- LOS ANGELES -- An unprecedented
array of US intelligence professionals, diplomats and former Pentagon officials
have gone on record to lambast the Bush administration for its distortion
of the case for war against Iraq. In their view, the very foundations of
intelligence-gathering have been damaged in ways that could take years,
even decades, to repair.
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- A new documentary film beginning to circulate in the
United States features one powerful condemnation after another, from the
sort of people who usually stay discreetly in the shadows - a former director
of the CIA, two former assistant secretaries of defence, a former ambassador
to Saudi Arabia and even the man who served as President Bush's Secretary
of the Army until just a few months ago.
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- Between them, the two dozen interviewees reveal how the
pre-war intelligence record on Iraq showed virtually the opposite of the
picture the administration painted to Congress, to US voters and to the
world. They also reconstruct the way senior White House officials - notably
Vice-President Dick Cheney - leaned on the CIA to find evidence that would
fit a preordained set of conclusions.
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- "There was never a clear and present danger. There
was never an imminent threat. Iraq - and we have very good intelligence
on this - was never part of the picture of terrorism," says Mel Goodman,
a veteran CIA analyst who now teaches at the National War College.
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- The case for accusing Saddam Hussein of concealing weapons
of mass destruction was, in the words of the veteran CIA operative Robert
Baer, largely achieved through "data mining" - going back over
old information and trying to wrest new conclusions from it. The agenda,
according to George Bush Senior's ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Chas Freeman,
was both highly political and profoundly misguided.
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- "The theory that you can bludgeon political grievances
out of existence doesn't have much of a track record," he says, "so
essentially we have been neo-conned into applying a school of thought about
foreign affairs that has failed everywhere it has been tried."
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- The hour-long film - entitled Uncovered: The Whole Truth
About the Iraq War - was put together by Robert Greenwald, a veteran TV
producer in the forefront of Hollywood's anti-war movement who never suspected,
when he started out, that so many establishment figures would stand up
and be counted.
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- "My attitude was, wow, CIA people, I thought these
were the bad guys," Mr Greenwald said. "Not everyone agreed on
everything. Not everyone was against the war itself. But there was a universally
shared opinion that we had been misled about the reasons for the war."
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- Although many elements in the film are not necessarily
new - the forged document on uranium sales from Niger to Iraq, the aluminium
tubes falsely assumed to be parts for nuclear weapons, the satellite images
of "mobile biolabs" that turned out to be hydrogen compression
facilities, the "decontamination vehicles" that were in fact
fire engines - what emerges is a striking sense of professional betrayal
in the intelligence community.
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- As the former CIA analyst Ray McGovern argues with particular
force, the traditional role of the CIA has been to act as a scrupulously
accurate source of information and analysis for presidents pondering grave
international decisions. That role, he said, had now been "prostituted"
and the CIA may never be the same. "Where is Bush going to turn to
now? Where is his reliable source of information now Iraq is spinning out
of control? He's frittered that away," Mr McGovern said. "And
the profound indignity is that he probably doesn't even realise it."
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- The starting point for the tarnishing of the CIA was
a speech by Vice-President Cheney on 26 August 2002, in which he told the
Veterans of Foreign Wars in Nashville that Saddam was reconstituting his
nuclear weapons programme and was thus threatening to inflict "death
on a massive scale - in his own region or beyond".
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- According to numerous sources, Mr Cheney followed up
his speech with a series of highly unorthodox visits to CIA headquarters
in Langley, Virginia, in which he badgered low-level analysts to come up
with information to substantiate the extremely alarming - but entirely
bogus - contents of his speech.
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- By early September, intelligence experts in Congress
were clamouring for a so-called National Intelligence Estimate, a full
rundown of everything known about Iraq's weapons programmes. Usually NIEs
take months to produce, but George Tenet, the CIA director, came up with
a 100-page document in just three weeks.
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- The man he picked to write it, the weapons expert Robert
Walpole, had a track record of going back over old intelligence assessments
and reworking them in accordance with the wishes of a specific political
interest group. In 1998, he had come up with an estimate of the missile
capabilities of various rogue states that managed to sound considerably
more alarming than a previous CIA estimate issued three years earlier.
On that occasion, he was acting at the behest of a congressional commission
anxious to make the case for a missile defence system; the commission chairman
was none other than Donald Rumsfeld, now Secretary of Defence and a key
architect of the Iraq war.
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- Mr Walpole's NIE on Iraq threw together all the elements
that have now been discredited - Niger, the alumin- ium tubes, and so on.
It also gave the misleading impression that intelligence analysts were
in broad agreement about the Iraqi threat, relegating most of the doubts
and misgivings to footnotes and appendices.
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- By the time parts of the NIE were made public, even those
few qualifications were excised. When President Bush's speechwriters got
to work - starting with the address to Congress on 7 October that led to
a resolution authorising the use of force against Iraq - the language became
even stronger.
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- Mr Tenet fact-checked the 7 October speech, and seems
to have played a major role in every subsequent policy address, including
Colin Powell's powerful presentation to the United Nations Security Council
on 5 February. Of that pivotal speech, Mr McGovern says in the film: "It
was a masterful performance, but none of it was true."
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- © 2003 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd
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- http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/story.jsp?story=461953
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