From One War To The
Next
Bush
administration actions, intelligence leak, raises questions regarding
Iran’s nuclear capabilities.
Bonnie
McFadden
WASHINGTON, D.C.– This past week we learned from a federal
court brief filed by Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald in
the CIA-agent exposure case that President Bush authorized Vice
President Dick Cheney’s Chief of Staff, Irv Lewis "Scooter"
Libby, to leak to journalists classified information from the
National Intelligence Estimate prepared in September-October,
2002 detailing the national intelligence concerning Iraq’s
possession (or non-possession) of weapons of mass destruction.
In September of 2003, President George Bush told the American
people that he would fire anyone he found who had disclosed classified
information or the identity of the CIA’s anti-nuclear proliferation
operative, Valerie Plame.
|  Photo:
Paul Morse
|
| President
George W. Bush discusses the War on Terror at Central
Piedmont Community College in Charlotte, N.C., Thursday
April 6, 2006. |
The
reason Bush authorized the disclosure of certain portions of this
NIE in June, 2003, to journalists Judith Miller and Bob Woodward
was to counter statements from Valerie Plame’s husband,
Ambassador Joseph Wilson, that Bush’s claims that Iraq had
tried to purchase yellow cake uranium from Niger were false.
Bush didn’t authorize the disclosure of all the NIE report,
just those portions which could be seen to support his claim that
Iraq was pursuing a nuclear weapons program. In fact, the NIE
contained well substantiated conclusions by the Department of
Energy and the State Department’s intelligence section that
substantially undermined the claim that Iraq was seeking to make
nuclear weapons. But Bush didn’t allow that information
to be leaked.
Thus, if Libby is to be believed, Bush’s informal declassification
of parts of the NIE was done expressly to enable Libby to again
mislead journalists, and thus the American public, concerning
the justification for the invasion of Iraq.
The documents that Libby testified were declassified by Bush before
he revealed the NIE information on July 8, 2003, were not officially
declassified and released until July 18, 2003, according to press
secretary Scott McClellan, raising a question as to their classification
status on July 8th.
But perhaps of far greater consequences than conducting a misleading
publicity campaign to discredit Joseph Wilson, was the fact that
Bush intentionally misled Congress and the country in his State
of the Union address of January 2003. In that speech to Congress,
which is required yearly by the Constitution, Bush claimed that
Iraq had been seeking to buy yellow cake uranium from Africa and
that Iraq had purchased aluminum tubes to make enriched uranium.
Did Bush know when he gave his State of the Union speech in January
of 2006, that these were false accusations against Iraq? It appears
that he did.
In the first week of October 2002 CIA Director George Tenet called
Stephen Hadley, Mr. Bush’s deputy national security advisor,
and told him to remove the Niger purchase accusation from President
Bush’s planned October 6, 2002 speech in Cincinnati, telling
Hadley that the claim was dubious and not believed credible by
the CIA. Hadley took the claim out of the Cincinnati speech.
That same week, the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iraq
was released which contained statements from the Department of
Energy and the State Department’s intelligence agency stating
that they found it unlikely that the aluminum tubes seized en
route to Iraq were intended for nuclear weapons development. And
the NIE again detailed that the State Department and the CIA didn’t
believe that Iraq had sought uranium from Iraq.
Bush’s national security advisor, Condoleezza Rice, variously
claimed not to have read all the pages in the NIE and later claimed
to have read the document several times, but she undoubtedly knew
that Tenet had ordered the references to uranium from Niger removed
from the President’s October Cincinnati speech. She allowed
the misinformation to be included in Bush’s State of the
Union address anyway. Rice’s deputy, Stephen Hadley, thereafter
claimed that he had just “forgotten” Tenet’s
October, 2002 warning to remove the claim from the Cincinnati
speech.
In July of 2003, Ambassador Wilson wrote an article in the New
York Times detailing how his trip to Niger at the request of the
CIA had yielded no evidence whatever that Iraq had sought uranium
from Niger.
A week thereafter, the Administration admitted that the uranium
accusation should not have been included in the president’s
speech, but blamed the error on the CIA’s failure to remove
it from the speech. CIA director George Tenet dutifully claimed
it was all his fault, falling on his sword, perhaps for the promise
of the “Medal of Freedom” award that Bush pinned on
him a year later.
President Bush never admitted whether or not he personally read
the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq before he gave his
State of the Union speech in which he prepared the country for
war. Given his well-known aversion to reading and to policy details,
a claim that he did not read the 90 page NIE would certainly be
believed.
But this week, Murray Waas, writing in the National Journal, reported
that Bush was given a one-page summary of the NIE that specifically
told him that the Department of Energy experts rejected the notion
that the aluminum tubes were intended for nuclear fuel enrichment,
stating that the tubes were likely intended for non-nuclear rockets.
Waas’s informants said he was observed reading this one-page
summary. The summary also discounted the validity of the Niger
yellow cake purchases.
In October 2002 Bush was warned that the evidence concerning Iraq’s
quest for nuclear weapons was dubious, yet in January of 2003
he told Congress and the American people that the evidence justified
going to war against Iraq.
When Joseph Wilson, a distinguished diplomat with personal knowledge
of the facts concerning the false Niger yellow cake claim, dared
to question Bush’s spurious war justifications, Bush and
Cheney began a campaign against Wilson, authorizing the declassification
and dissemination of just so much of the 2002 National Intelligence
Estimate as supported their justifications for the invasion of
Iraq.
In the course of their anti-Wilson campaign, Wilson’s wife,
Valerie Plame, was exposed as an undercover CIA operative. Plame
was tracking the distribution of nuclear weapon components in
the guise of working for a consulting company, Brewster-Jennings.
When Wilson and the Jennings company were exposed as part of a
CIA operation, the CIA’s network for tracking proliferation
of nuclear weapons was effectively demolished.
As a result, now that the Bush administration is accusing Iran
of developing nuclear weapons and threatening to bomb them with
our nuclear weapons, we have very little information about what
nuclear capability Iran actually has as our capacity to track
such information was destroyed with the exposure of CIA agent
Valerie Plame Wilson.
We know from their lead-up to the invasion of Iraq that Bush and
Cheney don’t require accurate information to start a war,
they much prefer spinning their own justifications without regard
to facts.
Bonnie McFadden is a former deputy public defender, law professor
from both the University of New Guinea and the University of Hawai}i,
and director of the Cambodia Defenders Project in Phnom Penh,
Cambodia. She currently resides and practices law on Maui and
is a core member of Maui Peace Action.
