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 Editorials | July 2005 
The Rush to Invade Iraq - the inside story | Part 4
 AlJazeera.com
| | Dick Cheney's role has led to questions asked over the validity of intel used in the run up to war. |
In early February 2002, contingency planning for a second Gulf war began in earnest. The Pentagon always keeps numerous basic war plans on its shelves, theoretical battle strategies against any nation which might conceivably become an enemy. The Iraq plan, code-named "1003 Victor," had been drawn up in the early 1990s, and it envisaged a war very similar to the Gulf conflict of 1991: a period of intense aerial bombardment followed by a ground invasion on an enormous scale.
Under Donald Rumsfeld, the commands had spent the past year reviewing all their old plans and had already begun to consider how to tackle Iraq.
As planning progressed, some administration hawks thought the White House was moving too slowly. More than a year after Bush and Condeleezza Rice had made it clear to the National Security Council (NSC) that they wanted a plan to change Iraq's regime, gridlock inside the administration was worse than ever.
Colin Powell was sounding tough in public while doing all he could when safely behind closed doors to blunt the edges of Bush's belligerence. Powell's follow-up came on February 12, in testimony before the Senate Budget Committee. There was no plan to start a war with Iran or North Korea, he promised, but "with respect to Iraq it has long been, for several years now, a policy of the United States government that regime change would be in the best interests of the region, the best interests of the Iraqi people. And we are looking into a variety of options that would bring that about."
Afterward, unnamed senior administration officials told The New York Times, "There (is) a consensus within the Administration that he (Saddam) must be overthrown and that plans to do so are being drawn up. But there is no agreement as to how precisely that should be done or how long the United States should be prepared to wait for action."
What was unknown at the time, that even as he testified, Powell was engaged in a fierce struggle with Rumsfeld over what-if anything-to do about what the defense secretary claimed was a flagrant Iraqi breach of UN sanctions. Within days of the president's State of the Union address, says a senior U.S. arms-nonproliferation official, the intelligence community circulated a report saying that Iraq had found a way to modify trucks in order to make them strong enough to carry heavy weaponry such as tanks and artillery pieces.
Under the Security Council imposed sanctions Iraq was expressly forbidden to own what the military calls "heavy-equipment transports" (HET). Such trucks, the intelligence report continued, could be used either to move tanks around the country swiftly in the event of war or to import them from a friendly third country such as Syria.
The dispute over what to do about the modified HET's went to the top of both the Pentagon and the State Department and was conducted mainly through a bitter exchange of letters. "Rumsfeld was saying, 'We've got to stiffen this up,'" says an official who saw the correspondence, "and State was saying, 'Oh no we're not.' Rumsfeld was like, 'We're going to war with these fuckers and you're letting them get equipment that they're going to use to kill Americans?'"
On February 16 the NSC at last ratified a National Security Policy Directive on Iraq, committing the U.S. both to examining ways of bringing about a CIA-backed coup d'Etat by a friendly general and to providing military support for a popular insurrection, along the lines of the strategy advocated by the INC.
The Bush administration spent much of the first half of 2002 analyzing intelligence about Iraq. Part of the effort was directed toward figuring out how Saddam would respond to an invasion, what his biological- and chemical-weapons capabilities actually were, and whether he would use them against American troops. But it was the second half of the intelligence process, one that personally involved Dick Cheney and his staff that has proven to be the most controversial.
Beginning in early 2002, Cheney, sometimes accompanied by Scooter Libby, paid "approximately 10" visits to the CIA, a member of the vice president's staff says, in order to speak directly with analysts. The vice president defended his visits on Meet the Press in September 2003 saying he needed to "go into an arena where you can make the arguments about why you believe what you do based on the intelligence we've got."
But vice presidents do not usually drop in at Langley and, given Cheney's strident public posture on the need for regime change in Iraq, the message could hardly have been misunderstood by the analysts.
The most authoritative acknowledgment of pressure on CIA analysts comes from Richard J. Kerr, a retired senior agency official who was brought back by the CIA to conduct a classified internal review of its pre-war intelligence on Iraq and how it was used by the White House. In a series of interviews he freely spoke of the pressure CIA analysts were under.
"There was a lot of pressure, no question," says Kerr. "The White House, State, Defense, were raising questions, heavily on WMD and the issue of 'terrorism'... Sure, I heard that some of the analysts felt there was pressure… Analysts will say, 'You're trying to politicize it…' Not that they were being asked to change their judgments, but they were being asked again and again to re-state their judgments-do another paper on this, repetitive pressures. Do it again."
Kerr concedes that it was a case of officials repeatedly asking for another paper until they got the answer they wanted and that the repetitive requests came from the agency's "senior customers," including "the White House, the vice president, State, Defense, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff."
Kerr began his internal review after receiving a call from the agency in February 2003, shortly before the war began. "The project was called 'Lessons Learned'-what can we learn from the intelligence analysis and what can policymakers learn from their use of intelligence?" The four-person team met once a week at Langley during the war and on into May. They looked only at the "finished intelligence"-memos, estimates, and assessments that the CIA had sent to the White House, the NSC, State, the Pentagon, and other players.
Kerr turned in his report last June in which he concluded that the CIA had erred because when UN inspectors had left Iraq in 1998 the agency's sources of human intelligence dried up. "We had sources, human and technical, but we did not have the inspectors," Kerr says. "After the inspectors left, they did not have firsthand information, firsthand access to documents." Consequently, he said, there was "heavy reliance" by analysts on sources with less access to information. The CIA's intelligence out of Iraq became "more spotty and ambiguous."
As a result the CIA based its pre-war estimates far too much on dated intelligence. "On WMD, there was no question in our mind that earlier information derived out of the Gulf War, and reporting from the inspectors-they (the Iraqis) could not prove they destroyed the chemical weapons. All this combined led to the judgment. We carried those judgments forward into the 2000 period and gave them weight, perhaps too much weight, that the programs were continuing."
But the zeal with which the Bush administration wanted to believe the worst about Iraqi capabilities was clear from the start. In September, when President Bush addressed the UN, he cited the now infamous "aluminum tubes" in warning that Saddam could, with the right materials, have a nuclear weapon "within a year."
The White House was absolutely convinced that the tubes were to be used as part of Iraq's nuclear-weapons program. But many people with technical expertise on the subject thought they definitely were not.
For Greg Thielmann, who headed the State Department's Office of Strategic Proliferation, the first sign of trouble came in the fall of 2001, when CIA analyst "Joe T.," argued that Saddam wanted the tubes for centrifuges that spin uranium at high speeds to enrich it for use in a nuclear weapon.
"I found the presentation to be unpersuasive," Thielmann recalled. "He seemed far more a man on a mission than an objective analyst. He had something to sell." A scientist from the Department of Energy's (DOE) also disputed Joe T.'s theory, and Thielmann's chief analyst on Iraqi weapons was equally skeptical.
But George Tenet was absolutely certain that the tubes were meant for centrifuges. Inside the agency's headquarters, however, other analysts believed Saddam wanted the tubes to modify artillery rockets like the Medusa 81s that Iraq had purchased from Italy in the 1980s. The dispute was vitally important because, if the tubes were really meant for centrifuge rotors, it was crucial evidence that Saddam was reconstituting his nuclear-bomb program.
In the summer of 2002, Wolfowitz convened a secret meeting in his office with Francis Brooke, the Iraqi National Council (INC) adviser, and Khidir Hamza, a former chief of Saddam's nuclear program, who had defected to America in 1994. Wolfowitz wanted to know if the tubes could be designed for use in centrifuges. Hamza had never built a centrifuge, but he delivered his judgment anyway: Saddam was pursuing centrifuge research, and the tubes were adaptable. Wolfowitz circulated his conclusions to his administration allies. A few days later, the story of the "nuclear" tubes was leaked to The New York Times.
The aluminum tubes were revisited in October 2002 when the CIA assembled a 90-page National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. It was concluded that the aluminum tubes were "compelling evidence that Saddam is reconstituting a uranium enrichment effort for Baghdad's nuclear weapons program." The document did note that the DOE's experts didn't think the tubes were meant for centrifuges, and the State Department didn't, either. State thought the tubes were for use in artillery rockets and, in addition, did not believe that Iraq was rebuilding a nuclear-weapons program.
The mistaken characterization of the tubes is typical of the NIE, the key document that the Bush administration used to make its case for war. The document was unusual in that it resulted from a request by Congress when typically they are requisitioned by the president, his NSC staff, the State Department, the Pentagon, or the director of central intelligence. But with Bush's request pending for a resolution authorizing war, Senator Bob Graham of Florida, the then chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, wrote Tenet to ask for the NIE.
The NIE would be a rush job with Tenet giving his approval after one single review meeting. Officials from the CIA delivered it to Congress on October 1 to be available for senators and members of the House of Representatives to read under security safeguards at the offices of the Senate and House Intelligence Committees. The main thrust of the NIE was that Saddam had chemical and biological weapons, including mobile labs in which to make them, and was building nukes. It also included dissenting comments on its conclusions. For instance, the NIE claimed Iraq was developing Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV's) probably capable of spraying deadly germs on targets; these drones could even reach the United States. But the air force dissented, saying the UAV's were most likely meant for reconnaissance.
The 90-page, classified NIE was deemed insufficient for a Congress deliberating on going to war. Legislators needed to refer to a public document, one that the American people themselves could read in order to decide whether Saddam posed an imminent threat. Graham asked for such a document, called a White Paper, which the CIA supplied several days later. The paper, "Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction Programs," was a declassified, 25-page condensation of the NIE, and it included an even further distillation of dramatic "Key Judgments."
But the White Paper not only condensed but also distorted and manipulated the NIE intelligence to paint an even worse threat.
Cautious evaluations were converted into assertions of fact, and conclusions were revised, not merely abridged, in order to make the strongest possible case for war.
On October 7, six days after the NIE was delivered to Congress, Bush delivered an Iraq speech in Cincinnati. But a few days earlier a strange event occurred.
George Tenet called Stephen Hadley, Rice's principal deputy several times. Take the reference to Iraq's trying to acquire uranium from Niger out of the speech, Tenet advised. The report, it was later revealed, was based largely on crudely forged documents. The CIA also sent over to Hadley two memos backing up Tenet's advice.
Bush did not mention Niger in his speech, but he did say Iraq had tried to buy aluminum tubes for centrifuges "to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons." And he added, "We cannot wait for the final proof-the smoking gun-that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud."
In using the phrase, Bush was repeating Rice, who had first used the mushroom cloud reference while appearing on CNN a month earlier.
On that very same day Tenet sent a letter to the Senate Intelligence Committee (SIC) suggesting that Iraq would probably not attack America with chemical or biological weapons, or give WMD to 'terrorists', unless the U.S. invaded.
On January 28, 2003, Bush delivered his State of the Union address, which included the infamous 16 words that were to become a major embarrassment for the White House: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."
How did the bogus reference that had been deleted from the Cincinnati speech show up again?
The original intelligence on the Niger-Iraq connection had been obtained not long after 9/11, when Italy delivered a report to the CIA about the visit of an Iraqi official to Niger in February 1999 which suggested that his purpose was to buy enriched uranium. The report lacked details, but, in the fervor of collecting any piece of evidence which could link Iraq with illegal weapons, it caught the attention of Cheney. Seeking confirmation, the vice president's office asked the CIA to investigate, and it in turn asked former ambassador Joseph Wilson IV to travel to Niger.
In Niger, Wilson spoke to the U.S. ambassador Barbra Owens-Kirkpatrick, who knew of the report and believed she had already discredited it. Carlton Fulford, a four-star Marine general, had also visited Niger to check out the story, and had returned satisfied there was nothing to it. Once in Niger, Wilson discovered that any such deal was improbable, if not impossible. Had an official transaction been made, any memorandum indicating as much would have borne the signature of Nigerois officials.
There are only two mines in Niger that produce uranium, and both are operated by the French nuclear company Cogema. Any changes in production or transportation would have to have been approved by the company. Even if someone wanted to sell enriched uranium to Iraq in secret, it would have been virtually impossible to do so without alerting the French, due to the tremendous cost of mining extra products. Wilson returned to Washington and filed his report, which was circulated.
Wilson was shocked when Bush cited the Africa-uranium story in his State of the Union speech. He told journalist Seymour Hersh, "I gave them months to correct the record ... but they kept on lying."
Finally, Wilson went public with his information. At a conference in Washington, Wilson revealed what he had discovered in Niger to New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, who got Wilson's permission to print his findings in a May 6 column. In a June 8 appearance on Meet the Press, Condoleezza Rice finally responded, "Maybe someone knew down in the bowels of the agency, but no one in our circles knew that there were doubts and suspicions that this might be a forgery."
Wilson contacted people he knew in the government and threatened to correct the record if Rice would not. She didn't and he did, writing a July 6 op-ed piece in The New York Times called "What I Didn't Find in Africa."
As the uranium story hit the fan, Tenet accepted the blame, saying that he was "responsible for the approval process in my agency." But he added that the CIA had warned the NSC the intelligence was dubious. The White House continued to deny any responsibility.
But the CIA would not go down all alone. Stephen Hadley admitted that he "should have recalled" the two memos from the CIA alerting the White House to the questionability of the Niger intelligence. While both memos were addressed to Hadley and one to Rice as well, Bush continued to express complete confidence in his national-security team.
Cheney's office claimed to have no knowledge of Wilson or his report: "The vice president doesn't know Joe Wilson and did not know about his trip until he read about it in the press," said the vice president's spokeswoman, Catherine Martin. Cheney's position was supported by Tenet, who said Wilson's trip was made on "the CIA's own initiative."
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