No. 235, July
17-23, 2002

SECCIÓN EN ESPAÑOL

COMMENTARY



To read an article, click on the headline.

All spin all the time

The dubious suicide of George Tenet

Authoritarians gone wild







All spin all the time

By Russ Baker



Viva Nihilism! It must be great working in the Bush White House. Zero accountability. It’s All Spin, All the Time. Nothing matters but politics, hence no unfounded claim requires correction or apology. Unless, of course, they are pushed to the end of the plank, as they were recently with the tale about Niger and nuclear materials.

Take those elusive Weapons of Mass Destruction. Despite the failure of the concentrated might of the US military-intelligence complex to find anything that might qualify in the remotest possible way, the administration labels critics “revisionist historians” and imperturbedly moves on. The initial assertions and touted “discoveries” usually get more attention than does the sound of a balloon deflating. That’s why polls find a sizable chunk of the American public still under the impression that WMD have been found.

Whatever Saddam’s interest in WMD, the administration didn’t know what he had and didn’t have solid evidence to make the claims it did — much less to launch a war over them. For those amateur “revisionist historians” out there, here is a partial, unscientific reconstruction of the claims that fizzled.

THE CLAIM: “Iraq has trained Al-Qaida members in bombmaking and poisons and deadly gasses... [which] could allow the Iraqi regime to attack America without leaving any fingerprints.” - President Bush, Oct. 7, 2002.

THE FACTS: The alleged Al-Qaida training camp, which Colin Powell described to the United Nations in February, is later revealed to be outside Iraq’s control and patrolled by Allied warplanes. By late June, Michael Chandler, the head of the UN team monitoring global efforts to counter Al-Qaida, tells Agence France Press: “We have never had information presented to us — even though we’ve asked questions — which would indicate that there is a direct link.”

THE SPIN: State Dept. spokesman Richard Boucher responds: “Secretary Powell provided clear and convincing evidence of the links between Iraq and Al-Qaida.”

THE CLAIM: “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa,” Bush declares in the State of the Union address.

THE FACTS: In March, Mohamed ElBaradei, director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), tells the UN Security Council that the documents substantiating the claim of alleged Iraqi efforts to buy uranium in Niger were fakes (and bad ones at that) and that “these specific allegations are unfounded.” The unnamed ex-ambassador whom the CIA sent to check out the story tells The New Republic: “They knew the Niger story was a flat-out lie.”

THE SPIN: Pass the buck, finally ‘fessing up in a White House statement delivered on July 7 that Bush should not have used the uranium allegations in his address.

THE CLAIM: US officials present evidence suggesting that Iraq tried to buy aluminum tubes for use in centrifuges for the uranium enrichment process.

THE FACTS: IAEA’s ElBaradei later reports that extensive investigation “failed to uncover any evidence” that Iraq intended to use the tubes for any project other than the reverse engineering of rockets.

THE SPIN: Powell releases a contradictory interpretation of the tubes, then the matter disappears.

THE CLAIM: In early April, the Pentagon “confirms” discovery of a biological and chemical weapons storage site near the town of Hindiyah, complete with suspected sarin and tabun nerve agents.

THE FACTS: Fourteen barrels of liquids are reassessed to be pesticide.

THE SPIN: Silence.

THE CLAIM: In early April, a white powder found at a site near Najaf is described as possible chemical agents, and presented as a likely “smoking gun.”

THE FACTS: The powder is an explosive.

THE SPIN: Silence.

THE CLAIM: “Biological laboratories described by our Secretary of State to the whole world that were not supposed to be there, that are a direct violation of the U.N. resolutions, have been discovered,” Bush tells reporters, on May 29, referring to trailers the administration says are mobile labs.

THE FACTS: For weeks, numerous independent experts express serious doubts about the trailers’ purposes; a classified State Department intelligence memo cited by The New York Times also cautions about premature conclusions.

THE SPIN: “The experts have spoken and the judgment of the experts is very clear on this matter,” says Fleischer. Colin Powell splits hairs in backing the White House: State experts “weren’t saying it was not a mobile lab, they just were not quite up in that curve of confidence that the rest of the intelligence community was at...”

THE CLAIM: “We believe [Saddam] has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons.” -- Vice President Cheney, Mar. 16, 2003 on Meet the Press.

THE FACTS: After the fighting, an Iraqi nuclear scientist cuts a deal for refuge with the United States. Buried in his garden are documents and parts of a gas centrifuge, which could be used to enrich uranium for bombmaking. But the process of enriching uranium would require hundreds or thousands of precisely machined centrifuges, working together perfectly.

THE SPIN: The administration declares this to be evidence that Bush and Cheney were correct in saying that Saddam had never given up hope of building nuclear weapons. From “possession” to “hope” in one easy spin.

THE CLAIM:

In his State of the Union address, Bush claimed Iraq had the capacity to produce 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin, 25,000 liters of anthrax and 500 tons of sarin, mustard gas and VX nerve agent. He said Iraq also had 30,000 munitions capable of delivering chemical weapons, plus several mobile biological weapons laboratories and an active nuclear weapons development program.

THE FACTS: Despite coalition troops combing the country, and vast reward monies offered, none of this arsenal has been uncovered.

THE SPIN: The administration “remains confident” that something substantial will be found.

Source: TomPaine.com

The dubious suicide of George Tenet

By William Rivers Pitt

Things have reached a pretty pass indeed when you apologize for making a mistake, but nobody believes your apology. So it is today with CIA Director Tenet, and by proxy George W. Bush and his administration.

On Friday evening, CIA Director Tenet publicly jumped on the Niger evidence hand grenade, claiming the use in Bush’s State of the Union Address in January 2003 of data from known forgeries to support the Iraq war was completely his fault. He never told Bush’s people that the data was corrupted, and it was his fault those “sixteen words” regarding Iraqi attempts to procure uranium from Niger for a nuclear program made it into the text of the speech.

Problem solved, right? Condoleezza Rice and Don Rumsfeld had been triangulating on Tenet since Thursday, claiming the CIA had never informed the White House about the dubious nature of the Niger evidence. Tenet, like a good political appointee, fell on his sword and took responsibility for the error. On Saturday, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer told the press corps that Bush had “moved on” from this controversy.

Not so fast, said the New York Times editorial board. The paper of record for the Western world published an editorial on Saturday entitled “The Uranium Fiction.” The last time the Times editors used language this strong was when Bush, in a moment of seemingly deranged hubris, tried to nominate master secret-keeper Henry Kissinger to chair the 9/11 investigation:

“It is clear, however, that much more went into this affair than the failure of the CIA to pounce on the offending 16 words in Mr. Bush’s speech. A good deal of information already points to a willful effort by the war camp in the administration to pump up an accusation that seemed shaky from the outset and that was pretty well discredited long before Mr. Bush stepped into the well of the House of Representatives last January. Doubts about the accusation were raised in March 2002 by Joseph Wilson, a former American diplomat, after he was dispatched to Niger by the CIA to look into the issue.  Mr. Wilson has said he is confident that his concerns were circulated not only within the agency but also at the State Department and the office of Vice President Dick Cheney. Mr. Tenet, in his statement yesterday, confirmed that the Wilson findings had been given wide distribution, although he reported that Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney and other high officials had not been directly informed about them by the CIA.”

The sun came up over Washington DC on Sunday and shined on copies of the Washington Post which were waiting patiently to be read. The lead headline for the Sunday edition read, “CIA Got Uranium Reference Cut in October.” The meat of the article states:

“CIA Director George J. Tenet successfully intervened with White House officials to have a reference to Iraq seeking uranium from Niger removed from a presidential speech last October, three months before a less specific reference to the same intelligence appeared in the State of the Union address, according to senior administration officials.

“Tenet argued personally to White House officials, including deputy national security adviser Stephen Hadley, that the allegation should not be used because it came from only a single source, according to one senior official. Another senior official with knowledge of the intelligence said the CIA had doubts about the accuracy of the documents underlying the allegation, which months later turned out to be forged.”

What do we have here?

Here is CIA Director Tenet arguing in October of 2002 against the use of the Niger evidence, stating bluntly that it was useless. He made this pitch directly to the White House. These concerns were brushed aside by Bush officials, and the forged evidence was used, despite the warnings, in the State of the Union address. Now, the administration is trying to claim they were never told the evidence was bad. Yet between Tenet’s personal appeals in 2002, and Ambassador Wilson’s assurances that everyone who needed to know was in the know regarding Niger, it appears the Bush White House has been caught red-handed in a series of incredible falsehoods.

There are two more layers on this onion to be peeled. The first concerns Secretary of State Powell. One week after the Niger evidence was used by Bush in the State of the Union address, Powell presented to the United Nations the administration’s case for war. The Niger evidence was notably absent from Powell’s presentation. According to CBS News, Powell said, “I didn’t use the uranium at that point because I didn’t think that was sufficiently strong as evidence to present before the world.”

What a difference a week makes. The White House would have us believe they were blissfully unaware of the forged nature of their war evidence when Bush gave his State of the Union address, and yet somehow the Secretary of State knew well enough to avoid using it just seven days later. The moral of the story appears to be that rotten war evidence is not fit for international consumption, but is perfectly suitable for delivery to the American people.

The second layer to be peeled deals with the administration’s newest excuse for using the forged Niger evidence to justify a war. They are claiming now that they used it because the British government told them it was solid. Yet there was the story published by the Washington Post on July 11 with the headline, “CIA Asked Britain to Drop Iraq Claim.” The article states:

“The CIA tried unsuccessfully in early September 2002 to persuade the British government to drop from an official intelligence paper a reference to Iraqi attempts to buy uranium in Africa that President Bush included in his State of the Union address four months later, senior Bush administration officials said yesterday. ‘We consulted about the paper and recommended against using that material,’ a senior administration official familiar with the intelligence program said.”

We are supposed to believe that the Bush administration was completely unaware that their Niger evidence was fake. We are supposed to believe George Tenet dropped the ball. Yet the CIA actively intervened with the British government in September of 2002, telling them the evidence was worthless. The CIA Director personally got the evidence stricken from a Bush speech in October of 2002. Intelligence insiders like Joseph Wilson and Greg Thielmann have stated repeatedly that everyone who needed to know the evidence was bad had been fully and completely informed almost a year before the data was used in the State of the Union address.

In an interesting twist, the profoundly questionable nature of Tenet’s confession has reached all the way around the planet to Australia. I spoke on Sunday to Andrew Wilkie, a former senior intelligence analyst for the Office of National Assessments, the senior Australian intelligence agency which provides intelligence assessments to the Australian prime minister. Mr. Wilkie notes the following:

“In the last week in Australia, the Defense Intelligence Organization has admitted they had the information on the Niger forgeries and says they didn’t tell the Defense Minister. The Australian Department of Foreign Affairs has admitted they had the information on the Niger forgeries and didn’t tell the Foreign Minister. The place I used to work, the Office of National Assessments, has admitted publicly that they knew the Niger evidence was fake and didn’t tell the Prime Minister about it. 

“You’ve got three intelligence organizations in Australia, the intelligence organizations in the US, and every one is saying they knew this was bad information, but not one political leader reckons they were told. All three organizations have said they didn’t give this information to their political leaders. It is unbelievable to the point of fantasy.”

I also spoke on Sunday with Ray McGovern, a 27-year veteran of the CIA who was interviewed by Truthout on these matters on June 26 2003. Mr. McGovern is not buying what the White House is trying to sell. 

“Tenet’s confession is designed to take the heat off,” says McGovern, “to assign some responsibility somewhere. It’s not going to work. There’s too much deception here. For example, Condoleezza Rice insisted that she only learned on June 8 about Former Ambassador Wilson’s mission to Niger back in February 2002. That means that neither she nor her staff reads the New York Times, because Nick Kristof on May 6 had a very detailed explication of Wilson’s mission to Niger. In my view, it is inconceivable that her remark this week -- that she didn’t know about Joe Wilson’s mission to Niger until she was asked on a talk show on June 8 -- that is stretching the truth beyond the breaking point.”

Andrew Wilkie crystallized the issue at hand by stating, “Remember that the sourcing of uranium from Niger was the only remaining pillar of the argument that Iraq was trying to reconstitute its nuclear program. By this stage, the aluminum tubes story about Iraq’s nuclear program had been laughed out of the room. That had been laughable since 2001, leaving the sourcing of uranium as the last key piece of evidence about Iraq reconstituting a nuclear program. It’s not just sixteen words.

“It is just downright mischievous to hear Condoleezza Rice on CNN this morning saying it was just sixteen words. It was worth a hell of a lot more than sixteen words. I can remember that October speech by Bush where he talked about ‘mushroom clouds’ from Iraq. The nuclear story was always played up as the most emotive and persuasive theme. It wasn’t just sixteen words.”

A page on the White House’s own website describes the Bush administration’s central argument for war in Iraq. The Niger evidence is featured prominently, along with claims that Iraq was in possession of 26,000 liters of anthrax; 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin; 500 tons of sarin, mustard, and VX nerve agents; almost 30,000 munitions capable of delivering chemical agents, and several mobile biological weapons labs. The Niger evidence has been destroyed, and the ‘mobile weapons labs’ have been shown to be weather balloon launching platforms. The vast quantities of anthrax, botulinum toxin, sarin, mustard gas, and VX, along with the munitions to deliver them, have completely failed to show up.

Many people quail at the idea that the President and his people could have lied so egregiously. What was in it for them? Besides the incredible amounts of money to be made from the war by oil and defense corporations like Halliburton and United Defense, two companies with umbilical ties to the administration, there was an “ancillary benefit to all this,” according to Ray McGovern. “Not only did the President get an authorization to make war, but there was an election that next month, the November midterms. The elections turned out surprisingly well for the Bush administration because they were able to use charges of being ‘soft on Saddam’ against those Democratic candidates who voted against the war.”

As Andrew Wilkie says, this issue is not about sixteen words in a speech. It is about lies and American credibility. “All of this breaking news is actually distracting us from the core issue,” says Wilkie. “The core issue is the credibility gap. We were sold this war on the promise that Iraq had this massive WMD arsenal. Of course that hasn’t been found, and whatever might be found now is not going to satisfy in any way that description of the ‘massive’ arsenal, the ‘imminent threat,’ and all those great words used in Britain and Australia and Washington. We’ve got to be careful that, in debating the details on the issue of Tenet and Niger, we are not distracted from that core issue which is still left to be resolved.”

Source: Truthout

Authoritarians gone wild

By Ted Rall

He has canceled elections in Iraq. He will probably cancel them in Afghanistan. Will George W. Bush put the kibosh on elections in the United States next year?

Frightened by Bush’s rapidly accruing personal power and the Democrats’ inability and/or unwillingness to stand up to him, panicked lefties worry that he might use the “war on terrorism” as an excuse to declare a state of emergency, suspend civil liberties, and jail political opponents.

People who have spoken out against Bush are talking exit strategy—not Alec Baldwin style, just to make a statement, but fleeing the US in order to save their skins. “Do you or your spouse have a European-born parent?” is a query making the rounds. (If you do, you can obtain dual nationality and a European Union passport that would allow you to work in any EU member nation.) Those whose lineage is 100 percent American are hoping that nations like Canada and France will admit American political refugees in the event of a Bushite clampdown.

To these people, whether or not the 2004 elections actually take place as scheduled is the ultimate test for American democracy. At Guantánamo Bay the United States is converting a concentration camp into a death camp where inmates will be executed without due process or legal representation. Never before in history has a US president contemplated the denaturalization of native-born citizens --thus far even people executed for treason have died as Americans -- but Bush has drafted legislation that would allow him to strip anyone he calls an “enemy combatant” of their citizenship and have them deported. By any objective standard he has already gone way too far, but for many it would take the cancellation or delay of the elections to confirm that we are trading in our wounded democracy for a fascist state.

Lincoln considered suspending the 1864 election because of the Civil War, but ultimately tabled the idea. To date nothing has ever prevented an American presidential election from being held on time.

It’s easy to come up with a scenario in which cancelling the 2004 election could be made to appear reasonable. Imagine that, a few weeks before Election Day, “dirty bombs” detonate simultaneously in New York and Washington. Government, media, and political institutions and personnel lie ruined in smoking rubble and ash; hundreds of thousands of people have been murdered. The economy, already teetering on the precipice, is shoved into depression. How could we conduct elections under such conditions?

Republicans have already floated the don’t-change-horses-in-midstream argument. After Democratic presidential canidate Sen. John Kerry criticized Bush recently, GOP National Committee Chairman Mark Racicot took him to task not for his specific remarks, but rather for “daring to suggest the replacement of America’s commander-in-chief at a time when America is at war.” The White House web site’s “frequently asked questions” section indicates that the “war” is expected to continue well beyond 2004: “There is no silver bullet, no single event or action that is going to suddenly make the threat of terrorism disappear. This broad-based and sustained effort will continue until terrorism is rooted out. The situation is similar to the Cold War, when continuous pressure from many nations caused communism to collapse from within. We will press the fight as long as it takes.”

The Cold War lasted 46 years; does Bush intend to remain in office that long?

Our boy president has plenty of reason to worry about his election chances. A new CNN-USA Today-Gallup poll says that only 50 percent of Americans would vote for Bush over a generic unnamed Democrat — the lowest number since 9/11. Two-thirds say that Bush lied about or exaggerated the threat from Iraq’s WMDs, and a steady flow of body bags from Afghanistan and Iraq has made 53 percent aware that the occupations are going poorly. Pollsters report that most people trust Democrats to rescue the sinking economy — and few believe that Bush’s tax cuts will help them.

Bush may be the kind of guy who sees 99 percent odds as two percent short of a sure thing, but I bet he’ll look at his $200 million campaign war chest and decide to let the people decide. He’ll surely want to win legitimately in 2004 — albeit for the first time. Though they’re capable of anything, Bush’s people probably know that Americans wouldn’t stand for two putsches in four years. Still, you have to hand it to him: The fact that Democrats are terrified of ending up imprisoned by an American Reich is the ultimate tribute to Bush’s artful bullying —and sad confirmation of the impotence of his would-be, should-be opponents.

Ted Rall is the author of Gas War: The Truth Behind the American Occupation of Afghanistan, an analysis of the underreported Trans-Afghanistan Pipeline project and the real motivations behind the war on terrorism.