@@ The new Pentagon papers @@
Arash
March 10, 2004
The new Pentagon papers
A high-ranking military officer reveals how Defense Department extremists suppressed
information and twisted the truth to drive the country to war.
Retired U.S. Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski
In July of last year, after just over 20 years of service, I retired as a lieutenant
colonel in the U.S. Air Force. I had served as a communications officer in the field
and in acquisition programs, as a speechwriter for the National Security Agency
director, and on the Headquarters Air Force and the office of the secretary of
defense staffs covering African affairs. I had completed Air Command and Staff
College and Navy War College seminar programs, two master's degrees, and everything
but my Ph.D. dissertation in world politics at Catholic University. I regarded my
military vocation as interesting, rewarding and apolitical. My career started in 1978
with the smooth seduction of a full four-year ROTC scholarship. It ended with 10
months of duty in a strange new country, observing up close and personal a process of
decision making for war not sanctioned by the Constitution we had all sworn to
uphold. Ben Franklin's comment that the Constitutional Convention of 1787 in
Philadelphia had delivered "a republic, madam, if you can keep it" would come to have
special meaning.
In the spring of 2002, I was a cynical but willing staff officer, almost two years
into my three-year tour at the office of the secretary of defense, undersecretary for
policy, sub-Saharan Africa. In April, a call for volunteers went out for the Near
East South Asia directorate (NESA). None materialized. By May, the call
transmogrified into a posthaste demand for any staff officer, and I was "volunteered"
to enter what would be a well-appointed den of iniquity.
The education I would receive there was like an M. Night Shyamalan movie
(http://www.hollywood.com/celebs/detail/celeb/187146) -- intense, fascinating and
frightening. While the people were very much alive, I saw a dead philosophy -- Cold
War anti-communism and neo-imperialism -- walking the corridors of the Pentagon. It
wore the clothing of counterterrorism and spoke the language of a holy war between
good and evil. The evil was recognized by the leadership to be resident mainly in the
Middle East and articulated by Islamic clerics and radicals. But there were other
enemies within, anyone who dared voice any skepticism about their grand plans,
including Secretary of State Colin Powell and General Anthony Zinni.
From May 2002 until February 2003, I observed firsthand the formation of the
Pentagon's Office of Special Plans and watched the latter stages of the
neoconservative capture of the policy-intelligence nexus in the run-up to the
invasion of Iraq. This seizure of the reins of U.S. Middle East policy was directly
visible to many of us working in the Near East South Asia policy office, and yet
there seemed to be little any of us could do about it.
I saw a narrow and deeply flawed policy favored by some executive appointees in the
Pentagon used to manipulate and pressurize the traditional relationship between
policymakers in the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence agencies.
I witnessed neoconservative agenda bearers within OSP usurp measured and carefully
considered assessments, and through suppression and distortion of intelligence
analysis promulgate what were in fact falsehoods to both Congress and the executive
office of the president.
While this commandeering of a narrow segment of both intelligence production and
American foreign policy matched closely with the well-published desires of the
neoconservative wing of the Republican Party, many of us in the Pentagon,
conservatives and liberals alike, felt that this agenda, whatever its flaws or
merits, had never been openly presented to the American people. Instead, the public
story line was a fear-peddling and confusing set of messages, designed to take
Congress and the country into a war of executive choice, a war based on false
pretenses, and a war one year later Americans do not really understand. That is why I
have gone public with my account.
To begin with, I was introduced to Bill Luti, assistant secretary of defense for
NESA. A tall, thin, nervously intelligent man, he welcomed me into the fold. I knew
little about him. Because he was a recently retired naval captain and now high-level
Bush appointee, the common assumption was that he had connections, if not capability.
I would later find out that when Dick Cheney was secretary of defense over a decade
earlier, Luti was his aide. He had also been a military aide to Speaker of the House
Newt Gingrich during the Clinton years and had completed his Ph.D. at the Fletcher
School at Tufts University. While his Navy career had not granted him flag rank, he
had it now and was not shy about comparing his place in the pecking order with
various three- and four-star generals and admirals in and out of the Pentagon. Name
dropping included references to getting this or that document over to Scooter, or
responding to one of Scooter's requests right away. Scooter, I would find out later,
was I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, the vice president's chief of staff.
Co-workers who had watched the transition from Clintonista to Bushite shared
conversations and stories indicating that something deliberate and manipulative was
happening to NESA. Key professional personnel, longtime civilian professionals
holding the important billets in NESA, were replaced early on during the transition.
Longtime officer director Joe McMillan was reassigned to the National Defense
University. The director's job in the time of transition was to help bring the newly
appointed deputy assistant secretary up to speed, ensure office continuity, act as a
resource relating to regional histories and policies, and help identify the best ways
to maintain course or to implement change. Removing such a critical continuity factor
was not only unusual but also seemed like willful handicapping. It was the first
signal of radical change.
At the time, I didn't realize that the expertise on Middle East policy was not only
being removed, but was also being exchanged for that from various agenda-bearing
think tanks, including the Middle East Media Research Institute, the Washington
Institute for Near East Policy, and the Jewish Institute for National Security
Affairs. Interestingly, the office director billet stayed vacant the whole time I was
there. That vacancy and the long-term absence of real regional understanding to
inform defense policymakers in the Pentagon explains a great deal about the
neoconservative approach on the Middle East and the disastrous mistakes made in
Washington and in Iraq in the past two years.
I soon saw the modus operandi of "instant policy" unhampered by debate or experience
with the early Bush administration replacement of the civilian head of the Israel,
Lebanon and Syria desk office with a young political appointee from the Washington
Institute, David Schenker. Word was that the former experienced civilian desk officer
tended to be evenhanded toward the policies of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of Israel,
but there were complaints and he was gone. I met David and chatted with him
frequently. He was a smart, serious, hardworking guy, and the proud author of a book
on the chances for Palestinian democracy. Country desk officers were rarely political
appointees. In my years at the Pentagon, this was the only "political" I knew doing
that type of high-stress and low-recognition duty. So eager was the office to have
Schenker at the Israel desk, he served for many months as a defense contractor of
sorts and only received his "Schedule C" political appointee status months after I
arrived.
I learned that there was indeed a preferred ideology for NESA. My first day in the
office, a GS-15 career civil servant rather unhappily advised me that if I wanted to
be successful here, I'd better remember not to say anything positive about the
Palestinians. This belied official U.S. policy of serving as an honest broker for
resolution of Israeli and Palestinian security concerns. At that time, there was a
great deal of talk about Bush's possible support for a Palestinian state. That the
Pentagon could have implemented and, worse, was implementing its own foreign policy
had not yet occurred to me.
Throughout the summer, the NESA spaces in one long office on the fourth floor,
between the 7th and 8th corridors of D Ring, became more and more crowded. With war
talk and planning about Iraq, all kinds of new people were brought in. A politically
savvy civilian-clothes-wearing lieutenant colonel named Bill Bruner served as the
Iraq desk officer, and he had apparently joined NESA about the time Bill Luti did. I
discovered that Bruner, like Luti, had served as a military aide to Speaker Gingrich.
Gingrich himself was now conveniently an active member of Bush's Defense Policy
Board, which had space immediately below ours on the third floor.
I asked why Bruner wore civilian attire, and was told by others, "He's Chalabi's
handler". Chalabi, of course, was Ahmad Chalabi, the president of the Iraqi National
Congress, who was the favored exile of the neoconservatives and the source of much of
their "intelligence." Bruner himself said he had to attend a lot of meetings downtown
in hotels and that explained his suits. Soon, in July, he was joined by another Air
Force pilot, a colonel with no discernible political connections, Kevin Jones. I
thought of it as a military-civilian partnership, although both were commissioned
officers.
Among the other people arriving over the summer of 2002 was Michael Makovsky, a
recent MIT graduate who had written his dissertation on Winston Churchill and was
going to work on "Iraqi oil issues". He was David Makovsky's younger brother. David
was at the time a senior fellow at the Washington Institute and had formerly been an
editor of the Jerusalem Post, a pro-Likud newspaper. Mike was quiet and seemed a bit
uncomfortable sharing space with us. He soon disappeared into some other part of the
operation and I rarely saw him after that.
In late summer, new space was found upstairs on the fifth floor, and the "expanded
Iraq desk," now dubbed the "Office of Special Plans", began moving there. And OSP
kept expanding.
Another person I observed to appear suddenly was Michael Rubin, another Washington
Institute fellow working on Iraq policy. He and Chris Straub, a retired Army officer
who had been a Republican staffer for the Senate Intelligence Committee, were
eventually assigned to OSP.
John Trigilio, a Defense Intelligence Agency analyst, was assigned to handle Iraq
intelligence for Luti. Trigilio had been on a one-year career-enhancement tour with
the office of the secretary of defense that was to end in August 2002. DIA had
offered him routine intelligence positions upon his return from his OSD sabbatical,
but none was as interesting as working in August 2002 for Luti. John asked Luti for
help in gaining an extension for another year, effectively removing him from the DIA
bureaucracy and its professional constraints.
Trigilio and I had hallway debates, as friends. The one I remember most clearly was
shortly after President Bush gave his famous "mushroom cloud" speech in Cincinnati in
October 2002, asserting that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction as well as ties
to "international terrorists", and was working feverishly to develop nuclear weapons
with "nuclear holy warriors". I asked John who was feeding the president all the bull
about Saddam and the threat he posed us in terms of WMD delivery and his links to
terrorists, as none of this was in secret intelligence I had seen in the past years.
John insisted that it wasn't an exaggeration, but when pressed to say which actual
intelligence reports made these claims, he would only say, "Karen, we have sources
that you don't have access to". It was widely felt by those of us in the office not
in the neoconservatives' inner circle that these "sources" related to the chummy
relationship that Ahmad Chalabi had with both the Office of Special Plans and the
office of the vice president.
The newly named director of the OSP, Abram Shulsky
(http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Abram_Shulsky), was one of the most
senior people sharing our space that summer. Abe, a kindly and gentle man, who would
say hello to me in the hallways, seemed to be someone I, as a political science grad
student, would have loved to sit with over coffee and discuss the world's problems. I
had a clear sense that Abe ranked high in the organization, although ostensibly he
was under Luti. Luti was known at times to treat his staff, even senior staff, with
disrespect, contempt and derision. He also didn't take kindly to staff officers who
had an opinion or viewpoint that was off the neoconservative reservation. But with
Shulsky, who didn't speak much at the staff meetings, he was always respectful and
deferential. It seemed like Shulsky's real boss was somebody like Douglas Feith or
higher.
Doug Feith (http://rightweb.irc-online.org/ind/feith/feith.php), undersecretary of
defense for policy, was a case study in how not to run a large organization. In late
2001, he held the first all-hands policy meeting at which he discussed for over 15
minutes how many bullets and sub-bullets should be in papers for Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld. A year later, in August of 2002, he held another all-hands meeting in the
auditorium where he embarrassed everyone with an emotional performance about what it
was like to serve Rumsfeld. He blithely informed us that for months he didn't realize
Rumsfeld had a daily stand-up meeting with his four undersecretaries. He shared with
us the fact that, after he started to attend these meetings, he knew better what
Rumsfeld wanted of him. Most military staffers and professional civilians hearing
this were incredulous, as was I, to hear of such organizational ignorance lasting so
long and shared so openly. Feith's inattention to most policy detail, except that
relating to Israel and Iraq, earned him a reputation most foul throughout Policy,
with rampant stories of routine signatures that took months to achieve and lost
documents. His poor reputation as a manager was not helped by his arrogance. One
thing I kept hearing from those defending Feith was that he was "just brilliant." It
was curiously like the brainwashed refrain in "The Manchurian Candidate" about the
programmed sleeper agent Raymond Shaw, as the "kindest, warmest, bravest, most
wonderful human being I've ever known."
I spent time that summer exploring the neoconservative worldview and trying to grasp
what was happening inside the Pentagon. I wondered what could explain this rush to
war and disregard for real intelligence. Neoconservatives are fairly easy to study,
mainly because they are few in number, and they show up at all the same parties.
Examining them as individuals, it became clear that almost all have worked together,
in and out of government, on national security issues for several decades. The
Project for the New American Century and its now famous 1998 manifesto to President
Clinton on Iraq is a recent example
(http://www.newamericancentury.org/iraqclintonletter.htm). But this statement was
preceded by one written for Benyamin Netanyahu's Likud Party campaign in Israel in
1996 by neoconservatives Richard Perle, David Wurmser and Douglas Feith titled "A
Clean Break: Strategy for Securing the Realm"
(http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article1438.htm).
David Wurmser (http://rightweb.irc-online.org/ind/wurmser_d/wurmser-d.php) is the
least known of that trio and an interesting example of the tangled neoconservative
web. In 2001, the research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute
(http://rightweb.irc-online.org/org/aei.php) was assigned to the Pentagon, then moved
to the Department of State to work as deputy for the hard-line conservative
undersecretary John Bolton (http://rightweb.irc-online.org/ind/bolton/bolton.php),
then to the National Security Council, and now is lodged in the office of the vice
president. His wife, the prolific Meyrav Wurmser, executive director of the Middle
East Media Research Institute, is also a neoconservative team player.
Before the Iraq invasion, many of these same players labored together for literally
decades to push a defense strategy that favored military intervention and
confrontation with enemies, secret and unconstitutional if need be. Some former
officials, such as Richard Perle, an assistant secretary of defense under Reagan
(http://rightweb.irc-online.org/ind/perle/perle.php) and James Woolsey, CIA director
under Clinton (http://rightweb.irc-online.org/ind/woolsey/woolsey.php), were granted
a new lease on life, a renewed gravitas, with positions on President Bush's Defense
Policy Board. Others, like Elliott Abrams and Paul Wolfowitz, had apparently overcome
previous negative associations from an Iran-Contra conviction for lying to the
Congress and for utterly miscalculating the strength of the Soviet Union in a
politically driven report to the CIA.
Neoconservatives march as one phalanx in parallel opposition to those they hate. In
the early winter of 2002, a co-worker U.S. Navy captain and I were discussing the
service being rendered by Colin Powell at the time, and we were told by the
neoconservative political appointee David Schenker that "the best service Powell
could offer would be to quit right now".
I was present at a staff meeting when Bill Luti
(http://rightweb.irc-online.org/ind/luti/luti.php) called Marine General and former
Chief of Central Command Anthony Zinni a "traitor", because Zinni had publicly
expressed reservations about the rush to war.
After August 2002, the Office of Special Plans established its own rhythm and cadence
separate from the non-politically minded professionals covering the rest of the
region. While often accused of creating intelligence, I saw only two apparent
products of this office: war planning guidance for Rumsfeld, presumably impacting
Central Command, and talking points on Iraq, WMD and terrorism. These internal
talking points seemed to be a mélange crafted from obvious past observation and
intelligence bits and pieces of dubious origin. They were propagandistic in style,
and all desk officers were ordered to use them verbatim in the preparation of any
material prepared for higher-ups and people outside the Pentagon. The talking points
included statements about Saddam Hussein's proclivity for using chemical weapons
against his own citizens and neighbors, his existing relations with terrorists based
on a member of al-Qaida reportedly receiving medical care in Baghdad, his widely
publicized aid to the Palestinians, and general indications of an aggressive
viability in Saddam Hussein's nuclear weapons program and his ongoing efforts to use
them against his neighbors or give them to al-Qaida style groups. The talking points
said he was threatening his neighbors and was a serious threat to the U.S., too.
I suspected, from reading Charles Krauthammer, a neoconservative columnist for the
Washington Post, and the Weekly Standard, and hearing a Cheney speech or two, that
these talking points left the building on occasion. Both OSP functions duplicated
other parts of the Pentagon. The facts we should have used to base our papers on were
already being produced by the intelligence agencies, and the war planning was already
done by the combatant command staff with some help from the Joint Staff. Instead of
developing defense policy alternatives and advice, OSP was used to manufacture
propaganda for internal and external use, and pseudo war planning.
As a result of my duties as the North Africa desk officer, I became acquainted with
the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) support staff for NESA. Every policy regional
director was served by a senior executive intelligence professional from DIA, along
with a professional intelligence staff. This staff channeled DIA products, accepted
tasks for DIA, and in the past had been seen as a valued member of the regional
teams. However, as the war approached, this type of relationship with the Defense
Intelligence Agency crumbled.
Even the most casual observer could note the tension and even animosity between "Wild
Bill" Luti (as we came to refer to our boss) and Bruce Hardcastle, our defense
intelligence officer (DIO). Certainly, there were stylistic and personality
differences. Hardcastle, like most senior intelligence officers I knew, was serious,
reserved, deliberate, and went to great lengths to achieve precision and accuracy in
his speech and writing. Luti was the kind of guy who, in staff meetings and in
conversations, would jump from grand theory to administrative minutiae with nary a
blink or a fleeting shadow of self-awareness.
I discovered that Luti and possibly others within OSP were dissatisfied with
Hardcastle's briefings, in particular with the aspects relating to WMD and terrorism.
I was not clear exactly what those concerns were, but I came to understand that the
DIA briefing did not match what OSP was claiming about Iraq's WMD capabilities and
terrorist activities. I learned that shortly before I arrived there had been an
incident in NESA where Hardcastle's presence and briefing at a bilateral meeting had
been nixed abruptly by Luti. The story circulating among the desk officers was "a
last-minute cancellation" of the DIO presentation. Hardcastle's intelligence briefing
was replaced with one prepared by another Policy office that worked nonproliferation
issues. While this alternative briefing relied on intelligence produced by DIO and
elsewhere, it was not a product of the DIA or CIA community, but instead was an OSD
Policy "branded" product -- and so were its conclusions. The message sent by Policy
appointees and well understood by staff officers and the defense intelligence
community was that senior appointed civilians were willing to exclude or marginalize
intelligence products that did not fit the agenda.
Staff officers would always request OSP's most current Iraq, WMD and terrorism
talking points. On occasion, these weren't available in an approved form and awaited
Shulsky's approval. The talking points were a series of bulleted statements, written
persuasively and in a convincing way, and superficially they seemed reasonable and
rational. Saddam Hussein had gassed his neighbors, abused his people, and was
continuing in that mode, becoming an imminently dangerous threat to his neighbors and
to us -- except that none of his neighbors or Israel felt this was the case. Saddam
Hussein had harbored al-Qaida operatives and offered and probably provided them with
training facilities -- without mentioning that the suspected facilities were in the
U.S./Kurdish-controlled part of Iraq. Saddam Hussein was pursuing and had WMD of the
type that could be used by him, in conjunction with al-Qaida and other terrorists, to
attack and damage American interests, Americans and America -- except the
intelligence didn't really say that. Saddam Hussein had not been seriously weakened
by war and sanctions and weekly bombings over the past 12 years, and in fact was
plotting to hurt America and support anti-American activities, in part through his
carrying on with terrorists -- although here the intelligence said the opposite. His
support for the Palestinians and Arafat proved his terrorist connections, and
basically, the time to act was now. This was the gist of the talking points, and it
remained on message throughout the time I watched the points evolve.
But evolve they did, and the subtle changes I saw from September to late January
revealed what the Office of Special Plans was contributing to national security. Two
key types of modifications were directed or approved by Shulsky and his team of
politicos. First was the deletion of entire references or bullets. The one I remember
most specifically is when they dropped the bullet that said one of Saddam's
intelligence operatives had met with Mohammad Atta in Prague, supposedly salient
proof that Saddam was in part responsible for the 9/11 attack. That claim had lasted
through a number of revisions, but after the media reported the claim as
unsubstantiated by U.S. intelligence, denied by the Czech government, and that Atta's
location had been confirmed by the FBI to be elsewhere, that particular bullet was
dropped entirely from our "advice on things to say" to senior Pentagon officials when
they met with guests or outsiders.
The other change made to the talking points was along the line of fine-tuning and
generalizing. Much of what was there was already so general as to be less than
accurate.
Some bullets were softened, particularly statements of Saddam's readiness and
capability in the chemical, biological or nuclear arena. Others were altered over
time to match more exactly something Bush and Cheney said in recent speeches. One
item I never saw in our talking points was a reference to Saddam's purported attempt
to buy yellowcake uranium in Niger. The OSP list of crime and evil had included
Saddam's attempts to seek fissionable materials or uranium in Africa. This point was
written mostly in the present tense and conveniently left off the dates of the last
known attempt, sometime in the late 1980s. I was surprised to hear the president's
mention of the yellowcake in Niger in his 2003 State of the Union address because
that indeed was new and in theory might have represented new intelligence, something
that seemed remarkably absent in any of the products provided us by the OSP (although
not for lack of trying). After hearing of it, I checked with my old office of
Sub-Saharan African Affairs -- and it was news to them, too. It also turned out to be
false.
It is interesting today that the "defense" for those who lied or prevaricated about
Iraq is to point the finger at the intelligence. But the National Intelligence
Estimate, published in September 2002, as remarked upon recently by former CIA Middle
East chief Ray McGovern, was an afterthought
(http://tompaine.com/feature2.cfm/ID/9917). It was provoked only after Sens. Bob
Graham and Dick Durban noted in August 2002, as Congress was being asked to support a
resolution for preemptive war, that no NIE elaborating real threats to the United
States had been provided. In fact, it had not been written, but a suitable NIE was
dutifully prepared and submitted the very next month. Naturally, this document
largely supported most of the outrageous statements already made publicly by Bush,
Cheney, Rice and Rumsfeld about the threat Iraq posed to the United States. All the
caveats, reservations and dissents made by intelligence were relegated to footnotes
and kept from the public. Funny how that worked.
Starting in the fall of 2002 I found a way to vent my frustrations with the
neoconservative hijacking of our defense policy. The safe outlet was provided by
retired Colonel David Hackworth
(http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2003/08/04/hackworth), who agreed to publish my
short stories anonymously on his Web site Soldiers for the Truth, under the moniker
of "Deep Throat: Insider Notes From the Pentagon." The "deep throat" part was his
idea, but I was happy to have a sense that there were folks out there, mostly
military, who would be interested in the secretary of defense-sponsored insanity I
was witnessing on almost a daily basis. When I was particularly upset, like when I
heard Zinni called a "traitor", I wrote about it in articles like this one
(http://www.amconmag.com/2004_01_19/article1.html).
In November, my Insider articles discussed the artificial worlds created by the
Pentagon and the stupid naiveté of neocon assumptions about what would happen when
we invaded Iraq.
I discussed the price of public service distinguishing between public servants who
told the truth and then saw their careers flame out and those "public servants" who
did not tell the truth and saw their careers ignite. My December articles became more
depressing, discussing the history of the 100 Years' War
(http://www.lewrockwell.com/kwiatkowski/kwiatkowski101.html) and "combat lobotomies".
There was a painful one titled "Minority Reports" about the necessity but
unlikelihood of a Philip Dick sci-fi style "minority report" on
Feith-Wolfowitz-Rumsfeld-Cheney's insanely grandiose vision of some future Middle
East, with peace, love and democracy brought on through preemptive war and military
occupation.
I shared some of my concerns with a civilian who had been remotely acquainted with
the Luti-Feith-Perle political clan in his previous work for one of the senior
Pentagon witnesses during the Iran-Contra hearings. He told me these guys were
engaged in something worse than Iran-Contra. I was curious but he wouldn't tell me
anything more. I figured he knew what he was talking about. I thought of him when I
read much later about the 2002 and 2003 meetings between Michael Ledeen, Reuel Marc
Gerecht and Iranian arms dealer Manucher Ghorbanifar -- all Iran-Contra figures.
In December 2002, I requested an acceleration of my retirement to the following July.
By now, the military was anxiously waiting under the bed for the other shoe to drop
amid concerns over troop availability, readiness for an ill-defined mission, and lack
of day-after clarity. The neocons were anxiously struggling to get that damn shoe
off. That other shoe fell with a thump, as did the regard many of us had held for
Colin Powell, on Feb. 5 as the secretary of state capitulated to the neoconservative
line in his speech at the United Nations -- a speech not only filled with falsehoods
pushed by the neoconservatives but also containing many statements already debunked
by intelligence.
War is generally crafted and pursued for political reasons, but the reasons given to
the Congress and to the American people for this one were inaccurate and so
misleading as to be false. Moreover, they were false by design. Certainly, the
neoconservatives never bothered to sell the rest of the country on the real reasons
for occupation of Iraq -- more bases from which to flex U.S. muscle with Syria and
Iran, and better positioning for the inevitable fall of the regional ruling
sheikdoms. Maintaining OPEC on a dollar track and not a euro and fulfilling a
half-baked imperial vision also played a role. These more accurate reasons for
invading and occupying could have been argued on their merits -- an angry and
aggressive U.S. population might indeed have supported the war and occupation for
those reasons. But Americans didn't get the chance for an honest debate.
President Bush has now appointed a commission to look at American intelligence
capabilities and will report after the election. It will "examine intelligence on
weapons of mass destruction and related 21st century threats ... [and] compare what
the Iraq Survey Group learns with the information we had prior..." The commission,
aside from being modeled on failed rubber stamp commissions of the past and
consisting entirely of those selected by the executive branch, specifically excludes
an examination of the role of the Office of Special Plans and other executive
advisory bodies. If the president or vice president were seriously interested in
"getting the truth," they might consider asking for evidence on how intelligence was
politicized, misused and manipulated, and whether information from the intelligence
community was distorted in order to sway Congress and public opinion in a narrowly
conceived neoconservative push for war. Bush says he wants the truth, but it is clear
he is no more interested in it today than he was two years ago.
Proving that the truth is indeed the first casualty in war, neoconservative member of
the Defense Policy Board Richard Perle called this February for "heads to roll."
Perle, agenda setter par excellence, named George Tenet and Defense Intelligence
Agency head Vice Adm. Lowell Jacoby as guilty of failing to properly inform the
president on Iraq and WMD. No doubt, the intelligence community, susceptible to
politicization and outdated paradigms, needs reform. The swiftness of the
neoconservative casting of blame on the intelligence community and away from
themselves should have been fully expected. Perhaps Perle and others sense the grave
and growing danger of political storms unleashed by the exposure of neoconservative
lies. Meanwhile, Ahmad Chalabi, extravagantly funded by the neocons in the Pentagon
to the tune of millions to provide the disinformation, has boasted with remarkable
frankness, "We are heroes in error," and, "What was said before is not important."
Now we are told by our president and neoconservative mouthpieces that our sons and
daughters, husbands and wives are in Iraq fighting for freedom, for liberty, for
justice and American values. This cost is not borne by the children of Wolfowitz,
Perle, Rumsfeld and Cheney. Bush's daughters do not pay this price. We are told that
intelligence has failed America, and that President Bush is determined to get to the
bottom of it. Yet not a single neoconservative appointee has lost his job, and no
high official of principle in the administration has formally resigned because of
this ill-planned and ill-conceived war and poorly implemented occupation of Iraq.
Will Americans hold U.S. policymakers accountable? Will we return to our roots as a
republic, constrained and deliberate, respectful of others? My experience in the
Pentagon leading up to the invasion and occupation of Iraq tells me, as Ben Franklin
warned, we may have already failed. But if Americans at home are willing to fight --
tenaciously and courageously -- to preserve our republic, we might be able to keep
it.
http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2004/03/10/osp_moveon/print.html