- MOSCOW - When George H. W.
Bush ordered American forces to the Persian Gulf - to reverse Iraq's August
1990 invasion of Kuwait - part of the administration case was that an Iraqi
juggernaut was also threatening to roll into Saudi Arabia. Citing top-secret
satellite images, Pentagon officials estimated in mid-September that up
to 250,000 Iraqi troops and 1,500 tanks stood on the border, threatening
the key US oil supplier.
-
- But when the St. Petersburg Times in Florida acquired
two commercial Soviet satellite images of the same area, taken at the same
time, no Iraqi troops were visible near the Saudi border - just empty desert.
-
- "It was a pretty serious fib," says Jean Heller,
the Times journalist who broke the story.
-
- The White House is now making its case. to Congress and
the public for another invasion of Iraq; President George W. Bush is expected
to present specific evidence of the threat posed by Iraq during a speech
to the United Nations next week.
-
- But past cases of bad intelligence or outright disinformation
used to justify war are making experts wary. The questions they are raising,
some based on examples from the 1991 Persian Gulf War, highlight the importance
of accurate information when a democracy considers military action.
-
- "My concern in these situations, always, is that
the intelligence that you get is driven by the policy, rather than the
policy being driven by the intelligence," says former US Rep. Lee
Hamilton (D) of Indiana, a 34-year veteran lawmaker until 1999, who served
on numerous foreign affairs and intelligence committees, and is now director
of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington.
The Bush team "understands it has not yet carried the burden of persuasion
[about an imminent Iraqi threat], so they will look for any kind of evidence
to support their premise," Mr. Hamilton says. "I think we have
to be skeptical about it."
-
- Examining the evidence
-
- Shortly before US strikes began in the Gulf War, for
example, the St. Petersburg Times asked two experts to examine the satellite
images of the Kuwait and Saudi Arabia border area taken in mid-September
1990, a month and a half after the Iraqi invasion. The experts, including
a former Defense Intelligence Agency analyst who specialized in desert
warfare, pointed out the US build-up - jet fighters standing wing-tip to
wing-tip at Saudi bases - but were surprised to see almost no sign of the
Iraqis.
-
- "That [Iraqi buildup] was the whole justification
for Bush sending troops in there, and it just didn't exist," Ms. Heller
says. Three times Heller contacted the office of Secretary of Defense Dick
Cheney (now vice president) for evidence refuting the Times photos or analysis
- offering to hold the story if proven wrong.
-
- The official response: "Trust us." To this
day, the Pentagon's photographs of the Iraqi troop buildup remain classified.
-
- After the war, the House Armed Services Committee issued
a report on lessons learned from the Persian Gulf War. It did not specifically
look at the early stages of the Iraqi troop buildup in the fall, when the
Bush administration was making its case to send American forces. But it
did conclude that at the start of the ground war in February, the US faced
only 183,000 Iraqi troops, less than half the Pentagon estimate. In 1996,
Gen. Colin Powell, who is secretary of state today, told the PBS documentary
program Frontline: "The Iraqis may not have been as strong as we thought
they were...but that doesn't make a whole lot of difference to me. We put
in place a force that would deal with it - whether they were 300,000, or
500,000."
-
- John MacArthur, publisher of Harper's Magazine and author
of "Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the Gulf War,"
says that considering the number of senior officials shared by both Bush
administrations, the American public should bear in mind the lessons of
Gulf War propaganda.
-
- "These are all the same people who were running
it more than 10 years ago," Mr. MacArthur says. "They'll make
up just about anything ... to get their way."
-
- On Iraq, analysts note that little evidence so far of
an imminent threat from Mr. Hussein's weapons of mass destruction has been
made public.
-
- Critics, including some former United Nations weapons
inspectors in Iraq, say no such evidence exists. Mr. Bush says he will
make his decision to go to war based on the "best" intelligence.
-
- "You have to wonder about the quality of that intelligence,"
says Mr. Hamilton at Woodrow Wilson.
-
- "This administration is capable of any lie ... in
order to advance its war goal in Iraq," says a US government source
in Washington with some two decades of experience in intelligence, who
would not be further identified. "It is one of the reasons it doesn't
want to have UN weapons inspectors go back in, because they might actually
show that the probability of Iraq having [threatening illicit weapons]
is much lower than they want us to believe."
-
- The roots of modern war propaganda reach back to British
World War II stories about German troops bayoneting babies, and can be
traced through the Vietnam era and even to US campaigns in Somalia and
Kosovo.
-
- While the adage has it that "truth is the first
casualty of war," senior administration officials say they cherish
their credibility, and would not lie.
-
- In a press briefing last September, Defense Secretary
Donald Rumsfeld noted occasions during World War II when false information
about US troop movements was leaked to confuse the enemy. He paraphrased
Winston Churchill, saying: "Sometimes the truth is so precious it
must be accompanied by a bodyguard of lies."
-
- But he added that "my fervent hope is that we will
be able to manage our affairs in a way that that will never happen. And
I am 69 years old and I don't believe it's ever happened that I have lied
to the press, and I don't intend to start now."
-
- Last fall, the Pentagon secretly created an "Office
of Strategic Influence." But when its existence was revealed, the
ensuing media storm over reports that it would launch disinformation campaigns
prompted its official closure in late February.
-
- Commenting on the furor, President Bush pledged that
the Pentagon will "tell the American people the truth."
-
- Critics familiar with the precedent set in recent decades,
however, remain skeptical. They point, for example, to the Office of Public
Diplomacy run by the State Department in the 1980s. Using staff detailed
from US military "psychological operations" units, it fanned
fears about Nicaragua's leftist Sandinista regime with false "intelligence"
leaks.
-
- Besides placing a number of proContra, antiSandinista
stories in the national US media as part of a "White Propaganda"
campaign, that office fed the Miami Herald a make-believe story that the
Soviet Union had given chemical weapons to the Sandinistas. Another tale
- which happened to emerge the night of President Ronald Reagan's reelection
victory - held that Soviet MiG fighters were on their way to Nicaragua.
-
- The office was shut down in 1987, after a report by the
US Comptroller-General found that some of their efforts were "prohibited,
covert propaganda activities."
-
- More recently, in the fall of 1990, members of Congress
and the American public were swayed by the tearful testimony of a 15-year-old
Kuwaiti girl, known only as Nayirah.
-
- In the girl's testimony before a congressional caucus,
well-documented in MacArthur's book "Second Front" and elsewhere,
she described how, as a volunteer in a Kuwait maternity ward, she had seen
Iraqi troops storm her hospital, steal the incubators, and leave 312 babies
"on the cold floor to die."
-
- Seven US Senators later referred to the story during
debate; the motion for war passed by just five votes. In the weeks after
Nayirah spoke, President Bush senior invoked the incident five times, saying
that such "ghastly atrocities" were like "Hitler revisited."
-
- But just weeks before the US bombing campaign began in
January, a few press reports began to raise questions about the validity
of the incubator tale.
-
- Later, it was learned that Nayirah was in fact the daughter
of the Kuwaiti ambassador to Washington and had no connection to the Kuwait
hospital.
-
- She had been coached - along with the handful of others
who would "corroborate" the story - by senior executives of Hill
and Knowlton in Washington, the biggest global PR firm at the time, which
had a contract worth more than $10 million with the Kuwaitis to make the
case for war.
-
- "We didn't know it wasn't true at the time,"
Brent Scowcroft, Bush's national security adviser, said of the incubator
story in a 1995 interview with the London-based Guardian newspaper. He
acknowledged "it was useful in mobilizing public opinion."
-
- Intelligence as political tool
-
- Selective use of intelligence information is not particular
to any one presidential team, says former Congressman Hamilton.
-
- "This is not a problem unique to George Bush. It's
every president I've known, and I've worked with seven or eight of them,"
Hamilton says. "All, at some time or another, used intelligence to
support their political objectives.
-
- "Information is power, and the temptation to use
information to achieve the results you want is almost overwhelming,"
he says. "The whole intelligence community knows exactly what the
president wants [regarding Iraq], and most are in their jobs because of
the president - certainly the people at the top - and they will do everything
they can to support the policy.
-
- "I'm always skeptical about intelligence,"
adds Hamilton, who has been awarded medallions from both the CIA and the
Defense Intelligence Agency. "It's not as pure as the driven snow."
-
- http://www.csmonitor.com/2002/0906/p01s02-wosc.html
|