Gene Lyons June 11, 2003
Faulty Intelligence
It turns out that there's a connection between the 9/11 al Qaeda attacks on the United States and the war in Iraq after all. But it's not the one President Junior and his advisors expected to find. Instead of unearthing Saddam Hussein's vaunted "weapons of mass destruction" or producing evidence of collusion with Osama bin Laden, what the fall of Baghdad has again exposed is the Bush administration's stubborn incapacity to heed "intelligence" that doesn't fit its pre-existing world-view.
Moving unwelcome information up the chain of command is difficult in ALL hierarchical bureaucracies, from the Little Rock Police Department to the CIA. Hence, in part, the CIA's failure to anticipate events as portentous as the collapse of the Soviet Union or India's development of nuclear weapons. Nobody's eager to give the boss the bad news. But the problem becomes acute when the people at the top are politically ruthless, determined ideologues, like the Bush administration's dominant figures.
Add extreme dishonesty and the media-enhanced cult of personality that has developed to cover Bush's obvious intellectual shortcomings, and you've got yourself the makings of a real mess. With respect to 9/11, the administration went into cover-up mode almost before the World Trade Center's twin towers had fallen--putting out a since-retracted story that the president high-tailed it to Nebraska because of a specific, credible threat to Air Force One.
There's reportedly a made-for-TV movie in the works in which a jut-jawed president demands to be taken back to Washington to face the enemy. I guess they'll airbrush away all those press briefings in which Ari Fliescher kept insisting the U.S. had "no warning" of the al Qaeda sneak attack. CBS News later reported that Bush had, in fact, received an urgent CIA briefing of imminent al-Qaeda terrorist strikes roughly a month before 9/11. He continued his vacation.
Stories appeared describing CIA director George Tenet and National Security Council counterterrorism head Richard Clarke as "nearly frantic" with worry. Having brushed off urgent warnings of the terrorist threat from the previous administration, White House advisor Condi Rice alibied that nobody could have imagined anything as fiendish as crashing airliners into buildings. Bush's August 2001 briefing, she claimed, had concerned only "traditional highjackings." In fact, intelligence professionals had predicted exactly what happened.
Bouyed by his decision to create a department of Homeland Security, which he'd previously opposed, Bush got away with it clean. Busting up al-Qaeda's sanctuary in Afghanistan and rousting the Taliban didn't hurt either. Questioning critics' patriotism proved a useful tactic in a time of fear. Giving Bush the benefit of the doubt, most citizens bought the bait and switch campaign to substitute Saddam Hussein and Iraq for Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda as threats to American security.
And why? Well, mainly because Bush has surrounded himself with self-described "neo-conservative" intellectuals centering around Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld who have been hollering that the sky was falling since the 1970s. Many were members of the infamous "Team B," convened by then-CIA director George H.W. Bush. Their great achievement was portraying the Russian military as ten feet tall and bulletproof precisely as the ramshackle Soviet empire was falling apart. Needless to say, dissenters were accused of being "soft on communism," lacking patriotism, etc. Meanwhile, real traitors like CIA spy Aldrich Ames got away with murder.
Undeterred, the same gang next sought a super-villain in the Middle East. Allied with the Israeli Likud party, the "Project for a New American Century" started urging Bill Clinton to attack Iraq five years ago, and devised a utopian scheme to dominate the world. Here's how one of its prime movers, Richard Perle, described his first meeting with President Junior in Vanity Fair recently: "Two things became clear. One, he didn't know very much. The other was he had the confidence to ask questions that revealed he didn't know very much...you got the sense that if he believed something he'd pursue it tenaciously."
The same article describes Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz telling friends Bush "wanted to be told what needed doing and how it should be done." So they told him, and he told the American people. He told us Saddam had nuclear weapons. He told us "weapons of mass destruction" had been deployed. British Prime Minister Tony Blair claimed they were ready for use in 45 minutes. Bush warned us that not attacking Iraq would be tantamount to national "suicide."
British intelligence now admits that the 45 minutes business was simply invented in response to political pressure to "sex-up" their report.
"What this administration has done to military and intelligence professionals in government is disgraceful," Former Reagan assistant defense secretary Lawrence Korb told Salon. 27-year CIA veteran Ray McGovern, head of an organization called Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, has described the administration's pressure tactics as "worse than the Gulf of Tonkin"--the fabricated incident that got us into Vietnam.
Condi Rice says it's all a big misunderstanding.
The question is whether Americans are too scared and confused to care.
8:10:39 PM 
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