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The War Profiteers - War Crimes,
Kidnappings & Torture |
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July 9th,
2009 - More Than $600 Billion And Counting: Iraq War Lies Revisited |
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More Than $600
Billion And Counting: Iraq War Lies Revisited By Jason Leopold The Public Record July 9th, 2009 Editor's Note: As the war in
Iraq surpassed its sixth year, a common refrain from politicians who
supported the invasion is "don't dwell on the past, think about the
future." It is an argument that distracts Americans from the important
lessons that this history can teach. The Iraq War, which was
predicated on the existence of weapons of mass destruction and fear of
another 9/11, has resulted in the deaths of more than 4,000 U.S. troops and
has cost taxpayers more than $600 billion. (Estimates of Iraqi dead range
into the hundreds of thousands.) Yet, the invasion of Iraq
was conceived prior to 9/11, according to Paul O'Neill, President Bush's
first Treasury Secretary. In the book, The Price of Loyalty, journalist Ron
Suskind interviewed O'Neill who said that the Iraq War was planned just days
after the president was sworn into office. "From the very
beginning, there was a conviction, that Saddam Hussein was a bad person and
that he needed to go," O'Neill told Suskind, adding that going after
Saddam Hussein was a priority 10 days after the Bush's inauguration and eight
months before Sept. 11. "From the very first
instance, it was about Iraq. It was about what we can do to change this
regime," Suskind wrote. "Day one, these things were laid and
sealed." As Treasury Secretary,
O'Neill was a permanent member of the National Security Council. He says in
the book he was surprised at the meeting that questions such as "Why
Saddam?" and "Why now?" were never asked. O'Neill was fired from his
post for disagreeing with Bush's economic policies. In typical White House
fashion, senior administration officials have labeled O'Neill a
"disgruntled employee," whose latest remarks are
"laughable" and have no basis in reality. But a little known article
in the Jan. 11, 2001, edition of the New York Times entitled "Iraq Is
Focal Point as Bush Meets with Joint Chiefs" confirms that the incoming
Bush administration was working on a plan to topple Saddam Hussein's regime,
even before Bush's inauguration on Jan. 20, 2001. "George W. Bush, the
nation's commander in chief to be, went to the Pentagon today for a
top-secret session with the Joint Chiefs of Staff to review hot spots around
the world where he might have to send American forces into harm's way,"
the Times story says. Bush was joined at the
Pentagon meeting by Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Colin L.
Powell, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, and National Security
Adviser Condoleezza Rice. The Times reported that
"half of the 75-minute meeting focused on a discussion about Iraq and
the Persian Gulf, two participants said. Iraq was the first topic briefed
because 'it's the most visible and most risky area Mr. Bush will confront
after he takes office, one senior officer said.'" "Iraqi policy is very
much on his mind," one senior Pentagon official told the Times.
"Saddam was clearly a discussion point." WMDs Cited for “Bureaucratic Reasons” On Sept.13, 2001 - two days
after the terror attacks - during a meeting at Camp David with President
Bush, Rumsfeld and other Bush administration officials, Wolfowitz said he
discussed with President Bush the prospects of launching an attack against
Iraq, for no apparent reason other than a "gut feeling" Saddam
Hussein was involved in the attacks, and there was a debate "about what
place if any Iraq should have in a counter terrorist strategy." "On the surface of the
debate it at least appeared to be about not whether but when," Wolfowitz
said during a May 9, 2003, interview with Vanity Fair. "There seemed to
be a kind of agreement that yes it should be, but the disagreement was
whether it should be in the immediate response or whether you should
concentrate simply on Afghanistan first. ... "The decision to
highlight weapons of mass destruction as the main justification for going to war
in Iraq was taken for bureaucratic reasons." When the United Nations
chose Hans Blix, the chief United Nations weapons inspector, in January 2002
to lead a team of U.N. weapons inspectors into Iraq to search for weapons of
mass destruction Wolfowitz contacted the CIA to produce a report on why Blix,
as chief of the International Atomic Energy Agency during the 1980s and
1990s, failed to detect Iraqi nuclear activity, according to an April 15,
2002, report in the Washington Post. The CIA report said Blix
"had conducted inspections of Iraq's declared nuclear power plants fully
within the parameters he could operate as chief of the Vienna-based agency
between 1981 and 1997," according to the Post. Wolfowitz "hit the
ceiling" because the report failed to provide sufficient ammunition to
undermine Blix and, by association, the new U.N. weapons inspection
program," according to the Post, quoting a former State Department
official familiar with the report. "The request for a CIA
investigation underscored the degree of concern by Wolfowitz and his civilian
colleagues in the Pentagon that new inspections - or protracted negotiations
over them - could torpedo their plans for military action to remove Hussein
from power," the Post reported. Blix accused the Bush
administration of launching a smear campaign against him because he did not
find evidence of WMD in Iraq. He said he refused to pump up his reports to
the U.N. about Iraq's WMD programs. In an interview with the
London Guardian newspaper, Blix said "U.S. officials pressured him to
use more damning language when reporting on Iraq's alleged weapons
programs." "By and large my
relations with the U.S. were good,'' Blix told the Guardian. "But toward
the end the (Bush) administration leaned on us.'" White House Iraq Group The Bush administration
needed a vehicle to market a war with Iraq. So, in August 2002, Bush's former
Chief of Staff Andrew Card formed the White House Iraq Group (WHIG) to
publicize the so-called threat posed by Saddam Hussein. The WHIG was not only
responsible for selling the Iraq War, but it took great pains to discredit
anyone who openly disagreed with the official Iraq War story. The group's members included
Deputy White House Chief of Staff Karl Rove, Bush's former adviser Karen
Hughes, then Senior Adviser to the Vice President Mary Matalin, former Deputy
Director of Communications James Wilkinson, Assistant to the President and
Legislative Liaison Nicholas Calio, National Security Adviser Condoleezza
Rice, Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley and I. Lewis
"Scooter" Libby, chief of staff to the vice president and co-author
of the administration's pre-emptive strike policy. Rove chaired the group's
meetings. Moreover, Rove's "strategic communications" task force,
operating inside the group, was instrumental in writing and coordinating
speeches by senior Bush administration officials, highlighting in September
2002 that Iraq was a nuclear threat, according to a report in the Wall Street
Journal in October 2005. Another member of WHIG, John
Hannah, along with former Defense Policy Board member Richard Perle, Under
Secretary of Defense Douglas Feith and Wolfowitz, were interviewed by FBI
officials in 2004, according to a report in the Washington Post, to determine
if they were involved in leaking U.S. security secrets to Israel, former head
of the Iraqi National Congress Ahmed Chalabi, and the American Israel Public
Affairs Committee (AIPAC). A senior official who
participated in the WHIG called it "an internal working group, like many
formed for priority issues, to make sure each part of the White House was
fulfilling its responsibilities," according to an Aug. 10, 2003,
Washington Post investigative report on the group's inner workings. During its very first
meetings, Card's Iraq group ordered a series of white papers showing Iraq's
alleged arms violations. The first paper, "A Grave and Gathering Danger:
Saddam Hussein's Quest for Nuclear Weapons," was never published.
However, the paper was drafted with the assistance of experts from the
National Security Council and Cheney's office. "In its later stages,
the draft white paper coincided with production of a National Intelligence
Estimate and its unclassified summary. But the WHIG, according to three
officials who followed the white paper's progress, wanted gripping images and
stories not available in the hedged and austere language of
intelligence," according to the Washington Post. Judith Miller and the Mushroom Cloud The group relied heavily on
New York Times reporter Judith Miller, who, after meeting with several of the
organization's members in August 2002, wrote an explosive story that many
critics of the war believe laid the groundwork for military action against
Iraq. On Sept. 8, 2002, Miller
wrote a front-page story for the Times, quoting anonymous officials who said
aluminum tubes found in Iraq were to be used as centrifuges. Her report said
the "diameter, thickness and other technical specifications" of the
tubes - precisely the grounds for skepticism among nuclear enrichment experts
- showed that they were "intended as components of centrifuges." She closed her piece by
quoting then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, who said the United
States would not sit by and wait to find a smoking gun to prove its case,
possibly in the form of a "a mushroom cloud." After Miller's piece was
published, administration officials pressed their case on Sunday talk shows,
using Miller's piece as evidence that Iraq was pursuing a nuclear bomb, even
though those officials had helped supply Miller with the story. Rice's comments on CNN's
"Late Edition" reaffirmed Miller's story. Rice said Saddam Hussein
was "actively pursuing a nuclear weapon" and that the tubes -
described repeatedly in U.S. intelligence reports as "dual-use"
items - were "only really suited for nuclear weapons programs ...
centrifuge programs." Cheney, on NBC's "Meet
the Press," also mentioned the aluminum tubes story in the Times and
said "increasingly, we believe the United States will become the
target" of an Iraqi atomic bomb. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld,
on CBS's "Face the Nation," asked viewers to "imagine a
September 11th with weapons of mass destruction." The Cincinnati Speech In October 2002, President
Bush gave a speech in Cincinnati and spoke about the imminent threat Iraq
posed to the U.S. because of Iraq's alleged ties with al-Qaeda and its
endless supply of chemical and biological weapons "Surveillance photos
reveal that the (Iraqi) regime is rebuilding facilities that it had used to
produce chemical and biological weapons," Bush said. "Iraq
possesses ballistic missiles with a likely range of hundreds of miles - far
enough to strike Saudi Arabia, Israel, Turkey, and other nations - in a
region where more than 135,000 American civilians and service members live
and work. "We've also discovered
through intelligence that Iraq has a growing fleet of manned and unmanned
aerial vehicles that could be used to disperse chemical or biological weapons
across broad areas. We're concerned that Iraq is exploring ways of using
these UAVS for missions targeting the United States. "And, of course,
sophisticated delivery systems aren't required for a chemical or biological
attack; all that might be required are a small container and one terrorist or
Iraqi intelligence operative to deliver it." Also in October 2002,
Defense Secretary Rumsfeld ordered the military's regional commanders to
rewrite all their war plans to
capitalize on precision weapons, better intelligence, and speedier deployment
in the event the United States decided to invade Iraq. The goal, Rumsfeld said, was
to use fewer ground troops, a move that caused dismay among some in the
military who said concern for the troops requires overwhelming numerical
superiority to assure victory. Rumsfeld refused to listen
to his military commanders, saying that his plan would allow "the
military to begin combat operations on less notice and with far fewer troops
than thought possible - or thought wise - before the Sept. 11, 2001,
terrorist attacks," the New York Times reported on Oct. 13, 2002. "Looking at what was
overwhelming force a decade or two decades ago, today you can have
overwhelming force, conceivably, with lesser numbers because the lethality is
equal to or greater than before," Rumsfeld told the Times. Rumsfeld said too many of the
military plans on the shelves of the regional war-fighting commanders were
freighted with outdated assumptions and military requirements, which have
changed with the advent of new weapons and doctrines. It has been a mistake, he
said, to measure the quantity of forces required for a mission and "fail
to look at lethality, where you end up with precision-guided munitions, which
can give you 10 times the lethality that a dumb weapon might, as an
example," according to the Times report. Through a combination of
pre-deployments, faster cargo ships and a larger fleet of transport aircraft,
the military would be able to deliver "fewer troops but in a faster time
that would allow you to have concentrated power that would have the same
effect as waiting longer with what a bigger force might have," Rumsfeld
said. Critics in the military said
there were several reasons to deploy a force of overwhelming numbers before
starting any offensive with Iraq. Large numbers illustrate U.S. resolve and
can intimidate Iraqi forces into laying down their arms or even turning
against Hussein's government. The new approach for how the
U.S. might go to war, Rumsfeld said in a speech in 2002, reflects an
assessment of the need after 9/11 to refresh war plans continuously and to
respond faster to threats from terrorists and nations possessing biological,
chemical or nuclear weapons. Silencing Experts One of the most vocal
opponent of the administration's prewar Iraq intelligence was David Albright,
a former United Nations weapons inspector and the president and founder of
the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS), a Washington,
D.C.-based group that gathers information for the public and the White House
on nuclear weapons programs. In a March 10, 2003, report
posted on the ISIS website, Albright accused the CIA of twisting the
intelligence related to the aluminum tubes. "The CIA has concluded
that these tubes were specifically manufactured for use in gas centrifuges to
enrich uranium," Albright said. "Many in the expert community both
inside and outside government, however, do not agree with this conclusion. "The vast majority of
gas centrifuge experts in this country and abroad who are knowledgeable about
this case reject the CIA's case and do not believe that the tubes are
specifically designed for gas centrifuges. In addition, International Atomic
Energy Agency inspectors have consistently expressed skepticism that the
tubes are for centrifuges." "After months of
investigation, the administration has failed to prove its claim that the
tubes are intended for use in an Iraqi gas centrifuge program," Albright
added. "Despite being presented with evidence countering this claim, the
administration persists in making misleading comments about the significance
of the tubes." Albright said he took his
concerns about the intelligence information to White House officials, but was
rebuffed and told to keep quiet. "I first learned of
this case a year and a half ago when I was asked for information about past
Iraqi procurements. My reaction at the time was that the disagreement
reflected the typical in-fighting between U.S. experts that often afflicts
the intelligence community. I was frankly surprised when the administration
latched onto one side of this debate in September 2002. I was told that this
dispute had not been mediated by a competent, impartial technical committee,
as it should have been, according to accepted practice," Albright said. "I became dismayed when
a knowledgeable government scientist told me that the administration could
say anything it wanted about the tubes while government scientists who
disagreed were expected to remain quiet," he said. Albright said the Department
of Energy, which analyzed the intelligence information on the aluminum tubes
and rejected the CIA's intelligence analysis, is the only government agency
in the U.S. that can provide expert opinions on gas centrifuges (what the CIA
alleged the tubes were being used for) and nuclear weapons programs. "For over a year and a
half, an analyst at the CIA has been pushing the aluminum tube story, despite
consistent disagreement by a wide range of experts in the United States and
abroad," Albright said. "His opinion, however, obtained traction in
the summer of 2002 with senior members of the Bush Administration, including
the President. The administration was forced to admit publicly that
dissenters exist, particularly at the Department of Energy and its national
laboratories." But Albright said the White
House launched an attack against experts who spoke critically of the
intelligence. "Administration
officials try to minimize the number and significance of the dissenters or
unfairly attack them," Albright said. "For example, when Secretary
Powell mentioned the dissent in his Security Council speech, he said: 'Other
experts, and the Iraqis themselves, argue that they are really to produce the
rocket bodies for a conventional weapon, a multiple rocket launcher.' Not
surprisingly, an effort by those at the Energy Department to change Powell's
comments before his appearance was rebuffed by the administration." The 16 Words Were False Eleven days before President
Bush's Jan. 28, 2003, State of the Union address in which he stated that the
United States learned from British intelligence that Iraq had attempted to
acquire uranium from Africa, the State Department told the CIA that key
intelligence behind the uranium claims may have been forgeries. The revelation of the
warning was contained in a closely guarded State Department memo, which
didn't surface until April 2006. On Jan. 12, 2003, the State Department's
Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) "expressed concerns to the CIA
that the documents pertaining to the Iraq-Niger deal were forgeries,"
the memo dated July 7, 2003, says. Moreover, the memo said that
the State Department's doubts about the veracity of the uranium claims may
have been expressed to the intelligence community even earlier. Those concerns, according to
the memo, are the reasons that former Secretary of State Colin Powell refused
to cite the uranium claims when he appeared before the United Nations in Feb.
5, 2003, a week after Bush's State of the Union address. "After considerable
back and forth between the CIA, the (State) Department, the IAEA
(International Atomic Energy Association), and the British, Secretary
Powell's briefing to the U.N. Security Council did not mention attempted
Iraqi procurement of uranium due to CIA concerns raised during the
coordination regarding the veracity of the information on the alleged
Iraq-Niger agreement," the memo further states. Iraq's interest in the
yellowcake uranium caught the attention of Mohamed ElBaradei, the head of the
International Atomic Energy Association. ElBaradei had read a copy of the
National Intelligence Estimate and had personally contacted the State
Department and the National Security Council in hopes of obtaining evidence
so his agency could look into it. Vice President Dick Cheney,
who made the rounds on the cable news shows in March 2003, tried to discredit
ElBaradei's conclusion that the documents were forged. "I think Mr. ElBaradei
frankly is wrong," Cheney said. "[The IAEA] has consistently
underestimated or missed what it was Saddam Hussein was doing. I don't have
any reason to believe they're any more valid this time than they've been in
the past." As it turns out, ElBaradei
was correct, the declassified State Department showed. The declassified State
Department memo was obtained by The New York Sun under a Freedom of
Information Act request the newspaper filed in July 2005. The Sun's story,
however, did not say anything about the State Department's warnings more than
a week before Bush's State of the Union address about the bogus Niger
documents. The memo was drafted by Carl
Ford Jr., the former head of the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence
and Research, in response to questions posed in June 2003 by
"Scooter" Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, about
a February 2002 fact-finding trip to Niger that former Ambassador Joseph
Wilson undertook to investigate the uranium claims on behalf of the CIA. The Ambassador Emerges A day after Bush's Jan.28,
2003, State of the Union address, Wilson said he reminded a friend at the
State Department that he (Wilson) had traveled to Niger in February 2002 to
investigate whether Iraq attempted to acquire yellowcake uranium from Niger,
according to Wilson's July 6, 2003, op-ed published in the New York Times. In his book, The Politics of
Truth, Wilson's said his State Department friend replied that "perhaps
the president was speaking about one of the other three African countries
that produce uranium: Gabon, South Africa or Namibia. At the time, I accepted
the explanation. I didn't know that in December, a month before the
president's address, the State Department had published a fact sheet that mentioned
the Niger case." But Wilson was certain that
the administration was trying to sell a war that was based on phony
intelligence. In March 2003, Wilson began to publicly question the
administration's use of the Niger claims without disclosing his role in
traveling to Niger in February 2002 to investigate it. Wilson's criticism of
the administration's pre-war Iraq intelligence caught the attention of
Cheney, Libby and Hadley. In an interview that took
place two-and-a-half weeks before the start of the Iraq War, Wilson said the
administration was more interested in redrawing the map of the Middle East to
pursue its own foreign policy objectives than in dealing with the so-called
terrorist threat. "The underlying
objective, as I see it - the more I look at this - is less and less
disarmament, and it really has little to do with terrorism, because everybody
knows that a war to invade and conquer and occupy Iraq is going to spawn a
new generation of terrorists," Wilson said in a March 2, 2003, interview
with CNN. "So you look at what's
underpinning this, and you go back and you take a look at who's been
influencing the process. And it's been those who really believe that our
objective must be far grander, and that is to redraw the political map of the
Middle East," Wilson added. During the same CNN segment
in which Wilson was interviewed, former U.N. weapons inspector David Albright
made similar comments about the rationale for the Iraq War and added that he
believed U.N. weapons inspectors should be given more time to search the
country for weapons of mass destruction A week later, Wilson was
interviewed on CNN again. This was the first time Wilson ridiculed the Bush
administration's claim that Iraq had tried to purchase yellowcake uranium
from Niger. "Well, this particular
case is outrageous. We know a lot about the uranium business in Niger, and
for something like this to go unchallenged by the U.S. - the U.S. government
- is just simply stupid. It would have taken a couple of phone calls. We have
had an embassy there since the early 1960s. All this stuff is open. It's a
restricted market of buyers and sellers," Wilson said in the March 8,
2003, CNN interview. "For this to have
gotten to the IAEA is on the face of it dumb, but more to the point, it
taints the whole rest of the case that the government is trying to build
against Iraq," Wilson said. Less than two weeks later,
on March 19, 2003, the U.S. attacked Iraq. External link: http://www.pubrecord.org/nationworld/1000-more-than-600-billion-and-counting-iraq-war-lies-revisited.html |