With Drumheller's story, defense of the regime becomes untenable

From CBS News
Dated Friday April 21



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In debates I've had over at the website of The Nation with die hard Bush supporters about the Downing Street memo, I have consistently asserted that "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy" means that facts were fabricated while Bush's defenders have claimed that it means that the facts were genuine or believed to be genuine, even if erroneous, and simply being added to the reasons for the war.

The argument presented by the Bush defenders has always been precarious. The Downing Street Memo points out that the case against Saddam was "weak" and that the policymakers in Washington were aware of it. A more recently revealed memo from the British government shows that Bush himself was aware of the tenuous nature of the case for war against Iraq based on claims that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. Bush was looking for an excuse for war and came up with the bizarre idea of provoking an Iraqi attack on US plane flying UN identification, an idea of which it can truly be said could only have been hatched by an idiot.

Throughout the run up to the war, spokespeople for the Bush regime behaved like liars. We know that Mr. Cheney and Mr. Libby were making frequent trips to Langley and that CIA analysts complained of feeling pressured to write reports conforming to what the policymakers wanted to hear. We know that Douglas Feith headed the Office of Special Plans in the Pentagon, where defense intelligence reports were cherry picked and edited to make the case for war sound stronger than the known facts warranted. We know that the National Intelligence Estimate that supported the case for war was based on this cherry picked and extorted intelligence. We know that sixteen words about Saddam's alleged efforts to purchase yellow cake in Africa found their way into the 2003 State of the Union address although former Ambassador Joseph Wilson had reported to the CIA as early as February 2002 that there was never any such deal. People who have any real confidence in their case don't cherry pick facts or tell those gathering facts for them what they want or don't want to hear. That is the behavior of liars.

They have continued to behave like liars. When Ambassador Wilson came forward with his story, he was personally attacked with a barrage of lies and half-truths and his wife's career at the CIA crippled by unmasking her as an employee of the CIA. If Wilson was wrong, the White needed only to say he was wrong and present the facts that proved him wrong. That is the one thing those in the White House Ministry of Truth or their surrogates at the Republican National Committee have not done.

Intelligence on matters of national security should be treated like scientific facts. The facts are there, they should all be reported and conclusions drawn from them. If the facts had supported the hypothesis that Saddam had a large biochemical arsenal, that he had an active nuclear weapons program or that he was giving active aid and support to international terrorists such as Osama bin Laden, then an invasion of Iraq for the purpose of ousting the Baathist regime could have been justified. However, the facts were inconclusive. The best thing to do was to try to gather more facts, which the United Nations did by sending weapons inspectors back to Iraq to see if anything could be found. The inspectors found nothing, but the policymakers in the Bush regime asserted, without presenting anything to support the assertion, that Saddam had just become very good at hiding his arsenal. They would never admit to the more obvious explanation that the inspectors found nothing because there was nothing to find. The most obvious explanation of that behavior, like the rest of their behavior, is that they had decided to go to war independent of the facts and were asserting not facts, but empty talking points. The facts be damned. They would not be denied their war.

The policymakers of the Bush regime have no more respect for national security intelligence than they have for scientific facts. It is just something with which to play politics. Whether it is climate change or war, it is a very dangerous game of charades that they play.

Mr. Drumheller's account is further confirmation of what is already known. He was told point blank that the intelligence didn't matter. The war was the thing. The reasons could be whatever the policymakers wanted.

If there is something new in this, it is that Mr. Drumheller may be the first member of the intelligence community to come forward with a first hand story of how his work was made irrelevant by policymakers bent on war. On the other hand, his story only differs from that of Ambassador Wilson's only in the breadth of the facts presented to the policymakers. Wilson's revelations by themselves could not have undermined the regime's case for war. He merely showed that, in at least one instance, facts that weren't facts were used in public statements supporting the case for war. Moreover, it was only one small facet in the case for war. Wilson admitted in his article in The Times that he at first assumed that Mr. Bush talking about something else of which he knew nothing; it was only later that he found out that it was not. If it had been the only thing the case for war the policymakers got wrong, it would have been written off as human error and no one would have cared. Unfortunately for the Bush regime, they had everything wrong. There were no weapons; there was no nuclear program; and there were no working ties to international terrorists. Iraq was not a threat in any way, shape or form.

However, Mr. Drumheller's revelations show that the policymakers didn't even want to hear anything about Saddam's weapons unless it made a case for war. They knew very well that there was as much or more evidence refuting their case as confirming it. They knew very well that they had no solid case. They went into Iraq perhaps hoping they would find something UN weapons inspectors did not that would justify their policy after the fact. They only admit now that they were wrong and attempt to make the CIA the fall guy for their lies.

The facts the policymakers had were at best inconclusive and they knew that they were inconclusive. They lied to Congress, the United Nations and directly to American people and the people of the world when stating with such confidence and certainty as they did that they had solid, inconvertible proof that Saddam was a threat to American security. When General Powell went to the Security Council and spoke of how much of what chemical agents Saddam had stored, he was lying. When Mr. Rumsfeld spoke of weapons in the neighborhoods of Baghdad and Tikrit, he was lying. When Dr. Rice spoke of spoke in poetic images of smoking guns and mushroom clouds, she was lying. When Mr. Cheney spoke of a reconstituted nuclear program, he was lying. When Mr. Bush spoke of attempts by Saddam to buy yellow cake in Africa, he was lying.

Mr. Drumheller was told that facts were irrelevant. It is no longer a tenable position to argue that Bush and his policymakers simply made bad decisions based on bad intelligence. They made bad decisions because they may as well have not even looked at the intelligence. The White House spin is just more lying.

What I wonder is was this the WHIG?

Saddam's son-in-law and in charge of his WMD programs told UNSCOM in 1995 after he defected that "I ordered destruction of all chemical weapons. All weapons - biological, chemical, missile, nuclear were destroyed."

That alone should have been enough to make the arguement that they didn't have any WMD.

http://middleeastreference.org.uk/kamel.html

I have often used that document to point out that Bush and his people had evidence prior to the war that should have caused them to look further into charges that Saddam actually possessed WMDs. Assertions by General Kamel didn't prove that Saddam didn't have these weapons, but they should have been checked out.

General Kamel's statements were used by the regime to prove that Saddam had a biochemical arsenal at one time. Of course, the US government and the American people didn't need General Kamel to tell us that. We had the sales receipts, after all. What was interesting is that the document was classified and the regime spokesmen remained silent on the matter of General Kamel's assertion made in the same document that the weapons had been destroyed on his orders. That is just out-and-out deception on their part.

The Bushies could have asserted Kamel was lying or otherwise untrustworthy. Had they done that, they would have had been challenged to present their reasons for discounting that part of his testimony while accepting other parts. It was just easier for them to pretend he didn't say anything about ordering the weapons destroyed.

The general public had overwhelming evidence before the war that the WMD was wrong or untrustworthy. The case for that has always been in plain view but has also always been ignored.

If one is to admit that everybody knew the WMD intelligence was unreliable, then one must also admit that Democrats and the media knew it was unreliable. The truth has only been told outside of the power structure.

The White House has had the opportunity to pretend that somehow Bush and they themselves were unaware of all this. We are caught in a silly game of trying to prove what Bush knew. And since Bush controls that information, the game is stacked against the truth.

Your essay provokes the basic reality that has been ignored. Its where the real truth must be reestablished. Of course, once we establish that everybody knew the WMD intelligence was wrong, we'll have to confront why so few spoke up at the time. Then the real truth will come out. This county allowed itself to be bullied into submission by right wing fanatics.

The general public had overwhelming evidence before the war that the WMD was wrong or untrustworthy. The case for that has always been in plain view but has also always been ignored.

I marched against the war prior to its onset not as a knee jerk pacifist, but as an informed citizen. In October 2002, long before Seymour Hersh provided the details of the OSP's operations, Julian Borger reported in The Guardian that intelligence was being politicized. For those of us who were aware of that, Mr. Hersh's story in the New Yorker (May 2003) was not a big surprise. However, people who in the Autumn of 2002 were watching CNN or reading Judy Miller's front page fiction in The New York Times were as badly misinformed as those watching FoxNews 24/7. Those of us who looked beyond the corporate-owned US mainstream media were aware of what was happening.

You are correct. If that information was available to those who dug around for it, it was available to members of Congress. Those who supported the war then had no more excuse than those who continue to support it now have.

But we already had enough evidence for impeachment several times over, including charges of fabricating a case for war.

... until the Democrats get a majority in Congress.

The entire administration hinges upon November. So does justice.

If Iraq had nukes don't you think they would have used them on Iran during their violent strife
that left over 1,000,000 casualties. Would Bush have run our troops into the mouth of a cannon
loaded with nukes. He attacked because it was going to be easy.

However, the issue was less whether Saddam had nukes, but whether he had a biochemical arsenal. The Bushies were insisting that he did. They only said he was trying to build a nuke.

The argument as to whether or not they really knew that Saddam had no WMDs of any kind may go on and on. What is clear now is that they didn't know he had them while they were swearing up and down that he did and that they had as much or more reason to think he didn't as to think he did. The lie wasn't so much in saying he had them but in saying that they knew he had them.

Had I been in Saddam's shoes, facing an opposing army massed on the frontier ready to invade and whose commander-in-chief was a maniac who wouldn't take "no" for an answer, and I had a biochemical arsenal, I would have used it. And I would have lost sleep over it; Saddam would not have. In any case, the leader of such a country would have a moral obligation to defend his nation by hitting that invading force with everything he had. Which is exactly what I think Saddam did: he fired four pathetic missiles, three of which fell into the Persian Gulf and the fourth was a dud.

You can't get a much softer target than that.

who resist the occupation, that's what it really is

This wasn't a war against Saddam.

The idea was to liberate the Iraqi people from their mineral rights.

10,000 people die a year from torture in Chinese prisons, I heard this comment by Mark
Shields on the Jim Lehrer show on PBS on Friday night.

MARK SHIELDS: I think we're just caught in incredible contradictions here. I mean, take China and take Cuba, all right? There is essentially three communist countries left on the face of the Earth, right? We've got China, Cuba and North Korea. North Korea is sui generis, OK? Cuba, which has a gross national product somewhat about the size of Kankakee, Illinois, we have to keep our...
JIM LEHRER: That's going to draw some mail, but go right ahead.
MARK SHIELDS: We have to keep our guard up 24 hours a day, seven days a week, because, my god, almighty, we don't know what they could be up to. I look at the United States' own State Department human rights report. Cuba is not Iowa -- don't get me wrong -- but it's not to be confused with China, where torture is regularly employed; 10,000 prisoners killed last year; organ transplants for sale around the word. I mean, it's really -- it's a repressive place.


http://www.pbs.org/newshour/textonly/focus2.html