This is an extreme example, but I think it shows us something about the far-too-common jingoism branch of the American intellectual class and how they understand 9/11:

Remember 9-11 without denial
By Jon Reisman

I watched the attacks on the World Trade Center on a perfect blue September morning five years ago. As I watched the world change with my two young sons I thought that I didn’t want to be at war. I really wanted to deny the reality of that awful day and its consequences. Apparently many of my fellow citizens feel the same way. Denial may ultimately bring peace through appeasement and defeat, but I can’t recommend it….

Riesman, identified as a faculty member at the University of Maine at Machias, goes on to paint essentially the Rums-Chen-Bushian image of an epic global struggle against the mad, ruthless force of “Islamo-fascist” killers from a “pool of 12,000 homicide bombers”.

Why? They do it for glory–“certain cultures are apparently glorifying such actions” and that is “disturbing.”

For how long will the war continue? Until there is “peace”:

Peace will come when we either win or lose the war. At the moment we’re losing, but we’d be in greater peril if we had accepted the 2001 status quo in the Middle East. If we want peace either the three large Persian Gulf regimes must change, or Israel must cease to exist. One Persian Gulf regime has been replaced, and another is developing nuclear weapons and flouting the United Nations. Either that regime will succeed, eradicate Israel and win the war, or they will not.

And Israel is the linchpin of Middle East righteousness. When Israel disappears under (I guess) Iran’s mushroom cloud, it’ll be the end of “America, capitalism and freedom.”

Never mind Israel’s advanced nuclear armaments pointed all over the Arab & Persian world? No threat there?

Over the last week or so, a media drumbeat of 9/11 5-yr anniversary programs sought answers to the question, “Are we more secure?” Every answer came from a point of view similar to Mr. Reisman’s.

I went to a forum yesterday where my friend Doug, a philosophy professor and academic with a more serious analysis, made an observation I have found quite compelling: “Only a very small percentage of our insecurity has anything to do with terrorists flying planes into buildings. We need to deepen and expand our notions of security….People flying planes into the World Trade Center, or suicide bombers, those are real concerns. But what I’d like to suggest is these are less than one percent of the real concerns about insecurity in the world that are not being addressed.”

The list of unaddressed security issues are very familiar to those of us not fortunate enough to belong to the upper classes: lack of jobs, the health care crisis, school decay, soaring energy prices.

Meanwhile, the United State continues to lead a Terror War steeped in false premises and manipulation of intelligence. The consequences of the US invasion of Iraq has visited the equivalent of one 9/11 per month on the Iraqis, as the Iraqi people have suffered untold detention, torture, and death at the hands of the Americans.

Yes, the post 9/11 Terror war started up whole new programs of attempted US domination around the world. But it is funny to listen to administration officials make the ridiculous argument that 9/11 could not be about US policy because Iraq had not yet been invaded at that time. These arguments presume that history itself started on 9/11/2001. Here is a quote from Vice President Cheney from a couple of weeks ago,

I know some have suggested that by liberating Iraq from Saddam Hussein, we simply stirred up a hornet’s nest. They overlook a fundamental fact: We were not in Iraq on September 11th, 2001, and the terrorists hit us anyway. As President Bush has said, the hatred of the radicals existed before Iraq was an issue, and it will exist after Iraq is no longer an excuse.

In fact there was history before 9/11. Rarely were US actions purely beneficent. The savagery of American policy over the last few decades hardly can be underestimated.

Here is how Guardian writer Seamus Milne put it in a September 13, 2001 comment:

Shock, rage and grief there has been aplenty. But any glimmer of recognition of why people might have been driven to carry out such atrocities, sacrificing their own lives in the process – or why the United States is hated with such bitterness, not only in Arab and Muslim countries, but across the developing world – seems almost entirely absent. Perhaps it is too much to hope that, as rescue workers struggle to pull firefighters from the rubble, any but a small minority might make the connection between what has been visited upon them and what their government has visited upon large parts of the world….

As Mahatma Gandhi famously remarked when asked his opinion of western civilisation, it would be a good idea. Since George Bush’s father inaugurated his new world order a decade ago, the US, supported by its British ally, bestrides the world like a colossus. Unconstrained by any superpower rival or system of global governance, the US giant has rewritten the global financial and trading system in its own interest; ripped up a string of treaties it finds inconvenient; sent troops to every corner of the globe; bombed Afghanistan, Sudan, Yugoslavia and Iraq without troubling the United Nations; maintained a string of murderous embargos against recalcitrant regimes; and recklessly thrown its weight behind Israel’s 34-year illegal military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza as the Palestinian intifada rages.

Now President Bush wants us to believe his utterly failed war that has destroyed Iraq is some kind of global line in the “struggle between tyranny and freedom” where “the worst mistake” would be to “pull out” because the terrorists we have attracted to Iraq “will follow us” home.

Mr. Bush then says, “The safety of America depends on the outcome of the battle in the streets of Baghdad.” He may be right, but he has it backwards. Then only victory possible at this point is a Pyrrhic victory where possibly decades of struggle against American domination by Iraqi resistance and their supporters will be the only thing that follows.

It’s turned out just like I wrote the week before the invasion:

US taking of Iraq will increase, not lessen, the chance of terrorism against Americans….Bush is in the process of whipping up such strong anti-American sentiment throughout the world that pathetically weak Iraq is near the back of the line of potential attackers who will remain angry for a long, long time. In the run-up to the attack, the terrorism threat is being played like an accordion with the flood of alerts and news of bin Laden tapes and al-Qa’ida connections to Hussein. Listen to the din carefully and you will hear the dissonance: Powell tells the U.N about al-Qa’ida in Iraq, but there are disclaimers on the terror alerts that want to direct us away from thinking there is a link to the coming war….Unfortunately, the anger generated by this approach will leave America the target of terror for years to come.

…An extended, dangerous period of escalation of application of U.S. power in an attempt to hold and control its expanding spoils of war can be expected. Despite their arrogance and hubris, Bush and his team should not have much confidence that the chaos of the post-invasion period can be kept benign. There is great uncertainty about the controllability of forces that could be unleashed as America commits to new global management requirements far beyond its present substantial deployments. Current U.S. planning envisions a three-phase transition of Iraq from American military administration to some form of American-style government led by current Iraqi exiles. This process will be highly problematic and will probably require considerable force to pacify the disparate populations within Iraq. Beyond Iraq, the U.S. intends to insure that the behavior of Saudi Arabia and other countries with strategic resources align with its hegemonic goals, thus inviting a radical anti-american response.

It really didn’t take a genius to see this then, nor does it take one to see where all this is still heading right now.

I suppose this has been the genius of the Bush regime. They have taken an extreme demonstration of vulnerability in the technological age–“Nineteen men attacked us with a barbarity unequaled in our history”–and turned that into an “offensive in a war unlike any we have fought before.”

But the Terror War is a failure. The “offensive” sweeps up mostly the innocent. Americans still don’t get it. Provoking people around the world against by killing their kin while we wallow in our victimhood is hardly going to protect us. Our attention to the real question of why someone would want to hurt us is lost.

Five years ago this week I wrote this about justice for 9/11:

Naturally, our first reaction is that we want those responsible punished. And they should be punished. But I have a great deal of fear that the U.S. will retaliate, blindly, with actions that would put us on the same disgusting moral level of terrorism of the hijackers. If we as a generous, free, peace-loving people, want justice, there should be justice, not just vengeance. This is no time for blind patriotism that could become the justification for the killing of innocents in the manner of the hijackers. Justice must be calm and measured in a fair Court of Law. Justice must involve not only punishment of perpetrators, but also an examination of the conditions giving those perpetrators the passions they possess lest such attacks will happen again. We must ask and answer fully–Why?

What President Bush and his administration have done, the multiple 9/11s they have inflicted upon others, unfortunately has come to pass with far too little resistance at home. We won’t be safe until we can take a good hard look in the mirror and act on to correct the moral failings that we would see.

Secret, contemporaneous report within the Pentagon itself debunked the notion that this laughable trailer meant in the dubious remarks of President Bush on Polish television (May 29, 2003) that, “We found the weapons of mass destruction.”

The hand-picked weapons inspector President Bush sent to Iraq in the spring of 2003, David Kay, later would say, “This is the one that’s damning.”

He was talking about phony defector Curveball’s story on mobile bioweapons labs and how it was used to stir up support for the invasion and occupation of Iraq. These units supposedly were one in the same with those famously projected in the UN slide show by then Secretary of State Colin Powell on February 5, 2003. The media had cooperated with the propaganda effort by uncritically hyping the story for months during fall 2002 and winter 2003 with tales of Saddam’s “Hell on Wheels” and “Winnebagos of Death.”

After the president’s “mission accomplished” events in May 2003, a widely-released story on May 7, 2003 read,

The Pentagon said Wednesday it may have recovered an Iraqi mobile biological weapons lab, the first such announcement since the start of the war to disarm the government of President Saddam Hussein.

American forces in Iraq are doing tests on a trailer that matches the description of such laboratories, given by various sources including a defector who says he helped operate one, Defense Department officials said.

“On the smoking gun, I don’t know,” Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence Stephen Cambone said when asked whether this was a breakthrough in the coalition search for weapons of mass destruction.

Cambone also announced that some 2,100 people will be sent to Iraq to augment the weapons hunt as well as the search for information on government leaders, terrorists, war crimes, atrocities and Iraqi prisoners of war. The effort will be headed by Maj. Gen. Keith Dayton of the Defense Intelligence Agency, Cambone said.

He said initial tests have been done on a trailer truck taken into custody April 19 at a Kurdish checkpoint in northern Iraq. It is painted in a military color scheme, was found on a transporter normally used for tanks and — as an Iraqi defector has described Iraq’s mobile labs — contains a fermenter and a system to capture exhaust gases, he said.

“While some of the equipment on the trailer could have been used for purposes other than biological weapons agent production, U.S. and U.K. technical experts have concluded that the unit does not appear to perform any function beyond what the defector said it was for, which is the production of biological agents,” Cambone said…

Later that month, a breathless CIA document describing the trailers using graphics similar to Powell’s (still here on the internet!) purported to show the “strongest evidence to date that Iraq was hiding a biological warfare program.”

Evidently this juiced-up story and document, totally at odds with what the Pentagon in secret was finding out about the trailers for itself, was designed to feed a remarkable post-war propaganda effort claiming WMD were found. Read the cited Deep Blade post for more detail and extensive analysis.

For those needing more proof that President Bush, Vice President Cheney, former Secretary of State Colin Powell, and other officials had a predilection for hyping false WMD stories while secret internal reports to the contrary were available, the Washington Post today revealed that,

A secret fact-finding mission to Iraq — not made public until now — had already concluded that the trailers had nothing to do with biological weapons. Leaders of the Pentagon-sponsored mission transmitted their unanimous findings to Washington in a field report on May 27, 2003, two days before the president’s statement.

The contents of the final report, “Final Technical Engineering Exploitation Report on Iraqi Suspected Biological Weapons-Associated Trailers,” remain classified. But interviews reveal that the technical team was unequivocal in its conclusion that the trailers were not intended to manufacture biological weapons. Those interviewed took care not to discuss the classified portions of their work.

“There was no connection to anything biological,” said one expert who studied the trailers. Another recalled an epithet that came to be associated with the trailers: “the biggest sand toilets in the world.”

This internal assessment confirms what has been on the record for a long time. Shortly after the Bush remarks on Polish TV, a June 15, 2003 story in The Observer reported that a British team who had examined the trailers determined

They are not mobile germ warfare laboratories. You could not use them for making biological weapons. They do not even look like them. They are exactly what the Iraqis said they were – facilities for the production of hydrogen gas to fill balloons.

The June 2004 Deep Blade post referenced above traces many more months of promotion of the bioweapons falsehoods. The last liar standing apparently was Dick Cheney, who claimed in January 2004 that the trailers meant there was “conclusive evidence, if you will, that he [Saddam] did, in fact, have programs for weapons of mass destruction.”

Obviously to me, all of this shows a persistent, intentional trail of falsehoods released by the Bush administration to the public — both pre-war and post-war — in order to maintain consent for the aggression.

While reading through the President’s speech from Friday March 10, cited in the last post, I note that he is still promoting the obviously false notion that Saddam Hussein failed to “disarm” in late 2002 and early 2003.

PRESIDENT BUSH (Mar. 10, 2006): First choice of any president ought to be to deal with issues diplomatically. And we dealt with the issue of Iraq diplomatically: Security Council resolution after Security Council resolution after Security Council resolution, until 1441, when the world spoke with a united voice that said to Iraq, “Disarm, disclose or face serious consequences.”

Saddam Hussein chose otherwise. He was removed from power. And there’s no doubt in my mind that the United States is more secure and the world is better off without Saddam Hussein in power.

But Saddam Hussein clearly told the truth in Iraq’s December 2002 declaration on weapons of mass destruction–Iraq had none. All subsequent pre-war hype on the subject from the president, Colin Powell, and other officials was hyperbolic pure crap. The president’s second hand-picked inspector threw in the towel in December 2004.

More recently, it has been reported that President Bush knew as early as January 2003 that Iraq was void of weapons of mass destruction. In fact, in a January 31, 2003 White House meeting with British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Bush proposed flying US spy planes painted with UN colors over Iraq in order to provoke war. Bush reportedly told Blair that the “diplomatic strategy had to be arranged around the military planning”. The case for war over WMD was non-existent and other rationale were sought.

In the end, the British Parliament authorized military action in Iraq on a bizarre legal theory concerning the post-Gulf-War resolution from 1991, in the absence of genuine authority from the UN Security Council. Contrary to the word of President Bush, UNSCR 1441 did not confer automatic authority for war without further Security Council action. All members’ comments at the time on UNSCR 1441, save for some ludicrous unilateralism from then US Ambassador to the UN John Negroponte, “welcomed the lack of `automaticity’ in the final resolution.”

Of course, there is a good reason President Bush promulgates this mythology–it may one day become his post-office defense in a war crimes trial, against the charge of the supreme crime of Aggression.

The oft-repeated rightist defense of the Bush administration pre-war public relations campaign against Iraq’s nonexistent weapons is that “everybody agreed, but all were wrong” about the WMD. The president, Prime Minister Blair, and other officials merely reacted with war due to their sincerely held beliefs that Iraq was some sort of threat. Now that they know war-&-sanctions-battered Iraq was not a threat, there still is no sign they will release their chokehold on the country anytime soon. They are still not forthcoming with the true motivations behind the major underlying policy decisions concerning the war. But that’s another matter and I’ll address it in a future post.

For now, I want to call attention to a new posting at Booman Tribune by Col. Patrick Lang, a highly decorated retired senior officer of U.S. Military Intelligence and U.S. Army Special Forces. In this posting, Lang lays out and analyzes today’s LA Times follow-up story on “Curveball” — the intelligence fabricator on whom Bush administration claims of marauding Iraqi “Winnebagoes of Death” (mobile bioweapons labs) were based.

A taste:

CURVEBALL, the Iraqi source of the German intelligence (BND) became an essential element in the campaign of distorted and manipulated information. CURVEBALL was a fraud. The Germans said they did not believe him. DIA said they did not believe him, but the Bush Administration evidently did believe him. Why? They believed because they wanted to believe.

Now just one more quote, this time from President Bush on January 28, 2003 in the State of the Union message:

From three Iraqi defectors we know that Iraq, in the late 1990s, had several mobile biological weapons labs. These are designed to produce germ warfare agents, and can be moved from place to a place to evade inspectors. Saddam Hussein has not disclosed these facilities. He’s given no evidence that he has destroyed them. [emphasis added]

Obviously, they did not “know” anything of the sort. The mobile labs never existed, even during the era of US & UK support for the real Iraqi bioweapons program in the 1980s.

My personal opinion is there was intentional pre-war distortion that this fabricated intelligence was solid — by the president, Secretary Powell, and other officials. The idea was to cherry pick whatever shards of intelligence they could get their hands on (and if necessary, create), and then puff it up into a threat case sufficient to provoke the desired drumbeat response from the Congress, the media, and the public. It worked so well that it’s hard to keep count the US soldiers, US Marines, and Iraqi civilians who keep dying as a result of the international crimes that followed.

So it is a rightist canard that there was an “overwhelming consensus” of world intelligence services that Saddam had weapons in March 2003. In fact the opposite was true. Warnings were rife in late 2002 and early 2003 about the shakiness of sources on which all of the main claims were based. These were not just minor peripheral nitpicks on an overwhelming consensus, but rather a complete collapse of the essential claims. And it is now known that that the collapse of these claims was evident before the war.

Nonetheless, it was months and months after the invasion before the promotion of the fabricated claims was abandoned. I analyzed this period in a long post written at two different times during the spring of 2004, after the initial LA Times story on Curveball emerged. The president’s handpicked weapons inspector, David Kay, a gung-ho believer, recognized the “damning” falsehoods behind the case for war earlier than other administration officials, Powell included. (I don’t think Cheney has yet renounced the mobile bioweapons labs as the fakes they were). Read that whole post — “We paid to fool ourselves” — here.

Recommended further reading
Rodger Payne has some excellent posts laying out this history with lots and lots of high-quality references. He examines the president’s Veteran’s Day shots taken against the anti-war movement. (I had wanted to post on that, but could not find enough time. Rodger does a great job there.) Please see:

(1) The Iraq “threat”, Saturday November 19; and
(2) The administration’s deceptions, Monday November 14

This quote from Meet the Press on September 25, 2005 during a gaggle with New York Times columnists illustrates how water for the Bush-absolving notion that “everybody” in the pre-Iraq-war period thought that Iraqi WMD were real and a genuine threat to the US and the UK is being carried by mainstream media.

Lately this has become quite an epidemic. Even administration dissident Lawrence Wilkerson — who Deep Blade discussed here — re-laid out the winter 2003 case, as cited by Max Boot (in a piece also discussed by Deep Blade here):

Wilkerson said on Oct. 19 that “the consensus of the intelligence community was overwhelming” that Hussein was building illicit weapons. This view was endorsed by “the French, the Germans, the Brits.” The French, of all people, even offered “proof positive” that Hussein was buying aluminum tubes “for centrifuges.” Wilkerson also recalled seeing satellite photos “that would lead me to believe that Saddam Hussein, at least on occasion, was giving us disinformation.”

Boot left out the part where Wilkerson said in a series of obviously conflicted and troubled statements concerning Colin Powell’s February 5, 2003 appearance before the United Nations Security Council, “I wasn’t all that convinced by the evidence I’d seen that he had a nuclear program other than the software.”

So the story from many quarters on the right is that we cannot accuse the Bush Administration of lying us into war because it was just common knowledge that what Bush, Cheney, Blair, and other officials said in the war run-up was based on their sincere and widely-shared beliefs.

Some days ago, I heard a prime example of this kind of water carrying on a Wisconsin Public Radio talk program featuring an interview with John C. McAdams, associate professor of political science at Marquette University. (Click here and find the audio links for October 26, 2005)

A caller to the program with Professor McAdams cited a Democracy Now! interview with former CIA analyst Melvin Goodman and asked McAdams to comment about the notion that the Plame investigation is not so much about revealing the name of a CIA operative as it is about the forged documents associated with the vice president’s office and the Pentagon Office of Special Plans — the lie factory, often cited in Deep Blade Journal — and hence the lies that led to war.

A fair question? Not to the professor, who gave this surprisingly harsh reply,

McAdams: [snickers] People who, who, who use the “Bush lied” argument, it seems to me, are, are just completely heedless of any standards of, of, of telling the truth or making a plausible argument… um, you know, Let’s make a list of those who believed Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction: Russian intelligence, French intelligence, British intelligence, Tony Blair, the CIA, Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton, John Kerry. And somehow we’re supposed to believe… ah, oh, oh, and the mainstream media, excellent article by Robert Kagan yesterday in the Washington Post where he talks about how the mainstream media, particularly the New York Times but also the Washington Post in the late 1990s and in 2000, before George Bush took office, were hyping the notion that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, and he has a long list of articles,… [see Kagan quoted below],… [UN chief inspector Hans Blix], who clearly told the United Nations that Saddam had had weapons of mass destruction in the 1990s, was under an obligation to have destroyed them, and to explain to his investigators, to document the destruction, but refused to document the destruction. Were supposed to believe that among all these people, George Bush was the only person who was so brilliant, ah, who was so wonderfully perceptive, that he knew Saddam Hussein didn’t have weapons of mass destruction when virtually everyone else who was paying attention did. Remember, the disagreement about going to war between say us and the French was not whether Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, it was what the appropriate strategy for dealing with that would be. Ah, so, it’s, ah simply ahistorical, to make that argument that “Bush lied” about weapons of mass destruction. Everybody was making that argument.

McAdams then follows up with a pro forma thrashing of Joseph Wilson, who McAdams says was “discredited.” (See previous post on this matter.)

The October 25 piece by Washington Post columnist Robert Kagan that McAdams cites is quite interesting. It expands the view of what media sources beyond New York Times WMD maven Judith Miller were saying about Iraq, and over a much longer time frame:

Many critics outside the Times suggest that Miller’s eagerness to publish the Bush administration’s line was the primary reason Americans went to war. The Times itself is edging closer to this version of events.

There is a big problem with this simple narrative. It is that the Times, along with The Post and other news organizations, ran many alarming stories about Iraq’s weapons programs before the election of George W. Bush. A quick search through the Times archives before 2001 produces such headlines as “Iraq Has Network of Outside Help on Arms, Experts Say”(November 1998), “U.S. Says Iraq Aided Production of Chemical Weapons in Sudan”(August 1998), “Iraq Suspected of Secret Germ War Effort” (February 2000), “Signs of Iraqi Arms Buildup Bedevil U.S. Administration” (February 2000), “Flight Tests Show Iraq Has Resumed a Missile Program” (July 2000). (A somewhat shorter list can be compiled from The Post’s archives, including a September 1998 headline: “Iraqi Work Toward A-Bomb Reported.”) The Times stories were written by Barbara Crossette, Tim Weiner and Steven Lee Myers; Miller shared a byline on one.

Sure, fine, Kagan is on to something here to the extent that he correctly describes what mainstream reporters did throughout pretty much the last decade when reporting on Iraq.

But what McAdams and other rightists do, though, is latch onto this history of mainstream thought as they hurl charges that people interested in getting to the bottom of just how intelligence support for bellicose administration rhetoric during late 2002 and early 2003 was created and disseminated are “ahistorical.”

I take that personally. When the professor says that very reasonable concern about the forgeries that swirled around vice presidential operatives and the unnecessarily alarmist rhetoric whipping up a public drumbeat for war that emanated from the Pentagon Office of Special Plans (OSP) are “just completely heedless of any standards of, of, of telling the truth or making a plausible argument,” I take offense. I have covered these issues here. This blog prides itself on plausible, well-supported arguments. (Please note that Professor McAdams totally failed to address the document forgeries or the Pentagon’s rogue intelligence shop, which I believe are key.)

Saying “Bush lied” not the truth? Depends on what “lie” we are talking about. I will grant that President Bush and other administration spokespeople were careful about not telling outright whoppers in the lead-up to the war. They created fallacies by omitting important details, they created hysteria by drawing worst-case conclusions over shaky intelligence (all of which turned out to be false), and they did outright lie about how much doubt existed concerning these facts about Iraq’s weapons.

For example, Vice President Cheney addressed the VFW with this unqualified certainty on August 26, 2002:

Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us. And there is no doubt that his aggressive regional ambitions will lead him into future confrontations with his neighbors — confrontations that will involve both the weapons he has today, and the ones he will continue to develop with his oil wealth. [emphasis added]

If there is any one brazen whopper in Cheney’s presentation, it is this conveyance of lack of doubt.

Here follows an example of how the president himself omitted facts about the then-known unreliability of the “Iraqi nuclear engineer” cited, and twisted even-then-shaky facts into a worst-case near certainty very obviously designed to strike maximum fear into the hearts of a 911-jittery public.

President Bush (October 7, 2002): Before being barred from Iraq in 1998, the International Atomic Energy Agency dismantled extensive nuclear weapons-related facilities, including three uranium enrichment sites. That same year, information from a high-ranking Iraqi nuclear engineer who had defected revealed that despite his public promises, Saddam Hussein had ordered his nuclear program to continue.

The evidence indicates that Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program. Saddam Hussein has held numerous meetings with Iraqi nuclear scientists, a group he calls his “nuclear mujahideen” — his nuclear holy warriors. Satellite photographs reveal that Iraq is rebuilding facilities at sites that have been part of its nuclear program in the past. Iraq has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes and other equipment needed for gas centrifuges, which are used to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons.

If the Iraqi regime is able to produce, buy, or steal an amount of highly enriched uranium a little larger than a single softball, it could have a nuclear weapon in less than a year. And if we allow that to happen, a terrible line would be crossed. Saddam Hussein would be in a position to blackmail anyone who opposes his aggression. He would be in a position to dominate the Middle East. He would be in a position to threaten America. And Saddam Hussein would be in a position to pass nuclear technology to terrorists.

These are the “lies” we refer to. They are lies if it is considered lying to hide the truth from the public about the extent of doubt, and to draw the most extreme conclusions (ie. we needed to attack, invade, conquer, and permanently occupy and dominate Iraq) from the doubtful data.

Beyond that, the degree to which Cheney’s office and OSP actually concocted pre-war Iraq weapons intelligence is not yet known, but it has been my belief for a long time that they in fact did make up a lot of it through clandestine channels. Much of this information was scooped up by Judy Miller and was disseminated exclusively by her (and a few co-authors) on front pages of editions of the New York Times. Alexander Cockburn posted an excellent summary of Miller’s role on August 18, 2003. Cockburn just followed the trail of an “an entire Noah’s Ark of scam-artists” that underbedded Miller’s reporting:

We don’t have full 20/20 hindsight yet, but we do know for certain that all the sensational disclosures in Miller’s major stories between late 2001 and early summer, 2003, promoted disingenuous lies. There were no secret biolabs under Saddam’s palaces; no nuclear factories across Iraq secretly working at full tilt. A huge percentage of what Miller wrote was garbage, garbage that powered the Bush administration’s propaganda drive towards invasion.

…

December 20, 2001, Headline, “Iraqi Tells of Renovations at Sites For Chemical and Nuclear Arms”.

Miller rolls out a new Iraqi defector, in the ripe tradition of her favorite, Khidir Hamza, the utter fraud who called himself Saddam’s Bombmaker.

Story:

“An Iraqi defector who described himself as a civil engineer said he 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 a year ago.

“The defector, Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri, gave details of the projects he said he worked on for President Saddam Hussein’s government in an extensive interview last week in Bangkok. The interview with Mr. Saeed was arranged by the Iraqi National Congress, the main Iraqi opposition group, which seeks the overthrow of Mr. Hussein.

“If verified, Mr. Saeed’s allegations would provide ammunition to officials within the Bush administration who have been arguing that Mr. Hussein should be driven from power partly because of his unwillingness to stop making weapons of mass destruction.”

Notice the sedate phrase “if verified”. It never was verified. But the story served its purpose.

September 7, 2002: Headline: “US says Hussein intensifies quest for a-bomb parts”.

This one was by Miller and Michael Gordon, promoting the aluminum tube nonsense: “In the last 14 months, Iraq has sought to buy thousands of specially designed aluminum tubes, which American officials believe were intended as components of centrifuges to enrich uranium.” All lies of course. Miller and Gordon emphasize “Mr. Hussein’s dogged insistence on pursuing his nuclear ambitions, along with what defectors described in interviews as Iraq’s push to improve and expand Baghdad’s chemical and biological arsenals”.

Another of Miller’s defectors takes a bow:

“Speaking on the condition that neither he nor the country in which he was interviewed be identified, Ahmed al-Shemri, his pseudonym, said Iraq had continued developing, producing and storing chemical agents at many mobile and fixed secret sites throughout the country, many of them underground.

“All of Iraq is one large storage facility,” said Mr. Shemri. Asked about his allegations, American officials said they believed these reports were accurate.”

A final bit of brazen chicanery from Gordon and Miller:

“Iraq denied the existence of a germ warfare program entirely until 1995, when United Nations inspectors forced Baghdad to acknowledge it had such an effort. Then, after insisting that it had never weaponized bacteria or filled warheads, it again belatedly acknowledged having done so after Hussein Kamel, Mr. Hussein’s brother-in-law, defected to Jordan with evidence about the scale of the germ warfare program.”

What Gordon and Miller leave out (or lacked the enterprise or desire to find out) is that Hussein Kamel told UN Inspectors that he had destroyed all Iraq’s WMDs, on Saddam Hussein’s orders.

September 13, 2002, headline: “White House Lists Iraq Steps To Build Banned Weapons”.

And on and on…

So then, what of the notion that the French, the Germans, the UK, the UN, Democrats, and so on all “knew” Saddam had weapons of mass destruction? “Everybody” did not “know” Saddam had WMD ready to use. The WMD America helped Saddam to acquire had long-since been destroyed, as the Hussein Kamel debriefing showed eight years earlier (and as was known to the CIA). Most of the rest of the intelligence had collapsed or was collapsing by early 2003, and all of these countries and the UN knew that and warned US officials about it. And the UK? That’s funny, Tony Blair’s own intel-PR shop had created the famous “WMD attack in 45 minutes”, and MI6 had cribbed a supposed fresh intelligence assessment on Iraq WMD directly off of the internet from a decade-old graduate student’s paper.

Democrats, except maybe for the likes of no-WMD converts like Henry Waxman or, on the left of the spectrum, Dennis Kucinich, were rather useless, so citing John Kerry as proof of WMD is rather a joke.

It became known that the defectors and suppliers of the intelligence were frauds often turned out by Ahmed Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress, like Khidir Hamza, the person who was the basis for 1998 stories like “Iraqi Work Toward A-Bomb Reported”; and “Curveball”, the defector who formed the basis for scare-mongering stories about “Winnebagoes of Death” — mobile bioweapons labs — described extensively here in Deep Blade Journal.

The initial LA Times story reporting Curveball stated that

Curveball’s story has since crumbled under doubts raised by the Germans and the scrutiny of U.S. weapons hunters, who have come to see his code name as particularly apt, given the problems that beset much of the prewar intelligence collection and analysis.

Deep Blade Journal has had from the beginning a general editorial position that while a local tyrant, Saddam in no way was a threat that required war during 2003 and beyond. Even so, I could not guarantee in late-2002/early-2003 that Saddam Hussein did not have some unconventional weapons. Instead, my editorial position since the beginning has been to depend honest analysis, the most important of which in the war buildup was that of Glen Rangwala from Cambridge University, “Claims and evaluations of Iraq’s proscribed weapons”.

A brief examination of this document will demonstrate thoroughly that there was no clear agreement that Saddam Hussein was any sort of threat to the US, UK, or even any of his immediate neighbors. It shows truly without doubt that Iraq had already been substantially disarmed.

Were there gaps in accounting? Yes. This is a point with which I must agree with Professor McAdams. But that in no way suggests that war was or is the answer, nor does it absolve the US administration for creating a false premise for the war.

Here is how I put this in March 2003:

Yes, there are officially unresolved issues concerning chemical and biological agents that could be locally very dangerous. And full credence should be given to the possibility that Hussein Kamel correctly reported the destruction of these agents. Above all, there is no way these issues add up to war in the absence of a direct threat from Iraq….a solution short of war has always been possible–lifting of sanctions and permanent in-country inspections coupled with region-wide peace initiatives. We probably will never know if present day Iraq can cooperate with the international community and heal itself from decades of tyrannical rule because the U.S. will not allow it.

Administration officials are now well-rehearsed in delivering lines like, “Saddam Hussein is a practiced liar, there is no doubt about it. We should take everything he says very skeptically.”

Apparently, the same holds true for Colin Powell and our own administration. Other countries see this clearly as their citizens line up at 80%+ rates against the war. Notwithstanding posturing of the U.S. administration that failure to vote along lines of U.S. will renders the U.N. “irrelevant,” the U.S. still faces three likely vetoes of a war resolution from China, France, and Russia; teetering of the Blair government in the U.K. as it desperately seeks cover for war; even withdrawal of support for the U.S. position in third-world countries like Pakistan and Cameroon. These are no small measures of how badly Powell’s diplomatic disaster has turned out.

This is history Professor McAdams and other rightists should review before attacking anti-war analysis with an “ahistorical” tag. It seems to me that such attacks serve the administration’s program to deflect the highly damaging Plame matter into a spurious discussion of the honesty of Joseph Wilson and others who would question the motives behind the conquest of Iraq.

Document collection: Iraq and Weapons of Mass Destruction National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 80. The administration’s pre-war intelligence papers are available here.