16 Words And Counting

[Gimpy]

Check THIS out!

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16 Words, and Counting
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF


After I wrote a month ago about the Niger uranium hoax in the State of the Union address, a senior White House official chided me gently and explained that there was more to the story that I didn't know.

Yup. And now it's coming out.

Based on conversations with people in the intelligence community, this picture is emerging: the White House, eager to spice up the State of the Union address, recklessly resurrected the discredited Niger tidbit. The Central Intelligence Agency objected, and then it and the National Security Council negotiated a new wording, attributing it all to the Brits. It felt less dishonest pinning the falsehood on the cousins.

What troubles me is not that single episode, but the broader pattern of dishonesty and delusion that helped get us into the Iraq mess ? and that created the false expectations undermining our occupation today. Some in the administration are trying to make George Tenet the scapegoat for the affair. But Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, a group of retired spooks, issued an open letter to President Bush yesterday reflecting the view of many in the intel community that the central culprit is Vice President Dick Cheney. The open letter called for Mr. Cheney's resignation.

Condi Rice says she first learned of former Ambassador Joseph Wilson's fact-finding trip to Niger during a TV interview, presumably when George Stephanopoulos asked her on "This Week" on June 8 about a column by me describing the trip. (Condi, you're breaking my heart ? you didn't read that column itself? How about if I fax you copies of everything I write, so you don't miss any, and you fax me everything you write?)

Actually, I have to agree with Ms. Rice that the focus on that single sentence in the State of the Union address is a bit obsessive. It was only 16 words, attributed in a weaselly way that made it almost accurate, and as any journalist knows well, mistakes do get into print.

So the problem is not those 16 words, by themselves, but the larger pattern of abuse of intelligence. The silver lining is that the spooks are so upset that they're speaking out.

The Defense Intelligence Agency has had town hall meetings in which everyone was told not to talk to journalists (thanks, guys, for naming me in particular). One insider complains: "In the most recent meeting, we also were told that, as much as possible, we should avoid `caveat-ing' our intelligence assessments. . . . Forget nuance, forget fine distinctions; they only confuse these guys. If that isn't a downright scary dumbing-down of our intelligence product, I don't know what is."

Intelligence isn't just being dumbed down, but is also being manipulated ? and it's continuing. Experts say the recent firefight on the Syrian-Iraq border involved not Saddam Hussein or a family member, as we were led to believe, but just some Iraqi petroleum smugglers. Moreover, Patrick Lang, a former senior D.I.A. official, says that many in the government believe that incursion was an effort by ideologues to disrupt cooperation between the U.S. and Syria.

While the scandal has so far focused on Iraq, the manipulations appear to be global. For example, one person from the intelligence community recalls an administration hard-liner's urging the State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research to state that Cuba has a biological weapons program. The spooks refused, and Colin Powell backed them.

Then there's North Korea. The C.I.A.'s assessments on North Korea's nuclear weaponry were suddenly juiced up beginning in December 2001. The alarmist assessments (based on no new evidence) continued until January of this year, when the White House wanted to play down the Korean crisis. Then assessments abruptly restored the less ominous language of the 1990's.

The latest issue of the Naval War College Review describes the ambiguities of the North Korean uranium program and argues that U.S. officials "opted to exploit the intelligence for political purposes."

"Is there a parallel with what is now going on, after the fact, in estimates about Iraq?" asked the article's author, Jonathan Pollack, chairman of the Strategic Research Department of the Naval War College, in an interview. "I think there may be."

So that chiding White House official was right: there was more to the picture. But I'm afraid the bigger the picture gets, the more it looks like a pattern of dishonesty.

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What ELSE is new???? Bush has been telling LIES al his life!

[Gimpy]

Check THIS out!
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WMD spin shows what leaders will do to take people to war
July 15 2003




Like lawyers, Bush, Blair and Howard have highlighted material that suits their case, writes Scott Burchill.


Like the Gulf of Tonkin lie in 1964 and the baby incubator fabrication in 1990, the weapons of mass destruction fiasco is a reminder of the lengths Western governments will go to in order to incite their populations to war.

Despite John Howard's claim that Iraq possessed chemical and biological weapons capable of "causing death and destruction on a mammoth scale", no evidence of their existence has been found by occupying armies searching for them.

With daily reminders of what they presented publicly as a casus belli shortly before the war, increasingly discomforted politicians are looking for scapegoats among the intelligence community. In Australia, the Office of National Assessments and the Defence Intelligence Organisation are being strongarmed into admissions that they failed to pass on doubts about claims that Iraq was seeking to buy uranium from Niger.

In the US and Britain, the CIA and MI6 are showing a greater reluctance to carry the blame by leaking to the media prewar briefings that show a gulf between what they advised and what their governments claimed.

How can this be explained? Is it sufficient for Howard, Bush and Blair to argue that they were merely passing on in good faith what the intelligence agencies had told them?


The confusion arises when political discourse designed to persuade rather than inform, is treated as if it were independent objective analyses based on historical truth. This is not the way to handle government propaganda.

The English historian A. J. P. Taylor argued that the principal difference between the methodologies of the lawyer and the historian was that "the lawyer aims to make a case; the historian wishes to understand a situation". According to Taylor, the evidence amassed by the lawyer is "loaded" in ways that will maximise the chances of conviction or acquittal: "anyone who relies on (this kind of evidence) finds it almost impossible to escape from the load with which they are charged."

Historians, on the other hand, allow a "detached and scholarly" examination of the evidence to direct them to conclusions rather than taking a stand and then, retrospectively, seeking evidence to support their case.

As Washington, London and Canberra are pressured to defend their claims about Iraq's WMD, it is worth recalling Taylor's warning about "loaded" documents. Bush, Blair and Howard assembled arguments to support a case for war after they had decided to attack Iraq. They did not arrive at a conclusion after a judicious evaluation of the evidence. Like barristers, they selected and highlighted material favourable to their argument and ignored anything that undermined it.

For example, on February 4, Howard was delighted to tell Parliament that until General Hussein Kamal - who had been in charge of Iraq's WMD programs - defected to Jordan in 1995, UN inspectors did not even know that Iraq had developed biological weapons. True enough. However, the Prime Minister neglected to mention a more significant disclosure. Kamal also told weapons inspectors that Iraq had abandoned its nuclear program and destroyed all its chemical and biological weapons four years earlier. According to the defector, who was also Saddam's son-in-law, WMD production had not resumed.

It would be misleading to report on a criminal trial by presenting the prosecution's legal brief as if it were a fair summary of the arguments for and against. It would be equally absurd to accept a government's case for war as if it was a conclusion arrived at after an exhaustive and independent assessment of the evidence. We are now discovering, day by day, just how loaded the case for war became.

Equally disturbing is the degree of anticipatory self-censorship adopted by the intelligence community. Instead of presenting the best analysis based on all available evidence regardless of where it pointed, it seems these increasingly politicised agencies only told government what they thought it wanted to hear. This is a fundamental breach of their public service obligations.

Just before the war, when the WMD issue lost traction, a humanitarian argument was suddenly invoked by those who until then had never shown concern for the welfare of the Iraqi people. WMD have still not been found in Iraq, so the discovery of mass graves is now said to retrospectively legitimate the war. It's a tempting digression, as long as no one asks whether they had been dug when Saddam was an ally of the West in the 1980s. Or how many of those buried there were incited to rebel against Saddam by George Bush's father in 1991, only to be cruelly betrayed by Washington.

Mark Twain identified in 1917 the problem we are now experiencing: "The statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently study them, and refuse to examine any refutations of them; and thus he will by and by convince himself that the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception."

Scott Burchill lectures in international relations at Deakin University.

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