[chottala.com] Inside the CIA Dossier on Iraq

Inside the CIA Dossier on Iraq

by VIJAY PRASHAD

Last week, Bishop Desmond Tutu was to sit beside former UK Prime
Minister Tony Blair at the cringingly named Discovery Invest
Leadership Summit in Johannesburg, South Africa. Tutu, one of the main
moral voices in the anti-Apartheid struggle, decided to withdraw. He
could not stand to sit next to Blair, or to Tony's mate, George W.
Bush because they had "fabricated the grounds [for war on Iraq] to
behave like playground bullies." Stingingly, in The Observer
(September 1), Tutu recounted how he had called the White House a few
days before the 2003 invasion, spoke to National Security Advisor
Condoleezza Rice and asked her to give the UN weapons inspectors more
time to do their work. But "Ms. Rice demurred, saying there was too
much risk and the president would not postpone any longer." The US and
UK went to war, and according to Tutu, "More than 110,000 Iraqis have
died in the conflict since 2003 and millions have been displaced. By
the end of last year, nearly 4,500 American soldiers had been killed
and more than 32,000 wounded."

Amnesia over Iraq has already set in. President Obama refused to
countenance any prosecution for Bush era officials (and Bush himself)
for the fabrications that Tutu alleges. In the UK, the Chilcot Inquiry
on the Iraq War has finished its deliberations, but Sir John Chilcot
has delayed the release of the final report for a full year because of
wrangling to prevent Blair's private letters to Bush from being
revealed (he perhaps does not want to allow validation that in a July
2002 note he wrote, "You know, George, whatever you decide to do, I'm
with you). At his appearances at the Inquiry, Blair admitted that the
Iraqis were continuing to allow weapons inspectors, and that, as Sir
Lawrence Freedman suggested, they had "started to reap dividends."
However, Blair worried that Saddam was "back to his old games" and was
not capable of a "change of heart." In his paper-thin memoirs, A
Journey, Blair notes the question of regret for the war should not be
a public question, but it can only be asked and answered "in the quiet
reflection of the soul."

If this were a universal standard, then Syria's Bashar Assad can
relax, and so should all those who are threatened with arrest and
trial at the International Criminal Court. They too should be allowed
to claim that retrospective analysis of war crimes is a matter of the
"quiet reflection of the soul," not public, legal accountability.

The flimsy thread of evidence presented to the UN on February 5, 2003,
by an increasingly chagrined Colin Powell has now been resoundingly
debunked. Not one of the claims remains aloft: the aluminum tubes were
for legal missiles; the desert trailers were hydrogen gas generators;
the Decontamination Vehicles were firefighting equipment; the fabled
Yellowcake Uranium from Niger entered the dossier through a "black
ops" mission run through the Italian military intelligence service,
SISMI, and the neo-conservatives in the various institutions of US
intelligence. Colonel Larry Wilkerson, Powell's Chief of Staff, told
Craig Unger (Vanity Fair, July 2006) that the neo-conservatives would
not let the Yellowcake seep out of Powell's statement, "You would take
it out and they would stick it back in. That was their favorite
bureaucratic technique—ruthless relentlessness." This was the heart of
the fabrication that took the US and the UK into the war, and rendered
a bewildered UN mute.

Ambassador Joseph Wilson went to Niger on February 26, 2002, met the
Prime Minister and the Minister of Mines and confirmed that the faxes
and documents in the Italian folder were all forged. This was known
inside the State Department a year before Powell went to the UN and
before the US and UK went to war. By September 2002, despite these
warnings, the UK government published a fifty page, fourteen-point
report that relied on the view that "Iraq has sought the supply of
significant quantities of uranium from Africa." On September 24, Blair
referred to this "dossier of death" in his condemnation of Iraqi
regime. These were lies that had been repeated so often that they had
earned the aura of truth. But they were lies nonetheless (the "dossier
of death" is now called the "dodgy dossier," sexed up to fit the
facts, as one UK official told the BBC in May 2003). No one has been
prosecuted for the Yellowcake Uranium forgeries.

Out of the bowels of the CIA, extracted by the relentlessness of the
National Security Archives, comes a document this week with a
remarkable title: Misreading Intentions: Iraq's Reaction to
Inspections Created Picture of Deception (5 January 2006). This report
was part of the CIA's Iraq WMD Retrospective Series, produced by the
Office of Iraq Analysis. Most of the declassified document is
censored, but that does not stop at least two remarkable conclusions
to emerge from it:

That the US misjudged the suspicious behavior of the Saddam Hussein
regime. "Ironically, even at key junctures when the regime attempted
to partially or fully comply with UN resolutions," the CIA noted in
2006, "its suspicious behavior and destruction of authenticating
documentation only reinforced the perception that Iraq was being
deceptive." When Iraq was "clumsy" in its attempt to shield itself
from UN or US scrutiny, rather than read this as an attempt to protect
state sovereignty (a cardinal view of Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath
ideology), the CIA read it as guilt that they had nuclear and
biological weapons in the desert. What trapped the CIA, in other
words, was that it could not sufficiently analyze the behavior of what
it saw as a serial deceiver. Or as they put it in their own jargon, "A
liability of intelligence analysis is that once a party has been
proven to be an effective deceiver, that knowledge becomes a heavy
factor in the calculations of the analytical observer."

At one point, the report acknowledges that this is not so much a
problem of deception and analysis but a problem of cultural
assessment. Here is the CIA report: "Analysts tend to focus on what
was most important to us – the hunt for WMD – and less on what would
be most important for a paranoid dictatorship to protect. Viewed
through an Iraqi prism, their reputation, their security, their
overall technological capabilities, and their status needed to be
preserved. Deceptions were perpetrated and detected, but the reasons
for those deceptions were misread." In other words, the CIA was right
to identify evidence of deception, but wrong in its analysis of why
Iraq was being deceptive: not to hide WMDs, but to protect its own
sovereignty and to provide ambiguous signals to its principal threats
(Iran and Israel). Analysts understood that Iraq's regime had a
different "logic system," but these same analysts did not grasp how
the differences manifest themselves.

The Iraqis were right. Anyone on the anti-war side in 2002-03 will
remember how hard it was to make the case that it might well be the
situation that the Iraqis have no WMDs. This is what the former UN
weapons inspector Scott Ritter had tried to do (in detail in War on
Iraq, 2002, an extended interview with Ritter conducted by William
Rivers Pitt), and this is what so many broadsheets and pamphlets tried
to argue (as did many writers at Counterpunch). It appears now that
the CIA in 2006 thinks that not only were we right on the facts (that
there were no WMDs) but that our assessment of the data available at
that time was correct.

This is a very important distinction. There is no way that that
anti-war left could have proved a counterfactual (if there are no
WMDs, what can one show to establish this?). What we can see, in
retrospect, is that given the kinds of evidence available through the
UN reports and given our own sense of the historical behavior of the
Saddam Hussein regime, we could see that it was likely that there were
no WMDs. The CIA's assessment notes, "Given Iraq's extensive history
of deception and only small changes in outward behavior, [CIA]
analysts did not spend adequate time examining the premise that the
Iraqis had undergone a change in their behavior, and that what Iraq
was saying by the end of 1995 was, for the most part, accurate." For
the eight years prior to the US-UK war that finished off the regime,
it was the Iraqis who were telling the truth. This should be
front-page news in the major newspapers. It is as likely as not to be
utterly ignored.

In July 2003, Blair's former National Security Advisor, Sir Rodric
Braithwaite wrote in the Financial Times, "Fishmongers sell fish;
warmongers sell war." That is what Blair and Bush did: they sold the
war based on intelligence that was very badly assessed and obscenely
poorly analyzed to a public terrified by the exaggerations and
inflamed by jingoism. Given that there has been no public accounting
of the falsehoods and no legal procedures against those who betrayed
their public offices, no lessons have been learned.

Much the same garbled nonsense is on offer with Iran, with
exaggerations and omissions leading the way forward. August has been a
bad month for this. On August 9, 2012, Barak Ravid wrote a piece based
on what "Western diplomats and Israeli officials" told his newspaper,
Ha'aretz. The headline was "Obama gets new US NIE: Iran making
surprising progress toward nuclear capability." There has been little
follow-through on this National Intelligence Estimate. This was all
smoke and mirrors. On August 30, 2012, the New York Times ran a story
on the new IAEA report on Iran with the headline, "Inspectors Confirm
New Work by Iran at Secure Nuclear Site." The word work played the
devil's role. In fact, the IAEA report noted of the processed fuel,
"Some of the 20 percent fuel is in a form that is extremely difficult
to use in a bomb, and most of the stockpile is composed of a fuel
enriched at a lower level that would take considerably longer to
process for weapons use." Once more the warmongers are selling war. It
is in their nature.

It is also in the nature of people like Bishop Tutu to stand firm
against mendacity. It is a pity that his call for an investigation
will be mockingly dismissed.

Vijay Prashad's new book, Arab Spring, Libyan Winter , is published by AK Press.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/09/06/inside-the-cia-dossier-on-iraq/


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