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Pretext for war exposed
CIA-backed exile was source for Times scoops
on Iraqi arms program
By David Walsh
28 May 2003
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A report in the Washington Post has cast devastating
new light on claims by the New York Times correspondent
Judith Miller that the US military had uncovered the smoking
gun of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (WMD).
Post media correspondent Howard Kurtz revealed May 26 the
contents of an e-mail exchange between Miller and Times Baghdad
chief John Burns in which the former acknowledges that long-time
US government asset Ahmad Chalabi of the Iraqi National Congress
provided most of the front page exclusives on WMD
to the Times.
The failure of the US military to discover chemical and biological
weapons in Iraq, the chief pretext for the pre-emptive
invasion and overthrow of the Saddam Hussein regime, has been
an ongoing political embarrassment for the Bush administration.
Various clumsy efforts have been made since the end of the
war, most prominently by Miller, to provide proof, even the slimmest,
of these weapons existence. In a series of lurid articles
in late April and early May, picked up by other news sources and
widely distributed, the Timess reporter claimed essentially
that American forces had discovered the much-looked-for evidence
of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.
In an April 21 piece, for example, headlined, Illicit
Arms Kept Till Eve of War, An Iraqi Scientist Is Said to Assert,
Miller claimed that an unnamed Iraqi scientist had been found
who asserted that the Hussein regime had 1) destroyed its stocks
of chemical weapons only days before the US invaded; 2) shared
its weapons technology with Syria; and 3) collaborated with Osama
bin Ladens Al-Qaeda. All three claims conveniently dovetailed
with Bush administration positions. Millers article, however,
provided nothing to substantiate these charges other than anonymous
sources in the US militarys Mobile Exploitation Team Alpha
(MET Alpha), the unit hunting for WMD.
Miller added this extraordinary disclaimer: Under the
terms of her accreditation to report on the activities of MET
Alpha, this reporter was not permitted to interview the scientist
or visit his home. Nor was she permitted to write about the discovery
of the scientist for three days, and the copy was then submitted
for a check by military officials.
Those officials asked that details of what chemicals
were uncovered be deleted. They said they feared that such information
could jeopardize the scientists safety by identifying the
part of the weapons program where he worked.
In other words, Miller was asking her readers to take the Pentagons
word for it that the man even existed. Nothing more has been heard
of this Iraqi scientist in the intervening four weeks
(after one more appearance April 23), and MET Alpha was apparently
reassigned to searching for Jewish antiquities. The Washington
Post reported on May 11 that the group directing all
known U.S. search efforts for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq
is winding down operations without finding proof that President
Saddam Hussein kept clandestine stocks of outlawed arms, according
to participants. MET Alpha is preparing to leave the country
without having found any chemical or biological weapons.
On May 13, at a press conference, Maj. Gen. David H. Petraeus,
commanding general, 101st Airborne Division, was asked by a reporter
why no technical weapons of mass destruction have been found,
much less any facilities or labs, given the ground that your units
have covered.
Petraeus replied: Well, one of the speculations, of course,
is that the individual who, in fact, passed the note to our soldiers
around Karbala and who was subsequently interviewed at some length
by the 75th Exploitation Brigadeand I think that Judith
Miller wrote some articles about him in the New York Timeshe
claims that whatever they had left was destroyed shortly before
the war. So that again is one theory. Millers smoking
gun was now, according to the US military command, merely
a claim and a theory.
Kurtz, in his May 26 piece in the Washington Post, published
portions of the exchange between Miller and Burns that began when
the Baghdad bureau chief complained about a May 1 Times
feature on Iraqi National Congress chief Ahmad Chalabi. Miller
had written the piece without consulting Burns, who had another
correspondent in mind for the article.
Miller replied: Ive been covering Chalabi for about
10 years, and have done most of the stories about him for our
paper, including the long takeout we recently did on him. He has
provided most of the front page exclusives on WMD to our paper.
According to Kurtz, she apologized for any confusion, but explained
that the MET Alpha is using Chalabis intell [intelligence]
and document network for its own WMD work... Since Im there
every day, talking to him...I thought I might have been included
on a decision by you as to who should write the piece on
Chalabi.
This is a remarkable admission. Both Miller and Andrew Rosenthal
of the Times were understandably reluctant to speak to
Kurtz about the e-mail exchange. It essentially acknowledges that
a convicted embezzler and right-wing Iraqi exile, with whom Miller
speaks on a daily basis, provided most of the Times
front-page scoops on alleged Iraqi weapons of mass
destruction.
Chalabi has a long history of dealings with the CIA and US
military, as well as with key members of the Bush administration,
including Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz. A member
of a wealthy family that fled Iraq when the monarch was overthrown
by a group of army officers in 1958, Chalabi amassed a fortune
as a banker in Jordan. Various allegations have been made concerning
Chalabis political activities, including collaboration with
Mossad, the Israeli secret service, in the 1980s and with Col.
Oliver North during what became known as the Iran-Contra scandal
in the same decade.
Chalabi is often referred to as an embezzler, but
it should be noted that he was not convicted of passing bad checks.
His Petra Bank, the second largest in Jordan, collapsed in 1989
(Chalabi allegedly fled the country in the trunk of a car), owing
hundreds of millions of dollars to depositors. The former chief
of Jordans Central Bank, Mohammed Said Nabulsi, calls Chalabi
a crook who absolutely cooked the books (Recalling
Ahmad Chalabi, Kareem Fahim, Village Voice). He was
alleged to have stashed $70 million in secret Swiss bank accounts.
Nabulsi claims that the impact of the Petra collapse was
much, much greater than the Enron case. Half a billion dollars
was lost, 10 percent of the Jordanian gross domestic product.
This individual, with the greatest possible motive for having
Iraqi weapons found, is apparently the chief source for Millers
WMD exclusives!
US intelligence may have erred
The claims about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction are unraveling,
although Bush administration and US military officials still promise
that finding them is a matter of time (Joint Chiefs
of Staff chairman Air Force Gen. Richard Myers on NBCs Today
show, May 26).
One of the American medias new tactics, in the face of
the failure of the search for WMD, is to raise the possibility
that prewar US intelligence on Iraqi weapons programs was flawed
or inaccurate and argue that efforts should be made
to improve intelligence-gathering so that such mistakes
are not repeated. The obvious purpose here is to block anyone
from drawing the conclusion that the Pentagon and the Bush administration
were deliberately and consciously lying in order to provide a
pretext for a war of imperialist conquest.
The Times ran a piece May 22, Prewar Views of
Iraq Threat Are Under Review by CIA, that reveals both the
unraveling of the administrations claims and this new tactic.
The article reports on a CIA review aimed at determining whether
the American intelligence community erred in its prewar assessments
of Saddam Husseins government and Iraqs weapons programs.
The article, by James Risen, claims that the review is something
quite routine, planned last October by Rumsfeld and CIA director
George Tenet (at a time when the US government was claiming that
it had no definite plans to go to war against Iraq) as a means
of gauging the accuracy of prewar intelligence against the reality
discovered on the ground after the war. The article
notes, however, that The failure so far of American forces
to find conclusive evidence either of Iraqi ties to Al Qaeda or
unconventional weapons has added urgency to the studys outcome.
The review will focus, among other things, on whether
the United States overstated the threat that Iraq was trying to
develop biological, chemical and nuclear weapons. Why it
should have done so is never raised. The article refers to the
well-known conflict between the Pentagon and the CIA over the
alleged threat posed by the Hussein regime, noting that several
CIA analysts had complained about pressure from Bush government
officials to produce reports that supported the administrations
positions on Iraq.
Unhappy that the spy agency was not confirming its claims about
the Iraqi threat, Rumsfelds Defense Department created a
special unit to review intelligence reports. In some cases,
Pentagon officials came to believe that the CIA was too dismissive
of information provided by Iraqi exiles and other sources warning
of the threat posed by reported Iraqi ties to Al Qaeda and by
suspected efforts to develop illegal weapons. The establishment
of this unit apparently set off a furor within the US intelligence
community.
The article complacently concludes that it is becoming
increasingly clear that the CIA, Pentagon and other agencies did
not know as much about the status of Iraqs weapons programs
and its ties to terrorists before the war as was previously believed.
In their inimitable and cynical fashion, the Times editors
several days later weighed in along the same lines (Reviewing
the Intelligence in Iraq, May 26, 2003), reporting themselves
glad to see that the Central Intelligence Agency has begun
a review of the spy assessments. After all, they reason,
the failure so far to find any WMD has raised serious questions
about the quality of American intelligence and even dark hints
that the data may have been manipulated to support a pre-emptive
war. The latter possibility is set aside, never to be mentioned
again.
Given the scant findings in Iraq so far, it is disturbing
to recall how gravely the administration portrayed the dangers
of Iraqs unconventional weapons. High officials said Iraq
had reconstituted its program to develop nuclear weapons, was
continuing to make biological weapons and possessed a large stockpile
of chemical agents, some ready to be used against American troops
or made available to terrorists. Not disturbing
enough, however, to revive those dark hints that the
entire WMD campaign was a pack of lies aimed at justifying a military
invasion of a sovereign nation.
The Times editors are more than willing to give the
Bush administration and the Pentagon the benefit of the doubt,
observing that Intelligence estimates about weapons are
notoriously difficult to get right. Nonetheless, they remain
disturbed, particularly by the critical question of
what information was presented to the president in the run-up
to war. They conclude: When President Bush and Secretary
of State Colin Powell repeatedly assured the world that Iraqs
unconventional weapons were a threat to international security,
they relied on Americas intelligence agencies. The country
needs to know if the spy organizations were right or wrong.
Excluded from this editorial is another possibility, that the
spy organizations, the Pentagon and the Bush administration
knew the true state of affairs about Iraqi WMD perfectly well
and combined to deceive the American public.
Also left out of the Times assessment is the role that
the newspaper itself played in the run-up to war and
afterward, as exemplified by the conduct of its own Judith Miller.
Involved here, however, is not the case of one journalist with
her own political agenda. The newspaper has been at the center
of the propaganda effort to justify US aggression in the Middle
East. While urging the Bush administration to gather UN and European
support for its attack on Iraq, the Times never cast doubt
on the claims about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.
A January 26, 2003, editorial (The Race to War),
for example, pontificated, Saddam Hussein is obviously a
brutal dictator who deserves toppling. No one who knows his history
can doubt that he is secretly trying to develop weapons of mass
destruction. Following Colin Powells presentation
at the UN, all of whose allegations have proven to be false, the
Times (The Case Against Iraq, February 6, 2003)
described the performance as the most powerful case to date
and a sober, factual case. Now that this all threatens
to go up in smoke, the Times is both seeking to cover its
own tracks and deflect attention from the Bush administrations
criminality.
See Also:
Manufacturing the news: New
York Times report on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction
[23 April 2003]
Jayson Blair and Judith Miller: Journalistic
ethics, hypocrisy and war at the New York Times
[13 May 2003]
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