@@ White House manipulation of the media @@
Arash
October 19, 2005
Secrets, Evasions and Classified Reports
The CIA leak case isn’t just about whether top officials will be indicted. A larger
issue is what Judith Miller’s evidence says about White House manipulation of the
media.
By Michael Isikoff & Mark Hosenball
The lengthy account by New York Times reporter Judy Miller
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judith_Miller_%28journalist%29) about her grand jury
testimony in the CIA leak case inadvertently provides a revealing window into how the
Bush administration manipulated journalists about intelligence on Iraq’s nonexistent
weapons of mass destruction.
Whatever the implications for special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald’s probe
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_Fitzgerald), Judith Miller describes a
conversation with Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, Lewis (Scooter) Libby
(http://rightweb.irc-online.org/ind/libby/libby.php), on July 8, 2003, where he
appears to significantly misrepresent the contents of still-classified material from
a crucial prewar intelligence-community document about Iraq.
With no weapons of mass destruction having been found in Iraq and new questions being
raised about the case for war, Lewis Libby assured Judith Miller that day that the
still-classified document, a National Intelligence Estimate, NIE
(http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB129), contained even stronger evidence
that would support the White House’s conclusions about Iraq’s weapons programs,
according to Judith Miller’s account.
In fact, a declassified version of the NIE was publicly released just 10 days later,
and it showed almost precisely the opposite. The NIE, it turned out, contained
caveats and qualifiers that had never been publicly acknowledged by the
administration prior to the invasion of Iraq. It also included key dissents by State
Department intelligence analysts, Energy Department scientists and Air Force
technical experts about some important aspects of the administration’s case.
The assertion that still-secret material would bolster the administration’s claims
about Iraqi WMD was “certainly not accurate, it was not true”, says Jessica Mathews
(http://www.carnegieendowment.org/about/staff/index.cfm?fa=expert_view&expert_id=18&prog=zgp),
president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, who coauthored a study
last year, titled “A Tale of Two Intelligence Estimates”, about different versions of
the NIE that were released
(http://www.carnegieendowment.org/publications/index.cfm?fa=view&id=1489). If Judith
Miller’s account is correct, Lewis Libby was “misrepresenting the intelligence” that
was contained in the document, she said.
A spokeswoman for Cheney’s office said today that she could not respond to Miller’s
account because it described grand jury testimony in the Valerie Plame Wilson leak
case (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valerie_Plame). Following standard White House
policy, the vice president’s office does not intend to make any public comments on
any matter relating to the investigation until after it is complete.
Lewis Libby’s comments about the NIE may seem at this point a sideshow to the
pressing question that is currently consuming much of Washington: whether he or any
other White House official will be charged with any crimes stemming from the outing
of CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plame_Affair), the
wife of former ambassador and administration critic Joseph Wilson
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_C._Wilson).
But Lewis Libby’s comments do touch on what many believe is a larger issue raised by
the case: whether the administration accurately represented the nature of what the
U.S. intelligence community knew, and didn’t know, about Saddam Hussein’s weapons
programs before the nation went to war.
The NIE was no small matter in that debate. Hastily prepared in the fall of 2002 at
the request of members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, the NIE was supposed to
be a blue-ribbon document that represented the consensus view of U.S. government
intelligence agencies. A white paper based on the NIE was publicly released by the
administration in early October 2002—just one week before Congress voted on a
resolution authorizing the president to go to war.
The publicly released white paper unequivocally backed up the White House’s case
about the dangers posed by Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs. It
stated boldly and without caveats in the first paragraph that Baghdad “has chemical
and biological weapons” and “if left unchecked, it probably will have a nuclear
weapon during this decade.” If Iraq obtains sufficient weapons-grade material from
abroad, the white paper further warned, Baghdad could make a nuclear weapon “within a
year”.
To support its conclusions about an Iraqi nuclear program, it prominently cited,
among other factors, Iraq’s “aggressive attempts” to purchase high-strength aluminum
tubes—an effort that Miller and her colleague Michael Gordon
(http://www.nytimes.com/pages/world/worldspecial3) had first written about in an
influential front-page story for The New York Times the previous September 8, 2002
(http://www.realdemocracy.com/abomb.htm).
When Judith Miller met with Lewis Libby for two hours at Washington’s Ritz-Carlton
Hotel on July 8, 2003, the vice president’s top aide provided an additional detail
that was not contained in the white paper, according to Judith Miller’s account
published in last Sunday’s New York Times
(http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/101505W.shtml). The still-classified NIE, Lewis
Libby told her, “had firmly concluded that Iraq was seeking uranium” for a nuclear
bomb.
The new information was potentially significant at that moment because it came just
two days after a New York Times op-ed by ambassador Joseph Wilson challenging the
administration’s claims about Iraqi attempts to purchase uranium
(http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0706-02.htm). In the op-ed, ambassador Wilson
had come forward for the first time to say that he had personally undertaken a
CIA-sponsored mission to Niger the year before and concluded that reports of Iraqi
attempts to purchase uranium from that country could not be substantiated.
As Judith Miller describes it, Lewis Libby’s principal message during their two-hour
breakfast meeting that day was to rebut ambassador Joseph Wilson’s attacks, launching
what she describes as a “lengthy and sharp critique” in which he laid out the
“credible evidence” of Iraqi attempts to buy uranium from Niger.
But Judith Miller wanted more specifics. She “pressed Lewis Libby to discuss
additional information about Iraq’s nuclear program that was in the more detailed,
classified version of the estimate”, Miller wrote, referring to the NIE. If the New
York Times was going to do an article, “the newspaper needed more than a recap of the
administration’s weapons arguments”.
Lewis Libby, though, “said little more than that the assessments of the classified
estimate were even stronger than those in the unclassified version”, Judith Miller
wrote.
Even when she sought to change the subject to Iraq’s chemical and biological weapons
programs, Judith Miller continues, “my notes show that Lewis Libby consistently
steered our conversation back to the administration’s nuclear claims. His main theme
echoed that of other senior officials: that contrary to ambassador Wilson’s
criticism, the administration had had ample reason to be concerned about Iraq’s
nuclear capabilities based on the regime’s history of weapons development, its use of
unconventional weapons and fresh intelligence reports”.
What Judith Miller didn’t mention in her article is that on July 18, 2003, the White
House did release a more detailed version of the NIE. At the time, White House aides
were trying to explain how the claims about Iraqi uranium purchases in Africa had
mistakenly found their way into the president’s State of the Union Message that
year—even though, it turns out, they were partially based on documents that were
forged.
But contrary to what Lewis Libby told Judith Miller, the more detailed version of the
NIE was hardly stronger. In fact, it revealed for the first time, in the very first
paragraph—right after the sentence that “if left unchecked, [Iraq] probably will have
a nuclear weapon during this decade”—the fact that the State Department’s
intelligence arm, the Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), had an “alternative
view” of the matter.
That alternative view, relegated to a boxed footnote inside the document, stated
that while INR believed that Saddam “continues to want nuclear weapons” and had a
“limited effort” underway to acquire nuclear capabilities, the evidence does not add
up to a “compelling case” that Iraq was pursuing a full-scale nuclear weapons
program. “Iraq may be doing so”, the footnote read, “but INR considers the available
evidence inadequate to support such a judgment”.
Specifically, the INR analysts challenged the assertion that Iraq’s purchase of
aluminum tubes was for the purpose of advancing a nuclear program. They noted that
“technical experts” at the Energy Department didn’t believe they were suited for such
uses. In fact, INR—citing the large number of tubes being purchased and the “atypical
lack of attention to operational security in the procurement efforts”—concluded that
the tubes are “not intended for use in Iraq’s nuclear weapon program”.
As for the purported Iraqi attempts to purchase uranium from Africa, the NIE did
indeed assert that Iraq had been “vigorously trying to procure uranium ore and yellow
cake”. It based that assessment on foreign government “reports” about attempted
purchases from Niger and two other African countries.
But the NIE also included an INR written annex in which the State Department analysts
concluded that claims of Iraq uranium purchases in Africa were “highly dubious”.
Those weren’t the only dissents included in the INR that had not been revealed in the
earlier white paper. The original pre-Iraq war white paper had asserted that Iraq was
developing an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) or missile that was “probably intended to
deliver biological warfare agents” and could even threaten “the U.S. homeland”. The
white paper had attributed these conclusions to “most analysts”.
In fact, the newly declassified NIE disclosed for the first time that the U.S. Air
Force’s intelligence agency, the Office of Intelligence, Surveillance and
Reconnaissance, had a different view. The Air Force intelligence agency “does not
agree” that Iraq’s UAVs were “primarily intended” for delivering biological weapons
and believed they were more likely to be primarily for reconnaissance, although
unconventional weapons delivery was “an inherent capability”.
As Carnegie president Jessica Mathews noted in her study last year, the actual NIE
had other caveats and qualifiers that were not in the declassified white paper that
was released before the war. In the prewar white paper, the words “we judge” and “we
assess” were deleted from five key findings of the NIE, making the conclusions seem
like flat declarative statements rather than more nuanced judgments. More
significantly, key sentences that were in the NIE—and revealed seeds of doubt about
some matters—were omitted from the prewar white paper. Among them: “We lack specific
information on many key aspects of Iraq’s WMD program”. Also: “We have low confidence
in our ability to assess when Saddam would use WMD”.
Judith Miller (http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Judith_Miller), who had
been among the most aggressive reporters in the country writing stories about the
threat posed by Iraqi WMD, was quoted in a New York Times article that accompanied
her piece last Sunday as saying for the first time” “WMD—I got it totally wrong. The
analysts, the experts and the journalists who covered them—we were all wrong”.
Today, in testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee
(http://judiciary.senate.gov/hearing.cfm?id=1637) on the need for a federal “shield”
law to protect journalists from having to disclose their sources, she elaborated a
bit: “As I painfully learned while covering intelligence estimates of Saddam’s
weapons of mass destruction, we are only as good as our sources. If they are
mistaken, we will be wrong.” She made no reference to Lewis Libby.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9756141/site/newsweek