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Wolfowitz
Aimed to Undermine Blix
So
US Could Strike Iraq
by
Jason Leopold
June
26, 2003
Paul
Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defense, was so eager to see the United
States launch a preemptive strike against Iraq in early 2002, that he ordered
the CIA to investigate the past work of Hans Blix, the chief United Nations
weapons inspector, who, in February 2002, was asked to lead a team of U.N.
weapons inspectors into Iraq to search for weapons of mass destruction.
The
unusual move by Wolfowitz underscores the steps the Bush administration was
willing to take a year before the U.S. invaded Iraq to manipulate and/or
exaggerate intelligence information to support its claims that Iraq posed an
immediate threat to the United States and that the only solution to quell the
problem was the use of military force.
U.S.
military forces in Iraq have yet to find any evidence of WMD. Some U.S.
lawmakers have accused the Bush administration of distorting intelligence
information, which claimed Iraq possessed tons of chemical and biological
agents, to justify the attack to overthrow Iraq's President Saddam Hussein.
Although the Bush administration continues to deny the accusations, evidence,
such as the secret report Wolfowitz asked the CIA in January 2002 to produce on
Blix, prove that the administration had already decided that removing Saddam
from power would require military force and it would do so regardless of the
position of the U.N.
Earlier
this month, Blix accused the Bush administration of launching a smear campaign
against him because he could not find evidence of WMD in Iraq and, he said, he
refused to pump up his reports to the U.N. about Iraq's WMD programs, which
would have given the U.S. the evidence it needed to get a majority of U.N.
member countries to support a war against Iraq. Instead, Blix said the U.N.
inspectors should be allowed more time to conduct searches in Iraq for WMD.
In
a June 11 interview with the London Guardian newspaper, Blix
said "U.S. officials pressured him to use more damning language when
reporting on Iraq's alleged weapons programs."
"By
and large my relations with the U.S. were good," Blix told the Guardian.
"But toward the end the (Bush) administration leaned on us.'"
Tensions
between Blix and the hawks in the Bush administration, such as Wolfowitz,
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney, go back at
least two years, when President Bush, at the urging of Secretary of State Colin
Powell, said he wanted the U.N. to resurrect U.N. arms inspections for Iraq.
The
move angered some in the administration, such as Wolfowitz, who, according to
an April 15 report in the Washington Post, wanted to see military action
against Iraq sooner rather than later.
When
the U.N. said privately in January 2002 that Blix would lead an inspections
team into Iraq, Wolfowitz contacted the CIA to produce a report on why Blix, as
chief of the International Atomic Energy Agency during the 1980s and 1990s,
failed to detect Iraqi nuclear activity.
But,
according to the Washington Post's April 15, 2002 story, the CIA report said
Blix "had conducted inspections of Iraq's declared nuclear power plants
fully within the parameters he could operate as chief of the Vienna-based
agency between 1981 and 1997."
Wolfowitz,
according to the Post, quoting a former State Department official familiar with
the report, "hit the ceiling" because it failed to provide sufficient
ammunition to undermine Blix and, by association, the new U.N. weapons
inspection program."
"The
request for a CIA investigation underscored the degree of concern by Wolfowitz
and his civilian colleagues in the Pentagon that new inspections – or
protracted negotiations over them – could torpedo their plans for military
action to remove Hussein from power," the Post reported.
Soon
after the CIA issued its report, the administration began exaggerating
intelligence information of Iraq's weapons programs and, in some cases, forcing
intelligence officials to "cook" up information to support a war,
according to a Nov. 19, 2002 story in the Guardian.
For
example, last August, Cheney said Iraq would have nuclear weapons "fairly
soon" – in direct contradiction of CIA reports that said it would take at
least five more years.
Rumsfeld,
in public comments last year, accused Saddam Hussein of providing sanctuary to
al-Qaida operatives fleeing Afghanistan – although they had actually traveled
to Iraqi Kurdistan, which is outside Saddam's control, the Guardian reported.
On
Feb. 12, 2002, a week or so after the CIA issued its report to Wolfowitz on
Blix, reporters questioned Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld about the accuracy of
the Bush administration's claim that Iraq was harboring al-Qaida terrorists and
the countries alleged stockpile of WMD, which some news reports said was not
true.
Rumsfeld's
response to the reporters' questions about the accuracy of the information
proves that the Defense Secretary cares little about providing the public with
thoughtful, intelligent analysis.
"Reports
that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because
as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also
know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we
do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don't know we
don't know," Rumsfeld said.
But
on Wednesday, Rumsfeld and Gen Richard Myers, Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff,
radically changed their stance on the accuracy of such intelligence The
officials said at a news conference that intelligence information the U.S.
gathered leading up to the war in Iraq that concluded the country possessed WMD
may have been wrong.
"Intelligence
doesn't necessarily mean something is true," Myers said "It's just –
it's intelligence. You know, it's your best estimate of the situation. It
doesn't mean it's a fact. I mean, that's not what intelligence is. It's not –
they're – and so you make judgments."
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.