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Dating Cheney's nuclear
drumbeat
By Jim Lobe
In
the wake of the release of the Downing Street
memo, there has been much talk about how the Bush
administration "fixed" its intelligence to create
a war fever in the US in the many months leading
up to the invasion of Iraq. What still remains to
be fully grasped, however, is the wider pattern of
propaganda that underlay the administration's war
effort - in particular, the overlapping networks
of relationships that tied together so many key
figures in the administration, the
neo-conservatives and their allies on the outside,
and parts of the media in what became a seamless,
boundary-less operation to persuade the American
people that Saddam Hussein represented an
intolerable threat to their national security.
Vice President Dick Cheney, for instance,
is widely credited with having launched the
administration's nuclear drumbeat to war in Iraq
via a series of speeches he gave, beginning in
August 2002, vividly accusing Saddam of having an
active nuclear weapons program. As it happens
though, he started beating the nuclear drum with
vigor significantly earlier than most remember;
indeed at a time that was particularly curious
given its proximity to the famous mission former
ambassador Joseph Wilson took on behalf of the
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
Cheney's initial public attempts to raise
the nuclear nightmare did not in fact begin with
his August 2002 barrage of nuclear speeches, but
rather five months before that, just after his
return from a tour of Arab capitals where he had
tried in vain to gin up local support for military
action against Iraq. Indeed, the specific date on
which his campaign was launched was March 24,
2002, when, on return from the Middle East, he
appeared on three major Sunday public-affairs
television programs bearing similar messages on
each. On CNN's Late Edition news show he
offered the following comment on Saddam:
This is a man of great evil, as the
president said. And he is actively pursuing
nuclear weapons at this time. On
NBC's Meet the Press news program he said:
There's good reason to believe that
he continues to aggressively pursue the
development of a nuclear weapon. Now will he
have one in a year, five years? I can't be that
precise. And on CBS's Face the
Nation show:
The notion of a Saddam Hussein with
his great oil wealth, with his inventory that he
already has of biological and chemical weapons,
that he might actually acquire a nuclear weapon
is, I think, a frightening proposition for
anybody who thinks about it. And part of my task
out there was to go out and begin the dialogue
with our friends to make sure they were thinking
about it. Why do I think that Cheney
moment, that particular barrage of statements
about Saddam's supposed nuclear program, remains
so significant today, in light of the Plame
affair? (The identity of CIA agent Valerie Plame
was leaked to the press, some believe because her
ambassador husband, Joseph Wilson, did not go
along with the Bush administration's nuclear line
on Saddam.)
For one thing, that Sunday's
drum roll of nuclear claims indicated that the
"intelligence and facts" were already being "fixed
around the policy" four months before Sir Richard
Dearlove, head of Britain's MI6, reached that
conclusion, as recorded in the Downing Street
memo. It's worth asking, then: on what basis could
Cheney make such assertions with such evident
certainty, nearly six months before, on September
7, 2002, Judith Miller and Michael Gordon of the
New York Times first broke a story about how Iraq
had ordered "specially designed aluminum tubes",
supposedly intended as components for centrifuges
to enrich uranium for Saddam's nuclear weapons
program. Even five months later, after all, those
tubes would still be the only real piece of
evidence for the existence of an Iraqi nuclear
program offered by then-secretary of state Colin
Powell in his presentation to the UN Security
Council.
Indeed, on March 24 when Cheney
made his initial allegations about an Iraqi
nuclear program, we know of only two pieces of
"evidence" available to him that might conceivably
have supported his charges:
1) Testimony
from Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri, a "defector"
delivered up by Ahmad Chalabi's exile
organization, the Iraqi National Congress (INC),
and enthusiastically recounted by the Times'
Miller on December 20, 2001 (although rejected as
a fabrication by both the CIA and Defense
Intelligence Agency). Al-Haideri claimed to have
personally worked on renovations of secret
facilities for biological, chemical and nuclear
weapons in underground wells, private villas and
under the Saddam Hussein Hospital in Baghdad as
recently as 2000.
2) The infamous forged
Niger yellowcake documents that, at some point in
December 2001 or January 2002, somehow appeared on
Cheney's desk, supposedly through the Defense
Intelligence Agency or the CIA, though accounts
differ on the precise route it took from Italian
military intelligence to the vice president's
office. It was these and related documents that
spurred Cheney to ask for additional information,
a request that would eventually result in Wilson's
trip to Niger in late February, which, of course,
set the Plame case in motion. Wilson's conclusion
- that there was nothing to the story - would echo
the conclusions of both US ambassador to Niger
Barbro Owens-Kirkpatrick and Marine General
Carlton W Fulford Jr, then-deputy commander of the
US European Command who was also sent to Niger in
February. A couple of days after his return to
Washington, Wilson would be debriefed by the CIA.
How far up their respective chains of
command Wilson's and Fulford's reports made it
remains a significant mystery to this day.
Cheney's office, which reportedly had reminded the
CIA of the vice president's interest in the
agency's follow-up efforts even while Wilson was
in Niger, claims never to have heard about either
report. We do know that Fulford's report made it
up to Joint Chiefs chairman Richard Myers, whose
spokesman, however, told the Washington Post in
July 2003, shortly after Wilson went public on the
New York Times op-ed page, that the general had
"no recollection" of it and so no idea whether it
continued on to the White House or Cheney's
office.
Meanwhile, Cheney, whose initial
curiosity set off this flurry of travel and
reporting, appeared to have lost interest in the
results by the time he left on a Middle Eastern
trip in mid-March; at least, no information has
come to light so far indicating that he ever got
back to the CIA or anyone else with further
questions or requests on the matter of whether
Saddam had actually been in the market for Niger
yellowcake uranium ore. Yet, within four days of
his return to Washington, there he was on the
Sunday TV shows assuring the nation's viewers that
Iraq was indeed "actively pursuing nuclear weapons
at this time".
Did he then acquire new
information, perhaps from Iraq's neighbors, during
his trip to the Middle East, or had he simply
decided by then that the "facts" really had to be
"fixed" - or more precisely in Wilson's case,
ignored altogether - if the American people were
to be persuaded that war was the only solution to
the problem of Saddam? In any event, one can only
describe his sudden lack of curiosity combined
with his public certainty on the subject as, well
... curious.
That Cheney did indeed make
the initial request to follow up on the Niger
yellowcake report appears now to be beyond
dispute, and it also draws attention to another
little-noted curiosity of the Plame case - the
knowledge and role of Clifford May, ex-New York
Timesman, recent head of communications for the
Republican National Committee (1997-2001), and
president of the ultra-neo-conservative Foundation
for the Defense of Democracies (FDD).
In
an article at National Review Online (NRO) on
September 29, 2003 (as pressure was building on
attorney general John Ashcroft to appoint a
special prosecutor in the case), he boasted that
he had been informed by an unnamed former
government official of Wilson's wife's identity
long before her outing as a CIA operative by
Robert Novak, on July 14, 2003, and so had assumed
that her identity (and relationship to Wilson) had
been an "open secret" among the Washington
cognoscenti. He has subsequently told the Nation
magazine's David Corn among others that he was
interviewed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation
but has never been asked to testify on the subject
before special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's
grand jury.
In that NRO article, he also
noted that he "was the first to publicly question
the credibility of Mr Wilson" following the
ambassador's Times op-ed. Indeed, only five days
after that op-ed appeared, on July 11, 2003, NRO
published May's first attack on Wilson - many more
would follow right up to the present - depicting
the ambassador as a "pro-Saudi, leftist partisan
with an axe to grind". The article - and this is
the curious part - included the following passage:
"Mr Wilson was sent to Niger by the CIA to verify
a US intelligence report about the sale of
yellowcake - because Vice President Dick Cheney
requested it, because Cheney had doubts about the
validity of the intelligence report." This
phrasing is fascinating because it purports to
know Cheney's subjective motivation, and the
motivation ascribed to him - that he had "doubts"
about the Niger story - conflicts with everything
we've otherwise come to understand about why he
asked for the Niger story to be investigated. It
hints, certainly, at how consciously Cheney would
indeed fix the facts when it came to Saddam's
nuclear doings.
Given this tidbit of
curious information hidden in May's piece, it's
important to know what former government officials
might not only have told May about Plame's
identity but possibly about Cheney's real thoughts
on the subject of Saddam's nuclear program -
presuming, that is, that Cheney himself or
"Scooter Libby", his chief of staff, was not the
source. Among May's board of advisers at FDD were
several former government officials, a number of
whom were known to be very close to Cheney and
Libby as well as to Pentagon hawks like
then-deputy secretary of defense Paul Wolfowitz
and under secretary of defense Douglas Feith. They
included head of the Center for Security Policy
Frank Gaffney, former CIA director James Woolsey,
and Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol. All of
them played starring roles in efforts to tie
Saddam's Iraq to al-Qaeda and the September 11
attacks, as well as in raising the nuclear
bogeyman well before Cheney did so on March 24,
2002.
In fact, a close examination of how
the pre-war propaganda machine worked shows that
it was led by the neo-cons and their associates
outside the administration, particularly those on
the Defense Policy Board (DPB) like Richard Perle,
Woolsey and Kenneth "Cakewalk" Adelman (and Judith
Miller of the Times) who had long championed the
cause of Ahmad Chalabi and his INC, and were also
close to the Office of Special Plans that Douglas
Feith had set up in the Pentagon to cherry-pick
intelligence. They would invariably be the first
to float new "evidence" against Saddam (such as
the infamous supposed Prague meeting of September
11 conspirator Mohammed Atta with an Iraqi
intelligence officer). They would then tie this
"evidence" into ongoing arguments for "regime
change" in Iraq that would often appear in the
Times or elsewhere as news and subsequently be
picked up by senior administration officials and
fed into the drumbeat of war commentary pouring
out of official Washington. It is by now perfectly
clear that the neo-conservatives on the outside
were aided by like-minded journalists,
particularly the Times' Miller - then the only
"straight" reporter on the client list of
neo-conservative heavyweights and columnists
represented by Benador Associates - and media
outlets, especially the Wall Street Journal's
editorial page and Fox News. Working hand-in-glove
with the war hawks on the inside, they created a
powerful and persuasive machine to convince the
public that Saddam's Iraq represented an imminent
and potentially cataclysmic threat to the US that
had to be eliminated once and for all. The failure
to investigate and demonstrate precisely how
seamlessly this web of intra and
extra-administration connections worked in the
run-up to the war - including perhaps in the
concoction of the Niger yellowcake documents, as
some former intelligence officials have recently
suggested - has been perhaps the most shocking
example of the mainstream media's failure to
connect the dots (the reporters from Knight-Ridder
excepted.)
In that context, it is worth
noting the first moment that the specter of an
advanced Iraqi nuclear-weapons program was
propelled into post-September 11 public
consciousness. On December 20, 2001, the New York
Times published Judith Miller's version of the
sensational charges made by Chalabi-aided defector
al-Haideri. Her report was immediately seized on
by former CIA director and Defense Policy Board
member Woolsey, (who had just spent many weeks
trying desperately but unsuccessfully to confirm
the alleged Mohammed Atta meeting in Prague that
would have linked Saddam to the September 11
attackers). Appearing that same evening on CNBC's
"Hard Ball", he breathlessly told Chris Matthews,
"I think this is a very important story. I give
Judy Miller a lot of credit for getting it. This
defector sounds quite credible." Within a week, he
was telling the Washington Post that the case that
Iraq was developing nuclear weapons was a "slam
dunk". (Now, there's a familiar expression!) He
continued confidently, "There is so much evidence
with respect to his development of weapons of mass
destruction and ballistic missiles ... that I
consider this point beyond dispute."
One
week later, Perle weighed in with an op-ed in the
New York Times in which he also referred to
Miller's work, albeit without naming her. "With
each passing day, [Saddam] comes closer to his
dream of a nuclear arsenal," he wrote.
"We
know he has a clandestine program, spread over
many hidden sites, to enrich Iraqi natural uranium
(Nigerian yellowcake perhaps?) to weapons grade.
We know he has the designs and the technical staff
to fabricate nuclear weapons once he obtains the
material. And intelligence sources know he is in
the market, with plenty of money, for both weapons
material and components as well as finished
nuclear weapons. How close is he? We do not know.
Two years, three years, tomorrow even? We simply
do not know, and any intelligence estimate that
would cause us to relax would be about as useful
as the ones that missed his nuclear program in the
early 1990s or failed to predict the Indian
nuclear test in 1998 or to gain even a hint of the
September 11 attack."
It was a new
argument being taken out for a test run, one that
would become painfully familiar in the months that
followed. At about that time, or shortly
thereafter, a report about the mysterious Niger
documents landed on Cheney's desk, and the rest
would be history.
Jim Lobe is a
reporter for the Rome-based international news
agency Inter Press Service and has followed the
paths of the neo-conservatives since the early
1970s.
(Copyright 2005 Jim Lobe)
(Used by permission of Tomdispatch) |
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