Commission on intelligence whitewashes a war based on lies
By Bill Van Auken
THE report by the Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction was entirely predictable. It follows the same pattern as the whitewashes performed last year for the Bush administration by the 9/11 Commission and the Senate Intelligence Committee. This so-called “independent” commission was handpicked by Bush and directed to concern itself solely with “intelligence failures”. It was constituted a little over a year ago for the political purpose of countering incontrovertible evidence that the Bush administration went to war against Iraq on the basis of lies.
Presenting the report at a White House press conference , Bush read out a prepared statement praising the very intelligence community that, according to the document, had been “dead wrong in almost all of its pre-war judgments about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.” After completing his statement, Bush turned on his heels and walked through a door that shut behind him. The gesture was unmistakable: as far as the administration was concerned, the controversy over non-existent Iraqi weapons of mass destruction was now closed.
The issue in the Iraq war was not one of false estimations in either direction, but rather the deliberate deception of the American people on a massive scale for the purpose of executing plans for conquering Iraq that had been drawn up well before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and even before the Bush administration took office.
“Scathing” is the adjective that the media has invariably used in describing the assessment in the 618-page public version of the report . What has drawn less attention is how the panel’s slavish defence of the Bush administration has left the US president and all of his senior advisors unscathed.
Over a dozen times in the document, the commission dismisses charges that the false intelligence used to justify the war on Iraq was the product of political pressure or outright fabrication on the part of the White House and the Pentagon’s civilian leadership. Yet the charges themselves are referred to only in a footnote that lists a series of news stories detailing instances in which such pressure was more than evident. These include the attempts by Vice President Dick Cheney to extort damning evidence against Iraq by browbeating CIA analysts, and the retaliation against Joseph Wilson — who blew the whistle on the phony intelligence concerning alleged Iraqi uranium purchases in Niger — by exposing his wife as a covert CIA agent. Also listed are articles that quoted CIA and State Department officials saying that they were coerced into producing intelligence that indicted Iraq on weapons violations.
Dismissing all of the evidence, the report states baldly: “The Commission found no evidence of political pressure to influence the Intelligence Community’s pre-war assessments of Iraq’s weapons programmes.” Cheney, who by all accounts led the administration’s drive to fabricate and disseminate such information, is mentioned precisely two times in the report, one of them in a footnote. Neither Bush nor Cheney were questioned about their responsibility for generating the phony intelligence that was used as the pretext for an unprovoked and illegal war.
None of this can come as a surprise given the commission’s makeup. It was constituted in February 2004, shortly after David Kay, who for the previous eight months had headed the US search in Iraq for nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, resigned as head of the Iraq Survey Group. He admitted that no WMD had been found and that, in his opinion, there had been none in Iraq when the US invaded.
The commission’s 14-month investigation, carried out entirely in secret, has revealed nothing new. In some instances where it delves in detail into the so-called intelligence failures, the level of argumentation approaches the ludicrous. Such is the case in its treatment of “Curveball,” the code name given to an Iraqi defector who fabricated a story that was the source, the report says, “of virtually all of the Intelligence Community’s information about Iraq’s alleged mobile biological weapons facilities.”
The report states: “It is at bottom a story of how Defence Department collectors abdicated their responsibility to vet a critical source; of Central Intelligence Agency analysts who placed undue emphasis on the source’s reporting because the tales he told were consistent with what they already believed; and, ultimately, of Intelligence Community leaders who failed to tell policymakers about Curveball’s flaws in the weeks before the war.”
This account’s distortions and omissions make it every bit as lying as Curveball’s tale about mobile weapons labs. The Pentagon “collectors” did not “abdicate their responsibility”. They were directed to produce just such material to make the case for war. Nowhere does the panel’s report refer to the creation of the Office of Special Plans by the war’s architects in the Defence Department’s civilian leadership. This office was a separate in-house intelligence agency tasked with spreading the most lurid possible accounts of Iraqi weapons and supposed terrorist ties. The purpose of the unit was precisely to circumvent the vetting carried out at the CIA. According to multiple accounts, those in the CIA who objected to such “intelligence” were subjected to immense pressure by the administration.
As for Curveball’s own motives, the panel merely brands him a “fabricator”. That he was also the brother of a senior aide to Ahmed Chalabi, the leader of the exile Iraqi National Congress (INC), goes unmentioned.
The report does acknowledge that the sole corroboration of his claims came from another source within the INC. But it then states, incredibly, that not only was “Curveball’s reporting not influenced by, controlled by, or connected to the INC,” but that “INC sources had a minimal impact on pre-war assessments.” The real relationship was that the INC functioned as a paid agent of the US government, providing the false intelligence that the administration wanted to justify the war. The Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans served as a conduit for this material, funnelling it to the administration and the media in the period leading up to the war.
Like the 9/11 commission, the panel calls for closer coordination between the FBI and the CIA. Together, these proposals amount to the framework for an American secret police, overturning restraints and protections against domestic spying and state provocation that were instituted after revelations of FBI and CIA abuses in the 1960s and 1970s.
Several sections of the report submitted to the Bush administration were censored from the declassified version. These include assessments of US intelligence capabilities in relation to the nuclear programmes of North Korea and Iran. Even the most general conclusions in this area were classified. This serves as a warning of new acts of military aggression.
That the administration was able to issue a report so packed with crude falsifications and howling contradictions testifies to the lack of any serious opposition to its policies in general, and the war in Iraq in particular, on the part of the Democratic Party. The positions of Robb, the panel’s co-chair, predominate within the Democratic Party leadership. They, like Bush, are prepared to close the door on the WMD question and on any attempt to hold accountable those who, in planning and launching an unprovoked war based on lies, committed war crimes.—Courtesy World Socialist Website.
