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New Republic Editor-In-Chief tells Bush to bomb Iraq
By Jason Leopold
February 21, 2003

Many of The New Republic’s readers are unaware that Peretz, along with several other journalists and right-wing lawmakers, lobbied President Bush nine days after the September 11 terrorist attacks to start a war with Iraq and remove Saddam Hussein from power, claiming that Iraq may be linked to the attacks, an allegation that the Bush Administration has made many times without a shred of evidence to back it up

The New Republic, the 89 year-old “liberal” journal of politics and the arts, has shifted its editorial stance recently by publishing stories that supports a war with Iraq and criticizes the Democratic party for its weakness, according to a story in Wednesday’s New York Observer.

Moreover, the weekly magazine will unveil a new redesign with the publication of Friday’s issue. But putting the magazine through a makeover is a cheap way to conceal from its subscribers Editor-in-Chief and co-owner Martin Peretz’s personal stance on Iraq. In a recent press release, The New Republic says its coverage as of late represents “several daring political stances” on issues such as the U.S. going to war with Iraq without the support of the United Nations.

This is misleading. The only thing that’s daring about the “new” New Republic is how Peretz is fooling readers of the magazine into believing that The New Republic’s editorial stance does not represent the personal politics of its editors. Many of The New Republic’s readers are unaware that Peretz, along with several other journalists and right-wing lawmakers, lobbied President Bush nine days after the September 11 terrorist attacks to start a war with Iraq and remove Saddam Hussein from power, claiming that Iraq may be linked to the attacks, an allegation that the Bush Administration has made many times without a shred of evidence to back it up.

“We agree with Secretary of State Powell’s recent statement that Saddam Hussein “is one of the leading terrorists on the face of the Earth,” the letter says. “It may be that the Iraqi government provided assistance in some form to the recent attack on the United States. But even if evidence does not link Iraq directly to the attack, any strategy aiming at the eradication of terrorism and its sponsors must include a determined effort to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq. Failure to undertake such an effort will constitute an early and perhaps decisive surrender in the war on international terrorism. The United States must therefore provide full military and financial support to the Iraqi opposition. American military force should be used to provide a “safe zone” in Iraq from which the opposition can operate. And American forces must be prepared to back up our commitment to the Iraqi opposition by all necessary means,” says the letter.

What’s most troubling about the letter to Bush is that it was written by The Project for the New American Century, a right-wing think tank that has been instrumental in advising Bush what America’s foreign policy should look like. It’s founder and chairman is William Kristol, editor of the conservative magazine The Weekly Standard, and its former members have included Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz. Kristol also signed the letter to Bush. It can be viewed at http://www.newamericancentury.org/Bushletter.htm

Peretz has been the top editor at The New Republic since 1974 and was co-founder with CNBC pundit and former hedge fund guru James Kramer of The Street.com. Peretz was former Vice President Al Gore’s professor at Harvard and helped Gore on his initial run for Congress and the Senate and was also instrumental in Gore’s run for the presidency.

Peretz said in an interview that “there are other editors around here” and that his personal views on Iraq are not represented in the pages of The New Republic. He said the magazine’s views on foreign policy have been consistent for 25 years.

“We were for the last Gulf War and for aid to the Contras,” Peretz said. Comparing The New Republic to its close competitor The Nation, Peretz said, “Whatever The Nation was for we were against. Whatever The Nation was against we were for. The only thing we share was we were rather soft on Stalin in the late 1930s.”

Still, when journalists become personally involved in the issues they cover there is no way readers can be sure they are getting their news delivered accurately. Being an opinion-oriented publication doesn’t excuse that. Look at how New York Times op-ed columnist Paul Krugman and Wall Street Journal opinion columnist Peggy Noonan were attacked by the media when they wrote critically about the financial machinations of Enron Corporation and how it was later revealed that both were paid speechwriters and consultants for the company. Krugman wasn’t even writing for The New York Times or any other publication when Enron hired him and he was still taken to task. Business journalists, as a general rule, aren’t allowed to own stock in company’s they write about because their coverage could be deemed bias. The Street.com’s reporters are the exception, but the online publication still requires its reporters to disclose to readers whether they own stock in the companies t the exception, but the online publication still requires its reporters to disclose to readers whether they own stock in the companies they write about. Peretz should be held to the same principles. If he were to simply disclose to The New Republic’s subscribers that he offered the President some advice about his views on how the Administration should deal with Iraq at least his subscribers could decide whether The New Republic is still worth reading.

Sherry Bebitch Jeffe, senior scholar of the University of Southern California’s school of Policy, Planning and Development and an expert on the media, said she doesn’t believe journalists should get involved in activism, but if they do it should be disclosed to the reader.

“ I know journalists who walked in abortion rights marches, but that’s not something I would do,” Jeffe said. “It’s an individual decision. A reporter or editor may believe they can still be objective despite it. I would expect a journalist who does that should write a letter to his or her readers and let readers judge. It’s a more honest way to handle it”.

I subscribe to The New Republic. While researching a story I wrote this week about how Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz wrote a letter to President Clinton in 1998 urging Clinton to start a war with Iraq and remove Saddam Hussein from power, I came across another the letter that Peretz and others wrote to Bush after 9-11. I felt cheated and betrayed. I was lead to believe that the magazine I read every week was providing me with its point of view, not Peretz’s. I haven’t decided yet whether to cancel my subscription.

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Powell Warned Bush Last Year Of Bloody War With Iraq Without UN Suport
By Jason Leopold
February 25, 2003

If the United States decides to wage a war with Iraq without the full support of the United Nations it will be “much more complicated and bloody” than the siege in Afghanistan after 9-11 and the first Gulf War combined, Secretary of State Colin Powell warned President Bush privately early last year, Bob Woodward wrote in the book “Bush at War.”

“It’s nice to say you can do it unilaterally,” Powell said to Bush about attacking Iraq, Woodward wrote. “Except you can’t. A successful military plan would require we need allies… International support has to be garnered.”

So what has changed between the time Powell warned Bush about alienating a majority of our allies in the United Nations and now, when Powell’s rhetoric before the U.N. Security Council this month is understood to mean that if the U.N. doesn’t back a full-scale war with Iraq the U.S. and Britain will attack Iraq alone if necessary?

Absolutely nothing. Despite the fact that Powell has recently changed his tone before the U.N., he knows full well that if the U.S. made good on its threats it will face a bloody battle in the Iraqi desert or on the streets of Baghdad.

A “unilateral war would be tough, close to impossible” Powell told Bush, according to Woodward’s book.

One can only assume that Powell’s sudden departure from the earlier warnings he made to the President is just Powell being a team player and agreeing with the “hawks” even though he knows better, said Sherry Bebitch Jeffe, a political and media analyst at the University of Southern California’s school of Public Policy and Development.

“If anything, international support for a war in Iraq has eroded over the past five months,” Jeffe said. “So it’s likely that those risks Powell presented to President Bush last year still exist. Powell’s rhetoric is just that. He knows better having spent most of his life in the military that without international support the U.S. is facing a dangerous situation if it decides to go to war alone.”

Dr. Hussein Shahristani, once Iraq’s top nuclear scientist who spent 11 years in solitary confinement for refusing Saddam Hussein’s order to build an atomic bomb, said in an interview Sunday on 60 Minutes that he believes the U.S. is rushing into a war without fully understanding the threat it faces. Shahristani was tortured for refusing to comply with the Saddam’s order and fled Iraq during the first Gulf War. He said would like nothing more than to see Saddam removed from power but he warned the Bush Administration not to start a war with Iraq without the support of the U.N.

As the U.S. moves closer to war it’s important to take another look at how the Bush Administration got here and how through lying, manipulation and with the events that brought this country to its knees, the Bush Administration has used this in attempt to make a case for war.

Of the half-dozen books that have been written about Bush since he was sworn into office two years ago, the recurring theme throughout all of them is the strong desire by the Administration to find a reason to start a war with Iraq—be it allegations that the country is concealing weapons of mass destruction or using 9-11 as an excuse to launch an immediate assault—without caring about how such a war would alienate the U.N. and the public or the fact that the U.S. cannot make a good case to justify a war with Iraq.

Woodward wrote in “Bush at War” that Vice President Dick Cheney was “hell bent for action against Saddam. It was as if nothing else existed.”

Following the 9-11 terrorist attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center, Woodward wrote that Rumsfeld “could take advantage of the terrorist attacks and make Iraq a target immediately.”

Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz said, without a shred of evidence to back it up, that there was a 10 to 50 percent chance that Saddam Hussein was involved in 9-11, Woodward wrote.

David Frum, the former White House speechwriter who coined the phrase “Axis of Evil,” wrote in “The Right Man,” his book about the year he spent in the Bush Administration, that the U.S. received intelligence information from Czechoslovakia that it could not confirm that a meeting took place between Mohammed Atta, the lead 9-11 hijacker, and an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague in April 2001 “suggesting some degree of cooperation between the al-Qaeda and the Iraqi dictator.”

That information, which has never been confirmed by U.S. intelligence, according to Frum, became the excuse the Bush Administration would use to attack Iraq and link 9-11 to Saddam Hussein. But according to Woodward, who spent ample time with Bush before writing his book, the President had no evidence that Iraq was involved in 9-11. He only had a gut feeling.

“I believe Iraq was involved but I am not going to strike them now. I don’t have the evidence at this point,” Bush said to his war cabinet, which includes Rumsfeld, Cheney, Powell and Wolfowitz, Woodward wrote.

Hard evidence linking Iraq to 9-11 never materialized. Still, the Bush Administration debated the idea of using 9-11 as an excuse to attack Iraq and remove Saddam from power, which Frum wrote in his book “was quite a gamble but also quite a prize.”

But it was Powell who was the lone dissenter and told Bush that he must put Iraq on the backburner and focus on dismantling al-Qaeda cells because “Americans were focused on al-Qaeda, Woodward’s book says.

Moreover, Powell told Bush that if he does consider attacking Iraq it’s crucial that he gets the public’s support first. Bush said recently, in response to the millions of anti-war protestors who marched in opposition to a war with Iraq last week, that the anti-war movement will not sway his efforts to use military force against Iraq if necessary.

“Any action needs public support,” Powell told Bush, Woodward wrote in his book. “It’s not what the international coalition supports it’s what the American people want to support.”

The American people have spoken.

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With War Looming, Iraqi Oil Imports May Be Strained
Time To Open Up ANWR, GOP Says
By Jason Leopold
published here March 10, 2003
In the coming weeks, the Senate will attempt to make a compelling argument for opening up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling. It turns out that tapping into ANWR’s resources would produce an immediate 600,000 barrels per day of oil—exactly the same amount of oil the U.S. currently purchases from Iraq under the United Nations oil for food program.

The U.N. Security Council set up the oil-for-food program in August 1990 after Iraq invaded Kuwait and the U.N then imposed comprehensive sanctions on the country. The program was aimed at removing some of the hardships placed on Iraqi civilians as a result of the sanctions. Since then, the U.S. has resented the fact that it has had to purchase Iraqi oil, which is crucial to our country’s overall supply, from Saddam Hussein who Bush Administration officials claim uses the money to fund his military and uses very little to reduce the suffering of innocent Iraqi’s affected by the sanctions.

If the U.S. does invade Iraq, which at this point seems inevitable, the Bush Administration is concerned that shortages will persist here forcing oil prices to skyrocket to unprecedented levels, putting further strain on the nation’s troubled economy. Oil prices in the past few weeks have come within a hair of $40 per barrel and analysts said that prices could reach as high as $70 if the U.S. goes to war with Iraq.

There is as much as 10 billion barrels of oil in more than 1 million acres surrounding ANWR. The United States uses about 20 million barrels of oil per day, and relies heavily on imports from the Middle East, Canada, Venezeula and Mexico. Environmentalists, who say drilling will hurt oxen, polar bears, the caribou population and other wildlife, will no doubt play an important role in the process.

At this point, according to key Republican lawmakers, it’s unclear whether the U.S. would be able to continue to import Iraqi oil if a war breaks out largely because there is concern among Bush Administration officials that Saddam Hussein may set fire to oil wells in the country. Moreover, these lawmakers said, it’s unlikely other Oil Petroleum Exporting Countries would increase output to help the U.S. because they don’t back the U.S. in a war against Iraq.

Since the United Nations embargo on Iraqi oil in August 1990, some 5 million barrels per day of oil has been removed from the market. Other OPEC countries increased their production capacity to make up the shortfall but they have already said they will not increase output in the event of a war.

So the lawmakers plan to argue that a decrease in oil imports is a national security issue and that ANWR should be opened up to drilling immediately, according to several Republican lawmakers in Washington who spoke to me off the record.
But much in the way the Bush Administration has tried to link the 9-11 terrorist attacks to Iraq, which so far have been unproven, as a way to justify a war the same is being done in the case of drilling in ANWR. The argument is that a war with Iraq will cut off much needed imports so the U.S. has no choice but to tap into its own resources. The truth is, according to Republican lawmakers, no one knows what to expect in the event of a war or how it will affect our ability to import oil. .

However, Bush made it clear before he took office that tapping into ANWR was a priority for his administration because the U.S. is “at the mercy of foreign governments and cartels” when it comes to our oil needs. A month before the 2000 presidential election, Bush gave a speech in Michigan and said, “oil consumption is increasing, our production is dropping and our imports of foreign oil is skyrocketing,” according to the book “The Right Man,” written by Bush’s former speechwriter David Frum.

“It’s not that we should use less energy but that we should import less,” Bush said, according to Frum’s book. “This has become a national security issue.”

Key Democratic lawmakers, including Senator Joseph Lieberman, D-Connecticut, and Senator Tom Daschle, D-South Dakota, said last week they will resist any attempt by Senate Republicans to open the ANWR for drilling.

GOP sources said they would deal with resistance by their Democratic counterparts to drilling in Northeastern Alaska by using a “filibuster-proof” legislative maneuver that would prevent Democrats from blocking passage of the energy policy with less than 50 votes. An aide to Senate Committee Chairman Pete Domenici, R-New Mexico, said getting the President’s energy policy approved is the first item on the Senate agenda if the United States engages in war with Iraq.

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Bush Sr. – 1996 : War With Iraq `Would Turn Entire Arab World Against Us’
By Jason Leopold
March 6, 2003
Former President George Bush predicted in 1996 that if the United States were to engage in another war with Iraq, one aimed at overthrowing Saddam Hussein, the “entire Arab world would turn against us” and the U.S. would alienate its allies in the international community.

“To occupy Iraq would instantly shatter our coalition, turning the whole Arab world against us, and make a broken tyrant into a latter-day Arab hero," Bush said in an interview with the BBC marking the five-year anniversary of the Gulf War.

Moreover, Vice President Dick Cheney said at an energy conference six years ago that hundreds of thousands of United States soldiers and Iraqi civilians would die if a war in Iraq were ever fought on the streets of Baghdad.

“To have brought the (Gulf) war into the populous Iraqi capital of Baghdad where Hussein is based would have involved a different type of military operation than in the desert, and would have put large numbers of Iraqi civilians and hundreds of thousands of our troops at risk of being killed,” he said.

Cheney, the former chairman and chief executive of oil conglomerate Halliburton Co. and former defense secretary under the first President Bush, was referring to the 1991 Gulf War when the U.S. liberated Kuwait. Cheney also said in 1997 that if the U.S. were to engage in another war with Iraq and try to remove Saddam Hussein from power the international coalition “would come apart,” a situation currently in the making as U.S. relations with France, Germany and Russia are becoming increasingly strained because our allies will not back a U.S. led coalition to attack Iraq.

Despite the dire warnings Bush Sr. and Cheney made six years ago, the current Bush Administration appears to be on course to launch a full-scale war with Iraq, one that appears to be more about finding Saddam Hussein and assassinating the Iraqi President than destroying any weapons of mass destruction that may or may no be hidden somewhere in the country.

Until that goal is achieved, the U.S. and the rest of the world will never be safe or at peace; statements made repeatedly by Republican hawks since the end of the first Gulf War.

“Unless we can take out Saddam Hussein, we are going to have to live with Saddam Hussein (for a long time),” said James Schlesinger, former defense secretary under presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, at a conference in 1998. Schlesinger noted however that the countries of the region “don’t want us to attack Iraq.”

“We keep getting waved off,” he said.

If the U.S. decides to attack Iraq this time around urban warfare appears to be inevitable, according to news reports that quoted senior defense officials.

Cheney said in 1997 that President Bush was not willing to sacrifice U.S. soldiers’ lives by allowing combat to spread to Baghdad in an effort to locate Saddam Hussein, a situation which the current Bush Administration seems willing to do now.

“From the standpoint of the president, the question was how many additional (U.S.) lives is Saddam Hussein worth? And his answer was, `Not very many,' “ Cheney said.

Cheney said six years ago that capturing the Iraqi president would be very difficult and would likely involve a large number of civilian casualties.

“The only way to make certain you could get him was to go occupy all of Iraq and start sorting through Iraqis until you find Saddam Hussein,” Cheney said in 1997.

If the U.S. does invade Iraq, the Bush Administration said the war won’t last more than two months and will not involve a large number of U.S. or civilian casualties.

But Secretary of State Colin Powell warned President Bush last year that if the U.S. starts a war in Iraq without the support of a majority of our allies in the international community, which is the case now, it would be “much more complicated and bloody” than the first Gulf War.

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For Six Years, Right-Wing Think Tank ‘Hell-Bent For War’
By Jason Leopold
February 27, 2003

Never before in the history of the United States presidency has a think tank had such an impact on shaping U.S. foreign policy as the Project for the New American Century has on helping President George W. Bush set foreign policy goals for his Administration, particularly dictating exactly how Bush should deal with Iraq and its President, Saddam Hussein.

For the past six years, PNAC has lobbied former President Clinton and Bush heavily to initiate a war in Iraq and remove Saddam Hussein from power, claiming the country poses a serious threat to the U.S. and its allies because of its ability to develop weapons of mass destruction. Clinton rebuffed the advice by PNAC members during the last four years of his presidency, but Bush has virtually used, word for word, the written statements by PNAC members when he speaks publicly about Iraq crisis.

PNAC, which says its goal is to promote America's foreign and defence policies, has been written about in dribs and drabs over the past year in the foreign press, but has yet to crack any of the big mainstream newspapers and magazines here. It operated below the radar while Clinton was in office and has recently resurfaced because of the uncanny similarities between its policies and that of the Bush Administration on matters relating to national defence to Asia and the Middle East.

Most of its members cut their teeth in the Reagan and the first Bush Administrations. However, many of its former members, notably Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and Dick Cheney, are working in the current Bush Administration. William Kristol, the editor of the ultra-conservative magazine The Weekly Standard, heads PNAC.

In the past year, the organisation has succeeded in getting the Bush Administration to scrap the Army's Crusader Artillery Program and to ask Congress for a one-year increase of more than $48 billion for national defence. But it's PNAC's position to drive America into a war with Iraq that has influenced Bush the most.

Dozens of letters and reports by PNAC members concerning Iraq are posted on its website, www.newamericancentury.org, and lays out in startling detail how war is the only way to deal with the so-called threat that Iraq poses to the U.S. Bush has drawn upon many of these letters to publicly make a case for war. Reading through the letters, the impression it leaves is not that the U.S. is in imminent danger but that the people that run PNAC have been hell-bent for war for six years and they finally got a president who will listen to them.

Robert Kagan, co-chair of PNAC and a former Deputy for Policy in the State Department's Bureau for Inter-American Affairs during Reagan's presidency, wrote in 1999 that the U.S. should "complete the unfinished business of the 1991 Gulf War and get rid of Saddam."

It's simply not enough to increase inspections by the United Nations, PNAC says, or to think "we can contain Saddam inside a box" to ensure the safety of the U.S. and our allies. It has to be war.

"Above all, only ground forces can remove Saddam and his regime from power and open the way for a new post-Saddam Iraq whose intentions can safely be assumed to be benign," Kristol said in a PNAC report in 1997. Kristol also said that containment and inspections won't work.

Consider the impact Kristol had on Cheney when the Vice President spoke about Iraq before the Veterans of Foreign Wars in Nashville last August.

"This is the same dictator who dispatched a team of assassins to murder former President Bush as he travelled abroad," said Cheney.

"A person would be right to question any suggestion that we should just get inspectors back into Iraq, and then our worries will be over. Saddam has perfected the game of cheat and retreat, and is very skilled in the art of denial and deception. A return of inspectors would provide no assurance whatsoever of his compliance with UN resolutions. On the contrary, there is a great danger that it would provide false comfort that Saddam was somehow back in his box."

"Meanwhile, he would continue to plot. Nothing in the last dozen years has stopped him -- not his agreements; not the discoveries of the inspectors; not the revelations by defectors; not criticism or ostracism by the international community; and not four days of bombings by the U.S. in 1998. What he wants is time and more time to husband his resources, to invest in his ongoing chemical and biological weapons programs, and to gain possession of nuclear arms," said Cheney.

But the mere fact that many of these letters and policy statements about Iraq were drafted while Clinton was President raises a number of serious questions: for one, where's the evidence that suggests the U.S. is in imminent danger of being attacked by Iraq?

No one at PNAC would respond to these or other questions about the organisation. The one thing that is crystal clear, however, is that neither PNAC nor the Bush Administration has been able to produce a shred of evidence that justifies the U.S. going to war with Iraq. Only through a co-ordinated effort of injecting fear into the minds of Americans has PNAC and the Bush Administration been able to win the little support it has to start a war.

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Is the United States headed for World War III?
U.S. Could Launch Attack Against North Korea While Troops Fight In Iraq—Rumsfeld
By Jason Leopold
March 11, 2003
Last week, at a Pentagon “town hall” meeting between Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and members of the U.S. armed forces someone asked Rumsfeld if the U.S. decides to invade Iraq, what would the U.S. do if the situation in North Korea boils over while troops are fighting a war in Iraq?

Rumsfeld responded by saying that the U.S., if need be, would wage a simultaneous war with North Korea. North Korea is part of the “axis of evil” President Bush referred to in his State of the Union address in 2002.

“That question was asked recently at a meeting that General Myers and I were having, and that was his answer, `yes,’” Rumsfeld said. The U.S. “would wage a major conflict in a theater and occupy a country, and near simultaneously swiftly defeat in another theater, and in addition be capable of conducting a variety of lesser contingencies such as things like Bosnia or Kosovo or what's currently going on in Afghanistan.

“The reason I say that is it is a big order, let there be no doubt. But we've spent a great deal of time over the past two years fashioning a new defense strategy,” Rumsfeld said. “We then had that tested in the tank by the chiefs, and they conducted a table-top -- series of, I guess there were two exercises to look at it and analyze it and make judgments about it as to whether or not we would in fact be able to fulfill that assignment; specifically, and the answer was that in any exercise like that or activity like that or analysis you obviously see things that you wish were somewhat better than they are…I think if you asked any of the gentlemen here who were involved in it they would say that we are well arranged and we feel good about the deterrent and the defensive capability that the United States has. “

According to the latest Gallup Poll, most Americans believe that North Korea poses a greater threat to the U.S. than Iraq because of the country’s ability, according to the Central Intelligence Agency, to launch ballistic missiles onto U.S. soil.

Secretary of State Colin Powell has said that the U.S. could deal with North Korea’s President Kim Jong Il and the threat the country poses peacefully by asking other countries, including Japan and China, to help broker a solution to the crisis there. With the U.S. focusing on overthrowing Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, North Korea has restarted its nuclear reactor and has made repeated threats that it would launch a nuclear attack on the U.S. if any attempt were made to shut down the facility.

Rumsfeld said last week that the U.S. might withdraw 37,000 troops from South Korea, part of the rethink of a deployment in place since the end of the Korean War in 1953.

“Whether the forces come home or whether they will move further south of the [Korean] peninsula or whether to some neighboring area are the kinds of things that are being sorted out,” Rumsfeld said.

But Pentagon officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said that if the situation in North Korea heats up while troops are fighting a war in Iraq “Secretary Rumsfeld has contingencies in place to deal with North Korea using military force.”

The so-called “major theater war,” which means that the U.S. could wage two simultaneous wars, was designed specifically so the U.S. would be in a position to launch attacks on the Iraq and North Korea, according to the September 2000 report “Rebuilding America’s Defense Strategy,” released by the right-wing think tank Project for the New American Century. The full report, which names North Korea, Iraq and Iran as threats to U.S. interests, can be viewed at http://www.newamericancentury.org/RebuildingAmericasDefenses.pdf

Rumsfeld, along with Vice President Dick Cheney, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and others, were involved with PNAC in the 1990s before becoming members of the Bush Administration. The think-tank has been a major influence on Bush’s foreign and defense policies and was successful in getting the administration to cancel the Army’s multibillion dollar Crusader Artillery project and recommending that Bush ask Congress for an additional $48 billion for defense, which he did.

The 76-page PNAC report calls for the United States to wage “a series of multiple, simultaneous major theater wars," beginning with the occupation of Iraq.

“The United States must retain sufficient forces able to rapidly deploy and win multiple simultaneous large-scale wars and also be able to respond to unanticipated contingencies in regions where it does not maintain forward-based forces,” the report says. “The theater-war analysis assumed that Kim Jong Il and Saddam Hussein each could begin a war—perhaps while employing chemical, biological or even nuclear weapons. “In the past, Pentagon wargames have given little or no consideration to the force requirements necessary not only to defeat an attack but to remove these regimes from power.”

PNAC’s influence over the Bush Administration is undeniable. The think-tank has a long history of lobbying the Clinton Administration and the Bush Administration to start a war with Iraq and overthrow Saddam Hussein, which at this point seems inevitable. But judging from Rumsfeld’s comments to the soldiers at the town hall meeting North Korea may be next.

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Rumsfeld, Bush Sr. Refused To Back 1989 UN Resolution On Iraq Human Rights Abuses
Jason Leopold looks back at earlier US, Iraq and UN relations and finds disquiet in the aisles
published here March 13, 2003
In 1989, the State Department released a report that described in gruesome detail Iraq's violation of human rights, specifically how Iraq's President Saddam Hussein tortured his own people for allegedly being disloyal. , writes Jason Leopold.

But despite the atrocities outlined in the report, which President Bush now refers to when speaking about his desire to remove Hussein from power, the United States, under the first Bush Administration, refused to vote in favor of a United Nations resolution calling for an inquiry into Iraq's treatment of its population and possibly indicting Hussein for war crimes and human rights abuses.

The two people most vocal about refusing to go along with the U.N. investigation are now lobbying for a U.N. resolution authorizing an invasion of Iraq and are highly critical of the countries that refuse to back a U.S. led coalition to use military force to remove Hussein from power. Those men are Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage.

But in 1989, the first Bush administration refused to join the U.N. in publicly protesting the forced relocation of at least half a million ethnic Kurds and Syrians in the late 1980s, even though the act violated principles of the 1948 Genocide Convention, according to Middle East Watch, a human rights organization.

The Bush and Reagan administrations also declined to punish Iraq when it used poison gas against Iranian soldiers in 1984 and Kurdish citizens in 1988. Moreover, the U.S. did not oppose the fact that Hussein bought 45 American helicopters, worth about $200 million, with assurances they were for civilian use, then transferred them to his military.

Armitage said in 1990 that that "in retrospect, it would have been much better at the time of their use of gas if we'd put our foot down," according to an August 1990 story in the Los Angeles Daily News.

Despite U.S. intelligence reports that showed Iraq's capability of building weapons of mass destruction and its inhumane treatment of its own civilians, the Bush Administration turned a blind eye and instead focused on improving U.S. relations with Hussein. The U.S. removed Iraq from its list of countries supporting terrorism in 1983, which reopened the door to federal subsidies and loans to Iraq.

Saddam Hussein "made it clear that Iraq was not interested in making mischief in the world," Rumsfeld said, who, as a Middle East envoy for the Regan Administration, reopened discussions with Saddam in 1983, according to the Daily News story. "It struck us as useful to have a relationship with him."

The current Bush Administration, many of whom served in the Reagan and the first Bush administrations, refuse to acknowledge that their policies toward Iraq at the time backfired and we may be paying a price for it now. But at this point, Iraq does not pose a threat to the U.S. and threats against the nation appear to be purely personal.

Under former Rumsfeld's watch during his years in the Reagan and Bush administrations, he and the former presidents allowed Hussein to build his army and a cache of chemical and nuclear weapons. In fact, many of the hawks that serve in the current Bush Administration assisted Hussein's regime in reaching these goals during the late 1980s and early 1990s.

For example, Judicial Watch said, according to the Daily News story, "that the U.S. extended $270 million in government-guaranteed credit from the Export-Import Bank to buy other American goods, despite repeated failures to make loan repayments on time. Since 1982, Baghdad has become one of the biggest buyers of U.S. rice and wheat, purchasing $5.5 billion in crops and livestock with federally guaranteed loans and agricultural subsidies and its own hard cash."

"Iraq benefited from a thriving grain trade with American farmers, cooperation with U.S. intelligence agencies, oil sales to American refiners that helped finance its military, and muted White House criticism of its human rights and war atrocities," the Daily News story said.

Armitage admitted in 1990 that the Reagan and Bush administrations were well aware of Hussein's brutality, but still, the U.S. was more interested in maintaining a healthy relationship with Iraq because the country's vast oil reserves was beneficial to U.S. interests.

"We knew this wasn't the League of Women Voters," Armitage said, referring to Hussein's regime, according to the Daily News story.

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Pres Bush Reminds World of Iraq's Crimes Against Humanity That His Father Failed To Punish
By Jason Leopold
published here March 17, 2003
President Bush started beating the war drums Saturday in an attempt to win support for a war that many people here and throughout the world believe is unjustified. In his weekly radio address Saturday, Bush dug deep into the past; reminding the public that last weekend marked the 15-year anniversary of the poison gas attack on the Kurdish village of Halabia by Iraq's President Saddam Hussein.

The attack was indeed an act of brutality and a gross violation of human rights. But what Bush failed to tell the world in his radio address was that it was his father, the former President Bush Sr., who punished Saddam Hussein with a mere slap on the wrist because Bush Sr. did not want to jeopardize United States-Iraqi relations. Today, Iraq does not pose an imminent threat to the U.S. Evidence to suggest otherwise is non-existent. Simply put, this is a case Bush tidying up unfinished business. It's these past crimes, that Bush's father turned a blind eye to, that the current president believes gives him the right to start a war with Iraq today. But there is no justification for waging such a war now.

Since Bush is so eager to sway public opinion in his favor by drudging up Saddam's past crimes in hopes of getting the public to back a war against Iraq, it's equally as important to highlight how his father's administration refused to hold Saddam accountable for his acts of aggression at a time when the Iraqi president was becoming a threat to countries in the Middle East.

The day before Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, Assistant Secretary of State for Near East Affairs John Kelly was on the Hill trying to persuade Congress not to impose economic sanctions against Iraq for its human rights violations against the Kurds and threats to decimate Israel.

Two years earlier, in October 1988, a bill passed by both houses calling for economic sanctions against Iraq died in conference. An amendment added the following year to the annual foreign-aid bill by Sen. Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii) passed both houses after a rider was added allowing the president to waive the sanctions if he determined they were not in the "national interest." Former President Bush issued such a waiver in 1990, shortly before Iraq invaded Kuwait. Saddam received more arms and more aid from the Reagan and Bush administrations, despite the fact that Saddam's regime systematically violated the Geneva Convention.

In February 1990, the human rights group, Middle East Watch, said despite findings by its group that showed Iraq's record of brutality, the Bush administration never raised with Iraqi authorities its own findings of murder, extralegal detention, torture and disappearances.

The report accused presidents Bush and Ronald Reagan of putting "the nurturing of newly friendly relations with Saddam Hussein's government well ahead of the violent and repressive nature of his regime."

Washington is reluctant to risk a break with Baghdad because of "Iraq's enormous oil wealth ... and the prospect of lucrative trade," the report said.

Several top-level Reagan and Bush administration officials also had strong ties to either Iraq or Saudi Arabia, which consistently backed Arab Iraq throughout the eight years of its war with Persian Iran.

Before he became secretary of state in 1982, George Shultz headed the Bechtel Corp., the largest construction company in the world, and won the contract to build a new oil pipeline from Iraq through Saudi Arabia.

In the Reagan administration, Shultz presided over the warming of relations with Iraq, including the reopening of a U.S. embassy there for the first time in more than 20 years.
Richard M. Fairbanks III, a former assistant secretary of state and special negotiator in the Middle East peace process, left the Reagan administration in 1985 to become a partner in the prestigious Washington law firm of Paul, Hastings, Janofsky & Walker, which, between December 1985 and March 1990, was a registered agent for the government of Iraq. Fairbanks was listed as personally handling the firm's Iraqi account.
President Bush took Fairbanks' views so seriously that he named him co-chairman of a group of Middle East experts to advise him during the 1988 presidential campaign.

"The first Bush administration came to office convinced that Saddam could change. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, the State Department offered the view that Bush could persuade Saddam to become a useful citizen of the world," wrote Jim Hoagland in the Washington Post in April 1990.

The administration provided Baghdad with $1 billion in guaranteed credits in 1989 to enable Iraq to buy U.S. food supplies while pouring money into missiles, chemical weapons production and the search for an atomic bomb. After Congress voted at the end of 1989 to bar U.S. Export-Import Bank credits to Iraq, President Bush signed a waiver on Jan. 17. He said it was in America's national interest to continue providing Baghdad with $200 million a year in subsidized financing, Hoagland reported in the Post.

But once Iraq invaded Kuwait and threatened to dominate the world's oil supply everything changed. That's the reason behind the first Gulf War. Saddam's brutality during the Reagan-Bush era was small potatoes when compared with U.S. interests. How else could one explain why presidents Reagan and Bush turned the other cheek while innocent Iraqi's and Kurds were being wiped out?

Here's the proof that the coming war in Iraq is about cleaning up Bush Sr.'s mess.

Fast-forward to 1997. The far-right Republicans who served under former presidents Reagan and Bush and helped Saddam build an arsenal of chemical and biological weapons and strengthen his military saw the monster they created that is Saddam Hussein-who at this point was well contained-and started lobbying President Clinton to attack Iraq and overthrow the regime. Those men, who include current Bush administration officials like Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Vice President Dick Cheney, claimed that Saddam's regime needed to go and the only recourse for this action was through military force. Like today, they offered no evidence to justify starting a war and Clinton rebuffed the pleas saying that he was focusing on dismantling al-Qaeda cells.

In 1999, while President Bush was campaigning for the presidency, he said on "Meet the Press" that if elected one of his first orders of business would be to "take out" Saddam and his weapons of mass destruction. The New York Times highlighted this point in an editorial on Dec. 12, 1999.

"Gov. George W. Bush of Texas talks about contingencies in which he would use American military power to ''take out'' Iraq's illegal weapons" if elected president, says the Times editorial.

In 2000, the right-wing think-tank Project for a New American Century, a influential group of neocons whose members included Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, issues a report called "Rebuilding America's Defense Strategies," which says that regime change in countries such as Iraq, Iran and North Korea would be difficult for the U.S. to achieve unless "some catastrophic and catalyzing event - like a new Pearl Harbor" took place in the U.S.

The terrorist attacks on 9-11 became the catalyst for a war against Iraq even though the U.S. did not have any intelligence information to link Iraq to 9-11. As recently as January, Bush has mentioned Iraq and 9-11 in the same sentence in an effort to lead the public to believe Saddam was involved.

Not one person will deny that Saddam is a brutal dictator and that Iraqi's are far better off without him. Bush Sr. failed miserably at holding Saddam accountable for crimes against humanity in the 1980s. President Bush and his administration have gone to great lengths to try and justify an attack now, even though Iraq does not pose an imminent threat to the U.S. But a war now, one that doesn't have the support of the public or the international community, is not the answer.

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Even As Bombs Drop, Hypocrisy Prevails
March 19, 2003 It was only five years ago when Vice President Dick Cheney, as chief executive of the oil-field supply corporation, Halliburton Co., was engaged in secret business dealings with Saddam’s regime by selling Iraq oil production equipment and spare parts to get the Iraqi oil fields up and running, according to confidential United Nations records.

During the 2000 presidential campaign, Cheney adamantly denied such dealings. While he acknowledged that his company did business with Libya and Iran through foreign subsidiaries, Cheney said, “Iraq’s different.” He claimed that he imposed a “firm policy” prohibiting any unit of Halliburton against trading with Iraq.

"I had a firm policy that we wouldn't do anything in Iraq, even arrangements that were supposedly legal," Cheney said on the ABC-TV news program “This Week” on July 30, 2000. "We've not done any business in Iraq since U.N. sanctions were imposed on Iraq in 1990, and I had a standing policy that I wouldn't do that."

But it turns out that Cheney was lying. It’s only through the sale of Iraqi oil that Saddam would be able to afford to obtain such weapons. If Saddam was in fact building nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction, which some news reports allege could be used against American and British troops, Cheney is partially responsible.

The Washington Post first reported Halliburton’s trade with Iraq in February 2000. But U.N. records obtained by The Post two years ago showed that the dealings were more extensive than originally reported and than Vice President Cheney has acknowledged.

As secretary of defence in the first Bush administration, Cheney helped to lead a multinational coalition against Iraq in the Persian Gulf War and to devise a comprehensive economic embargo to isolate Saddam Hussein's government. After Cheney was named chief executive of Halliburton in 1995, he promised to maintain a hard line against Baghdad.

But his stance changed when it appeared that Halliburton was headed for financial disaster in the mid-1990s.
Cheney said sanctions against countries such as Iraq were hurting corporations such as Halliburton.
"We seem to be sanction-happy as a government,” Cheney said at an energy conference in April 1996, reported in the oil industry publication Petroleum Finance Week. “The problem is that the good Lord didn't see fit to always put oil and gas resources where there are democratic governments," he observed during his conference presentation.
Sanctions make U.S. businesses "the bystander who gets hit when a train wreck occurs," Cheney told Petroleum Finance Week. “While virtually every other country sees the need for sanctions against Iraq and Saddam Hussein's regime there, Cheney sees general agreement that the measures have not been very effective despite their having most of the international community's support. An individual country's embargo, such as that of the United States against Iran, has virtually no effect since the target country simply signs a contract with a non- U.S. business,” the publication reported

“That's exactly what happened when the government told Conoco Inc. that it could not develop an oil field there," Cheney told Petroleum Finance Week. Total S.A. "simply took it over."

In 1998, Cheney oversaw Halliburton's acquisition of Dresser Industries Inc., the unit that sold oil equipment to Iraq through two subsidiaries of a joint venture with another large U.S. equipment maker, Ingersoll-Rand Co.

The Halliburton subsidiaries, Dresser-Rand and Ingersoll Dresser Pump Co., sold water and sewage treatment pumps, spare parts for oil facilities and pipeline equipment to Baghdad through French affiliates from the first half of 1997 to the summer of 2000, U.N. records show. Ingersoll Dresser Pump also signed contracts -- later blocked by the United States -- to help repair an Iraqi oil terminal that U.S.-led military forces destroyed in the Gulf War, the Post reported in a June 2001 story.

The Halliburton subsidiaries and several other American and foreign oil supply companies helped Iraq increase its crude exports from $4 billion in 1997 to nearly $18 billion in 2000. Since the program began, Iraq has exported oil worth more than $40 billion.

U.S. and European officials have argued that the increase in production also expanded Saddam’s ability to use some of that money for weapons, luxury goods and palaces. Security Council diplomats estimate that Iraq may be skimming off as much as 10 percent of the proceeds from the oil-for-food program, according to the Post.

During his tenure as chief executive of Halliburton, Cheney pushed the U.N. Security Council, after he became vice president; to end an 11-year embargo on sales of civilian goods, including oil related equipment, to Iraq. Cheney has said sanctions against countries like Iraq unfairly punish US companies.

Earlier this year, Halliburton was chosen as one of the companies to rebuild Iraq’s dilapidated oil fields following a US led attack on the country.

UN documents show that Halliburton's affiliates have had controversial, dealings with the Iraqi regime during Cheney’s tenure at the company. The Clinton administration blocked one of the deals Halliburton was trying to push through. That deal, between Halliburton subsidiary Ingersoll Dresser Pump Co. and Iraq, included agreements by the firm to sell $760,000 in spare parts, compressors and firefighting equipment to refurbish an offshore oil terminal, Khor al Amaya.

The Clinton administration blocked the sale because it was "not authorised under the oil-for-food deal," according to UN documents. Under the oil-for-food program, Iraq is allowed to export crude oil and the money is supposed to be used to help remove some of the hardships on Iraqi civilians affected by the UN sanctions.

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The Enterprising Hawk
By Jason Leopold
March 28, 2003
Richard Perle’s resignation Thursday as chairman of the Defense Policy Board, a Pentagon advisory group, is long overdue. Perle quit the board because he was hired to help bankrupt telecommunications firm Global Crossing win approval from the Department of Defense to sell the company to a Hong Kong billionaire and lawmakers questioned whether Perle’s dual roles was a conflict-of-interest.

Presumably, Global Crossing hired Perle, who served as assistant secretary of defense under former President Ronald Reagan, as a lobbyist because he wields an enormous amount of power around the Pentagon and would likely get the job done. Perle is a key adviser to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and a leading architect in the Bush administration’s policies toward Iraq.

The Pentagon and the Federal Bureau of Investigation objected to Global Crossing’s sale to Asian investors last year because the government uses Global Crossing’s fiber optics networks and a sale would put the networks under control of the Chinese government. Global Crossing said it would pay Perle $125,000 and an additional $600,000 if the deal went through.

Perle denied Thursday that his unpaid advisory role on the policy board would have interfered with his lobbying on behalf of Global Crossing, which is mired in shareholder lawsuits as a result of its questionable accounting practices. But Perle has a long history of using his influential role as a government adviser to line his pockets.

“Richard Perle…has made a lucrative career out of some bald conflicts of interest,” wrote Mark Crispin Miller, a New York University media professor, in the Free Press in 2000. “As an Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security under Ronald Reagan, he got in some slight trouble when he wrote a memorandum urging the department to consider buying equipment from a company that had paid him a $50,000 consulting fee (as the the New York Times noted back in 1984). As chairman and CEO of Hollinger Digital (owned by media titan Conrad Black), Perle maintains his close connections with the military industries. For example, as a non-executive director of Morgan Crucible, PLC (UK), which has done business with the Pentagon...”

Moreover, Perle was also a director of Memorex Corp., a defense contractor, in the 1990s while he was advising then-Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney as a member of the Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee during the first Bush administration. At the same time, Perle also was a paid consultant to a Turkish-hired lobbying firm in Washington and has been both an adviser to FMC Corp. and a director of an FMC-Turkish joint venture building military equipment. It should be noted that during Perle’s tenure in the Reagan administration he was a fierce proponent of aid to Turkey’s military.

In 1987, the Pentagon’s Office of General Counsel opened an inquiry into whether Perle’s attempts to write a fictional novel based on classified intelligence information were a conflict-of-interest. At the time, Perle was offered a $300,000 advance for the novel, titled “Memoranda.”

The proposal for the novel described an inside look at the bureaucracy and promised a plot that seemed a thinly veiled account of Perle's long-running internecine struggle with former assistant secretary of state Richard R. Burt. It promised “an array of bureaucratic maneuvers recounted in the context of actual events altered only enough to make them publishable, to preserve the fiction in “Memoranda.”

In April of 1987, Sen. Sam Nunn (D-Ga.), the former ranking Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, wrote an angry letter to Reagan suggesting that Perle’s book “creates a climate encouraging disrespect for the protection of classified information” and might have “a chilling effect on the candor of {officials'} policy analysis and recommendations.” Nunn also raised questions about the propriety of the sale of the book during Perle's tenure in office.

In response to the inquiries, Perle resigned his post as assistant secretary of defense in April 1987 to write the book. The title was later changed to "Hard Line".

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Rummy's Failed War Plan And The Casualties That May Result

“According to Defense Department sources, Rumsfeld at first insisted that vast air superiority and a degraded Iraqi military would enable 75,000 U.S. troops to win the war. Gen. Tommy Franks, the theater commander-in-chief, convinced Rumsfeld to send 250,000 (augmented by 45,000 British). However, the Army would have preferred a much deeper force, leading to anxiety inside the Pentagon in the first week of war, conservative columnist Bob Novak reported last week.”

By Jason Leopold
published here March 31, 2003

Last October, the New York Times reported that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld ordered the military’s regional commanders to rewrite all of their war plans to capitalize on precision weapons, better intelligence and speedier deployment in the event the United States decided to invade Iraq. That war plan, which Rumsfeld helped shape, has now failed and has led to deep divisions between military commanders and the defense secretary, according to news reports.

Despite Rumsfeld’s recent denials that he did not override requests by military brass to deploy more ground troops in Iraq, he told the Times last year that the cornerstone of the war plan against Iraq was to use fewer ground troops, a move that caused consternation among some in the military who said concern for the troops requires overwhelming numerical superiority to assure victory, the Times reported in its Oct. 13, 2002 edition.

These officers said they view Rumsfeld's approach as injecting too much risk into war planning and have said it could result in U.S. casualties that might be prevented by amassing larger forces.

But Rumsfeld refused to listen to his military commanders, Pentagon officials told the Washington Post Saturday.

Rumsfeld said last year that his plan would allow “the military to begin combat operations on less notice and with far fewer troops than thought possible -- or thought wise -- before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks,” the Times reported.

“Looking at what was overwhelming force a decade or two decades ago, today you can have overwhelming force, conceivably, with lesser numbers because the lethality is equal to or greater than before” Rumsfeld told the Times.

The speedier use of smaller and more agile forces also could provide the president with time to order an offensive against Iraq that could be carried out this winter, the optimal season for combat in the desert, which is exactly what President Bush did.

The new approach for how the U.S. might go to war, Rumsfeld said last year, reflects an assessment of the need after Sept. 11 to refresh war plans continuously and to respond faster to threats from terrorists and nations possessing biological, chemical or nuclear weapons, according to the Times.

Rumsfeld first laid the groundwork for a U.S. led invasion of Iraq shortly after the Sept. 11. Like his well-known, “Rumsfeld’s rules,”--http://www.defenselink.mil/news/Jan2001/rumsfeldsrules.pdf--a collection of wisdom he has compiled over three decades on how to succeed in Washington, Rumsfeld’s checklist used the same methodical approach to determining when U.S. military force should be used in the event of war against Iraq.

Rumsfeld kept the checklist tucked away in his desk drawer at the Pentagon. Since last March, when it became clear that the Bush administration was leaning toward using military force to overthrow Saddam Hussein’s regime, Rumsfeld added what he said were important elements to the checklist to ensure the U.S. would be prepared for a full-scale war. But Rumsfeld and the Bush administration never lived up to the promises laid out in the checklist when the U.S. military bombed Baghdad. For example:

Casualties. Rumsfeld says the public "should not be allowed to believe an engagement could be executed . . . with few casualties." Yet the president and Rumsfeld didn’t prepare Americans for major casualties. Bush warned in an Oct. 7 speech in Cincinnati that "military action could be difficult" and that there is no "easy or risk-free course of action."

* Risks. Rumsfeld warns that the risks of taking action "must be carefully considered" along with the dangers of doing nothing. The administration has repeatedly made the case against inaction -- the possibility that Saddam will acquire nuclear weapons and strike the U.S. But it has not been equally candid about the dangers of action.

* Honesty. Rumsfeld urges U.S. leadership to be "brutally honest with itself, Congress, the public and coalition partners." Yet the administration has not produced compelling evidence to support its claims that Saddam is linked to al-Qaeda terrorists, is on the verge of acquiring nuclear weapons or intends to strike the U.S. To the contrary, the CIA has played down Iraq's ties to al-Qaeda and a possible first strike.

Rumsfeld said too many of the military plans on the shelves of the regional war-fighting commanders were freighted with outdated assumptions and military requirements, which have changed with the advent of new weapons and doctrines.

It has been a mistake, he said, to measure the quantity of forces required for a mission and “fail to look at lethality, where you end up with precision-guided munitions, which can give you 10 times the lethality that a dumb weapon might, as an example,” according to the Times report.

Through a combination of pre-deployments, faster cargo ships and a larger fleet of transport aircraft, the military would be able to deliver "fewer troops but in a faster time that would allow you to have concentrated power that would have the same effect as waiting longer with what a bigger force might have” Rumsfeld said.

Critics in the military said last year there were several reasons to deploy a force of overwhelming numbers before starting any offensive with Iraq. Large numbers illustrate U.S. resolve and can intimidate Iraqi forces into laying down their arms or even turning against Hussein's government.

Large numbers in the region also would be required should the initial offensive go badly. Also, once victory is at hand, it might require an even larger force to pacify Iraq and search for weapons of mass destruction than it took to topple Hussein.

According to Defense Department sources, Rumsfeld at first insisted that vast air superiority and a degraded Iraqi military would enable 75,000 U.S. troops to win the war. Gen. Tommy Franks, the theater commander-in-chief, convinced Rumsfeld to send 250,000 (augmented by 45,000 British). However, the Army would have preferred a much deeper force, leading to anxiety inside the Pentagon in the first week of war, conservative columnist Bob Novak reported last week.

While Army officers would have preferred a larger commitment, even what was finally approved for Operation Iraqi Freedom was reduced when the 4th Infantry Division was denied Turkey as a base to invade northern Iraq. The Defense and State departments point fingers. Secretary of State Colin Powell is criticized for not flying to Ankara to convince the Turkish government. The Pentagon is criticized for not immediately dispatching the division via the Red Sea, Novak reported.

To the critics who said last year that Rumsfeld is accepting too much risk in U.S. war planning, Rumsfeld said he had ordered rigorous reviews and was satisfied. "We are prepared for the worst case,” he told the Times.

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The Reality of War Sinks In With Casualties of U.S. and British Soldiers
By Jason Leopold
March 26, 2003
I hope the stock market gets hammered. I hope the Iraqis set fire to as many oil fields as possible. I hope oil prices in the United States surge and shortages persist. I hope the antiwar protestors become disobedient. I hope the economy never recovers. I hope Iraq doesn’t have weapons of mass destruction. I hope our troops make it home alive.

This is the only way to drive home the point that war is brutal no matter who the enemy is. After the bombs dropped on Baghdad and hundreds of Iraqi soldiers surrendered to U.S. and British troops, the pundits on CNN, Fox News and MSNBC reported that the war could end within a month.

“Nonsense,” I said.

This war would be an easy victory for the U.S. and its allies, the cable news outlets said. Kind of like watching the Los Angeles Lakers pummel the Los Angeles Clippers. Reaction here to the commentaries and the real-time images was swift. The stock market soared. Oil prices plummeted. It appears that the outcome of the war is measured by how well the Dow Jones Industrial Average performs

Since last Wednesday, I have been glued to the television, watching in shock and awe how the pundits on the cable news outlets reported on the conflict like it was some sort of sporting event. The television and print reporters covering the war failed to ask any questions about Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction and where they were hidden. It’s as if the media forgot the reasons the Bush administration said we were invading Iraq in the first place.

Then last weekend, the realities of war set. A few military helicopters crashed. U.S. and British soldiers died. On Saturday, a dozen American soldiers were captured and may have been executed in an ambush by Iraqi soldiers, which was aired on an Arab news station. President Bush warned that if U.S. soldiers were executed it would violate the Geneva Convention and that those responsible would be prosecuted for war crimes.

Excuse me for being cynical, but for a president who only last week promised to eradicate Saddam Hussein’s regime and everyone who fights on behalf of it, why would Iraqi soldiers abide by the rules of war? What’s the incentive? The way they see it they’re dead men walking.

Reaction here to the two-dozen U.S. and British casualties in the four-day war has been anger, frustration, even disbelief. And the ground war against Iraq’s elite Republican Guard—which promises to bring even more U.S. and British combat deaths—hasn’t even started yet.

What this proves is that the public can’t and won’t accept the loss of U.S. life in exchange for the Bush administration’s goal of overthrowing Saddam and liberating the Iraqi people. Nor should they.

Sure, the U.S. will prevail. We will win this war. Saddam will be history. Iraqi’s will be free. But it will come at a cost. Only when the reality of war sets in, when mothers lose their sons, wives lose their husbands and children lose their fathers and mothers will people start to question the motives of invading a country that so far has proved to be nothing more than a nuisance to the U.S., not a threat.

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More links to Jason Leopold on the web

By Jason Leopold : http://www.bigwig.net/softwaredesign/by_jason_leopold.htm

Scoop: Jason Leopold – Shafted By The New York Times

Jason Leopold: How Enron Helped the Secretary of the Army Build ... ... How Enron Helped Army Secretary Thomas White Build an $8 Million Fortress. by JASON LEOPOLD.

Jason Leopold 2/12/03 - It’s the Oil, Stupid ... By Jason Leopold. Why is it so difficult to accept the fact that America’s thirst for oil is the primary reason for waging a war against Iraq? ...

Column: Jason Leopold. The Year According To Bush. By Jason Leopold ...

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INSIDER VISIONS FROM THE USA

[back to main page]

Bush Should Be Facing ‘A Long, Hard Slog’ On The Campaign Trail, But Dems Too Busy Fighting With Each Other
Defense Dept Secretly Tapped Halliburton Unit To Operate Iraq's Oil Industry In Nov [May 14, 2003]
Cheney’s Old Company Continues To Break Law’s While Profiting From Terror [May 9, 2003]
Company Chosen By Pentagon To Extinguish Iraqi Oil Well Fires Has History Of Supporting Terrorist Regimes [April 16, 2003]
Rummy's Failed War Plan And The Casualties That May Result [March 31, 2003]
The Enterprising Hawk [March 28, 2003]
The Reality of War Sinks In With Casualties of U.S. and British Soldiers [March 26, 2003]
Even As Bombs Drop, Hypocrisy Prevails [March 19, 2003]
Pres Bush Reminds World of Iraq's Crimes Against Humanity [March 17, 2003]
Rumsfeld, Bush Sr. Refused To Back '89 UN Resolution on Iraq Human Rights Abuses [March 13, 2003]
Is the US headed for World War III? [March 11, 2003]
With War Looming, Iraqi Oil Imports May Be Strained [March 10, 2003]
Bush Sr. – 1996 : War With Iraq `Would Turn Entire Arab World Against Us’ [March 6, 2003]
For Six Years, Right-Wing Think Tank Has Been Hell-Bent For War [February 27, 2003]
Powell’s warning to Bush of bloody war with Iraq without UN support [February 25, 2003]
New Republic Editor-In-Chief tells Bush to bomb Iraq [February 21, 2003]
Dems Scrap Plans To Look Into Claims White House Manipulated Intel On Iraqi Threat
White House Said In Jan It Used Info From Iraqi Exiles In Pres State of Union Speech
CIA Probe Finds Secret Pentagon Group Manipulated Intelligence on Iraq July 25, 2003
CIA Warned White House Last Oct That Iraq/Uranium Claims Based On Forged Docs - July 15, 2003
Wolfowitz Ordered CIA Investigate Hans Blix Prior To Start of Iraq War - June 26, 2003
White House Silenced Experts Who Questioned Iraq Intelligence Info 6 Months Before War - June 12, 2003
Powell Denies Intelligence Failure In Buildup To War - June 9, 2003
Iraq War Always Based On Shaky Evidence And Wrong Intelligence Info - June 4, 2003
Wolfowitz Admits Iraq War Planned Two Days After 9-11- June 3, 2003
Despite Thin Intelligence Reports, US Plans To Overthrow Iranian Regime - May 29, 2003

...On Iraq

January 12, 2004
Bush Should Be Facing ‘A Long, Hard Slog’ On The Campaign Trail, But Dems Too Busy Fighting With Each Other
By Jason Leopold
You’d think that President Bush would be facing, to quote Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, a long, hard slog in his bid to recapture the White House for a second term what with all the information trickling out of the president’s administration the past few months showing that senior administration officials knowingly mislead the American public about the reasons for launching a preemptive attack against Iraq.

But, unfortunately, there’s too much infighting taking place among the nine Democrats campaigning for their party’s presidential nomination and not enough attention to the administration’s misdeeds. Too bad, because this is the type of ammunition that even the weakest Democratic candidate should be able to easily spin to convince voters that Bush should be replaced come November.

Still, despite the evidence that shows how Bush and his closest advisers have spent most of the three years they’ve been in office lying to the American public about their knowledge of the 9-11 terrorist attacks right on down to the reasons the United States invaded Iraq, Bush’s approval rating is still above fifty percent and he holds a strong lead over all of the Democratic presidential contenders.

Maybe the drama now unfolding will put a permanent dent in Bush’s armor once and for all.
Bush’s former Treasury Secretary, Paul O’Neill, has revealed in a new book, “The Price of Loyalty,” by journalist Ron Suskind, that the Iraq war was planned just days after the president was sworn into office.

“From the very beginning, there was a conviction, that Saddam Hussein was a bad person and that he needed to go,” O’Neill said, adding that going after Saddam Hussein was a priority 10 days after the Bush’s inauguration and eight months before Sept. 11.

“From the very first instance, it was about Iraq. It was about what we can do to change this regime,” Suskind said. “Day one, these things were laid and sealed.”

As treasury secretary, O'Neill was a permanent member of the National Security Council. He says in the book he was surprised at the meeting that questions such as "Why Saddam?" and "Why now?" were never asked.

O’Neill was fired from his post for disagreeing with Bush’s economic policies. In typical White House fashion, senior administration officials have labeled O’Neill a “disgruntled employee,” whose latest remarks are “laughable” and have no basis in reality.

Moreover, claims by O’Neill that the U.S. and Britain were operating off of murky intelligence during the buildup to war came six days after Bush’s inauguration. It was then that British intelligence communicated to the CIA, the Pentagon and National Security Adviser Rice’s office that an Iraqi defector told British intelligence officials that Saddam Hussein had two fully operational nuclear bombs, according to two senior Bush advisers.

The London Telegraph reported the defector’s claims on Jan. 28, 2001.
“According to the defector, who cannot be named for security reasons, bombs are being built in Hemrin in north-eastern Iraq, near the Iranian border,” according to the Telegraph report, a copy of which can be found at
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2001/01/28/wiraq28.xml

The defector said: "There are at least two nuclear bombs which are ready for use. Before the UN inspectors came, there were 47 factories involved in the project. Now there are 64."
That information turned out to be grossly inaccurate, but it was cited by Vice President Dick Cheney during a speech in 2002 as a means to build the case for war.

However, O’Neill’s allegations that Bush planned an Iraq invasion prior to 9-11 are backed up by dozens of on-the-record statements and speeches made by the president’s senior advisers, including Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell and National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice, during Bush’s first four months in office.

In dozens of transcripts posted on the Defense Department’s web site between January and May 2001, months before 9-11, Rumsfeld said the United States needed to be prepared for surprises, such as launching preemptive wars against countries like Iraq.

“If you think about it, Dick Cheney's (Secretary of Defense) confirmation hearing in 1989 -- not one United States senator mentioned a word about Iraq,” Rumsfeld said in a May 25, 2001 interview with PBS’ “NewsHour, a copy of which can be found at
http://www.defenselink.mil/transcripts/2001/t05292001_t525pbsa.html

“The word "Iraq" was never mentioned in his entire confirmation hearing. One year later we're at war with Iraq. Now, what does that tell you? Well, it tells you that you'd best be flexible; you'd best expect the unexpected.”In fact, Rumsfeld discusses the above scenario in a half-dozen other interviews in May 2001 and appears to suggest, by specifically mentioning Iraq, that history would eventually repeat itself.

Responding to a reporter’s question on Jan. 26, 2001 about the Bush administration’s policy toward Saddam Hussein’s regime days after his Senate confirmation hearing, Rumsfeld said “I think that the policy of the country is that it is not helpful to have Saddam Hussein's regime in office.” A transcript of Rumsfeld’s comments can be found at
http://www.defenselink.mil/transcripts/2001/t01262001_t126mdav.html

In his inaugural address on Jan. 20, 2001 President Bush also alluded to the possibility of war, although he did not mention Iraq by name.

“We will confront weapons of mass destruction, so that a new century is spared new horrors,” Bush said. “The enemies of liberty and our country should make no mistake… We will defend our allies and our interests.”

Further evidence suggests that when the Bush administration took office it was worried that the U.S. was losing international support for the sanctions it placed on Iraq ten years earlier leaving the door open to the possibility that Saddam Hussein would be let out of his proverbial box. President Bush sent Powell on a trip to the Middle East in late February 2001 to study the situation in Iraq to decide whether the administration should keep the sanctions in place or whether it should start to lay the groundwork for a preemptive strike.

But Powell returned to the U.S. and championed the sanctions saying, Iraq posed absolutely no threat to the U.S., during testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on March 8, 2001, much to the dismay of Vice President Cheney, Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, all of whom believed in using military force to oust Saddam Hussein.

“When we took over on the 20th of January, I discovered that we had an Iraq policy that was in disarray, and the sanctions part of that policy was not just in disarray; it was falling apart,” Powell said during his Senate testimony, a copy of which can be found at http://www.state.gov/secretary/rm/2001/1164.htm

“We were losing support for the sanctions regime that had served so well over the last ten years, with all of the ups and downs and with all of the difficulties that are associated that regime, it was falling apart. It had been successful. Saddam Hussein has not been able to rebuild his army, notwithstanding claims that he has. He has fewer tanks in his inventory today than he had 10 years ago. Even though we know he is working on weapons of mass destruction, we know he has things squirreled away, at the same time we have not seen the capacity emerge to present a full-fledged threat to us.

In an interview with broadcast journalist Charlie Rose last Wednesday, Richard Perle, the former chairman of the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board and one of the major architects of the war against Iraq, lent further credibility to the claim that one of the reasons Iraq became a target for invasion was because support for sanctions were eroding.

Perle also said that White House lawyers advised President Bush and members of the National Security Council to accuse Iraq of violating United Nations resolutions by concealing stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons so as not to break international laws when the time came to attack the country.

With the possibility of finding Iraq’s alleged WMD’s, which the Bush administration used to as a basis to invade Iraq last March, becoming increasingly remote after 10 months of combat and as the President’s hand-picked team hired to search for the weapons begins to filter out of Iraq empty handed, Bush and his hawks still maintain that the war was justified.

In a heated exchange with “20/20” anchor Dianne Sawyer several weeks ago, Bush admitted that he personally saw no difference as to whether Iraq had physical weapons or a weapons program. Either way, the president said, “Saddam Hussein was a dangerous person.”

But it wasn’t the threat of an Iraqi weapons program that Bush said threatened the U.S. when he spoke before the U.N. Security Council and Congress and the Senate to support the war. It was an actual stockpile of weapons that posed the threat.

Finally, Bush is going to face a tough crowd come September. That’s when the Republican National Convention hits New York City and officially nominates Bush for a second-term. This is the same New York City that Bush denied tens of billions of dollars in aid to after the terrorists obliterated the World Trade Center, breaking a promise to help rebuild the city’s downtown area. And this is the same New York City that the Environmental Protection Agency, on orders from the White House, told New Yorkers it was safe to breathe when reliable information on air quality was not available.

Beware, Mr. President, you messed with the wrong city.

Dems Scrap Plans To Look Into Claims White House Manipulated Intel On Iraqi Threat
By Jason Leopold
September 13, 2003
Democrats in Congress have abandoned their efforts to investigate the White House’s use of questionable intelligence information about Iraq’s alleged stockpile of weapons of mass destruction, saying the issue has been "eclipsed" by President Bush’s request for $87 billion from Congress to continue funding the war there, writes Jason Leopold.

David Helfert, a spokesman for Congressman David Obey, D-Wisconsin, who criticized the White House for relying too heavily on murky intelligence to get support for the war, said Friday that Congressional Democrats would no longer pursue hearings on the intelligence matter.

"We’re past that," Helfert said, referring to the intelligence issue. "Those questions were eclipsed by the supplemental request by President Bush for $87 billion" to fund the Iraq war. "Congress if focusing on asking questions about the $87 billion, what it will be used for and whether it’s worth it. It would be a good characterization to say that the intelligence questions on Iraq and how the President came to believe that it had weapons of mass destruction are no longer an issue."

No weapons of mass destruction have been found in Iraq since Bush declared an end to major combat in May.

Obey, who this week called for the resignation of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, wrote a letter to the General Accounting Office last month to try and get the agency to investigate a secret Pentagon committee known as the Office of Special Plans. The Special Plans Office, headed by Wolfowitz and other hawks in the Bush administration, cherry-picked intelligence, much of which was gathered by unreliable Iraqi defectors, to make a stronger case for war in Iraq, according to four intelligence officials with knowledge of the inner workings of the group.

After collecting the intelligence data, the Office of Special Plans then sent the information it gathered directly to Vice President Dick Cheney’s office and to the office of National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice without first vetting the information through the CIA, the intelligence officials said.

Several other Democrats in Congress, including Ellen Tauscher, D-California, called for an investigation into the Office of Special Plans to find out whether the group knowingly used and supplied the White House with unreliable intelligence information to win support for the war, but their efforts were thwarted by the Republican controlled Congress.

In July, a month before Congress took off for a month-long summer recess, Bush and senior officials in the White House took a beating in the press for what looked like an attempt by the administration to manipulate prewar intelligence on the threat Iraq posed to the U.S. and its neighbors in the Middle East in order to convince Congress and the public to support a preemptive strike against Iraq.

For weeks, the White House was dogged by questions of its use of intelligence information on the so-called Iraqi threat, most notably the 16-word statement that made its way into Bush’s January State of the Union speech claiming Iraq had sought large quantities of yellowcake uranium from Niger to build a nuclear bomb. It has since been revealed that the uranium claim was based on forged documents. The White House then admitted that the statement should never have been included in Bush’s State of the Union address.

The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence held a closed-door hearing in July, questioning CIA Director George Tenet and other officials with the spy agency about the intelligence information collected by the CIA about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. It was Tenet who, after National Security Adviser Rice blamed the CIA director, took the fall for Bush when questions were asked about why the White House allowed the uranium claims to be used in Bush’s State of the Union address even though there were uncertainties about its authenticity. But it was later revealed that Tenet had warned Stephen Hadley, an aide to Rice, in a memo that the statements about Iraq’s attempts to purchase uranium from Niger should not be included in Bush’s speech because it was not true. Hadley said he "forgot" to advise Bush and Rice about the CIA’s warnings.

Still, with the media keeping the pressure on Bush and his use of faulty intelligence, Democrats in both houses continued to ask tough questions and appeared to be close to getting some answers. But then came the summer recess, ending the debate for good.

Meanwhile, in Britain, a Parliamentary committee launched a full-scale investigation last summer into Prime Minister Tony Blair’s government and whether he or his advisers falsified intelligence on the Iraqi threat. The committee, which wrapped up its probe Thursday, concluded that Blair did not falsify intelligence but failed to disclose to the public the uncertainty surrounding Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and questioned the claims used by Blair that Iraq could deploy missiles in 45 minutes and that Iraq was a threat to Britain.

But here in the United States, it appears all but likely that Congress will never direct the same questions Parliament compelled Tony Blair to answer toward Bush. In his televised speech Sunday, Bush shifted his rationale for the war in Iraq, saying it was now the central front on the war on terror and less about weapons of mass destruction, which was the reasons he cited as starting the war in the first place.

Halfert, Congressman Obey’s spokesman, said because there are now "cracks in Bush’s armor" because of the tough questions he was asked about his use of intelligence, it will be easier for Democrats to ask even tougher questions about how the administration will spend the $87 billion to continue funding the war.

"These are now the important questions that have to be asked and answered," Halfert said.

Let’s hope we get some answers before Congress takes off for the winter.

White House Said In Jan It Used Info From Iraqi Exiles In Pres State of Union Speech
By Jason Leopold
July 28, 2003
Last weekend, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz explained that the United States at times relied on “murky” intelligence in trying to link Iraq to the al-Qaeda terrorist group, but the war against Iraq was justified despite the fact that the White House is now being dogged by questions about the accuracy of its prewar intelligence.

“The nature of terrorism intelligence is intrinsically murky,” Wolfowitz said on “Meet the Press. “If you wait until the terrorism picture is clear, you're going to wait until after something terrible has happened.”

But the reasons behind the murky intelligence used by the White House to build a case for war against Iraq may have more to do with the people who provided the Pentagon and the White House with its information on Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction than the difficulties the intelligence community already faces in trying to obtain reliable intelligence from a variety of sources.

“Having concluded that international inspectors are unlikely to find tangible and irrefutable evidence that Iraq is hiding weapons of mass destruction, the Bush administration is preparing its own assessment that will rely heavily on evidence from Iraqi defectors, according to senior administration officials,” The New York Times reported Jan. 23.

In addition, Bush administration officials said Jan. 23 some of the intelligence information provided by the Iraqi defectors would likely be included in the president’s State of the Union address, which may explain why the White House has come under fire for failing to paint an accurate picture of the Iraqi threat—it is well-known among intelligence experts that much of the information provided by Iraqi defectors is unreliable.

“The White House asked administration intelligence analysts … to use the information from the defectors as part of a "bill of particulars" that the administration hopes will convince skeptical allies and the American public that Iraq's behavior warrants military action, the officials said,” The Times reported. “In addition, they said, it may be incorporated into President Bush's State of the Union address on Jan. 28.”

Many of the defectors were encouraged to speak to intelligence officials by Ahmad Chalabi, head of the Iraqi National Congress, an exile group with close ties to the White House. There continue to be deep divisions in Washington over the value of information from defectors associated with Chalabi’s group.

“The Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency has been the most receptive to the defectors intelligence, saying that defectors are critical to penetrating Iraq's deceptive practices. The CIA has often been dismissive of the defectors and questioned their credibility, according to administration officials,” the Times reported.

As lawmakers in Washington begin investigations into the accuracy of pre-war intelligence, they should question whether the White House and the Pentagon used dubious information from Iraqi defectors to help sway public opinion in supporting the war and whether some of that information was included in Bush’s State of the Union address in January.

Five days before President’s Bush’s State of the Union Speech Jan. 28, Wolfowitz spoke to the Council of Foreign Relations in New York and credited Iraqi defectors with providing the Pentagon and other U.S. “intelligence agencies” much of the information on Iraq’s secret weapons programs that has long been dismissed by military personnel in Iraq as unreliable.

Wolfowitz said in his Jan. 23, presentation to the Council of Foreign Relations that it was Iraqi defectors who told the CIA and the Pentagon about mobile trailers in Iraq that were allegedly used to produce biological weapons.

“We know about that capability from defectors and other sources,” Wolfowitz said during his speech, which can be found at http://www.defenselink.mil/news/Jan2003/t01232003_t0123cfr.html

“For a great body of what we need to know, we are very dependent on traditional methods of intelligence — that is to say, human beings who are either deliberately or inadvertently communicating to us.”

Secretary of State Colin Powell in his February presentation to the United Nations where he was trying to win support for war, pointed to the trailers as evidence of Iraq’s secret weapons program.

When the trailers were found in May, President Bush, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice were quick to point out that the trailers were used to produce lethal chemical weapons, even though no traces of any chemical weapons were found inside the trailers.

But the State Department in a June 2 classified memorandum disputed the conclusion that the trailers were used to cook up deadly weapons. United Nations weapons inspectors said that the trailers were likely used to produce hydrogen for weather balloons.

Prior to the war in March, Wolfowitz said some of the most valuable information it received came from Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri, a contractor who escaped Iraq in the summer of 2001. He told American officials that chemical and biological weapons laboratories were hidden beneath hospitals and inside presidential palaces and he provided documents to back up some of his other assertions about Iraq’s weapons programs.

In December and January, the White House highlighted Haideri’s claims against Iraq in a report called “Iraq; A Decade of Deception and Defiance” and in a fact sheet on Iraq posted on the White Houses web site. But when U.S. forces searched the hospitals and presidential palaces where Haideri said weapons were hidden they found nothing, not even evidence that weapons had ever been there.

CIA Probe Finds Secret Pentagon Group Manipulated Intelligence on Iraq
By Jason Leopold
July 25, 2003
A half-dozen former CIA agents investigating prewar intelligence have found that a secret Pentagon committee, set up by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in October 2001, manipulated reams of intelligence information prepared by the spy agency on the so-called Iraqi threat and then delivered it to top White House officials who used it to win support for a war in Iraq.

More than a dozen calls to the White House, the CIA, the National Security Council and the Pentagon for comment were not returned.

The ad-hoc committee, called the Office of Special Plans, headed by Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith and other Pentagon hawks, described the worst-case scenarios in terms of Iraq’s alleged stockpile of chemical and biological weapons and claimed the country was close to acquiring nuclear weapons, according to four of the CIA agents, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the information is still classified, who conducted a preliminary view of the intelligence.

The agents said the Office of Special Plans is responsible for providing the National Security Council and Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice and Rumsfeld with a bulk of the intelligence information on Iraq’s weapons program that turned out to be wrong. But White House officials used the information it received from the Office of Special Plans to win support from the public and Congress to start a war in Iraq even though the White House knew much of the information was dubious, the CIA agents said.

For example, the agents said the Office of Special Plans told the National Security Council last year that Iraq’s attempt to purchase aluminum tubes were part of a clandestine program to build an atomic bomb. The Office of Special Plans leaked the information to the New York Times last September. Shortly after the story appeared in the paper, Bush and Rice both pointed to the story as evidence that Iraq posed a grave threat to the United States and to its neighbors in the Middle East, even though experts in the field of nuclear science, the CIA and the State Department advised the White House that the aluminum tubes were not designed for an atomic bomb.

Furthermore, the CIA had been unable to develop any links between Iraq and the terrorist group al-Qaeda. But under Feith’s direction, the Office of Special Plans came up with information of such links by looking at existing intelligence reports that they felt might have been overlooked or undervalued. The Special Plans office provided the information to the Pentagon and to the White House. During a Pentagon briefing last year, Rumsfeld said he had “bulletproof” evidence that Iraq was harboring al-Qaeda terrorists.

At a Pentagon news conference last year, Rumsfeld said of the intelligence gathered by Special Plans: “Gee, why don't you go over and brief George Tenet? So they did. They went over and briefed the CIA. So there's no there's no mystery about all this."
CIA analysts listened to the Pentagon team, nodded politely, and said: "Thank you very much," said one government official, according to a July 20, report in the New York Times. That official said the briefing did not change the agency's reporting or analysis in any substantial way.

Several current and former intelligence officials told the Times that they felt pressure to tailor reports to conform to the administration's views, “particularly the theories Feith's group developed.”

Moreover, the agents said the Office of Special Plans routinely rewrote the CIA’s intelligence estimates on Iraq’s weapons programs, removing caveats such as “likely,” “probably” and “may” as a way of depicting the country as an imminent threat. The agents would not identify the names of the individuals at the Office of Special Plans who were responsible for providing the White House with the wrong intelligence. But, the agents said, the intelligence gathered by the committee sometimes went directly to the White House, Cheney’s office and to Rice without first being vetted by the CIA.

In cases where the CIA’s intelligence wasn’t rewritten the Office of Special Plans provided the White House with questionable intelligence it gathered from Iraqi exiles from the Iraqi National Congress, a group headed by Ahmad Chalabi, a person whom the CIA has publicly said is unreliable, the CIA agents said.

More than a dozen CIA agents responsible for writing intelligence reports for the agency told the former CIA agents investigating the accuracy of the intelligence reports said they were pressured by the Pentagon and the Office of Special Plans to hype an exaggerate intelligence to show Iraq as being an imminent threat to the security of the U.S.

The White House has been dogged by questions for nearly a month on whether the intelligence information it had relied upon was accurate and whether top White House officials knowingly used unreliable information to build a case for war. The furor started when President Bush said in his January State of the Union address that Iraq had tried to purchase uranium ore from Africa. Bush credited British intelligence for the claims, but the intelligence was based on forged documents. The Office of Special Plans is responsible for advising the White House to allow Bush to use the uranium claims in his speech, according to Democratic Senators and a CIA agent who are privy to classified information surrounding the issue.

CIA Director George Tenet took responsibility last week for allowing Bush to cite the information, despite the fact that he had warned the Rice’s office that the claims were likely wrong. Earlier this week, Stephen Hadley, an aide to Rice, said he received two memos from the CIA last year and before Bush’s State of the Union address alerting him to the fact that the uranium information should not be included in the State of the Union address. Hadley, who also took responsibility for failing to remove the uranium reference from Bush’s speech, said he forgot to advise the President about the CIA’s warnings.

Hawks in the White House and the Pentagon seized upon the uranium claims before and after Bush’s State of the Union address, telling reporters, lawmakers and leaders of other nations that the only thing that can be done to disarm Saddam Hussein is a preemptive strike against his country.

The only White House official who didn’t cite the uranium claim is Secretary of State Colin Powell. According to Greg Thielmann, who resigned last year from the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research– whose duties included tracking Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs – he personally told Powell that the allegations were “implausible” and the intelligence it was based upon was a “stupid piece of garbage.”

Patrick Lang, the former head of worldwide human intelligence gathering for the Defense Intelligence Agency, which coordinates military intelligence, said the Office of Special Plans "cherry-picked the intelligence stream" in a bid to portray Iraq as an imminent threat. Lang said in interviews with several media outlets that the CIA had "no guts at all" to resist the allegedly deliberate skewing of intelligence by a Pentagon that he said was now dominating U.S. foreign policy.

Vince Cannistraro, a former chief of CIA counter-terrorist operations, said he has spoken to a number of working intelligence officers who blame the Pentagon for playing up "fraudulent" intelligence, "a lot of it sourced from the Iraqi National Congress of Ahmad Chalabi."

In an October 11, 2002 report in the Los Angeles Times, several CIA agents “who brief Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz on Iraq routinely return to the agency with a long list of complaints and demands for new analysis or shifts in emphasis.”

"There is a lot of unhappiness with the analysis," usually because it is seen as not hard-line enough, one intelligence official said, according to the paper.

Another government official said CIA agents "are constantly sent back by the senior people at Defense and other places to get more, get more, get more to make their case," the paper reported

Now, as U.S. military casualties have surpassed that of the first Gulf War, Democrats in Congress and the Senate are starting to question whether other information about the Iraqi threat cited by Bush and his staff was reliable or part of a coordinated effort by the White House to politicize the intelligence to win support for a war.

The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence is investigating the issue but so far neither the Senate intelligence committee nor any Congressional committee has launched an investigation into the Office of Special Plans. But that may soon change.

Based on several news reports into the activities of the Office of Special Plans, a number of lawmakers have called for an investigation into the group. Congresswoman Ellen Tauscher, D-California, who sits on the House Armed Services Committee, wrote a letter July 9 to Congressman Duncan Hunter, R-California, chairman of the Armed Services committee, calling for an investigation into the Office of Special Plans.

The Office of Special Plans should be examined to determine whether it “complemented, competed with, or detracted from the role of other United States intelligence agencies respecting the collection and use of intelligence relating to Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and war planning. I also think it is important to understand how having two intelligence agencies within the Pentagon impacted the Department of Defense’s ability to focus the necessary resources and manpower on pre-war planning and post-war operations,” Tauscher’s letter said.

Congressman David Obey, D-Wisconsin, also called for a widespread investigation of the Office of Special Plans to find out whether there is any truth to the claims that it willfully manipulated intelligence on the Iraqi threat. During a Congressional briefing July 8, Obey described what he knew about Special Plans and why an investigation into the group is crucial.

“A group of civilian employees in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, all of whom are
political employees have long been dissatisfied with the information produced by the established intelligence agencies both inside and outside the Department. That was particularly true, apparently, with respect to the situation in Iraq,” Obey said. “As a result, it is reported that they established a special operation within the Office of the Secretary of Defense, which was named the Office of Special Plans. That office was charged with collecting, vetting, and disseminating intelligence completely outside the normal intelligence apparatus. In fact, it appears that the information collected by this office was in some instances not even shared with the established intelligence agencies and in numerous instances was passed on to the National Security Council and the President without having been vetted with anyone other than (the Secretary of Defense).”

“It is further alleged that the purpose of this operation was not only to produce intelligence more in keeping with the pre-held views of those individuals, but to intimidate analysts in the established intelligence organizations to produce information that was more supportive of policy decisions which they had already decided to propose.”

CIA Warned White House Last Oct That Iraq/Uranium Claims Based On Forged Docs
By Jason Leopold
July 15, 2003
The CIA successfully got the White House last October to omit references to Iraq’s alleged attempts to purchase uranium from Niger because the agency concluded that the documents used to back up the allegations were forgeries, according to two Democratic members of the Senate’s intelligence committee, both of whom were briefed by the CIA in classified hearings last year about the uranium allegations.

But it still remains unclear how, after briefing the White House and the intelligence committee that the documents about Iraq’s attempt to procure uranium from Niger wound up in President Bush’s State of the Union address in January.

Bush and his top White House advisers said last the CIA cleared week the erroneous information referenced in the State of the Union address. But White House officials did not disclose that the British intelligence documents Bush cited were known forgeries. The claims that Iraq tried to buy uranium from South Africa was a key point the Bush administration used in trying to sway the public to support a war against the country.

George Tenet, director of the CIA, took responsibility Friday for allowing Bush to use the information in his State of the Union address in January. Still, Democrats and a handful of Republicans want a broader probe on pre-war intelligence information used by the White House to build a case for war against Iraq.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair first mentioned the allegations last September about Iraq trying to obtain large quantities of uranium from a South African country just three hours before a Commons debate on whether Britain would use military force and back the United States in a war against Iraq.

In an exclusive interview last week, the two Democratic U.S. Senators said the CIA tried to get Blair to remove the uranium reference from a dossier released by British intelligence officials because the documents used to support the allegations were “crude forgeries,” the Senators said.
The Senators said they could not speak “on the record” because the information the CIA shared with the intelligence committee is still considered classified.

A spokesperson for Blair and the CIA would not return numerous calls for comment. These members said the Senate Intelligence Committee accused the CIA last September of withholding information the committee requested on U.S. military action in Iraq and that after the accusations were made publicly the CIA briefed the committee on the existence of the phony uranium documents an other intelligence information

The British dossier, which said Iraq had sought large quantities of uranium from South Africa in an effort to jump start its nuclear weapons program, were quickly dismissed as forgeries last October in a private meeting in Vienna at the International Atomic Energy Agency, according to the head of the IAEA, Mohammed ElBaradei.

The IAEA quickly realized that the documents handed over by the U.S. and British were phony after one letter purportedly signed by a Nigerian minister who had been out of office for 10 years.
“The IAEA was able to review correspondence coming from various bodies of the Government of Niger, and to compare the form, format, contents and signatures of that correspondence with those of the alleged procurement-related documentation,” ElBaradei said in a statement in March. “Based on thorough analysis, the IAEA has concluded, with the concurrence of outside experts, that these documents - which formed the basis for the reports of recent uranium transactions between Iraq and Niger - are in fact not authentic.”

The IAEA said the documents in the British dossier included a letter discussing the uranium deal supposedly signed by Niger President Tandja Mamadou. The IAEA described the signature as "childlike" and said that it clearly was not Mamadou's.

Another document, written on paper from a 1980s military government in Niger, bears the date of October 2000 and the signature of a man who by then had not been foreign minister of Niger in 14 years.

A U.S. intelligence official told CNN in March that the documents were passed on to the IAEA within days of being received last September with the comment, " 'We don't know the provenance of this information, but here it is.' "

The IAEA had dismissed another erroneous report about Iraq’s nuclear weapons program earlier in September. The IAEA said that a report cited by President Bush as evidence that Iraq in 1998 was "six months away" from developing a nuclear weapon did not exist.

"There's never been a report like that issued from this agency," Mark Gwozdecky, the IAEA's chief spokesman, said in a Sept. 26 telephone interview with the Washington Times. In a Sept. 7 news conference with Prime Minister Blair, Bush said: "I would remind you that when the inspectors first went into Iraq and were denied — finally denied access [in 1998], a report came out of the Atomic — the IAEA that they were six months away from developing a weapon.

The White House told the Washington Times that Bush was referring to an earlier IAEA report.
"He's referring to 1991 there," said Deputy Press Secretary Scott McClellan. "In '91, there was a report saying that after the war they found out they were about six months away."
But Gwozdecky said no such report was ever issued by the IAEA in 1991.

The IAEA also took issue with a Sept. 9 report by the International Institute for Strategic Studies — cited by the Bush administration — that concludes Saddam "could build a nuclear bomb within months if he were able to obtain fissile material," the Washington Times reported.

"There is no evidence in our view that can be substantiated on Iraq's nuclear-weapons program. If anybody tells you they know the nuclear situation in Iraq right now, in the absence of four years of inspections, I would say that they're misleading you because there isn't solid evidence out there," Gwozdecky told the paper.

"I don't know where they have determined that Iraq has retained this much weaponization capability because when we left in December '98 we had concluded that we had neutralized their nuclear-weapons program. We had confiscated their fissile material. We had destroyed all their key buildings and equipment," he said.

Gwozdecky said there is no evidence about Saddam's nuclear capability right now — either through his organization, other agencies or any government. A few weeks later, on Sept. 25, 2002, just three hours before a crucial debate in the House of Commons on whether the British would support a U.S. led coalition to disarm Iraq by force, Blair publicly released a dossier, much of which was based on already available public information, but included the frightening claim that Iraq could launch a nuclear missile in 45 minutes and that the country sought 500 tons of Uranium from South Africa.

Father of the House Tam Dalyell, MP for Linlithgow, slammed the cynical timing of the document's publication saying, "I now understand very clearly why the Government wanted to produce this report at 8a.m. on the morning of the debate, rather than subject it to the anvil of expert scrutiny by publishing it a week in advance.”

The White House said the findings in the British dossier were “frightening” and proved that Iraq was an imminent threat to its neighbors in the Middle East and to the U.S.

But a day after the dossier was released, Aziz Pahad, South African Deputy Prime Minister of Foreign Affairs, dismissed the report as a fake. Pahad said the IAEA had already rejected the claims that Iraq could have obtained uranium from Africa to make nuclear weapons.

“The agency (IAEA) had said there was no substance to the report. Four African countries produced uranium -- South Africa, Namibia, Niger and Gabon -- but South Africa was the only one capable of producing the enriched uranium for use in nuclear weapons,” Pahad said in a Sept. 26, 2002 prepared statement.

The IAEA also said in a statement in September 2002 that it is keeping an eye on stores of uranium that could be used for nuclear weapons in Africa–and they would know if any went missing. Indeed, in a report by UPI in October 2002, the news service said, “It seems unlikely, all the same, that the South African government has sold uranium to Iraq. (Former South African President) F.W. De Klerk, apprehensive about what might happen with South Africa's nuclear capabilities under an African National Congress government -- now the ruling party -- had made provision for tight and regular inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency, and the IAEA seems happy that its controls are adequate.”

But the British and top officials in the White House continued to harp on the uranium allegations, despite the fact that the IAEA had dismissed the documents as forgeries. When Iraq delivered its 12,000 page weapons report to the United Nations in December, the U.S. State Department released a fact sheet asking why hasn’t Iraq accounted for uranium it tried to obtain from Niger.
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld also highlighted Iraq’s alleged uranium purchases from Africa during a Jan. 29 briefing with reporters and called for the U.N. to support the U.S. in the event of war.

Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, said Jan. 23, in a speech before the Council of Foreign Relations in New York that Iraq’s 12,000 page weapons report to the U.N. was unacceptable because “there is no mention of Iraqi efforts to procure uranium from abroad.”

The timing of the statements by Bush’s top advisers was crucial because the U.N. was gearing up to hold a vote on whether to find Iraq in material breach of a U.N. resolution calling for the country to disarm, which if U.N. countries voted in favor of would have allowed the U.S. to start a war with Iraq with the full support of U.N. member countries.

National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice, in a Jan. 23, New York Times op-ed column headlined “Why We Know Iraq is Lying,” accused Iraq of filing a “false declaration to the United Nations that amounts to a 12,200-page lie.”

“For example, the declaration fails to account for or explain Iraq's efforts to get uranium from abroad,” Rice said in the column.

Wolfowitz Ordered CIA Investigate Hans Blix Prior To Start of Iraq War
By Jason Leopold
June 26, 2003
Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defense, was so eager to see the United States launch a preemptive strike against Iraq in early 2002, that he ordered the CIA to investigate the past work of Hans Blix in an attempt to undermine the scientist, writes Jason Leopold.

Blix, the chief United Nations weapons inspector, was asked in February 2002 to lead a team of U.N. weapons inspectors into Iraq to search for weapons of mass destruction.

The unusual move by Wolfowitz underscores the steps the Bush administration was willing to take a year before the U.S. invaded Iraq to manipulate and or exaggerate intelligence information to support it’s claims that Iraq posed an immediate threat to the United States and that the only solution to quell the problem was the use of military force.

U.S. military forces in Iraq have yet to find any evidence of WMD. Some U.S. lawmakers have accused the Bush administration of distorting intelligence information, which claimed Iraq possessed tons of chemical and biological agents, to justify the attack to overthrow Iraq’s President Saddam Hussein. Although the Bush administration continues to deny the accusations, evidence, such as the secret report Wolfowitz asked the CIA in January 2002 to produce on Blix, prove that the administration had already decided that removing Saddam from power would require military force and it would do so regardless of the U.N..

Earlier this month, Blix accused the Bush administration of launching a smear campaign against him because he could not find evidence of WMD in Iraq and, he said, he refused to pump up his reports to the U.N. about Iraq’s WMD programs, which would have given the U.S. the evidence it needed to get a majority of U.N. member countries to support a war against Iraq. Instead, Blix said the U.N. inspectors should be allowed more time to conduct searches in Iraq for WMD.

In a June 11 interview with the London Guardian newspaper, Blix said “U.S. officials pressured him to use more damning language when reporting on Iraq's alleged weapons programs.“

“By and large my relations with the U.S. were good,'' Blix told the Guardian. “But toward the end the (Bush) administration leaned on us.'”

Tensions between Blix and the hawks in the Bush administration, such as Wolfowitz, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney, go back at least two years, when President Bush, at the urging of Secretary of State Colin Powell, said he wanted the U.N. to resurrect U.N. arms inspections for Iraq.

The move angered some in the administration, such as Wolfowitz, who, according to an April 15 report in the Washington Post, wanted to see military action against Iraq sooner rather than later.

When the U.N. said privately in January 2002 that Blix would lead an inspections team into Iraq, Wolfowitz contacted the CIA to produce a report on why Blix, as chief of the International Atomic Energy Agency during the 1980s and 1990s, failed to detect Iraqi nuclear activity.

But, according to the Washington Post’s April 15, 2002 story, the CIA report said Blix “had conducted inspections of Iraq's declared nuclear power plants fully within the parameters he could operate as chief of the Vienna-based agency between 1981 and 1997.”

Wolfowitz, according to the Post, quoting a former State Department official familiar with the report, “hit the ceiling" because it failed to provide sufficient ammunition to undermine Blix and, by association, the new U.N. weapons inspection program.”

“The request for a CIA investigation underscored the degree of concern by Wolfowitz and his civilian colleagues in the Pentagon that new inspections -- or protracted negotiations over them -- could torpedo their plans for military action to remove Hussein from power,” the Post reported.

Soon after the CIA issued its report, the administration began exaggerating intelligence information of Iraq’s weapons programs and, in some cases, forcing intelligence officials to “cook” up information to support a war, according to a Nov. 19, 2002 story in the London Guardian newspaper.

For example, last August, Cheney said Iraq would have nuclear weapons “fairly soon” - in direct contradiction of CIA reports that said it would take at least five more years.
Rumsfeld, in public comments last year, accused Saddam Hussein of providing sanctuary to al-Qaida operatives fleeing Afghanistan - although they had actually traveled to Iraqi Kurdistan, which is outside Saddam’s control, the Guardian reported.

On Feb. 12, 2002, a week or so after the CIA issued its report to Wolfowitz on Blix, reporters questioned Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld about the accuracy of the Bush administration’s claim that Iraq was harboring al-Qaida terrorists and the countries alleged stockpile of WMD, which some news reports said was not true.

Rumsfeld’s response to the reporters’ questions about the accuracy of the information proves that the Defense Secretary cares little about providing the public with thoughtful, intelligent analysis.

“Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns -- the ones we don't know we don't know,” Rumsfeld said.

But on Wednesday, Rumsfeld and Gen Richard Myers, Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff, radically changed their stance on the accuracy of such intelligence The officials said at a news conference that intelligence information the U.S. gathered leading up to the war in Iraq that concluded the country possessed WMD may have been wrong.

“Intelligence doesn't necessarily mean something is true,” Myers said “It's just -- it's intelligence. You know, it's your best estimate of the situation. It doesn't mean it's a fact. I mean, that's not what intelligence is. It's not -- they're -- and so you make judgments.”

White House Silenced Experts Who Questioned Iraq Intelligence Info 6 Months Before War
By Jason Leopold
June 12, 2003
Six months before the United States was dead-set on invading Iraq to rid the country of its alleged weapons of mass destruction, experts in the field of nuclear science warned officials in the Bush administration that intelligence reports showing Iraq was stockpiling chemical and biological weapons was unreliable and that the country did not pose an imminent threat to its neighbors in the Middle East or the U.S.

But the dissenters were told to keep quiet by high-level administration officials in the White House because the Bush administration had already decided that military force would be used to overthrow the regime of Iraq’s President Saddam Hussein, interviews and documents have revealed.

The most vocal opponent to intelligence information supplied by the CIA to the hawks in the Bush administration about the so-called Iraqi threat to national security was David Albright, a former United Nations weapons inspector and the president and founder of the Institute for Science and International Security, a Washington, D.C. based group that gathers information for the public and the White House on nuclear weapons programs.

With the likelihood of finding WMD in Iraq becoming increasingly remote, new information, such as documents and interviews provided by Albright and other weapons experts, prove that the White House did not suffer so much from an intelligence failure on Iraq’s WMD, but instead shows how the Bush administration embellished reams of intelligence and relied on murky intelligence in order to get Congress and the public to back the war. That may explain why it is becoming so difficult to find WMD: Because it’s entirely likely that the weapons don’t exist.

“A critical question is whether the Bush Administration has deliberately misled the public and other governments in playing a "nuclear card" that it knew would strengthen public support for war,” Albright said in a March 10 assessment of the CIA’s intelligence, which is posted on the ISIS website.

John Dean, the former counsel to President Richard Nixon, wrote in a column this week that if President Bush mislead the public in building a case for war in Iraq, largely because the WMD have yet to be found. If Bush did distort intelligence information to make a case for war he could a case for impeachment could be made, according to Dean.

“Presidential statements, particularly on matters of national security, are held to an expectation of the highest standard of truthfulness,” Dean wrote this week. “A president cannot stretch, twist or distort facts and get away with it. President Lyndon Johnson's distortions of the truth about Vietnam forced him to stand down from reelection. President Richard Nixon's false statements about Watergate forced his resignation.”

In September, USA Today reported that “the Bush administration is expanding on and in some cases contradicting U.S. intelligence reports in making the case for an invasion of Iraq, interviews with administration and intelligence officials indicate.”
“Administration officials accuse Iraq of having ties to al-Qaeda terrorists and of amassing weapons of mass destruction despite uncertain and sometimes contrary intelligence on these issues, according to officials,” the paper reported. “In some cases, top administration officials disagree outright with what the CIA and other intelligence agencies report. For example, they repeat accounts of al-Qaeda members seeking refuge in Iraq and of terrorist operatives meeting with Iraqi intelligence officials, even though U.S. intelligence reports raise doubts about such links. On Iraqi weapons programs, administration officials draw the most pessimistic conclusions from ambiguous evidence.”

In secret intelligence briefings last September on the Iraqi threat, House Minority Whip Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said administration officials were presenting "embellishments" on information long known about Iraq.

A senior Bush administration official conceded privately that there are large gaps in U.S. knowledge about Iraqi weapons programs, USA Today reported.

The concerns jibe with warnings about the CIA’s intelligence information Albright first raised last September, when the agency zeroed in on high-strength aluminum tubes Iraq was trying to obtain as evidence of the country’s active near-complete nuclear weapons program.

The case of the aluminum tubes is significant because President Bush identified it during a speech last year as evidence of Iraq’s nuclear weapons program and used to rally the public and several U.N. countries in supporting the war. But Albright said many officials in the intelligence community knew the tubes weren’t meant to build a nuclear weapon.

“The CIA has concluded that these tubes were specifically manufactured for use in gas centrifuges to enrich uranium,” Albright said. “Many in the expert community both inside and outside government, however, do not agree with this conclusion. The vast majority of gas centrifuge experts in this country and abroad who are knowledgeable about this case reject the CIA's case and do not believe that the tubes are specifically designed for gas centrifuges. In addition, International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors have consistently expressed skepticism that the tubes are for centrifuges.”

“After months of investigation, the administration has failed to prove its claim that the tubes are intended for use in an Iraqi gas centrifuge program,” Albright added. “Despite being presented with evidence countering this claim, the administration persists in making misleading comments about the significance of the tubes.”

Albright said he tried to voice his concerns about the intelligence information to White House officials last year, but was rebuffed and told to keep quiet.

“I first learned of this case a year and a half ago when I was asked for information about past Iraqi procurements. My reaction at the time was that the disagreement reflected the typical in-fighting between US experts that often afflicts the intelligence community. I was frankly surprised when the administration latched onto one side of this debate in September 2002. I was told that this dispute had not been mediated by a competent, impartial technical committee, as it should have been, according to accepted practice,” Albright said. “I became dismayed when a knowledgeable government scientist told me that the administration could say anything it wanted about the tubes while government scientists who disagreed were expected to remain quiet.”

Albright said the Department of Energy, which analyzed the intelligence information on the aluminum tubes and rejected the CIA’s intelligence analysis, is the only government agency in the U.S. that can provide expert opinions on gas centrifuges (what the CIA alleged the tubes were being used for) and nuclear weapons programs.

“For over a year and a half, an analyst at the CIA has been pushing the aluminum tube story, despite consistent disagreement by a wide range of experts in the United States and abroad,” Albright said. “His opinion, however, obtained traction in the summer of 2002 with senior members of the Bush Administration, including the President. The administration was forced to admit publicly that dissenters exist, particularly at the Department of Energy and its national laboratories.”

But Albright said the White House launched an attack against experts who spoke critically of the intelligence.

“Administration officials try to minimize the number and significance of the dissenters or unfairly attack them,” Albright said. “For example, when Secretary Powell mentioned the dissent in his Security Council speech, he said: "Other experts, and the Iraqis themselves, argue that they are really to produce the rocket bodies for a conventional weapon, a multiple rocket launcher." Not surprisingly, an effort by those at the Energy Department to change Powell's comments before his appearance was rebuffed by the administration.”

Moreover, former scientists who worked on Iraq’s nuclear weapons program and escaped the country also disputed the CIA’s intelligence of the country’s existing nuclear weapons program, saying it ended in 1991 after the first Gulf War. However, some Iraq scientists who supplied the Pentagon with information claim that Iraq's nuclear weapons program continues, but none of these Iraqis have any direct knowledge of any current banned nuclear programs. They appear to all carry political baggage and biases about going to war or overthrowing Saddam Hussein, and these biases seem to drive their judgments about nuclear issues, rendering their statements about current Iraqi nuclear activities suspect, according to Albright, who said he was privy to much of the information being supplied to the Bush administration and the CIA.

Another example of disputed intelligence used by the Bush administration to build its case for war is Iraq’s attempts to obtain uranium from Niger as evidence of another secret nuclear weapons program. Bush in his State of the Union Speech in January used this information as an example of a “smoking gun” and the imminent threat Iraq posed to the U.S. But the information has since been widely discounted.

“One person who heard a classified briefing on Iraq in late 2002 said that there was laughter in the room when the uranium evidence was presented,” Albright said. “One of (the) most dramatic findings, revealed on March 7, was that the documents which form the basis for the reports of recent uranium transactions between Niger and Iraq are not authentic.”

Iraq's attempts to acquire a magnet production plant are likewise ambiguous. Secretary of State Colin Powell stated to the UN Security Council on February 5, 2003 that this plant would produce magnets with a mass of 20 to 30 grams. He added: "That's the same weight as the magnets used in Iraq's gas centrifuge program before the Gulf War." One US official said that because the pieces are so small, many end uses are possible, making it impossible to link the attempted acquisition to an Iraqi centrifuge program.”

One piece of intelligence information that seemed to go unnoticed by the media was satellite photographs released by the White House last October of a facility in Iraq called Al Furat to support Bush's assertion that Iraq was making nuclear weapons there.

But Albright said that Iraq already admitted making such weapons at Al Furat before the Gulf War and that the site had long been dismantled.

In addition to Albright, other military experts also were skeptical of the intelligence information gathered by the CIA.

“Basically, cooked information is working its way into high-level pronouncements and there's a lot of unhappiness about it in intelligence, especially among analysts at the CIA,” said Vincent Cannistraro, the CIA's former head of counter-intelligence, in an interview with London’s Guardian newspaper last October.

Cannistraro told the Guardian that hawks at the Pentagon had deliberately skewed the flow of intelligence to the top levels of the administration.

Last October, Bush said the Iraqi regime was developing unmanned aerial vehicles, which “could be used to disperse chemical or biological weapons across broad areas.”

“We're concerned that Iraq is exploring ways of using these UAVs for missions targeting the United States,” Bush said.

While U.S. military experts confirmed that Iraq had been converting eastern European trainer jets into UAV’s, but with a maximum range of a few hundred miles they were no threat to targets in the U.S.

“It doesn't make any sense to me if he meant United States territory,” said Stephen Baker, a retired US navy rear admiral who assesses Iraqi military capabilities at the Washington-based Center for Defense Information, also in an interview with the Guardian last October.

In true Bush fashion, however, the administration had long believed it was better to strike first and ask questions later.

When Senator Dianne Féinstein, D-California, who sits on the intelligence committee, sent Bush a letter Sept. 17, 2002 requesting he urge the CIA to produce a National Intelligence Estimate, a report that would have showed exactly how much of a threat Iraq posed, Condoleeza Rice, the National Security Adviser, said in the post 9-11 world the U.S. cannot wait for intelligence because the Iraq is too much of a threat to the U.S.

“We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud,” Rice said.

Powell Denies Intelligence Failure In Buildup To War —
But Evidence Doesn’t Hold Up
By Jason Leopold
June 9, 2003
The evidence, or lack thereof, speaks for itself. In the months leading up to the war in Iraq, the Bush administration produced hundreds of pages of intelligence for members of Congress and for the United Nations that showed how Iraq’s President Saddam Hussein possessed tons of chemical and biological weapons and was actively pursuing a nuclear weapons program.

The intelligence information, gathered by the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency, a Department of Defense agency that gathers foreign military intelligence for the Pentagon, was used by the Bush administration to convince the public that Iraq posed a threat to the world.

But the information in those reports, much of which has been declassified and is now available online, hasn’t panned out as U.S. military forces comb Iraq for weapons of mass destruction. Moreover, it turns out that a bulk of the intelligence contained in the reports was just plain wrong, suggesting that either the intelligence was doctored to make a case for war or, even worse, that a massive intelligence failure is rampant inside the CIA and other U.S. government agencies.

The Bush administration has come under fire from Republicans and Democrats alike over the past two weeks for failing to find any WMD in Iraq and for possibly manipulating intelligence reports to back the war. Secretary of State Colin Powell and National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice appeared on news programs Sunday and vehemently denied these claims, saying that the media has turned the issue of the absence of WMD into a scandal and that the public is not concerned.

Last week, U.S. News and World Report disclosed the existence of a DIA report that said no reliable evidence of Iraq’s WMD program could be found, but the agency said it believed that Iraq had some chemical weapons.

“There can be no question there were weapons before the war” in Iraq, Powell said. “They have had weapons throughout their history. They have used chemical weapons. They have admitted that they had biological weapons. And they never accounted for all that they had or what they might or might not have done with it.”

“I don't think that the public is as upset about all this or as concerned about this as is the media, which has had a feeding frenzy for the last week,” Powell said Sunday in an interview with Fox News.

That’s not entirely accurate. Depending on how the question is asked, some people believe the Bush administration misled the public by using exaggerated evidence of WMD in making a case for war while other polls, conducted by outlets such as Fox News, say a majority of people still believe the war was justified even if WMD are never found.

Still, despite the denials by Rice and Powell, both of who said they believe the intelligence information to be accurate, most, if not all, of the intelligence information publicly available has turned out to be false. And in its rush to war, it has become clear that the Bush administration overstated the urgency of the so-called Iraq threat.

For example, in a report produced by the CIA in October 2002, the agency said that Iraq had tried to obtain high-strength aluminum tubes “capable of producing enough highly enriched uranium for a couple of weapons per year.”

President Bush seized upon this intelligence last year as evidence that Iraq was pursuing a nuclear weapons program and urged the U.N. to back the U.S. in disarming Iraq by force if the country failed to do so voluntarily.

But aluminum tubes that Iraq was trying to obtain was to build rockets rather than for centrifuges to enrich uranium, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency.

“While the matter is still under investigation, and further verification is foreseen, the IAEA's analysis to date indicates that the specifications of the aluminum tubes sought by Iraq in 2001 and 2002 appear to be consistent with reverse-engineering of rockets," an IAEA report submitted in January to the UN Security Council said. "While it would be possible to modify such tubes for the manufacture of centrifuges, they are not directly suitable for it.”

The claim about Iraq trying to buy uranium oxide from Niger first emerged in British intelligence documents last September. The documents have since turned out to be forgeries, according to the IAEA.

The IAEA quickly realized that the documents handed over by the US were phony after one letter purportedly signed by a Nigerian minister who had been out of office for 10 years.

The CIA report contains more than three-dozen other instances of erroneous information, including the time frame for producing nuclear and biological weapons and alleged evidence of Iraq’s ballistic missile programs.

The IAEA report also said “to date, no evidence of ongoing prohibited nuclear or nuclear-related activities has been detected.”

The CIA report identifies dozens of specific geographical locations where Iraq is alleged to have been developing its chemical and biological weapons program and goes even further in identifying the exact quantity of chemical and biological weapons, such as anthrax, VX, serin and mustard gas Iraq already has, but a search of these sites after the war has turned up nothing.

Case in point: In 2001, an Iraqi defector, Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri, said he had visited twenty secret facilities for chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. Saeed, a civil engineer, supported his claims with stacks of Iraqi government contracts, complete with technical specifications. Saeed said Iraq used companies to purchase equipment with the blessing of the United Nations - and then secretly used the equipment for their weapons programs.

But the information never held up and turned out to be one of the single biggest intelligence failures for the Bush administration. Judith Miller first brought the existence of Saeed to light in a New York Times story in December 2001 and again in January. The White House, in September 2002, cited the information provided by Saeed, who told U.S. officials that chemical and biological weapons labs could be found in hospitals and presidential palaces, which turned out to be completely untrue, in a public report on the imminent threat Iraq presented to U.S. security. The White House report, “A Decade of Deception and Defiance” can be found at http://www.whitehouse.gov/infocus/iraq/decade/sect3.html

The argument within the Pentagon and the Bush administration is that Iraq, a country the size of California, has done an outstanding job of hiding its weapons. But the CIA in its report identified tons of chemical and biological weapons stockpiled throughout the country yet not even a spec of anthrax has been found, which doesn’t make sense if Iraq did in fact have such a large quantity of chemical and biological weapons agents.

Hans Blix, the chief U.N. weapons inspector, said last week in his final report to the U.N. Security Council http://www.un.org/apps/news/infocusnewsiraq.asp?NewsID=529&sID=6 that during the relatively short time U.N. inspectors searched Iraq for WMD “the commission has not at any time during the inspections in Iraq found evidence of the continuation or resumption of programs of weapons of mass destruction or significant quantities of proscribed items – whether from pre 1991 or later.”

“This does not necessarily mean that such items could not exist,” Blix said. “They might – there remain long lists of items unaccounted for – but it is not justified to jump to the conclusion that something exists just because it is unaccounted for.”

Iraq War Always Based On Shaky Evidence And Wrong Intelligence Info
By Jason Leopold
June 4, 2003
Here’s what we know so far about Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction: of the 600 or so sites identified by United States intelligence and Iraqi officials as places where the country biological weapons may be hidden, about 100 of these sites have been searched over the past six weeks and not a single spec of anthrax or other WMD has been uncovered.

Two skeletal trailers that may have been used to develop anthrax or botulism, scrubbed from top to bottom when it was found, leaving no biological weapons traces behind, according to the Department of Defense, is the only evidence the U.S. has found so far to justify it’s preemptive strike against Iraq. But this is far from a “smoking gun and the prospects for finding any WMD in the months ahead are becoming grim.

The media is peppering U.S. military officials in Iraq on why WMD haven’t been found yet. The responses are short and to the point.

“I honestly don’t know,” said Stephen Cambone, undersecretary of defense for U.S. intelligence, during a briefing May 30.

Prior to the war, nearly every major media outlet warned, based on reports from the Pentagon, that Iraq’s cache of chemical and biological weapons could be used on U.S. and British troops sent in to Iraq to destroy Saddam Hussein’s regime.

To back up these claims, President Bush and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said Saddam’s history of using WMD on his own people and in the war the country fought against Iran was evidence of the viciousness of the dictatorship. So are we to believe that Saddam suddenly got a dose of humanity, opting instead to let his regime being torn apart rather than go out in a blaze of glory? Or could it be that Iraq either destroyed its WMD or never had anything substantial to begin with?

Looking back at the events that led up to the war, it’s likely the latter. The Bush administration never presented the proof to the United Nations that its intelligence suggesting Iraq was developing chemical and biological weapons was superior to that of the U.N. weapons inspectors who actually combed through the country looking for stockpiles of anthrax, botulism or VX. Now the military, which has taken over inspections, are finding exactly what U.N. weapons inspectors found, nothing. Even Al Capone’s safe had a couple of empty bottles of liquor in it when Geraldo Rivera opened it up twenty years ago.

In October 2002, President Bush gave a speech in Cincinnati and spoke about the imminent threat Iraq posed to the U.S. because of the country’s alleged ties with al-Qaeda and its endless supply of chemical and biological weapons

“Surveillance photos reveal that the (Iraqi) regime is rebuilding facilities that it had used to produce chemical and biological weapons,” Bush said. “Iraq possesses ballistic missiles with a likely range of hundreds of miles -- far enough to strike Saudi Arabia, Israel, Turkey, and other nations -- in a region where more than 135,000 American civilians and service members live and work. We've also discovered through intelligence that Iraq has a growing fleet of manned and unmanned aerial vehicles that could be used to disperse chemical or biological weapons across broad areas. We're concerned that Iraq is exploring ways of using these UAVS for missions targeting the United States. And, of course, sophisticated delivery systems aren't required for a chemical or biological attack; all that might be required are a small container and one terrorist or Iraqi intelligence operative to deliver it.’

None of this intelligence information has ever panned out, according to dozens of news reports over the past five months. Most notably, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency, Bush erred when he said last year that Iraq was six months away from developing a nuclear weapon. Furthermore, the president’s claims that thousands of high-strength aluminum tubes sought by Iraq were intended for a secret nuclear weapons program.

Bush said last September in a speech that attempts by Iraq to acquire the tubes point to a clandestine program to make enriched uranium for nuclear bombs. But experts contradicted Bush, saying that the evidence is ambiguous.

The report, from the Institute for Science and International Security, a copy of which was acquired by the Washington Post, “also contends that the Bush administration is trying to quiet dissent among its own analysts over how to interpret the evidence.”

David Albright, a physicist who investigated Iraq’s nuclear weapons program following the 1991 Persian Gulf War as a member of the International Atomic Energy Agency’s inspection team, the Post reported, authored the report.

The institute, headquartered in Washington, is an independent group that studies nuclear and other security issues.”

“By themselves, these attempted procurements are not evidence that Iraq is in possession of, or close to possessing, nuclear weapons," the report said, according to the Post story http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A36348-2002Sep18?language=printer. “They do not provide evidence that Iraq has an operating centrifuge plant or when such a plant could be operational.”

The lack of evidence and public blunders by other high-ranking officials in the Bush administration is endless.

Secretary of State Colin Powell made it clear in an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal February 3, a day before his famous meeting at the U.N. where he presented “evidence” of an Iraqi weapons program, which turned out to be the empty trailers the U.S. military found earlier this month, that there was no “smoking gun”

“While there will be no "smoking gun," we will provide evidence concerning the weapons programs that Iraq is working so hard to hide,” Powell said in his op-ed. “We will, in sum, offer a straightforward, sober and compelling demonstration that Saddam is concealing the evidence of his weapons of mass destruction, while preserving the weapons themselves.”

However, Powell did no such thing. Instead, Powell held up a small vial of anthrax at the U.N. meeting to illustrate how deadly just a small vial can be and then used that to couch his claims that Iraq’s alleged stockpile of anthrax would be much deadlier.

The same day, February 3, White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer dodged a dozen or so questions about the intelligence information from sources in Iraq and from the CIA that showed, without any doubt, that Iraq possessed WMD.

“I think the reason that we know Saddam Hussein possesses chemical and biological weapons is from a wide variety of means. That's how we know,” Fleischer said.

In virtually every press briefing, which is archived on the White House’s web site at
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/briefings/, and every speech by President Bush between January and the days leading up to the war in March hundreds of questions were directed at Bush during stake outs and Fleischer at his press briefings about what intelligence information the U.S. had that could be declassified to support it’s allegations that Iraq was either developing WMD or was hiding them. However, not a single shred of proof was offered up by the White House to back up its claims.

Moreover, when the White House finally seized on something tangible prior to the war, such as the existence of long-range missiles, Iraq started destroying the weapons in the presence of U.N. inspectors. But at this point war with Iraq was inevitable.

In an interview with Meet the Press February 9, Tim Russert, the program’s host, asked Powell about one of the alleged WMD sites Powell spoke about at a U.N. meeting the week before. Russert asked Powell if the U.S. knew where certain weapons in Iraq were being stored why not just send the U.N. inspectors in or destroy the facility rather than go to war?

Powell’s response is poignant.

“Well, the inspectors eventually did go there, and by the time they got there, they were no longer active chemical bunkers,” Powell said.

To suggest today, nearly two months after the war in Iraq started, whether there may have been an intelligence failure now that WMD have yet to be found is to suggest there was some sort of intelligence in the first place.

Besides, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz both said publicly during interviews last week that the war in Iraq was planned two days after the 9-11 terrorist attacks, well before the issue of WMD was every discussed by the Bush administration.

Wolfowitz Admits Iraq War Planned Two Days After 9-11
By Jason Leopold
June 3, 2003

While the hawks in the Bush administration attempt to justify the logic behind a preemptive strike against Iraq now that its become clear the country’s alleged weapons of mass destruction are nowhere to be found, the true reasons for going to war are finally coming to light.

In his State of the Union address in January, President Bush said intelligence reports from the CIA and the FBI indicated that Saddam Hussein “had the materials to produce as much as 500 tons of sarin, mustard and VX nerve agent,” which put the United States in imminent danger of possibly being attacked sometime in the future.

Two months later, despite no concrete evidence from intelligence officials or United Nations inspectors that these weapons existed, Bush authorized the use of military force to decimate the country and destroy Saddam Hussein’s regime.

Now it appears the weapons of mass destruction will never be found and many critics of the war are starting to wonder aloud whether the community was duped by the Bush administration.

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, both of who spent a better part of the past decade advocating the use of military force against Iraq, put the issue to rest once and for all.

Judging by recent interviews Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz gave to a handful of media outlets during the past week, the short answer is yes, the public was mislead into believing Iraq posed an imminent threat to the United States. Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz admit that the war with Iraq was planned two days after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001.

On September13, 2001, during a meeting at Camp David with President Bush, Rumsfeld and others in the Bush administration, Wolfowitz said he discussed with President Bush the prospects of launching an attack against Iraq, for no apparent reason other than a “gut feeling” Saddam Hussein was involved in the attacks, and there was a debate “about what place if any Iraq should have in a counter terrorist strategy.”

“On the surface of the debate it at least appeared to be about not whether but when,” Wolfowitz said during the May 9 interview, a transcript of which is posted on the Department of Defense website www.defenselink.mil/transcripts/2003/tr20030509-depsecdef0223.html. “There seemed to be a kind of agreement that yes it should be, but the disagreement was whether it should be in the immediate response or whether you should concentrate simply on Afghanistan first.”

Wolfowitz said it was clear that because Saddam Hussein “praised” the terrorist attacks on 9-11 that besides Afghanistan, Iraq went to the top of the list of countries the United States expected to launch an attack against in the near future.

“To the extent it was a debate about tactics and timing, the President clearly came down on the side of Afghanistan first. To the extent it was a debate about strategy and what the larger goal was, it is at least clear with 20/20 hindsight that the President came down on the side of the larger goal.”

In an interview with WABC-TV last week, Rumsfeld took it a step further saying United States policy advocated regime change in Iraq since the 1990s and that was also a reason behind the war in Iraq.

“If you go back and look at the debate in the Congress and the debate in the United Nations, what we said was the President said that this is a dangerous regime, the policy of the United States government has been regime change since the mid to late 1990s … and that regime has now been changed. That is a very good thing,” Rumsfeld said during the interview, a transcript of which can be found at http://www.defenselink.mil/transcripts/2003/tr20030527-secdef0228.html

Rumfeld’s response is only partly true. He and Wolfowitz, along with Vice President Dick Cheney and others in the administration, wrote to President Clinton in 1998 urging regime change in Iraq but Clinton rebuffed them saying his administration was focusing on dismantling al-Qaeda cells.

In the bigger picture, Iraqis are better off without Saddam Hussein, who ruled the country with an iron fist, torturing and murdering any citizen who spoke against his regime. But that’s beside the point. The issue is the Bush administration lied to the world and launched an unjustifiable war.

And it’s just the beginning of a so-called two front war the U.S. is planning against other “outlaw” regimes. The administration is ratcheting up the rhetoric on Iran by making similar allegations that this country too poses a threat to national security by harboring al-Qaeda terrorists and building a nuclear arms arsenal.

Serious disagreements exist between the State Department and the Bush administration on how to deal with Iran, with the State Department pushing for an open dialogue and the Bush administration pushing for a new regime.

In a half a dozen interviews last week, Rumsfeld refused to respond to questions about whether the U.S. will use military force to overthrow Iran’s governing body.

“That’s (military force) up to the President but the fact is that to the extent that Iran attempts to influence what’s taking place in Iraq and tries to make Iraq into their image, we will have to stop it. And to the extent they have people from their Revolutionary Guard in they’re attempting to do that, why we’ll have to find them and capture them or kill them,” Rumsfeld said in an interview last week with WCBS-TV.

Wolfowitz, however, is more direct in how to deal with Iran. Responding to the question of whether military force will be used to weed out the clerics running the country, Wolfowitz said in an interview with CNN International Saturday “you know, I think you know, we never rule out that kind of thing.”

Despite Thin Intelligence Reports, US Plans To Overthrow Iranian Regime
By Jason Leopold
May 29, 2003
Here we go again. While postwar Iraq continues to crumble, the Bush administration is now setting its sights on a new target—Iran—in its so-called effort to reshape most of the Middle East and bring democracy to countries ruled by vicious dictators. But the Bush administration is again relying on flimsy evidence and thin intelligence information in claiming that the Iran poses an immediate threat to the United States.

The U.S. still hasn’t uncovered any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, which was the prime reason for launching an attack against the country. Rumsfeld said in an interview reported by CNN Tuesday that it’s possible the WMD in Iraq may have been destroyed prior to the war. So right now, the Bush administration doesn’t have much credibility here or with countries that rightfully opposed the war in Iraq.

Ari Fleischer, Bush’s press secretary, said during his daily press briefing Tuesday that Iran hasn’t taken the appropriate steps to round up al Qaeda terrorists allegedly hiding out within its borders. Moreover, Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons puts the U.S. in grave danger. Therefore, regime change is in order.

“The future of Iran will be determined by the Iranian people, and I think the Iranian people have a great yearning for government that is representative of their concerns,” Fleischer said.

Fleischer also said Iran's claim that its nuclear program is designed to produce fuel for civilian nuclear reactors is a "cover story."

“Our strong position is that Iran is preparing instead to produce fissile materials for nuclear weapons,” Fleischer said. “That is what we see.”

An Iranian opposition group says the Iranian government is building two secret nuclear sites that might already be partially operational, producing enriched uranium that could be used in nuclear weapons.

Alireza Jafarzadeh, a spokesman for the National Council of Resistance of Iran, claims the Iranian government has "planned it" so that it can "be able to get the bomb by 2005."

The NCRI provided detailed information about the previously undisclosed sites -- Lashkar-Abad and Ramandeh, about 25 miles west of Tehran, but offered no direct evidence.

Iranian officials have denied harboring al-Qaeda operatives and said the country would vigorously defend itself against any U.S. threat, which in the eyes of the Bush administration, could set the stage for another war and further increase anti-American sentiment and put the U.S. in more danger of terrorist attacks, according to several Democratic lawmakers.

However, the real cover story is the one the Bush administration is spinning in order to win public support for what was already planned for Iran months ago, well before “Operation Iraqi Freedom.”

Before the United States military decimated Iraq, the neocons at the highly influential think tanks the American Enterprise Institute and the Project for the New American Century were already advising Bush administration officials, like Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, on how to overthrow the ruling parties in Iran, Libya and Syria after the war in Iraq was over.

Many of AEI and PNAC’s former members are now working in Bush’s administration. PNAC’s influence on Bush’s foreign and defense policies are so powerful that many of its recommendations on how to transform the military have already been adopted by the Pentagon.

But unlike Iraq, using military force in these other countries to replace the rulers wasn’t being considered as a way to oust the regimes, according to former Bush administration officials. Whether or not that becomes the course of action now is debatable, but even if military force isn’t used for regime change in Iran or other Middle Eastern countries the reasons for engaging in political warfare in that region is just as troubling as the reasons the U.S. launched a military attack on Iraq: intelligence information that suggests these countries pose an immediate threat to the U.S. is thin and possibly non-existent.

Still, the Bush administration has its agenda and it seems that Iran is indeed its next target. Instead of military action, the Bush administration will encourage a “popular uprising” in its effort to overthrow Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, and lend financial support to Iranians to get the job done.

To get Iranians to rise up against its government, U.S. Senator Sam Brownback, R-Kansas, has drafted an amendment to the Senate Foreign Authorization bill titled The Iran Democracy Act that calls for using the new Radio Farda to host programming from Iranian Americans who communicate with their families inside Iran about the desire for an internationally monitored referendum vote on what form of government Iran should have.

The amendment would also provide grants for private radio and TV stations in the U.S. that broadcast pro-democracy news and information into Iran. The amendment also provides funds to translate books, videos and other materials into Persian - specifically, information on building and organizing non-violent social movements.

Moreover, Brownback introduced legislation that would establish an Iran Democracy Foundation to provide grants to the Iranian-American community and for the radio and TV Stations in the U.S. that broadcast

This is the type of political warfare the Bush administration believes will force Iran’s government from power. But the Bush administration will have a hard time convincing Iranians that it can follow through on its promise. For one, anarchy is running amok in postwar Iraq and many critics have accused the Bush administration of abandoning its goal of democratizing the country. Furthermore, Iranians remember how the first President Bush encouraged the Kurds to rise up against Saddam Hussein during the 1990s only to be abandoned by that administration and ultimately slaughtered by Hussein.

But that doesn’t stop the think tanks from believing that it can’t be done.

“For Iran, the approach might be compared to the approach the United States and other democratic states took to Poland in the 1980s,” said David Frum, President Bush’s former speechwriter, who is credited with coining the phrase “axis of evil,” in an April 5 presentation at AEI. “In Poland, as in Iran, an economically incompetent authoritarian regime ruled over an increasingly angry population. In Poland, as in Iran, a mass opposition movement rose up against the regime: Solidarity in Poland, the student democratic movement in Iran. Back in the 1980s, the United States and its allies never confronted the Polish communists directly. Instead, they imposed stringent economic sanctions on the regime--and contributed hundreds of millions of dollars to pay for its covert newspapers and radio stations and to support the families of jailed or exiled activists…as the regimes

Richard Perle, who sits on the Defense Policy Board, a group that advises Rumsfeld, is more blunt in the reasons for going after Iran and he is not shy about suggesting that military force be used if necessary.

“The idea that our victory over Saddam will drive other dictators to develop chemical and biological weapons misses the key point: They are already doing so. That's why we may someday need to preempt rather than wait until we are attacked,” Perle said in a letter to AEI members earlier this month.

Michael Ledeen, another influential AEI scholar, claims that the U.S. ought to “bag” Iran’s regime because of its anti-American views.

‘The Iranian people have shown themselves to be the most pro-American population in the Muslim world, but the Iranian regime is arguably the most anti-American on Earth. Let's support the people, and help them bag the regime.”

Defense Dept Secretly Tapped Halliburton Unit To Operate Iraq's Oil Industry In Nov
By Jason Leopold
May 14, 2003
Months before the United States military showered Iraq with bombs and missiles, the Department of Defense was secretly working with Vice President Dick Cheney’s old company, Halliburton Corp., on a deal that would give the world’s second largest oil services company total control over Iraq’s oil fields, according to interviews with Halliburton’s most senior executives.

Moreover, classified Halliburton documents obtained over the past month prove that the war in Iraq was as much about controlling the world’s second largest oil reserves as it did about overthrowing the regime of Iraq’s President Saddam Hussein.

The deal between the Department of Defense and Halliburton unit Kellogg, Brown & Root to operate Iraq’s oil industry, which was hatched as early as October 2002, according to the documents, and could ultimately be worth $7 billion, couldn’t have come at a better time for Halliburton.

Back in October of last year, Halliburton was saddled with a multibillion-dollar asbestos liability and the company was also suffering through a slowdown in domestic oil production. Halliburton’s stock price responded swiftly, plummeting to $12.62 in October 2002, from a high of $22 the year beforee, and rumors began to swirl that the company would be forced to file for bankruptcy.

But news of a pending war in Iraq meant that Halliburton’s financial troubles would, like Saddam Hussein’s regime, be history. Classified documents from November 2002 show that the Department of Defense recommended that The Army Corps of Engineers award a contract to Brown & Root to extinguish Iraqi oil well fires in addition to “assessing the condition of oil-related infrastructure; cleaning up oil spills or other environmental damage at oil facilities; engineering design and repair or reconstruction of damaged infrastructure; assisting in making facilities operational; distribution of petroleum products; and assisting the Iraqis in resuming Iraqi oil company operations.”

“The fact that the Department was planning for the possibility that it would need to repair and provide for continuity of operations of the Iraqi oil infrastructure was classified until March 2003,” the agency said on its web site. “This prevented earlier acknowledgement or announcement of potential requirements to the business community.”

The Army Corps of Engineers has declassified portions of some documents related to its deal with Brown & Root.

Since October, when Halliburton was awarded the contract to repair Iraq’s oil industry, the company’s stock has nearly doubled. On Tuesday, the stock closed at $23.90.

Publicly, when the Army Corps of Engineers was criticized by Washington lawmakers earlier this year for awarding the no-bid contract to Brown & Root because of the company’s strong ties to Cheney, the agency said Brown & Root would do nothing more than extinguish oil well fires. Brown & Root was chosen, according to the Army Corps of Engineers, because Brown & Root could be “deployed” on short notice.

However, according to interviews with Halliburton executives, company employees were working out of a hotel room in Kuwait City as far back as November assessing the Iraq’s oil infrastructure and mapping out plans for operating Iraq’s oil industry.

A report in the magazine Business 2.0 from April 2003 makes this point clear.

“From behind the obsidian mirrors of his wraparound sunglasses, Ray Rodon surveys the vast desert landscape of southern Iraq's Rumailah oilfield. A project manager with Halliburton's engineering and construction division, Kellogg Brown & Root, Rodon has spent months preparing for the daunting task of repairing Iraq's oil industry. Working first at headquarters in Houston and then out of a hotel room in Kuwait City, he has studied the intricacies of the Iraqi national oil company, even reviewing the firm's organizational charts so that Halliburton and the Army can ascertain which Iraqis are reliable technocrats and which are Saddam loyalists,” the story says.

Halliburton, in a March news release, said it first began working on a plan to repair Iraq’s oil infrastructure at the request of the Defense Department.

“The DoD, through its US Army Logistics Civil Augmentation Program (LOGCAP) III contract with KBR, tapped the company in November 2002 to develop the contingency plan. Implementation of the plan is being executed through a separate contract KBR now holds with the US Army Corps of Engineers,” the news release says.

A half-dozen Halliburton employees said that they don’t believe Cheney played any role in the company securing the lucrative contract from the government, but they noted that the Army Corps of Engineers purposely downplayed the company’s role in repairing Iraq’s infrastructure because of Halliburton’s ties to Cheney and the criticism that would likely come from Congressional Democrats who claim the government is playing favorites.

“Halliburton has been working with the United States government since the 1940s,” said one executive who supplied documents and requested anonymity. “But because Vice President Dick Cheney used to run the firm everyone automatically assumes that he had something to do with the government contracts we now get.”

Since 9-11, Halliburton’s Brown & Root division is the only company that has profited from the so-called war on terror.

Based on its performance providing U.S. troops in the Balkans with housing, food, water, mail, laundry, and heavy equipment (a job for which Halliburton has been paid $3 billion so far), the company won an unprecedented ten-year deal in December 2001 to supply similar logistical support to U.S. military operations around the world.

“The Pentagon's Logistics Civil Augmentation Program pays Halliburton through what's called a cost-plus arrangement, meaning that KBR is guaranteed to recover its expenses, plus receive a set profit, provided the contract terms are met. To date, KBR has received $830 million from the program. The company is also helping to run Incirlik Air Base and other U.S. military facilities in Turkey (where an initial contract, set to expire in September, was worth $118 million) and received $65 million to support bases in Afghanistan and Uzbekistan. What's more, it earned $33 million building cells for suspected al Qaeda members at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Overall, Halliburton's backlog of government revenue expanded 40% in the last three months of 2002 alone,” Business 2.0 reported. .

What is most troubling about the sweet deals Brown & Root has been awarded and what has lawmakers like Congressman Henry Waxman, D-California, up in arms is how the company ripped off the government to the tune of $2 million on several occasions while Cheney was chief executive of Halliburton and the company’s long history of supporting terrorist regimes—including Iraq, Iran and Libya—despite U.S. sanctions on such countries.

Last year, KBR agreed to pay the U.S. government $2 million to settle allegations it defrauded the military while Cheney was chief executive of parent company Halliburton. KBR was accused of inflating contract prices for maintenance and repairs at Fort Ord, a now-shuttered military installation near Monterey, Calif. The lawsuit, filed in Sacramento, alleged KBR submitted false claims and made false statements in connection with 224 delivery orders between April 1994 and September 1998.
KBR and Halliburton has also paid out settlements to end investigations and lawsuits on half-a-dozen other occasions.

In 1978, a grand jury indicted KBR on charges that it colluded with a competitor on marine construction work. KBR paid a $1 million fine to settle the charges. In 1995, the U.S. fined Halliburton $3.8 million for violating a ban on exports to Libya. Four years later, a Halliburton subsidiary opens an office in Iran, despite a U.S. ban on
doing business in that country. In 2001, Halliburton shareholders lash out at company executives for its pipeline project in Burma, citing that country's human-rights abuses.
Also in 2001, watchdog groups blast Cheney for placing 44 Halliburton subsidiaries in foreign tax havens.

Halliburton's dealings in six countries - Azerbaijan, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Libya and Nigeria - show that the company's willingness to do business where human rights are not respected is a pattern that goes beyond its involvement in Burma..

So how does the company continue to win such lucrative contracts with the government, as in the case of Iraq, in spite of its shady record?

“KBR was selected for the award based on the fact that KBR is the only contractor that could commence implementing the complex contingency plan on extremely short notice,” Halliburton said in a March news release.

Despite Waxman’s criticism of the government awarding the bulk of the work in Iraq to Halliburton unit Brown & Root, it appears that the company’s role in the country is getting bigger by the second. And plans to open up the bidding to other companies appear to be a dead issue.

On Monday, the Army Corps of Engineers said it awarded Brown & Root another $24 million contract, this time to distribute gasoline and cooking fuel in Iraq.

The Army Corps of Engineers said the delivery order was awarded to Halliburton subsidiary on May 4 as part of the $7 billion umbrella contract awarded to the company in March for fire fighting services in Iraq.

The Army Corps last week said the Halliburton subsidiary had received about $75 million in orders so far, and the total amount would likely reach about $600 million, far less than the worst-case figure of $7 billion estimated before the Iraq war.

Corps spokeswoman Carol Sanders said the new order fell under the broad terms of the original contract and rejected criticism from Waxman, who said Halliburton now appeared to have a more lucrative and direct role in rebuilding Iraq's oil industry.

She said Iraqi people urgently needed cooking oil and gasoline as they began rebuilding their country. Given the need to boil water to prevent disease, it was not feasible to competitively bid the work.

“We made the contract broad enough so we could handle issues just like this,” she said.

Specifically, Sanders said KBR was bringing supplies of liquefied national gas and gasoline to regional storage centers, where Iraqis were managing its distribution.

KBR spokeswoman Wendy Hall said the latest contract was part of the broader contract, which aimed to maintain “the continuity of operations of the Iraqi oil infrastructure.”

Cheney’s Old Company Continues To Break Law’s While Profiting From Terror
Halliburton Corp., the second largest oil services company in world, is the poster child for corporate greed and terror. KBR has been scrutinized by human rights organizations for doing business in countries like Nigeria, where human rights are routinely violated.

A Halliburton spokeswoman said the tax scheme did not involve any of the company's senior officials, but several employees of the company involved in the scam were fired after the discovery.

Halliburton officials said KBR may have to pay as much as $5 million in additional taxes to Nigeria, according to the SEC filing.

This week, Congressman Henry Waxman, D-California, disclosed in a letter sent to him by the Army Corps of Engineers, that KBR has gone from fixing Iraq's oil wells to running them, turning the no-bid contract to extinguish oil well fires into a multimillion deal to supply Iraq's emergency energy needs.

Meanwhile, while KBR is skirting U.S. laws and profiting off rebuilding Iraq's oil fields, the SEC is still investigating the company for alleged accounting fraud. more...

Jason Leopold – Shafted By The New York Times
Wednesday, 9 October 2002, 12:09 pm Article: Jason Leopold

‘Scoop Editor's Note: This is a story about a story. A great story. A scoop that ought to see a member of George Bush's cabinet at least indicted, if not behind bars. But that is not what has happened. This is a scoop, that for reasons unknown to its author, appears to be about to cost a brilliant investigative journalist his career. This is his story. ’

Cheney’s Old Company Continues To Break Law’s While Profiting From Terror
By Jason Leopold
May 9, 2003
Halliburton Corp., the second largest oil services company in world, is the poster child for corporate greed and terror. And it seems that nothing will stop Vice President Dick Cheney’s old company from repeatedly breaking the law to save and earn mountains of cash.

In a Securities and Exchange Commission filing this week, Kellogg Brown & Root, the Halliburton unit that won a controversial no-bid contract to extinguish Iraqi oil well fires, disclosed that it paid $2.4 million in bribes to a Nigerian tax official to obtain favorable tax treatment in the country where it’s building a natural gas plant and an offshore oil and gas facility.

The bribes were paid between 2001 and 2002 to “an entity owned by a Nigerian national who held himself out as a tax consultant, when in fact he was an employee of a local tax authority,” the company said in the SEC filing, which was discovered during an internal audit.

That was also the time frame which some of Nigeria’s worst human rights abuses took place. KBR has been scrutinized by human rights organizations for doing business in countries like Nigeria, where human rights are routinely violated.

In 1997, while Cheney was chief executive of Halliburton, KBR was alleged by Environmental Rights Action to have collaborated with Nigeria’s Mobile Police unit who shot and killed a protestor, playing a similar role to Shell and Chevron in the mobilization of this 'kill and go" unit to protect company property, Wayne Madsen reported in The Progressive in 2000.

When it comes to corruption, Nigeria routinely scores near the bottom on surveys of world business leaders.

In last year's Corruption Perceptions Index, published by Berlin-based Transparency International, Nigeria ranked 101 out of 102, beating out only Bangladesh.

In March, Halliburton launched an investigation it has started a probe involving U.S. and Nigerian government officials over theft of a radioactive device used at its Nigerian operations that officials feared could be used to make a “dirty bomb,” an explosive device designed to scatter radioactivity in a densely populated area. The theft occurred between the Nigerian towns of Wari and Port Harcourt in the Niger Delta, in the heart of the West African country's oil producing region.

According to one expert, if the device's radioactive material were combined with a pound of TNT and exploded, an area covering 60 city blocks would be contaminated with a radiation dose in excess of safety guidelines of the Environmental Protection Agency.

The tax scheme is just the latest development in a long list of laws the company broke over the past decade—including skirting U.S. sanctions imposed on countries such as Syria, Libya, Iran and Iraq—in an effort to boost its stock price and enrich the company’s shareholders.

A Halliburton spokeswoman said the tax scheme did not involve any of the company’s senior officials, but several employees of the company involved in the scam were fired after the discovery.

Halliburton officials said KBR may have to pay as much as $5 million in additional taxes to Nigeria, according to the SEC filing.

This week, Congressman Henry Waxman, D-California, disclosed in a letter sent to him by the Army Corps of Engineers, that KBR has gone from fixing Iraq's oil wells to running them, turning the no-bid contract to extinguish oil well fires into a multimillion deal to supply Iraq's emergency energy needs.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers on Wednesday disclosed the wider role for KBR in response to an inquiry from Waxman, who accused the company of conducting business in countries that sponsored terrorism.

News of KBR’s expanded role in Iraq prompted criticism from some congressional critics who were under the impression that the company's job would be limited to putting out fires and repairing damage to Iraq's rich petroleum fields.

The Army Corps of Engineers said KBR actually had been authorized under the original contract to operate and distribute oil produced in Iraq, but the Corps of Engineers played down that aspect of the deal in its initial communications with Congress and the media.

For pumping oil from Iraq's oil fields and importing gasoline and propane from Turkey and other countries, Halliburton will receive $24 million, raising to $76.8 million the amount it will have received since being awarded the contract in March, said Scott Saunders, a spokesman for the Corps of Engineers.

Saunders said the Halliburton subsidiary now is pumping 125,000 barrels of oil a day, far short of the demand that is expected to reach 400,000 barrels.

Meanwhile, while KBR is skirting U.S. laws and profiting off rebuilding Iraq’s oil fields, the SEC is still investigating the company for alleged accounting fraud. The SEC is examining how Halliburton booked and disclosed cost overruns on construction contracts beginning in 1998, when Cheney was chief executive officer. The SEC, according to a lawyer familiar with the matter, has not contacted Cheney. Cheney's office confirmed he hasn't been questioned, Reuters reported.

The company said Thursday it turned over about 300,000 documents to the SEC, a process that "is essentially complete," according to a regulatory filing. The company said it is continuing to make people available to testify under subpoenas.

THE US & IRAQ CONFRONTATION - a background view

Jason Leopold explores the political motives of the US regarding Iraq. Following the background item, articles are listed by ascending date.

Company Chosen By Pentagon To Extinguish Iraqi Oil Well Fires Has History Of Supporting Terrorist Regimes April 16, 2003
Rummy's Failed War Plan And The Casualties That May Result March 31, 2003
The Enterprising Hawk March 28, 2003
The Reality of War Sinks In With Casualties of U.S. and British Soldiers March 26, 2003
Even As Bombs Drop, Hypocrisy Prevails March 19, 2003
Pres Bush Reminds World of Iraq's Crimes Against Humanity March 17, 2003
Rumsfeld, Bush Sr. Refused To Back '89 UN Resolution on Iraq Human Rights Abuses March 13, 2003
Is the US headed for World War III? March 11, 2003
With War Looming, Iraqi Oil Imports May Be Strained March 10, 2003
Bush Sr. – 1996 : War With Iraq `Would Turn Entire Arab World Against Us’ March 6, 2003
For Six Years, Right-Wing Think Tank Has Been Hell-Bent For War February 27, 2003
Powell’s warning to Bush of bloody war with Iraq without UN support February 25, 2003
New Republic Editor-In-Chief tells Bush to bomb Iraq February 21, 2003

Company Chosen By Pentagon To Extinguish Iraqi Oil Well Fires
Has History Of Supporting Terrorist Regimes
By Jason Leopold
April 16, 2003
Kellogg Brown & Root, the company chosen last month by the Pentagon to extinguish oil well fires in Iraq, has a long history of supporting the same terrorist regimes vilified by the Bush administration and on at least one occasion defrauded the United States government to the tune of $2 million, according to public documents.

Halliburton, headed by Dick Cheney before he became vice president, and it’s KBR subsidiary did business with some of the world's most notorious governments and dictators - in countries such as Azerbaijan, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Libya and Nigeria. The company has routinely skirted U.S. sanctions placed on these countries and lobbied the U.S. government to lift sanctions so it could set up new partnerships and create new business opportunities in these countries.

Still, the Pentagon awarded the Iraqi oil well contract to KBR without competitive bidding; a move that some Democratic lawmakers in Congress said was based on favoritism because of Cheney’s ties to the company.

Charges of cronyism led the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers on Monday to open the job of putting out Iraqi oil well fires to other firms that will now bid for the multibillion -dollar and KBR would have to compete with other companies for the right to finish the job. The Army Corps of Engineers said it would seek new bidders to rebuild Iraq's oil infrastructure, considered the key to reviving that country's economy.

KBR and Halliburton have broken U.S. laws on numerous occasions while Cheney was chief executive and as far back as 1978. Moreover, the company inflated the price of some of its military contracts and defrauded the government.

Last year, KBR agreed to pay the U.S. government $2 million to settle allegations it defrauded the military while Cheney was chief executive of parent company Halliburton. KBR was accused of inflating contract prices for maintenance and repairs at Fort Ord, a now-shuttered military installation near Monterey, Calif. The lawsuit, filed in Sacramento, alleged KBR submitted false claims and made false statements in connection with 224 delivery orders between April 1994 and September 1998.

KBR and Halliburton has also paid out settlements to end investigations and lawsuits on half-a-dozen other occasions.

In 1978, a grand jury indicted KBR on charges that it colluded with a competitor on marine construction work. KBR paid a $1 million fine to settle the charges. In 1995, the U.S. fined Halliburton $3.8 million for violating a ban on exports to Libya. Four years later, a Halliburton subsidiary opens an office in Iran, despite a U.S. ban on
doing business in that country. In 2001, Halliburton shareholders lash out at company executives for its pipeline project in Burma, citing that country's human-rights abuses.
Also in 2001, watchdog groups blast Cheney for placing 44 Halliburton subsidiaries in foreign tax havens.

Halliburton's dealings in six countries - Azerbaijan, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Libya and Nigeria - show that the company's willingness to do business where human rights are not respected is a pattern that goes beyond its involvement in Burma. A May 2001 report in the Multinational Monitor identified the following countries in which Halliburton and its KBR unit did business with, despite U.S. sanctions and charges of human rights abuses.

Azerbaijan. Dick Cheney lobbied to remove Congressional sanctions against aid to Azerbaijan, sanctions imposed because of concerns about ethnic cleansing. Cheney said the sanctions were the result only of groundless campaigning by the Armenian-American lobby. In 1997, Halliburton subsidiary Brown & Root bid on a major Caspian project from the Azerbaijan International Operating Company.

Indonesia. Halliburton had extensive investments and contracts in Suharto's Indonesia. The post-Suharto government during a purging of corruptly awarded contracts canceled one of its contracts. Indonesia Corruption Watch named Kellogg Brown & Root (Halliburton's engineering division) among 59 companies using collusive, corruptive and nepotistic practices in deals involving former President Suharto's family.

Iran. Dick Cheney has lobbied against the Iran-Libya Sanctions Act. Even with the Act in place, Halliburton has continued to operate in Iran. It settled with the Department of Commerce in 1997, before Cheney became CEO, over allegations relating to Iran for $15,000, without admitting any wrongdoing.

Iraq. Dick Cheney cites multilateral sanctions against Iraq as an example of sanctions he supports. Yet since the war, Halliburton-related companies helped to reconstruct Iraq's oil industry. In July 2000, the International Herald Tribune reported, "Dresser-Rand and Ingersoll-Dresser Pump Co., joint ventures that Halliburton has sold within the past year, have done work in Iraq on contracts for the reconstruction of Iraq's oil industry, under the United Nations' Oil for Food Program." A Halliburton spokesman acknowledged to the Tribune that the Dresser subsidiaries did sell oil-pumping equipment to Iraq via European agents.

Libya. Before Cheney's arrival, Halliburton was deeply involved in Libya, earning $44.7 million there in 1993. After sanctions on Libya were imposed, earnings dropped to $12.4 million in 1994. Halliburton continued doing business in Libya throughout Cheney's tenure. One Member of Congress accused the company "of undermining American foreign policy to the full extent allowed by law."

Nigeria. Local villagers have accused Halliburton of complicity in the shooting of a protester by Nigeria's Mobile Police Unit, playing a similar role to Shell and Chevron in the mobilization of this 'kill and go" unit to protect company property. Dick Cheney has been a strong advocate for preventing or eliminating federal laws that place limits on Halliburton's ability to do business in these countries.
Before it awards the contract this time around, the Pentagon ought to consider that KBR, which the Army Corps of Engineers says is most qualified to extinguish Iraq’s oil well fires, supports the same terrorist regimes we’re at war with.

top

THE US & IRAQ CONFRONTATION
compiled by Jason Leopold
February 20, 2003

“...the advice Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Weekly Standard Editor William Kristol first offered the attention of the Clinton Administration five years ago has now become the blueprint for how the Bush Administration is dealing with Iraq”

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz undertook a full-fledged lobbying campaign in 1998 to get former President Bill Clinton to start a war with Iraq and topple Saddam Hussein's regime claiming that the country posed a threat to the United States, according to documents obtained from a former Clinton aide, writes Jason Leopold.

This new information begs the question: what is really driving the Bush Administration's desire to start a war with Iraq if two of Bush's future top defense officials were already planting the seeds for an attack five years ago?

In 1998, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz were working in the private sector. Both were involved with the right-wing think tank Project for a New American Century, which was established in 1997 by William Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard, to promote global leadership and dictate American foreign policy.

While Clinton was dealing with the worldwide threat from Al-Qaeda and Osama Bin Laden, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz wrote to Clinton urging him to use military force against Iraq and remove Hussein from power because the country posed a threat to the United States due to its alleged ability to develop weapons of mass destruction. The Jan 26, 1998 letter sent to Clinton from the Project for the New American Century said a war with Iraq should be initiated even if the United States could not muster support from its allies in the United Nations. Kristol also signed the letter.

"We are writing you because we are convinced that current American policy toward Iraq is not succeeding, and that we may soon face a threat in the Middle East more serious than any we have known since the end of the Cold War," says the letter. "In your upcoming State of the Union Address, you have an opportunity to chart a clear and determined course for meeting this threat. We urge you to seize that opportunity, and to enunciate a new strategy that would secure the interests of the U.S. and our friends and allies around the world. That strategy should aim, above all, at the removal of Saddam Hussein's regime from power."

"We urge you to turn your Administration's attention to implementing a strategy for removing Saddam's regime from power. This will require a full complement of diplomatic, political and military efforts. Although we are fully aware of the dangers and difficulties in implementing this policy, we believe the dangers of failing to do so are far greater. We believe the U.S. has the authority under existing UN resolutions to take the necessary steps, including military steps, to protect our vital interests in the Gulf. In any case, American policy cannot continue to be crippled by a misguided insistence on unanimity in the UN Security Council," says the letter.

The full contents of the Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz letter can be viewed at http://www.newamericancentury.org/iraqclintonletter.htm

Clinton rebuffed the advice from the future Bush Administration officials saying he was focusing his attention on dismantling Al-Qaeda cells, according to a copy of the response Clinton sent to Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Kristol.

Unsatisfied with Clinton's response, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Kristol and others from the Project for the New American Century wrote another letter on May 29, 1998 to former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Senate Republican Majority Leader Trent Lott saying that the United States should "establish and maintain a strong U.S. military presence in the region, and be prepared to use that force to protect our vital interests in the Gulf - and, if necessary, to help remove Saddam from power."

"We should take whatever steps are necessary to challenge Saddam Hussein's claim to be Iraq's legitimate ruler, including indicting him as a war criminal," says the letter to Gingrich and Lott. "U.S. policy should have as its explicit goal removing Saddam Hussein's regime from power and establishing a peaceful and democratic Iraq in its place. We recognize that this goal will not be achieved easily. But the alternative is to leave the initiative to Saddam, who will continue to strengthen his position at home and in the region. Only the U.S. can lead the way in demonstrating that his rule is not legitimate and that time is not on the side of his regime."

The letter to Gingrich and Lott can be viewed at
http://www.newamericancentury.org/iraqletter1998.htm

The White House would not comment on the letters or whether Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz possessed any intelligence information that suggested Iraq posed an imminent threat to the United States at the time. The letters offered no hard evidence that Iraq was in possession of weapons of mass destruction.

The Clinton aide said the former President believed that the policy of "containing Saddam Hussein in a box" was successful and that the Iraqi regime did not pose any threat to U.S. interests at the time.

President Clinton "never considered war with Iraq an option," the former aide said. "We were encouraged by the UN weapons inspectors and believed they had a good handle on the situation."

Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Kristol, however, disagreed; saying the only way to deal with Hussein was by initiating a full-scale war.

"The policy of "containment" of Saddam Hussein has been steadily eroding over the past several months," Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Kristol wrote in their letter to Clinton. "As recent events have demonstrated, we can no longer depend on our partners in the Gulf War coalition to continue to uphold the sanctions or to punish Saddam when he blocks or evades UN inspections. It hardly needs to be added that if Saddam does acquire the capability to deliver weapons of mass destruction, as he is almost certain to do if we continue along the present course, the safety of American troops in the region, of our friends and allies like Israel and the moderate Arab states, and a significant portion of the world's supply of oil will all be put at hazard. The only acceptable strategy is one that eliminates the possibility that Iraq will be able to use or threaten to use weapons of mass destruction. In the near term, this means a willingness to undertake military action as diplomac

Those alleged threats posed by Iraq and the advice Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Weekly Standard Editor William Kristol first offered the attention of the Clinton Administration five years ago have now become the blueprint for how the Bush Administration is dealing with Iraq.

The existence of the Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz "war" letters is just another reason to question the Bush Administration's desire to go to war with Iraq now instead of dealing with other pressing issues such as Al-Qaeda. Because the letters were written in 1998 it proves that this war was planned well before 9-11 and casts further doubt on the claims that Saddam Hussein was involved in the 9-11 terrorist attacks.

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