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White
House Silenced Experts Who Questioned Iraq Intel Info Six Months Before
War
by
Jason Leopold
June
12, 2003
Six
months before the United States was dead-set on invading Iraq to rid the
country of its alleged weapons of mass destruction, experts in the field of
nuclear science warned officials in the Bush administration that intelligence
reports showing Iraq was stockpiling chemical and biological weapons was
unreliable and that the country did not pose an imminent threat to its
neighbors in the Middle East or the U.S.
But
the dissenters were told to keep quiet by high-level administration officials
in the White House because the Bush administration had already decided that
military force would be used to overthrow the regime of Iraq’s President Saddam
Hussein, interviews and documents have revealed.
The
most vocal opponent to intelligence information supplied by the CIA to the
hawks in the Bush administration about the so-called Iraqi threat to national
security was David Albright, a former United Nations weapons inspector and the
president and founder of the Institute for Science and International Security,
a Washington, D.C. based group that gathers information for the public and the
White House on nuclear weapons programs.
With
the likelihood of finding WMD in Iraq becoming increasingly remote, new
information, such as documents and interviews provided by Albright and other
weapons experts, prove that the White House did not suffer so much from an
intelligence failure on Iraq’s WMD, but instead shows how the Bush
administration embellished reams of intelligence and relied on murky
intelligence in order to get Congress and the public to back the war. That may
explain why it is becoming so difficult to find WMD: Because it’s entirely
likely that the weapons don’t exist.
“A
critical question is whether the Bush Administration has deliberately misled
the public and other governments in playing a "nuclear card" that it
knew would strengthen public support for war,” Albright said in a March 10
assessment of the CIA’s intelligence, which is posted on the ISIS website.
John
Dean, the former counsel to President Richard Nixon, wrote in a column this
week that if President Bush mislead the public in building a case for war in
Iraq, largely because the WMD have yet to be found. If Bush did distort
intelligence information to make a case for war he could a case for impeachment
could be made, according to Dean.
“Presidential
statements, particularly on matters of national security, are held to an
expectation of the highest standard of truthfulness,” Dean wrote this week. “A
president cannot stretch, twist or distort facts and get away with it.
President Lyndon Johnson's distortions of the truth about Vietnam forced him to
stand down from reelection. President Richard Nixon's false statements about
Watergate forced his resignation.”
In
September, USA Today reported that “the Bush administration is expanding on and
in some cases contradicting U.S. intelligence reports in making the case for an
invasion of Iraq, interviews with administration and intelligence officials
indicate.”
“Administration
officials accuse Iraq of having ties to al-Qaeda terrorists and of amassing
weapons of mass destruction despite uncertain and sometimes contrary
intelligence on these issues, according to officials,” the paper reported. “In
some cases, top administration officials disagree outright with what the CIA
and other intelligence agencies report. For example, they repeat accounts of
al-Qaeda members seeking refuge in Iraq and of terrorist operatives meeting
with Iraqi intelligence officials, even though U.S. intelligence reports raise
doubts about such links. On Iraqi weapons programs, administration officials
draw the most pessimistic conclusions from ambiguous evidence.”
In
secret intelligence briefings last September on the Iraqi threat, House
Minority Whip Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said administration officials were
presenting "embellishments" on information long known about Iraq.
A
senior Bush administration official conceded privately that there are large
gaps in U.S. knowledge about Iraqi weapons programs, USA Today reported.
The
concerns jibe with warnings about the CIA’s intelligence information Albright
first raised last September, when the agency zeroed in on high-strength
aluminum tubes Iraq was trying to obtain as evidence of the country’s active
near-complete nuclear weapons program.
The
case of the aluminum tubes is significant because President Bush identified it
during a speech last year as evidence of Iraq’s nuclear weapons program and
used to rally the public and several U.N. countries in supporting the war. But
Albright said many officials in the intelligence community knew the tubes
weren’t meant to build a nuclear weapon.
“The
CIA has concluded that these tubes were specifically manufactured for use in
gas centrifuges to enrich uranium,” Albright said. “Many in the expert
community both inside and outside government, however, do not agree with this
conclusion. The vast majority of gas centrifuge experts in this country and
abroad who are knowledgeable about this case reject the CIA's case and do not
believe that the tubes are specifically designed for gas centrifuges. In
addition, International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors have consistently
expressed skepticism that the tubes are for centrifuges.”
“After
months of investigation, the administration has failed to prove its claim that
the tubes are intended for use in an Iraqi gas centrifuge program,” Albright added.
“Despite being presented with evidence countering this claim, the
administration persists in making misleading comments about the significance of
the tubes.”
Albright
said he tried to voice his concerns about the intelligence information to White
House officials last year, but was rebuffed and told to keep quiet.
“I
first learned of this case a year and a half ago when I was asked for
information about past Iraqi procurements. My reaction at the time was that the
disagreement reflected the typical in-fighting between US experts that often
afflicts the intelligence community. I was frankly surprised when the
administration latched onto one side of this debate in September 2002. I was
told that this dispute had not been mediated by a competent, impartial
technical committee, as it should have been, according to accepted practice,”
Albright said. “I became dismayed when a knowledgeable government scientist
told me that the administration could say anything it wanted about the tubes
while government scientists who disagreed were expected to remain quiet.”
Albright
said the Department of Energy, which analyzed the intelligence information on
the aluminum tubes and rejected the CIA’s intelligence analysis, is the only
government agency in the U.S. that can provide expert opinions on gas
centrifuges (what the CIA alleged the tubes were being used for) and nuclear
weapons programs.
“For
over a year and a half, an analyst at the CIA has been pushing the aluminum
tube story, despite consistent disagreement by a wide range of experts in the
United States and abroad,” Albright said. “His opinion, however, obtained
traction in the summer of 2002 with senior members of the Bush Administration,
including the President. The administration was forced to admit publicly that
dissenters exist, particularly at the Department of Energy and its national
laboratories.”
But
Albright said the White House launched an attack against experts who spoke
critically of the intelligence.
“Administration
officials try to minimize the number and significance of the dissenters or
unfairly attack them,” Albright said. “For example, when Secretary Powell
mentioned the dissent in his Security Council speech, he said: "Other
experts, and the Iraqis themselves, argue that they are really to produce the
rocket bodies for a conventional weapon, a multiple rocket launcher." Not
surprisingly, an effort by those at the Energy Department to change Powell's
comments before his appearance was rebuffed by the administration.”
Moreover,
former scientists who worked on Iraq’s nuclear weapons program and escaped the
country also disputed the CIA’s intelligence of the country’s existing nuclear
weapons program, saying it ended in 1991 after the first Gulf War. However,
some Iraq scientists who supplied the Pentagon with information claim that
Iraq's nuclear weapons program continues, but none of these Iraqis have any
direct knowledge of any current banned nuclear programs. They appear to all
carry political baggage and biases about going to war or overthrowing Saddam
Hussein, and these biases seem to drive their judgments about nuclear issues,
rendering their statements about current Iraqi nuclear activities suspect,
according to Albright, who said he was privy to much of the information being
supplied to the Bush administration and the CIA.
Another
example of disputed intelligence used by the Bush administration to build its
case for war is Iraq’s attempts to obtain uranium from Niger as evidence of
another secret nuclear weapons program. Bush in his State of the Union Speech
in January used this information as an example of a “smoking gun” and the
imminent threat Iraq posed to the U.S. But the information has since been
widely discounted.
“One
person who heard a classified briefing on Iraq in late 2002 said that there was
laughter in the room when the uranium evidence was presented,” Albright said.
“One of (the) most dramatic findings, revealed on March 7, was that the
documents which form the basis for the reports of recent uranium transactions between
Niger and Iraq are not authentic.”
Iraq's
attempts to acquire a magnet production plant are likewise ambiguous. Secretary
of State Colin Powell stated to the UN Security Council on February 5, 2003
that this plant would produce magnets with a mass of 20 to 30 grams. He added:
"That's the same weight as the magnets used in Iraq's gas centrifuge
program before the Gulf War." One US official said that because the pieces
are so small, many end uses are possible, making it impossible to link the
attempted acquisition to an Iraqi centrifuge program.”
One
piece of intelligence information that seemed to go unnoticed by the media was
satellite photographs released by the White House last October of a facility in
Iraq called Al Furat to support Bush's assertion that Iraq was making nuclear
weapons there.
But
Albright said that Iraq already admitted making such weapons at Al Furat before
the Gulf War and that the site had long been dismantled.
In
addition to Albright, other military experts also were skeptical of the
intelligence information gathered by the CIA.
“Basically,
cooked information is working its way into high-level pronouncements and
there's a lot of unhappiness about it in intelligence, especially among
analysts at the CIA,” said Vincent Cannistraro, the CIA's former head of
counter-intelligence, in an interview with London’s Guardian newspaper last
October.
Cannistraro
told the Guardian that hawks at the Pentagon had deliberately skewed the flow
of intelligence to the top levels of the administration.
Last
October, Bush said the Iraqi regime was developing unmanned aerial vehicles,
which “could be used to disperse chemical or biological weapons across broad
areas.”
“We're
concerned that Iraq is exploring ways of using these UAVs for missions
targeting the United States,” Bush said.
While
U.S. military experts confirmed that Iraq had been converting eastern European
trainer jets into UAV’s, but with a maximum range of a few hundred miles they
were no threat to targets in the U.S.
“It
doesn't make any sense to me if he meant United States territory,” said Stephen
Baker, a retired US navy rear admiral who assesses Iraqi military capabilities
at the Washington-based Center for Defense Information, also in an interview
with the Guardian last October.
In
true Bush fashion, however, the administration had long believed it was better
to strike first and ask questions later.
When
Senator Dianne Feinstein, D-California, who sits on the intelligence committee,
sent Bush a letter Sept. 17, 2002 requesting he urge the CIA to produce a National
Intelligence Estimate, a report that would have showed exactly how much of a
threat Iraq posed, Condoleezza Rice, the National Security Adviser, said in the
post 9-11 world the U.S. cannot wait for intelligence because the Iraq is too
much of a threat to the U.S.
“We
don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud,” Rice said.
Jason Leopold, formerly the
bureau chief of Dow Jones Newswires, is a freelance journalist based in
California. He is currently finishing a book on the California energy crisis.
He can be contacted at jasonleopold@hotmail.com.
* See also DV News Service’s Compilation:
“Bush
Administration's Lies About Iraq's WMD Unraveling”