I thought I might pick up today where I left off yesterday — with those pesky missing weapons of mass destruction. The administration in the persons of Condi Rice and Colin Powell felt obliged to rush onto the Sunday morning policy-wonk TV shows — the Nick at Nite for aging inside-the-Beltway junkies. There, they both insisted that, in Rice’s words, “it was the judgment of the U.S. intelligence community that Saddam Hussein possessed chemical and biological weapons and that the president and others did not exaggerate the threat in the months before going to war.” Rice described the very idea that the president might have “exaggerated” (policy-wonk TV is a polite medium when it comes to the handling of important officials) as “revisionist history” — a hilarious description if you think about it (as if history were a giant incised stone slab which “revision” could only mar).
According to Rice , who seems quite ready to hang CIA director George Tenet out to dry, on NBC’s “Meet the Press” (Walter Pincus, Officials Defend Iraq Intelligence, the Washington Post),
“‘The truth of the matter is that repeated directors of central intelligence, repeated reports by intelligence agencies around the world, repeated reports by United Nations inspectors asking hard questions of Saddam Hussein, and tremendous efforts by this regime to conceal and hide what it was doing, clearly give a picture of a regime that had weapons of mass destruction and was determined to conceal them.’
“She said that Director of Central Intelligence George J. Tenet believed Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and ‘the president gets his intelligence from his director of central intelligence.’ The key judgments of the intelligence community, Rice said on ABC’s “This Week,” were contained in an October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate that said flatly that ‘Iraq had weapons of mass destruction’ and that Husseinwas hiding these from the world'”
So it goes, except that the tone of defensiveness in all this is not good news for the White House, nor is the fact that such articles now invariably include Democrats and others sayin’ maybe it ain’t so, Joe. And worse yet, the scandal is mutating. It’s heading elsewhere and the administration may have to run hard to keep up. Events like this might be compared to computer viruses. They have a way of multiplying and moving on, sometimes with startling speed, through networking, especially if, as is the case right now, there are ever more angry people out there ready to blab.
Case in point, a piece on today’s New York Times front page by James Risen, Captives Deny Qaeda Worked With Baghdad, whose first paragraph is: “Two of the highest-ranking leaders of Al Qaeda in American custody have told the C.I.A. in separate interrogations that the terrorist organization did not work jointly with the Iraqi government of Saddam Hussein, according to several intelligence officials.”
But here’s the crucial paragraph (four) in the piece, the one that indicates that the wmd scandal is replicating: “The Bush administration has not made these statements public, though it frequently highlighted intelligence reports that supported its assertions of links between Iraq and Al Qaeda as it made its case for war against Iraq.”
“She said that Director of Central Intelligence George J. Tenet believed Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and ‘the president gets his intelligence from his director of central intelligence.’ The key judgments of the intelligence community, Rice said on ABC’s “This Week,” were contained in an October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate that said flatly that ‘Iraq had weapons of mass destruction’ and that Husseinwas hiding these from the world'”
So it goes, except that the tone of defensiveness in all this is not good news for the White House, nor is the fact that such articles now invariably include Democrats and others sayin’ maybe it ain’t so, Joe. And worse yet, the scandal is mutating. It’s heading elsewhere and the administration may have to run hard to keep up. Events like this might be compared to computer viruses. They have a way of multiplying and moving on, sometimes with startling speed, through networking, especially if, as is the case right now, there are ever more angry people out there ready to blab.
Case in point, a piece on today’s New York Times front page by James Risen, Captives Deny Qaeda Worked With Baghdad, whose first paragraph is: “Two of the highest-ranking leaders of Al Qaeda in American custody have told the C.I.A. in separate interrogations that the terrorist organization did not work jointly with the Iraqi government of Saddam Hussein, according to several intelligence officials.”
But here’s the crucial paragraph (four) in the piece, the one that indicates that the wmd scandal is replicating: “The Bush administration has not made these statements public, though it frequently highlighted intelligence reports that supported its assertions of links between Iraq and Al Qaeda as it made its case for war against Iraq.”
For the last year, of course, this administration has been strategically leaking like a sieve whatever information it wanted in the media, including the Times. But here, really for the first time since this what-did-the-president-know-and-when scandal began, is some news, something we couldn’t have known (as far as I can tell anyway) before the war. Somebody(bodies) is (are) leaking reports on CIA interrogations, somebod(ies) referred to as “several intelligence officials” in paragraph one.
Now, let’s stop for a moment and consider the author of this piece, a Pulitzer Prize winning Times journalist with a “national security” beat, who covers the “intelligence community” and whose last book was “The Main Enemy: The Inside Story of the CIA’s Final Showdown With the KGB,” which he coauthored with Milton Bearden, who just happens to be the CIA’s former Soviet- Eastern European division head during the years of the Soviet collapse (a subject on which, by the way, the CIA had a dreadful record, predictively speaking).
So here we may once again have a case of “retired officer syndrome.” Certainly, Risen himself is well connected. Now, let’s look at his piece again, this time without any of the content, just its sourcing. What you find is but a single named source, Bill Harlow, “a spokesman for the Central Intelligence Agency,” who (absurdly enough) refuses comment on the story. So the only named source says not a word, while a myriad of unnamed ones blab away. Here, then, are the other sources, as described in the piece, in addition to the “several intelligence officials” in paragraph one of a story only seventeen paragraphs long.
“according to an official who has read the Central Intelligence Agency’s classified report on the interrogation the official saida senior intelligence official played down Other intelligence and military officials added several intelligence officials acknowledged several officials said Those officials said one official said. an intelligence official said.”
You have to be a lot more of an insider than I could ever hope to be to have a sense of who exactly such sources may be, since, given who’s speaking, a fair amount of fudging is undoubtedly going on. But whoever “he” is, they’re angry. Whether we’re dealing here — to steal from the administration’s language — with a preemptive or a preventive attack, an attack on the administration, on the Pentagon in particular, it certainly is. How far and fast it will spread I don’t know, but as long as it comes from aggrieved members of the intelligence community it provides a kind of patriotic cover for the Democrats that no arguments, no matter how winning by the antiwar movement, ever could.
Already, today, the administration has had to trot out the president himself to defend his weapons of mass destruction record — and, if you look at James Gerstenzang’s piece in the Los Angeles Times, Bush Defends Weapons Reports, you’ll see three things: He also felt obliged to defend the argument about al Qaeda links to Saddam Hussein while making a clear reference to Risen’s piece (“I read a report that somehow, you know — that there’s no Al Qaeda presence in Baghdad”); the comments of mainstream Democratic critics were included in the same piece (“On Sunday, pressure grew on the administration to go along with a congressional investigation of the prewar intelligence. ‘I think that the nation’s credibility is on the line, as well as [Bush’s],’ said Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan, the senior Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee.”); and the president has had to backtrack even further on the wmd issue and quite defensively at that, emphasizing no longer the moment of going to war, but the full previous decade (“Iraq had a weapons program. Intelligence throughout the decade showed they had a weapons program. I am absolutely convinced, with time, we’ll find out that they did have a weapons program.”). Those two mobile trailers now seem to have disappeared from sight.
Here in the U.S. the administration is, not surprisingly, still hanging tough (though –and I say this on the firm basis of no knowledge whatsoever — I might watch out for Tenet’s departure one of these days). In England, the Blair administration, under far fiercer attack is already starting to back off a bit and apologize. See, for instance, George Jones’ piece in the Telegraph, ‘Dodgy’ Iraq dossier was error, says Blunkett. For a fuller rundown of the whole scandal to this moment from a Brit point of view, I include a piece from yesterday’s Observer. Tom
The arms hunt: were they weapons of self-delusion?
By Peter Beaumont and Kamal Ahmed in London, Ed Vulliamy in New York and David Fickling in Sydney
The Observer
June 8, 2003Every week, senior senators in the United States Congress sit down to a policy-makers’ lunch. It is usually a pretty ho-hum affair, an occasion for political backslapping. But last Tuesday as the grand panjandrums of the Grand Old Party assembled, Vice-President Dick Cheney had pressing business on his mind. That business, unusually, was to reassure the assembled senators that the administration of George Bush was not, as some had alleged, lying about weapons of mass destruction and that it did have credible evidence before American soldiers were sent to war that Iraq retained those weapons.
It has not been an easy argument to make this week. On both sides of the Atlantic, war on Iraq has given way to an altogether more difficult guerrilla battle over propaganda. Victory is in danger of being soured by nagging doubts: was the public deceived, by the manipulation of intelligence, as to the nature of the enemy they were fighting?
To read more of this Observer piece click here