was thought to possess. His record of willingness to use such armaments against Iran and against the Kurds had blunted U.S. resolve, he believed.
After the Gulf War, Saddam had been forced to dismantle his WMD programs (mostly in 1991, with some dual-use programs surviving, however, until 1995). But Saddam regarded it as hazardous to his health for the world to be certain he had actually complied. Thus for a decade he played a cat-and-mouse game with UNSCOM weapons inspectors, featuring incomplete disclosures, deliberately implausible denials, suspicious defiance of inspections, and military and security activities deliberately designed to look as if they were protecting WMD secrets. You can get an excellent flavor of this in weapons inspector Scott Ritter’s memoir, Iraq Confidential (2005). Ritter provides an amusing account, for instance, of the way the Mukhabarat, the Iraqi secret police, who just wanted the inspectors gone, were totally frustrated with the Iraqi WMD scientists’ failures to provide straightforward explanations that would have convinced the inspectors of the truth.[Comment2] But the Mukhabarat did not control the scientists; Saddam’s Special Security Organization did, and it had a contrary mission.
Saddam avoided at least some sanctions by pleading compliance, and by making it impossible to prove he had not complied; he avoided invasion and insurrection (at least in his own mind) by making it impossible to prove he had complied. Saddam’s downfall was that the world was full of people who wanted to believe or at least to convince others that there still was an Iraqi WMD program. The widespread belief in 2003 that Saddam had WMDs was not owing to Saddam’s being an outstandingly successful liar; there were just far more determined and successful liars on the loose than he – and they were telling the same lie he was.
The deceptions went back to the Clinton administration. Inspectors from the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) found that, as they came closer to establishing the destruction and non-replacement of the WMDs, the CIA became actively involved in subverting and discrediting them. The CIA was trying to orchestrate a coup, and nothing that made Saddam look less menacing was to their liking. To that end, according to Ritter, the CIA endangered British signals intelligence operatives in Iraq, repeatedly stiffed UNSCOM on promised technical cooperation, and provided dishonest reports, supposedly for UNSCOM’s benefit, purportedly digesting information UNSCOM had gathered. Most egregiously, the CIA hid a signals spying operation of its own within UNSCOM without seeking permission (which would of course have been denied if asked for). The operation was deliberately so situated that if the cover were blown, it would look like UNSCOM espionage, and UNSCOM, not the CIA, would get the blame.
The coup against Saddam was set for early 1996. Its plan was to use the failure of Iraq’s regime to cooperate fully with UNSCOM as a pretext for an attack coordinated with the coup. Unfortunately for the CIA, the Mukhabarat had penetrated the CIA’s network, and shortly before the coup was set to start, all CIA assets (some 800 individuals) associated with plot were all arrested, mostly tortured and killed. Thereafter for a time, the Clinton administration’s objective was simply to keep sanctions in place. But even those sanctions would be abandoned if Saddam were cleared of having a WMD program. Hence the UNSCOM process had to fail, and U.S. policy was dedicated to its failure.
Again, Saddam himself played right into Washington’s strategy. In the late 1990s he was in fact perpetrating a sort of Mesopotamian Watergate: a coverup that was worse in its impact than the revelation of the thing concealed would have been. All he sought to conceal in the late 90s was the history of the early 90s coverup. But his timing was impeccably bad. This was the very point at which UNSCOM started aiming its inspections directly at the earlier coverup. So there was more stonewalling, more frustrated inspections, and finally a temporary termination of Saddam’s cooperation with the inspectors altogether. The result could not have proven worse for Saddam, because his actions left open a slim possibility that the weapons program actually demolished in 1991 and 1995 still existed.
The Clinton team did return to Plan A briefly. In early 1998, Secretary of State Madeline Albright and UN Ambassador Bill Richardson quite candidly involved Richard Butler, the head of the inspections, in a plan to use Iraqi failure to cooperate with the inspections as a trigger for an heavy attack by cruise missiles and bombers. The Iraqis (perhaps cued by the Mukhabarat, which had by this time completely penetrated UNSCOM communications) foiled that by cooperating at the last minute. Thereafter, both sides returned to form, the Americans pretending to support UNSCOM and the Iraqis defying it.
And then came the Bush Administration, ushering in a group of zealots determined to manufacture reasons to attack Iraq. The CIA knew full well that the UNSCOM intelligence made highly unlikely the continued existence of a WMD program in Iraq. But the CIA bent in the prevailing political winds. Few things make sadder reading than the account in New York Times correspondent James Risen’s State of War (2006) of the way George Tenet, then the Director of Central Intelligence, was beaten down by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.
Two examples, both described in Risen’s book and each centered on a particular informer, will need to stand for the whole of the resulting perversion of intelligence analysis. One was an Iraqi defector in the hands of the Germans, appropriately code-named Curveball, who told tales of an Iraqi bioweapons program. His uncorroborated stories were the fundamental source of the CIA’s case that there was an Iraqi bioweapons program. The Germans would not provide the CIA direct access to Curveball, and there was no way to question him. The Germans themselves told the CIA unofficially that Curveball was “crazy,” and officially they warned that he was unreliable. Top CIA managers were aware of the warnings, and aware that without direct access to Curveball, they had no way to evaluate his intelligence directly. The head of the European Division of the CIA’s Directorate of Operations tried to assure that Curveball’s stories would not become part of Colin Powell’s February 2003 speech to the UN. He thought he had secured Tenet’s agreement to keep it out of the speech. But of course he Tenet did not live up to his word.
Here is what Colin Powell told the UN on February 5, 2003, reportedly based entirely on Curveball’s unverified tall tales:
Let me take you inside that intelligence file and share with you what we know from eye witness accounts. We have firsthand descriptions of biological weapons factories on wheels and on rails. The trucks and train cars are easily moved and are designed to evade detection by inspectors. In a matter of months, they can produce a quantity of biological poison equal to the entire amount that Iraq claimed to have produced in the years prior to the Gulf War.
We now know that this was utter fantasy. The Germans, Curveball’s keepers, were appalled at the time. Later, so was Powell, who was to call that speech “the lowest point in my life,” and claimed he had never been warned about the questions raised about Curveball or the CIA’s lack of access to him.
Saad Tawfiq was Curveball’s opposite, a bona fide nuclear scientist who had been at the heart of the former Iraqi nuclear program, and who told the truth. He knew that in early 1991 U.S. bombers had unknowingly destroyed the physical facilities upon which the program was built. He had been involved in the coverup of the non-existence of the program, the coverup that had so enraged Scott Ritter and the UNSCOM teams. As Risen recounts, Tawfiq’s sister, a U.S. citizen, was dispatched by the CIA to Baghdad in September 2002 to obtain confirmation that there was still a nuclear program. Tawfiq was incredulous when she asked him. He responded: “Where do they come up with these questions? Don’t they know that there is no nuclear program?” When she reported back Tawfiq’s flat denials, the CIA merely concluded in an obviously patronizing way that Tawfiq had lied to a credulous sister. It turned out that Tawfiq was one of thirty Iraqi nuclear scientists who had been contacted by the CIA and who had all said the same thing.
By contrast, the information the President (in his 2003 State of the Union address) relied on was primarily a few documents that purported to chronicle efforts by Iraq to purchase uranium in Niger. These documents, we now know, were clumsy forgeries. (The identities and motivations of the forgers are still a matter of debate.) But Tawfiq, if the CIA had asked him, could have told them that Iraq had its own uranium deposits, and would have had no need to buy ore in Niger. The CIA, as everyone now knows, sent former Ambassador Joseph Wilson to Niger to check out the story. Wilson came back with clear evidence and analysis that established beyond doubt the falsehood of the documents. The CIA believed Wilson, as did the Bureau of Intelligence and Research within the State Department. Eric Alterman and Mark Green report that there was also a lesser-known trip to Niger in February 2002 by retired Marine General Carlton W. Fulford Jr. who came away convinced that the uranium supply was “secure” (insecurity being a necessary precondition to Saddam gaining access).
There is little doubt that the White House was aware that the intelligence community thought the documents to be bogus. According to Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times, lower CIA officials so informed Vice President Cheney’s office and National Security Council staff members.[Comment11] Dana Priest of the Washington Post reported in July 2003 the words of an unidentified “senior administration decision-maker” that “everyone knew” the documents “were not good.”
The International Atomic Energy Commission also quickly concluded that the documents were counterfeit and its head, Mohamed El-Baradei, so warned the UN Security Council on March 7, 2003, two weeks before the U.S. began the invasion of Iraq for which it was citing the documents as a prime justification.
In short, the Bush administration surely was not concerned by warnings that the intelligence might be wrong; it knew the intelligence was wrong. This explains the otherwise somewhat puzzling treatment of the inspectors still in Iraq just before the invasion. It invaded before they were finished, an unreasonable course if doubts persisted, but a reasonable one if motivated by a fear that the inspectors might soon give Saddam a clean bill of health. After El-Baradei’s presentation, the administration had to know the WMD justification came with a rapidly approaching sell-by date.
Later on, speaking from the Oval Office on July 14, 2003, Bush tried to revise history and say the inspectors were not even there, claiming Saddam had not let them in. Historical revisionism was rife, anyway. It is clear now, reading the statements of the Administration’s senior officials, that they did this primarily by wilfully failing to distinguish between facts that were current and facts that were 15 years old.
For instance, Alterman and Green in The Book on Bush (2004), note that in the 2003 State of the Union, Bush declared Saddam had “biological weapons materials sufficient to produce over 25,000 liters of anthrax” and “the materials to produce as much as five hundred tons of sarin, mustard and VX nerve agent.” And Powell, in his address to the UN, claimed Iraq had created “four tons” of VX. In each case, the speaker neglected to mention that the Iraqis had claimed to have destroyed these agents under the UNSCOM inspection regime in 1991, and that the inspectors had largely verified the claims.
This deliberate chronological sleight-of-hand went on after the WMDs failed to emerge. David Kay, head of the CIA’s 1400-person Iraq Survey Group, admitted to Congress in October 2003 that after six months of searching, there was evidence only of “the very most rudimentary” nuclear program. Essentially, he told Congress that the program had been dormant since the early 1990s. Bush characterized this report as somehow confirming that the program “continued even beyond the end of Operation Iraqi Freedom.”
Hence, through two administrations, Democratic and Republican, the US kept up the pretense of believing Saddam’s pretense of having WMDs. Along with the “Global War on Terror” lies, already discussed, this formed two-thirds of the main justifications for the war. The third justification, that Saddam was a bloodthirsty tyrant, of course was true, but not much of a casus belli standing by itself. The lies were the active ingredient in the case for war.
Copyright (c) Jack L. B. Gohn
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