Thank you very much for this. I'm e-mailing it in its entirety to my friends.
Posted by boog & echo at November 12, 2005 12:07 PMThorough and illuminating. Thanks for doing all the heavy lifting.
Posted by The Heretik at November 12, 2005 12:22 PMStupendous work, I'm still trying to understand it all.
If the Dems did not and could not see the full intelligence and reports, why haven't they been screaming this everywhere as an explanation for their disastrous vote authorizing Bushco to use whatever force necessary?
Posted by euzoius at November 12, 2005 01:07 PMExtremely valuable and well executed, eRiposte, as always.
(Although Example #3 is largely after the fact, it mirrors (and attempts to shore up) the pre-war pattern of deception on the uranium subject. That too of course is absolutely typical.)
I did want to make a more general point about your introductory comments. Those are indeed two important ingredients of the massive Bush Admin campaign of deception re: Iraq. But they are in no sense exhaustive, as you might be read as implying.
There are many, many more ingredients to the fraud. And many of these have nothing to do with "intelligence", strictly speaking. (Indeed, as an aside, many of them did not even hinge on whether or not "WMDs" were ultimately found in Iraq. They were lies, quite simply and quite indisputably, no matter what happened in the future.) Just one (important) example is the gross and systematic misrepresentation of UN inspections reports (and of the previous history of UN inspections).
In my opinion this is a general problem with the way the entire subject of Admin lies and deception has been conceptualised thus far. The whole question (!) of whether or not the Admin lied (deceived, exaggerated, "hyped", etc. etc.) has been framed exclusively in terms of the disjuncture between "intelligence" and public Admin claims. That is, "the intelligence" (which gets disaggregated in more sophisticated analyses) said X, and the Admin said Y; the problem is reduced to seeing how closely X and Y match. Of course that is an important dimension of the issue. But, as I've pointed out, it is just one dimension. And to focus on it exclusively or excessively prevents us from seeing how truly massive the scope of the deception was, in addition to playing into the justificatory, obfuscatory, displacing and minimising rhetorical strategy of the Admin and its apologists.
There is a related problem. This framework encourages us to miss or gloss over the important role "the intelligence" played in the deception. This is a complex issue with many strands, and I must emphasise that the reasons for such participation -- and often, in effect, complicity -- are diverse, and almost invariably (with the exception of WH plants and sympathisers in the intelligence agencies) quite different from those of a White House ruthlessly engaged in pushing a war by any means necessary. (This is a quite essential point, and vital in obliterating the apologists' attempt to drag everyone else down with them. I have little patience or time, for instance, for Democrats who were bullied into voting for this war, but to pretend that they somehow share blame in anything remotely approaching that of the Bush Admin itself is, quite simply, monstrous. The same applies, mutatis mutandis, to the CIA.) But to ignore this sometime complicity (including the fact that it was only acquiescence/complicity, and only sometime), and the reasons, mechanics and dynamics behind it, is, ironically and counterintuitively, to play into the hands of those who want to scapegoat that intelligence and diminish/displace/diffuse the true responsibility for the war.
Moreover -- and this is a generic point following from and expanding the last comment, not a criticism of this post --, there is the additional conceptual problem about the whole debate in that it tends to portray/understand the various players as unitary entities. It's not enough to distinguish between the DIA, CIA, INR, OSP and so on and on; there are serious problems, I'd suggest, in treating these agencies (with the likely exception of OSP!) as internally homogeneous in their responses to the various aspects of Admin pressure for war. Your and emptywheel's analyses alone have given multiple indications of the need for a more nuanced look if we are to understand the full scale of the fraud and how the Admin managed to carry it off. (Look at Tenet's role in Example 1 in this very post. Should we extend blame in this instance to the entire agency (as for instance the Admin's rhetorical strategy tries to do more generally)?) If we want to understand the complex pattern of accommodation and resistance on the part of agencies like the CIA, we are going to have to look very closely at who, internally, was pushing what claims and when (and, ideally, why), at what point certain actors and agencies were willing to go along and at what point they simply wouldn't, and so on. (Despite my initial disclaimer, this is one reason I'm somewhat sceptical of the force of your specific arguments against the US having initially received (or been made aware of) the original Niger transcriptions (with errors and all) -- which is not to say that your conclusion might not, as Josh Marshall and La Repubblica appear to suggest, be correct.)
Apologies for the very long comment ... just a few thoughts provoked by this piece. Again, this is an excellent crack at an extremely important question.
Posted by KM at November 12, 2005 01:52 PMThis may be oldish news, but it makes it no less damning:
"US Forces 'Used Chemical Weapons' During Assault on City of Fallujah"
Eriposte: do you blog professionally elsewhere? The mainstream media could use someone like you - the American public could use someone like you in the mainstream media.
Posted by DukeRevolution at November 12, 2005 02:41 PMEuzoius,
I have never been able to figure out why the Dems have not been screaming about the facts, but it is possible it is because some prominent Presidential candidates voted for the war.
KM,
Point taken. You are right that I did *not* intend to exclude the garden variety lying, etc. I have added an update to the post accordingly. Also, I hope to have more on the scapegoating of the intel agencies in the future (getting time to do it is the big constraint).
Regarding your comment:
"If we want to understand the complex pattern of accommodation and resistance on the part of agencies like the CIA, we are going to have to look very closely at who, internally, was pushing what claims and when (and, ideally, why), at what point certain actors and agencies were willing to go along and at what point they simply wouldn't, and so on."
Agree 200% :-). This is exactly what I *want* to do but find myself unable to - as much as I would have liked - because it's hard to find time to do that with the demands of my regular job. Anyway, please keep the comments coming. They are very pertinent and thoughtfully argued.
Posted by eriposte at November 12, 2005 03:36 PMDukeRevolution,
No, I don't blog elsewhere for the time being.
Thanks for the feedback.
Posted by eriposte at November 12, 2005 03:37 PMeR
Great work, as always.
But I'd be careful about Judy's claims about what Libby told her about the NIE. The claim itself is not credible, insofar as Judy claims the NIE had ALREADY been declassified, when it wasn't declassified until 10 days later. That, plus the fact that Fitz seems to have shown her a VERSION of the NIE (presumably the classified one) and she seems to have seen it, maybe.
In other words, Judy has to be lying about what Libby said. And given the evidence, it may be that she's lying to cover up the fact that Libby DID show her the NIE. So we can't trust what she says Libby said to her.
Posted by emptywheel at November 12, 2005 05:25 PMEW,
The spin about Wilson's trip was used publicly - not just in Libby's conversation with Miller. That was, after all, the biggest spin from the WH after the Wilson op-ed saying that his trip actually provided evidence of uranium seeking.
Posted by eriposte at November 12, 2005 06:13 PMeRiposte, Laura Rozen linked to this post and says the SSCI should use you for their phase two investigation. Congratulations. You have definitely advanced the story.
Posted by Mary at November 13, 2005 09:25 AMThe fun thing about the SSCI rapport on the uranium claim was that it was worded so incredibly specific. According to the investigation the problem was that the intelligence community failed to authenticate *the document* in time for the state of the union... The investigation remains silent on whether *the claim based on the niger documents* was fact checked. Someone disliked the claim enough to make sure the bush pointed the finger at the UK as the source of the claim before letting the speech through. But that part the investigation hasn`t started yet.
And you have to say with all the investigation on syria and libya and all that other stuff in the rapport the people behind doing the investigation must have been very busy. I mean the rapport has hundreds of pages that are almost as interesting as questions about the what intel was put in the speeches and what wasn`t. You have to appreciate the work that went into all that almost interesting stuff.
Saying the document wasn`t authenticated is kind of like saying that someone failed to authenticate an article on Elvis his recent tour. Could it be that the Document wasn`t authenticated because the claim itself was disproved or distrusted before people even started on checking the paperwork?
In Niger the uranium is mined by a French consortium. They kinda depend on foreign uranium in France with something like 75% of their electricity being nuclear. So even if France (which got the niger docs very early) and the rest of the IAEA who keep track of the uranium from niger hadn`t cared about 500 tons of it going to Saddam, then they still would have cared about 500 tons not going to France!
Also the “but clinton said it to” claims need some nuance. Under clinton the nuclear claim where limited to saying that Saddam was 5 years away from a bomb.... *if he got his hands on weapons grade fissile material.... from somewhere, in sufficient amounts*. A scary thought, but this claim should be true for pretty much anyone who payed attention during high school physics. In essence a simple nuke is little more than a big enough chunk of enriched uranium or plutonium.
But this is all nitpicking the interesting question is: How come a single piece of evidence of every step in a nuclear weapons program just happened to appear in time for the NIE?
That saddam had “sought” uranium would be bad, it would mean he wanted a big pile of yellowcake. Possible as decoration, it is of little other use without being enriched. But Somehow somewhere in the CIA someone comes up with the really exciting scenario. What if Saddam where to start using tubes he has always used for rockets and started to use them for enrichment centrifuges? These would only be very unreliable less efficient and need many more tightly controlled parts than his previous centrifuges. This would fool the rest of the world which would assume that if Saddam where to start an enrichment program, he would start with the efficient and reliable German designed centrifuges for which he had drawings and knowhow. On top of that a pakistani had just started selling parts all over the world....
The department of energy was fooled. These people (who build the US centrifuges) figured Saddam wanted centrifuges that.... worked. Thankfully these silly buggers where told to shut up and sit down in time. (No wonder the guy who told them this got a big fat bonus)
Ofcourse with plenty of enriched uranium Saddam now has a nuke... laying around in Iraq. But fear not, a captured Al Qaida member just heapons to start talking about how close he and saddam where. In fact during his chemical weapons training in iraq this fundamentalist would often stop for the afternoon prayer along with uday and his many hookers. Could terrorists bring the nuke to the US where it could be used as mushroom cloud imagery? The DIA doesn`t think so, but he talked just in time to explain how an iraqi nuke is a big threat to the US.
Yes thanks to the CIA thinking outside the box on this one and not sticking with expert advice on what is and isn`t possible they where just in time with a set of evidence that more a less fits together like a jigsaw puzzle.... okey two half jigsaw puzles but it has got as many pieces as it says on the box right?
Anyway in a week in which science and torture have been redefined to better suit contemporary use looking back is a waste of time anyway. Americans have to look forward for their new definition of:
Freedom (The new definition should be made to fit with contemporary interpretations of the constitution)
Peace (Preferably should be defined for use on aircraft carrier banners when the pullout starts)
Ignorance (Blocking a leak investigation into prisons once the party affiliation of the leaker is known. America is stronger if it doesn`t know Cheney provided that data for another leak)
Excellent work as always, Eriposte. I do my best to keep up with your analysis.
You really should consider talking to a publisher and write a book, if you haven't already. I know there are some serious pitfalls to book writing, but overall I think it would definitely be worth it for you. Your insight and detail in these matters are extremely refreshing and important.
Is that enough sun up your ass yet? :D
Keep it up!
Posted by MisterOpus1 at November 14, 2005 08:22 PM