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FROM: http://www.nzherald.co.nz/storydisplay.cfm?storyID=
3533304&thesection=news&thesubsection=world
Case for war made
up, say top names
[TVOTW
Insert - And what was it all for? Suffering
beyond description on an unprecedented scale.
This
little one - the thousands of other innocent men, woman and children
in Iraq AND Afghanistan together with those servicemen and woman of
the U.S. armed forces sacrificed as dispensable pawns - will ALL have
their day in the International Criminal Court.
Also
- Saddam
- Full Confirmation By Clinton - At No Time Was Iraq A Direct Or Indirect
Threat To The US - 218 kb/sec - 18 Jul 2004.]
10 Nov 2003
By ANDREW GUMBEL in Los
Angeles
An unprecedented array
of United States intelligence professionals, diplomats and former Pentagon
officials have gone on record to lambast the Bush Administration for
its distortion of the case for war against Iraq.
In their view, the very
foundations of intelligence-gathering have been damaged in ways that
could take years, even decades, to repair.
A new documentary circulating
in the US features one powerful condemnation after another, from the
sort of people who usually stay discreetly in the shadows.
They include a
former director of the CIA, two former assistant secretaries of defence,
a former ambassador to Saudi Arabia and even the man who served as President
George W. Bush's Secretary of the Army until just a few months ago.
The two dozen interviewees
reveal how the pre-war intelligence record
on Iraq showed virtually the opposite of the picture
the Administration painted to Congress, to US voters and to the world.
They also reconstruct
the way senior White House officials - notably
Vice-President Dick Cheney - leaned on the CIA to find evidence that
would fit a preordained set of conclusions.
"There
was never a clear and present danger. There was never
an imminent threat. Iraq - and we have very good intelligence on this
- was never part of the picture of terrorism,"
says Mel Goodman, a veteran CIA analyst who now teaches at the National
War College.
The case for accusing
Saddam Hussein of concealing weapons of mass destruction was, in the
words of the veteran CIA operative Robert Baer, largely
achieved through "data mining" - going back
over old information and trying to wrest new conclusions from it.
The
agenda, according to George Bush snr's ambassador to
Saudi Arabia, Chas Freeman, was both highly
political and profoundly misguided.
"The theory that
you can bludgeon political grievances out of existence doesn't have
much of a track record," he says, "so
essentially we have been neo-conned into applying a school
of thought about foreign affairs that has failed everywhere it has been
tried."
The hour-long film -
Uncovered: The Whole Truth about the Iraq War - was put together by
Robert Greenwald, a TV producer in the forefront of Hollywood's anti-war
movement who never suspected, when he started out, that so many establishment
figures would stand up and be counted.
"My attitude was,
wow, CIA people, I thought these were the bad guys," Greenwald
said.
"Not everyone agreed
on everything. Not everyone was against the war itself.
"But
there was a universally shared opinion that we had been misled about
the reasons for the war."
Although many elements
in the film are not necessarily new - the forged document on uranium
sales from Niger to Iraq, the aluminium tubes falsely assumed to be
parts for nuclear weapons, the satellite images of "mobile biolabs"
that turned out to be hydrogen compression facilities, the "decontamination
vehicles" that were, in fact, fire engines - what
emerges is a striking sense of professional betrayal
in the intelligence community.
As former CIA analyst
Ray McGovern argues with particular force, the traditional role of the
CIA has been to act as a scrupulously accurate source of information
and analysis for Presidents pondering grave international decisions.
That role, he said,
had now been "prostituted"
and the CIA may never be the same.
"Where is Bush going
to turn to now? Where is his reliable source of information now
Iraq is spinning out of control? He's frittered that
away," McGovern said.
"And
the profound indignity is that he probably doesn't even realise it."
The starting point for
the tarnishing of the CIA was a speech by
Cheney on August 26 last year, in which he told the Veterans
of Foreign Wars in Nashville that Saddam was reconstituting his nuclear
weapons programme and was thus threatening
to inflict "death on a massive scale - in his own region or beyond".
Numerous sources say
Cheney followed up his speech with a series
of highly unorthodox visits to CIA headquarters in Virginia,
in which he badgered low-level analysts to come up with information
to substantiate the extremely alarming - but entirely bogus - contents
of his speech.
By early September, intelligence
experts in Congress were clamouring for a so-called National Intelligence
Estimate, a full rundown of everything known about Iraq's weapons programmes.
Usually NIEs take months
to produce, but George Tenet, the CIA director,
came up with a 100-page document in just three weeks.
The man he picked to
write it, the weapons expert Robert Walpole, had a track record of going
back over old intelligence assessments and
reworking them in accordance with the wishes of a specific political
interest group.
In 1998, he had come
up with an estimate of the missile capabilities of various rogue states
that managed to sound considerably more alarming than a previous CIA
estimate issued three years earlier.
On that occasion, he
was acting at the behest of a congressional commission anxious to make
the case for a missile defence system; the
commission chairman was none other than Donald Rumsfeld,
now Secretary of Defence and a key architect of the Iraq war.
- INDEPENDENT
FROM: http://www.nzherald.co.nz/storydisplay.cfm?storyID=
3533304&thesection=news&thesubsection=world
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