hot piece from AntiWar.com -- and who is Julian Borger of the Guardian and when did he know it?

[Michael Eisenstadt]

Neocons Busted!
Dick Cheney is over – and so are the neoconservatives who lied us into war
by Justin Raimondo
You have to give CIA director George Tenet credit: he managed to pack 
more obfuscations, evasions, and outright lies into what couldn't have 
been more than a half hour speech than one might have thought humanly 
possible.

The purpose of Tenet's peroration was to get the President, and also his 
own Agency, off the hook when it comes to the complete absence of 
"weapons of mass destruction" in Iraq. Either the President of the 
United States and his advisors made it all up out of whole cloth, or the 
intelligence they were being fed was faulty. The first conclusion is not 
allowable, and so the second conclusion was the Republican line by 
default – and that, from Tenet's point of view, wasn't good either, 
because it looked like the CIA was being set up to take the fall. Thus, 
the speech had to walk a very fine line between blaming the boss, and 
taking it on the chin, and, when all is said and done, one has to say: 
Good job, George!

That is, if we don't look too closely….

"The question being asked about Iraq in the starkest terms is, were we 
right or were we wrong? In the intelligence business, you are almost 
never completely wrong or completely right. That applies in full to the 
question of Saddam's weapons of mass destruction. And like many of the 
toughest intelligence challenges, when the facts of Iraq are all in, we 
will neither be completely right nor completely wrong."

Nobody's right, nobody's wrong, and we're just gonna have to make the 
most of it. It's something that a philosophy teacher might want to put 
forward in the classroom – especially in our modern universities, where 
concepts of right, wrong, and objective reality are definitely out of 
fashion. But is this radical subjectivism really suited to a foreign 
policy of hegemonic preemption, which assumes the right to strike at a 
potential threat?

Secondly, the question being asked is not, were we right or wrong, but, 
rather: why were we so wrong?

Tenet says that the intelligence assessment of Iraqi WMD drew from three 
information streams: history, the UN inspection team, and "other means," 
including not only satellite imagery but also information funneled in 
through foreign intelligence agencies.

Looking at the history of Iraq's WMD, Tenet claims we couldn't have 
drawn any other conclusion but that the Iraqi dictator was 
reconstituting his program:

"Everyone knew that Iraq had chemical and biological weapons in the 
1980s and 1990s. Saddam Hussein used chemical weapons against Iran and 
his own people on at least 10 different occasions. He launched missiles 
against Iran, Saudi Arabia and Israel."

But that was more than a decade ago – before the crippling sanctions 
that decimated Iraq's military capabilities, as well as the civilian 
economy. Aside from that, however, Iraq, you'll remember, lost the war 
against Iran – in spite of our best efforts to help the Iraqi dictator 
prevail over Tehran. So much for the military value of Iraqi WMD.

It's true that, on Feb. 24, 1991, what the Pentagon's own propagandists 
called "a low-tech Scud ballistic missile armed with a conventional 
warhead" struck an American barracks in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, where 
twenty-eight soldiers died, and 98 were wounded. But that was at the 
height of Gulf War I, when the U.S. was invading Iraq and decimating its 
cities from the air – hardly a case of Saddam suddenly and inexplicably 
lashing out.

As for the equally low-tech Scuds he lobbed into Israel, these were 
unguided and flopped harmlessly to the ground, failing spectacularly in 
their mission of breaking apart the Anglo-American-Arab coalition 
assembled by Bush I. An article published by the official American 
Forces Press Service avers that "the Scud missiles in Hussein's arsenal 
were not much technologically beyond the Nazi V-2s."

How is a nation wielding World War II era weaponry a threat to America, 
with all its hi-tech super-duper military equipment – and a "defense" 
budget equaling more than the sum total of the top 25 spenders on God's 
green earth?

"By definition," said Tenet, "intelligence deals with the unclear, the 
unknown, the deliberately hidden." In analyzing his Georgetown remarks, 
it's best to keep that last phrase in mind.

The function of intelligence agencies worldwide, and down through the 
ages, has been to hide, rather than reveal. The problem however, is that 
it's becoming increasingly impossible to hide the truth in the age of 
instantaneous communications. Not only television, and other mass 
communications networks, but also the Internet make a policy of 
systematic lying virtually impossible to sustain. It used to be that war 
propaganda buried the truth for years, even decades, after the fact: now 
the machinations of the War Party are exposed practically before they 
are implemented.

As blogger Ken Layne famously put it: watch out, bud, because we can 
fact-check your ass.

"Our second stream of information," says Tenet, "was that the United 
Nations could not and Saddam would not account for all the weapons the 
Iraqis had: tons of chemical weapons precursors, hundreds of artillery 
shells and bombs filled with chemical or biological agents."

But where are these hundreds of bombs and shells? Where are the 
biological agents? They are nowhere to be seen: and that is the problem 
faced by this administration, and its apologists, which Tenet fails to 
surmount.

As Gertrude Stein said of her hometown of Oakland, California: There is 
no there there.

When Tenet says of the UN inspectors' work that "we did not take this 
data on face value," surely he is uttering a considerable 
understatement. The Americans disdained the repeated statements of Hans 
Blix that evidence of Iraqi WMD was thin to nonexistent. As war clouds 
darkened over the Middle Eastern horizon, Blix said he suspected Iraq 
had most likely destroyed its WMD shortly after Gulf War I – a statement 
that turned out to be right on the money. Yet Tenet claims:

"To conclude before the war that Saddam had destroyed his existing 
weapons, we would have had to ignore what the United Nations and allied 
intelligence said they could not verify."

But Blix and the UN pleaded with the Americans and their British allies 
to hold off for a while, to give the inspectors the time they needed to 
verify what turned out to be the truth. Saddam's last minute proposal to 
let the UN inspectors back in without conditions was brushed aside. The 
rush to war was not to be stopped.

"The third stream of information," according to Tenet, "came after the 
U.N. inspectors left Iraq in 1998. We gathered intelligence through 
human agents, satellite photos and communications intercepts. Other 
foreign intelligence services were clearly focused on Iraq and assisted 
in the effort."

Tenet's description of the various bits of evidence gathered up by 
purely technological means is baffling: if the incidents he recounts are 
true, then where's the beef? Why were the satellite photos wrong, or 
misleading? How is it that those intercepted communications haven't 
provided any leads in physically tracking down the missing WMD?

In getting down to brass tacks, Tenet essentially admits that arms 
inspector David Kay was absolutely right when he said "we were almost 
all wrong." He just says it in a more roundabout way:

"Our community said with high confidence that Saddam was continuing and 
expanding his missile programs, contrary to U.N. resolutions. He had 
missiles and other systems with ranges in excess of UN restrictions and 
he was seeking missiles with even longer ranges.

"What do we know today? Since the war we have found an aggressive Iraqi 
missile program concealed from the international community."

Iraq, we are told, would have made "improvements" if the war had not 
occurred, a prediction worthy of Nostradamus. Oh yes, and "Iraq had 
plans and advanced design work." Plenty of plans and programs, but no 
missiles. To date, not a single missile with a range beyond the 
permitted distance has been found.

There's no there there, is there?

This becomes even more apparent when Tenet gets to the rather sensitive 
topic of the unmanned aerial drones that George W. Bush declared to be a 
threat to the U.S. mainland. Tenet loyally echoes Bush's assessment, and 
goes on to ask:

"What do we know today? The Iraq Survey Group found that two separate 
groups in Iraq were working on a number of unmanned aerial vehicles 
designs that were hidden from the U.N. until Iraq's declaration in 
December of 2002. Now we know that important design elements were never 
fully declared.

"The question of intent, especially regarding the smaller unmanned 
aerial vehicle, is still out there. But we should remember that the 
Iraqis flight tested an aerial biological weapons spray system intended 
for a large unmanned aerial vehicle.

"A senior Iraqi official has now admitted that their two large unmanned 
vehicles, one developed in the early '90s and the other under 
development in late 2000, were intended for the delivery of biological 
weapons.

"My provisional bottom line today: We detected the development of 
prohibited and undeclared unmanned aerial vehicles. But the jury is 
still out on whether Iraq intended to use its newer, smaller unmanned 
aerial vehicle to deliver biological weapons."

This is utter nonsense. As the Associated Press reported last year:

"Huddled over a fleet of abandoned Iraqi drones, U.S. weapons experts in 
Baghdad came to one conclusion: Despite the Bush administration's public 
assertions, these unmanned aerial vehicles weren't designed to dispense 
biological or chemical weapons. The evidence gathered this summer 
matched the views of Air Force intelligence analysts who argued in a 
national intelligence assessment of Iraq before the war that the 
remotely piloted planes were unarmed reconnaissance drones."

The commander of the facility where the drones were found, and 
interviews with Iraqi scientists, yielded the same conclusions.

In spite of Colin Powell's extravagant fantasy, which had Iraqi drones 
spraying poison over American cities, the dissenting footnotes to the 
national intelligence assessment on Iraq turned out to have been right. 
The Defense Intelligence Agency agreed with their Air Force 
counterparts: those drones didn't have the capabilities to dispense WMD. 
They were strictly for reconnaissance. After American troops combed the 
conquered country, searching for an ex post facto rationalization for 
the war, these infamous drones were found in various stages of 
disrepair. Scientists were brought in to analyze the find, and their 
assessment was unequivocal:

"'We just looked at the UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) and said, 
"There's nothing here. There's no room to put anything in here,"' one of 
the scientists said. The wingspan on drones that Iraqis showed 
journalists in March measured 24.5 feet, and the aircraft were built 
like large, model airplanes."

There's no there there.

Tenet backs away completely from the nuclear issue, contending that the 
CIA never claimed Saddam had nukes to begin with, and conceding, in the 
end, that "we may have overestimated the progress Saddam was making." 
Again, Tenet's penchant for understatement is notable, especially 
considering National Security advisor Condoleeza Rice's dramatic 
assertion that

"The problem here is that there will always be some uncertainty about 
how quickly he [Saddam] can acquire nuclear weapons. But we don't want 
the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."

Nor did that stop Vice President Dick Cheney from going on Meet the 
Press and telling Tim Russert that Iraq could launch a nuclear attack:

Russert: "And even though the International Atomic Energy Agency said he 
does not have a nuclear program, we disagree?"

Cheney: "I disagree, yes. And you'll find the CIA, for example, and 
other key parts of our intelligence community disagree. Let's talk about 
the nuclear proposition for a minute. … We know that based on 
intelligence, that [Saddam] has been very, very good at hiding these 
kinds of efforts. He's had years to get good at it and we know he has 
been absolutely devoted to trying to acquire nuclear weapons. And we 
believe he has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons. I think Mr. 
ElBaradei, frankly, is wrong."

In this context, Tenet's statement that "most were convinced that he 
still had a program and if he obtained fissile material he could have a 
weapon within a year, but we detected no such acquisition" means: Don't 
blame us!

On the biological weapons front, it's the same story: the CIA initially 
distrusted reports of Iraq reconstituting its bio-chemical WMD, and, as 
it turned out, there were plenty of purported "plans," but, as Tenet 
lamely admits, no actual stocks of such weapons.

What's really interesting is that, aside from blaming, by implication, 
those administration officials, like Cheney and Rice, who clearly went 
overboard in an effort to ratchet up support for the war, Tenet also 
tries to shift the blame to those he calls "our foreign partners." Who 
are they? Tenet doesn't say, but begs us to understand "some of what was 
going on in the fall of 2002." According to the CIA chief:

"Several sensitive reports crossed my desk from two sources 
characterized by our foreign partners as established and reliable. The 
first from a source who had direct access to Saddam and his inner circle 
said Iraq was not in the possession of a nuclear weapon. However, Iraq 
was aggressively and covertly developing such a weapon. Saddam had 
recently called together his nuclear weapons committee, irate that Iraq 
did not yet have a weapon because money was no object and they possessed 
the scientific know-how….

"The same source said that Iraq was stockpiling chemical weapons and 
that equipment to produce insecticides under the oil-for-food program 
had been diverted to covert chemical weapons production. The source said 
that Iraq's weapons of last resort were mobile launchers armed with 
chemical weapons which would be fired at enemy forces in Israel…."

Now take a good guess as to the identity of our "foreign partner."

Reports that Israel was feeding the U.S. false information via the 
"Office of Special Plans" (OSP) – the nexus of the neoconservative cabal 
inside the administration – are varied and widespread. The Guardian's 
Julian Borger reports an Israeli equivalent of the OSP, that worked in 
tandem with its American counterpart, as does Robert Dreyfuss in The 
Nation. So does a first-hand observer on the scene at the Pentagon, 
former Lt. Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski, who recounts a chilling story of 
high-ranking Israelis ushered in the offices of high-ranking officials 
without having to sign in. As Dreyfuss reports:

"According to [a] former [U.S.] official, also feeding information to 
the Office of Special Plans was a secret, rump unit established last 
year in the office of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of Israel. This unit, 
which paralleled Shulsky's – and which has not previously been reported 
– prepared intelligence reports on Iraq in English (not Hebrew) and 
forwarded them to the Office of Special Plans. It was created in 
Sharon's office, not inside Israel's Mossad intelligence service, 
because the Mossad – which prides itself on extreme professionalism – 
had views closer to the CIA's, not the Pentagon's, on Iraq. This 
secretive unit, and not the Mossad, may well have been the source of the 
forged documents purporting to show that Iraq tried to purchase 
yellowcake uranium for weapons from Niger in West Africa, according to 
the former official."

The question of the OSP's key role in pushing us into this war was 
raised after the Georgetown philippic, when one of the students asked Tenet:

"Recent investigative reports, including a long piece in the journal 
Mother Jones, which came out this past January, detailed the creation of 
a Pentagon group a few weeks after September 11th which, as of January 
of 2002, became known as the Office of Special Programs [sic]. And it 
contained prominent neoconservatives with direct ties to Dick Cheney and 
members of the administration. This group was shown to have a clear 
political agenda, to have influenced people in the intelligence 
community, and definitely used gross intelligence to promote their case.

"So my question is, can you confirm or deny the existence of such a 
Pentagon group? And if so, how can we prevent small ideological groups 
from influencing intelligence estimates?"

Forgive me if I indulge in a little conspiracy theorizing, but I hardly 
think that's inappropriate when we're talking about the head of an 
agency which has been known to pull off a covert operation or two. I 
know a planted question when I hear one, and the student who asked it no 
doubt has a bright future ahead of him or her, and a desk all picked out 
at Langley. Because it was this question, and not Tenet's rather evasive 
answer, that really was significant. "There's gambling in this casino," 
the CIA chieftain joked. "Everybody has different views of what the 
intelligence means or doesn't mean." Yes, but why did one side – the CIA 
side, the side of caution, of skepticism in the face of the claims of 
our "foreign partner," – lose out, and the neocons win?

That is the real question before the house, and the answer won't be 
forthcoming until a thorough investigation is undertaken, not by the 
executive – which cannot investigate itself – but by the people's 
elected representatives. Congress has the constitutional and moral 
responsibility to uncover how and why the intelligence-gathering process 
was subverted – perhaps by agents of a foreign power.

One sure way to prevent small ideological groups from influencing 
intelligence estimates – and hijacking U.S. foreign policy in the 
process – is to return to the policy of the Founders of this country, 
recalling in particular George Washington's sage advice:

"A passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of 
evils…. It leads also to concessions to the favorite nation of 
privileges denied to others which is apt doubly to injure the nation 
making the concessions; by unnecessarily parting with what ought to have 
been retained, and by exciting jealousy, ill-will, and a disposition to 
retaliate, in the parties from whom equal privileges are withheld. And 
it gives to ambitious, corrupted, or deluded citizens (who devote 
themselves to the favorite nation), facility to betray or sacrifice the 
interests of their own country, without odium, sometimes even with 
popularity; gilding, with the appearances of a virtuous sense of 
obligation, a commendable deference for public opinion, or a laudable 
zeal for public good, the base or foolish compliances of ambition, 
corruption, or infatuation."

The Iraq war, we are learning, was the dubious achievement of ambitious, 
corrupted, and deluded citizens, who devoted themselves – and continue 
to devote themselves – to their favorite nation, which is not the U.S. 
In dragging us into this unwinnable, undesirable, and unjustifiable 
conflict, they betrayed their own country, sacrificing American 
interests on the altar of their devotion to Israel, whose partisans in 
this country had been agitating to "finish" the war with Iraq for over a 
decade.

As I pointed out in my last column, the President's attempts to provide 
cover for the War Cabal may prove fruitless in light of the Justice 
Department's investigation in the Plame affair. Two figures at the very 
heart of the neocon network are very close to being indicted: the Vice 
President's chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby (as I predicted in a 
special article, posted in early October of last year) and John Hannah, 
in charge of Middle East policy in the Vice President's office. Hannah 
is a former deputy director of Washington Institute for Near East 
Policy, widely known as the thinktank division of Israel's amen corner 
in Washington.

This is how we prevent a small cabal of ideologically-motivated moles 
from taking over: dig them up, root and branch, and then jail them.

And it won't end with Scooter and Hannah. As the Washington 
Times/UPI/Insight Magazinereports:

"'We believe that Hannah was the major player in this,' one federal 
law-enforcement officer said. … The strategy of the FBI is to make clear 
to Hannah 'that he faces a real possibility of doing jail time' as a way 
to pressure him to name superiors, one federal law-enforcement official 
said."


By going after Libby and Hannah, federal prosecutors are homing in on 
the command center of what Borger in the Guardian calls the "shadow 
government" that pushed us into war. Borger writes:

"The president's most trusted adviser, Mr Cheney, was at the shadow 
network's sharp end. He made several trips to the CIA in Langley, 
Virginia, to demand a more "forward-leaning" interpretation of the 
threat posed by Saddam. When he was not there to make his influence 
felt, his chief of staff, Lewis 'Scooter' Libby, was. Such hands-on 
involvement in the processing of intelligence data was unprecedented for 
a vice-president in recent times, and it put pressure on CIA officials 
to come up with the appropriate results."

What the Justice Department is now uncovering is evidence that the 
Libby-Hannah-OSP Axis of Neocons also prosecuted the war on the home 
front, breaking the law in the process.

And there's more good news to report: rumor has it that Richard Perle, 
the neocons' Prince of Darkness, is next to be indicted. (Whether in 
connection with the Boeing tanker deal, the Hollinger brouhaha, his paid 
speaking engagement at a terrorist fundraiser, or yet another of Perle's 
multifarious business investments that somehow cashed in on his 
government connections, remains to be seen.)

They thought they could get away with it. The neocons really believed 
that they ruled Washington, and that their power was unassailable. But 
in the end their own hubris was their undoing, just as it will be the 
Waterloo of our Napoleonic foreign policy.

Dick Cheney is over. And so are the neocons. The only question now is: 
will they plea bargain, or fight? I'm betting on the latter. And how 
long before we hear the cry go up that these people are being persecuted 
and that's it's all an "anti-Semitic" conspiracy? I give it a few hours, 
at the most….

But that isn't going to work -- not this time. As I said in my last 
[February 4] column:

"So keep your eye on the prize, and think of the glory and wonder of a 
future headline reading: Neocons Behind Bars."

It looks like Patrick J. "Bulldog" Fitzgerald is living up to his 
nickname after all, and much sooner than even I dared to hope.

As the immortal Jackie Gleason used to say: How sweet it is!



–Justin Raimondo