Monday, June 9, 2008

McClatchy to McClellan: We knew all this back when you were lying to us about it

OK, Scott, What Happened?

Here's what happened, based entirely on our own reporting and publicly available documents:

* The Bush administration was gunning for Iraq within days of the 9/11 attacks, dispatching a former CIA director, on a flight authorized by Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, to find evidence for a bizarre theory that Saddam Hussein was responsible for the first World Trade Center attack in 1993. (Note: See also Richard Clarke and former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill on this point).

* Bush decided by February 2002, at the latest, that he was going to remove Saddam by hook or by crook. (Yes, we reported that at the time).

* White House officials, led by Dick Cheney, began making the case for war in August 2002, in speeches and reports that not only were wrong, but also went well beyond what the available intelligence said at that time, and contained outright fantasies and falsehoods. Indeed, some of that material was never vetted with the intelligence agencies before it was peddled to the public.

* Dissenters, or even those who voiced worry about where the policy was going, were ignored, excluded or punished. (Note: See Gen. Eric Shinseki, Paul O'Neill, Joseph Wilson and all of the State Department 's Arab specialists and much of its intelligence bureau).

* The Bush administration didn't even want to produce the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs that's justly received so much criticism since. The White House thought it was unneeded. It actually was demanded by Congress and slapped together in a matter of weeks before the congressional votes to authorize war on Iraq.

* The October 2002 NIE was flawed, no doubt. But it contained dissents questioning the extent of Saddam's WMD programs, dissents that were buried in the report. Doubts and dissents were then stripped from the publicly released, unclassified version of the NIE.

* The core of the administration's case for war was not just that Saddam was developing WMDs, but also that, unchecked, he might give them to terrorists to attack the United States. Remember smoking guns and mushroom clouds? Inconveniently, the CIA had determined just the opposite: Saddam would attack the United States only if he concluded a U.S. attack on him was unavoidable. He'd give WMD to Islamist terrorists only "as a last chance to exact revenge."

* The Bush administration relied heavily on an Iraqi exile, Ahmed Chalabi, who had been found to be untrustworthy by the State Department and the CIA. Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress were given millions, and produced "defectors" whose tales of WMD sites and terrorist training were false, fanciful and bogus. But the information was fed directly to senior officials and included in official White House documents.

* The same INC-supplied "intelligence" used in the White House propaganda effort (you got that bit right, Scott) also was fed to dozens of U.S. and foreign news organizations.

* It all culminated in a speech by Secretary of State Colin Powell to the U.N. Security Council in February 2003 making the case against Saddam. Virtually every major allegation Powell made turned out later to be wrong. It would have been even worse had not Powell and his team thrown out even more shaky "intelligence" that Cheney's office repeatedly tried to stuff into the speech.

* The Bush administration tried to link Saddam to al Qaida and, by implication, to the 9/11 attacks. Officials repeatedly pushed the CIA for information on such links, and a separate intel shopwas set up under Defense Under Secretary Douglas Feith to find "proof" of such ties. Neither the CIA nor anyone else ever found anything resembling an operational relationship between Saddam and al Qaida.

* An exhaustive review of Saddam Hussein's regime's own documents, released in March 2008, found no operational relationship between Saddam and al Qaida.

* The Bush administration failed to plan for the rebuilding of postwar Iraq, as we were perhaps the first to report. The White House ignored stacks of intelligence reports, some now available in partially unclassified form, warning before the war about the possibilities for insurgency, ethnic warfare, social chaos and the like.


The McClatchy crew are among the few journalistic sources who had this story right from the beginning. So don't let anyone tell you the administration was a victim of bad intelligence just like everybody else, or that the press had to take the administration's claims at face value because they could not possibly have fact-checked super-secret intel. Bullshit. McClatchy was all over this, and their readers knew the administration was cooking the intelligence before the war began. If the administration hadn't been spoon-feeding their pre-cooked WMD/Al-Qaeda/Iraq pablum to the mainstream media, and pundits, anchors, reporters and editors hadn't been eagerly lapping it up, more people might have known what McClatchy knew and we might have avoided this unnecessary bloodletting.

2 comments:

Mark said...

I think you're fooling yourself. The Senate report was a lot more damning than you are willing to admit here. And I'm not sure I'd trust the Senate Dems to provide a fully acurate account of the war in any case: those who rolled over for the President and voted in favor of the war need the "bad intel" alibi to avoid accountability for their votes. I doubt you would trust them as having the final word either. Fortunately, we don't have to rely on them: there is lots of other evidence.

Overall, the claim that the administration was an innocent victim of bad intelligence is nonsense if a big part of the reason that the intelligence was bad is because the administration was doing everything it could to slant the case in favor of war, downplay any doubts(of which there were many on every major part of their case), and exaggerate anything which might seem to strengthen their dubious case for war. The administration wasn't a passive consumer, but was an active producer of a lot of the bad intel they now want to claim misled them. Office of Special Plans, White House Iraq Group, Cheney putting unprecedented pressure on CIA analysts,ordering up the bogus NIE basically for PR purposes, attempting to discredit Wilson/Plame: on a whole range of fronts these guys were deliberately warping the intelligence picture in favor of a war they had already decided on.

You're right that the State department's INR was one of the strongest sources of dissent about WMD, but there were others. There were doubts about the yellowcake, the aluminum tubes, Curveball and the chemical weapons story, Atta and the Iraqis, every major part of the case for war was being questioned somewhere within the intelligence bureaucracy, and those questions were suppressed in order not to impede the rush to war. All of this is documented in multiple posts with many source links throughout this blog.

Mark said...

Here's one PAF post where doubts about the various pillars of the case for war are reviewed with evidentiary links:

http://prematureanti-fascist.blogspot.com/2007/04/department-of-infuriatingly-undead.html