FEBRUARY 5, 2004 UPDATE

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EPIPHANY FROM THE BREAST

                Janet Jackson exposes one breast on national television during half time at the Super Bowl on Sunday.  Within 24 hours, the Federal Communications Commission announces it will conduct an investigation of the “classless, crass and deplorable stunt." – Drudge Report

                Someone, most probably inside Bush’s White House, deliberately “outted” Valerie Plame as a CIA operative in July 2003.  The disclosure is a federal crime, a reprehensible act of political retaliation and potentially life threatening not only to Plame but the people she may have used as sources. – TPJ, “Wild Justice – Fair Game,” Sept. Wk. 5   A prosecutor was not even named for over six months.

                Priorities of Bush’s neoconservative administration?  Perhaps the common theme between the two events is Republicans simply want everything covered up? 

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                               TRANSATLANTIC BOOMERANG

                Bush and Blair have announced “independent commissions” to investigate the “intelligence” failures that led to false claims that Saddam possessed WMD constituting an “imminent threat.”  Bush and Blair’s sudden reversal of course on forming the commissions has been met with substantial skepticism.  It has been interpreted as:

British and American intelligence services look set to share the blame for the spectacular failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

President George Bush is to order a full investigation of US intelligence failures in Iraq, a senior White House official said last night, while politicians on both sides of the Atlantic are preparing to argue that MI6 and the CIA supplied a false picture of Saddam Hussein's alleged weapons stockpile. – Independent (England)

George Tenet, Bush’s CIA Director, will be delivering a “high-impact speech” today “defending his agency's work on analyzing Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs!” – Drudge Report  

                In England, a career intelligence officer has delivered a bombshell.  Dr. Brian Jones worked within the Scientific and Technical Directorate of Defense Intelligence Staff (“DIS”).  His group was responsible for the analysis of intelligence on Saddam’s WMD.  Dr. Jones retired from active service in January 2003

                Dr. Jones has now written a public account of the process by which the obviously false claims of Saddam’s WMD’s came into being.  His major points are:

In my view the expert intelligence analysts of the DIS were overruled in the preparation of the dossier in September 2002 resulting in a presentation that was misleading about Iraq's capabilities.  . . .

There was no indication that the Iraqi military had practiced the use of CW (chemical weapons) or BW (biological) weapons for more than a decade. But it was known that Iraq had previously possessed CW and BW capabilities and used chemical weapons. Further, Saddam had failed to satisfy the UN that the capability had been eliminated.

On balance the DIS experts felt it should be recorded that a CW or BW capability at some level was a probability, but argued against its statement in stronger terms. Despite pointing this out in comments on several drafts, the stronger statements did eventually appear in the executive summary, the part of the dossier "owned" by the chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee.  . . .  – Independent (England) (All quotes that follow are from this source until otherwise noted).

                Jones is essentially saying that the career intelligence officers doubted Saddam had chemical or biological weapons, but it was a “probability.”  The “probability” was not even based on current intelligence information.  Jones continues:

The problem was that the best available current evidence that Saddam actually had chemical and biological weapons (CW and BW) was the inference that this must be so from the claim of an apparently unproven original source that such weapons could be "deployed" within 45 minutes. Although the information was relayed through a reliable second source, there was no indication the original or primary source had established a track record of reliability. Furthermore, the information reported by the source was vague in all aspects except, possibly, for the range of times quoted. 

There was no indication that the Iraqi military had practiced the use of CW or BW weapons for more than a decade. But it was known that Iraq had previously possessed CW and BW capabilities and used chemical weapons. Further, Saddam had failed to satisfy the UN that the capability had been eliminated.

                Who was the ultimate source for the WMD claim that Saddam could deliver WMDs within 45 minutes?  The career intelligence officers never knew:

[W]e were told there was other intelligence that we, the experts, could not see, and that it removed the reservations we were expressing. It was so sensitive it could not be shown to us. It was held within a tight virtual "compartment", available only to a few selected people.

                Who were the “select few” to see the intelligence that helped led us to war?

[T]wo DIS representatives on the dossier-drafting group were told at the last drafting meeting on 17 September that the compartmented intelligence would be shown by the SIS (MI6) to only the two most senior members of the DIS, the Chief of Defense Intelligence (CDI) and his deputy (DCDI).  . . . 

It transpired from evidence to the Hutton inquiry that the clinching intelligence was never seen by the DCDI. 

                Perhaps the most fascinating part of this incredible story is that even after being told that the report was final as to its content, Jones and his colleagues continued to object to the emphatic conclusions reached in the report.  Jones concludes:

We could only suppose that the compartmented intelligence seen by the CDI was clear and unambiguous for him to disregard, without discussion, the recorded views of two senior analysts who, although only of middle rank were, like the late Dr Kelly, the UK's foremost experts in their field.

Jones has a very simple solution to answer all of the questions: disclose the intelligence report that he and his colleagues were not allowed to see.

                Why is all of this so terribly important?  Jones is essentially “[suggesting] that not a single defense intelligence expert backed Tony Blair's most contentious claims on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.” – Independent (England)  

                In Parliament Wednesday, Blair attempted to quell the growing unrest.  A public protest in the public gallery ended with the public being removed from Parliament during the debate.    Blair made three key concessions:

Mr Blair admitted, however, that concerns expressed about the claim that Iraqi WMD could be fired in 45 minutes by defence intelligence officers, including former MoD scientist Brian Jones, may have been "the grain of truth that led to the mountain of untruth" in BBC reports.  . . .

Concluding his half-hour opening defence of his government, Mr Blair finally uttered the key phrase when he told MPs: "It may well be we overestimated WMD capabilities in some quarters - but we should be proud of those intelligence services."

He added that if any parts of the intelligence "turn out to be wrong, I shall accept it as I should". – Guardian Unlimited (England)

                In the final analysis, Blair stuck to the Bush mantra, as “insisted: "Ridding the world of Saddam Hussein has made the world a safer place." – Guardian Unlimited (England)

                The revelations developing in England in conjunction with the emerging facts that a Secret Intelligence Unit was created in the US is leading to one compelling conclusion.  The “intelligence” that was used to justify war in Iraq was not processed in the normal manner.  In the US, Wurmser controlled a great deal of intelligence flow even though he came to his position already advocating Saddam’s overthrow.  In England, career experts were ignored and not provided access to the critical information on which Blair based his justifications.

                The pieces of the puzzle are emerging.  As Bush and Blair both work to blame the intelligence services, expect those officers who know the truth of what happened and who will not accept the blame will provide even more pieces of the puzzle.

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FEBRUARY 3, 2004 UPDATE

                               DOWN TO WURMSER

            Bush has reversed course and will appoint a bipartisan commission to investigate “intelligence failures” in assessing the “imminent” threat of the non-existent Iraqi WMD.  Bush reversed course in the face of mounting calls and the probability that Congress would act, providing Democrats with a critical campaign issue.  Bush’s strategy is simple:

By setting up the investigation himself, Bush will have greater control over its membership and mandate. Another senior White House official told The Associated Press that it would be patterned after the Warren Commission, named for its chairman, Chief Justice Earl Warren, which led a 10-month investigation that concluded in 1964 that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in killing President John F. Kennedy.

The president did not set a timetable for the investigation to report its findings, and he sidestepped a question about whether the country was owed an explanation before the elections in November. But the senior official who spoke to NBC News said Bush would call for the panel’s report next year because he did not want its work colored by politics. – MSNBC (emphasis added) 

Translation:  Bush will select his own “jury” and decide the “issues” his jury can hear.  For good measure, the “verdict” will be rendered after the November election.

            Democrats in Congress quickly framed their response:

But Democrats said they wanted the commission to report back much sooner and to be authorized by Congress. Five key Democrats wrote a letter to Bush asking that the commission be “truly independent” by being appointed by Congress instead of the White House, as was the commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

“A commission appointed and controlled by the White House will not have the independence or credibility necessary to investigate these issues,” said the letter by Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle of South Dakota, House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi of California, Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV of West Virginia, Rep. Henry Waxman of California and Sen. Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut.

They also asked that the commission address whether senior administration officials, including members of the Cabinet and senior White House officials, misled Congress and the public about the nature of the threat from Iraq.

“Even some of your own statements and those of Vice President Cheney need independent scrutiny,” they wrote.

The Democrat response is a solid policy and political position that should be clearly understandable to the public. 

            Robert Dreyfuss and Jason Vest have just published an article in Mother Jones entitled, “The Lie Factory.”   They reveal that:

Only weeks after 9/11, the Bush administration set up a secret Pentagon unit to create the case for invading Iraq. Here is the inside story of how they pushed disinformation and bogus intelligence and led the nation to war. – Mother Jones (subscription required for the entire article)

            These are Dreyfuss and Vest’s major points:

Kwiatkowski, 43, a now-retired Air Force officer who served in the Pentagon's Near East and South Asia (NESA) unit in the year before the invasion of Iraq, observed how the Pentagon's Iraq war-planning unit manufactured scare stories about Iraq's weapons and ties to terrorists. "It wasn't intelligence—it was propaganda," she says. "They'd take a little bit of intelligence, cherry-pick it, make it sound much more exciting, usually by taking it out of context, often by juxtaposition of two pieces of information that don't belong together." It was by turning such bogus intelligence into talking points for U.S. officials—including ominous lines in speeches by President Bush and Vice President Cheney, along with Secretary of State Colin Powell's testimony at the U.N. Security Council last February—that the administration pushed American public opinion into supporting an unnecessary war. 

[The authors] expose . . .  the workings of a secret Pentagon intelligence unit and of the Defense Department's war-planning task force, the Office of Special Plans. It's the story of a close-knit team of ideologues who spent a decade or more hammering out plans for an attack on Iraq and who used the events of September 11, 2001, to set it into motion. – Mother Jones (emphasis added).

             The authors publicly published this flow chart which is essential to understanding how Bush’s neoconservatives controlled the flow of intelligence information.

Carefully notice that the Secret Intelligence Unit (“SIU”) acted as the “filter” for intelligence from the CIA, DIA and NSA. 

                David Wurmser is listed at one of the two principals heading the SIU.  Who is David Wurmser?

                Wurmser’s biographical information can be found at this site: -- Biography  Wurmser pre-government service included the following:

Director of the Research in Strategy and Politics Program at the Institute for Advanced Strategic & Political Studies

Director of Institutional Grants at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and

Project Director at the United States Institute of Peace.

Research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute

            Wurmser’s wife, Meyrav Wurmser, was born in Israel.  She is the head of the Middle East studies at the Hudson Institute, a neoconservative think tank.

                In short, Wurmser is one of the legions of neoconservatives dominating Bush’s foreign policy initiatives.  Wurmser is critical to understanding why Bush attacked Iraq. Prior to being named as a principal in the Secret Intelligence Unit, Wurmser had an unequivocal record of advocating the overthrow of Iraq’s government.

            Meyrav Wurmser authored an article for the Institute for Advanced Strategic & Political Studes entitled, “Study Group on a New Israeli Strategy Toward 2000.”  The paper was written for the new Israeli prime minister at the time, Binyamin Netanyahu.  The paper was based on a “study group” including these infamous neoconservatives: Richard Perle, James Colbert, Charles Fairbanks, Jr., Douglas Feith, Robert Loewenberg, David Wurmser, and Meyrav Wurmser. 

            The thesis of the the Study Group is that Syria is the major threat to peace in Israel.  The Study Group advocated the overthrow of Saddam in order to “roll back” Syrian interests in the region:

Israel can shape its strategic environment, in cooperation with Turkey and Jordan, by weakening, containing, and even rolling back Syria. This effort can focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq — an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right — as a means of foiling Syria’s regional ambitions.

Jordan has challenged Syria's regional ambitions recently by suggesting the restoration of the Hashemites in Iraq. This has triggered a Jordanian-Syrian rivalry to which Asad has responded by stepping up efforts to destabilize the Hashemite Kingdom, including using infiltrations. Syria recently signaled that it and Iran might prefer a weak, but barely surviving Saddam, if only to undermine and humiliate Jordan in its efforts to remove Saddam.

But Syria enters this conflict with potential weaknesses: Damascus is too preoccupied with dealing with the threatened new regional equation to permit distractions of the Lebanese flank. And Damascus fears that the 'natural axis' with Israel on one side, central Iraq and Turkey on the other, and Jordan, in the center would squeeze and detach Syria from the Saudi Peninsula. For Syria, this could be the prelude to a redrawing of the map of the Middle East which would threaten Syria's territorial integrity.

Since Iraq's future could affect the strategic balance in the Middle East profoundly, it would be understandable that Israel has an interest in supporting the Hashemites in their efforts to redefine Iraq, including such measures as: visiting Jordan as the first official state visit, even before a visit to the United States, of the new Netanyahu government; supporting King Hussein by providing him with some tangible security measures to protect his regime against Syrian subversion; encouraging — through influence in the U.S. business community — investment in Jordan to structurally shift Jordan’s economy away from dependence on Iraq; and diverting Syria’s attention by using Lebanese opposition elements to destabilize Syrian control of Lebanon.

Most important, it is understandable that Israel has an interest supporting diplomatically, militarily and operationally Turkey’s and Jordan’s actions against Syria, such as securing tribal alliances with Arab tribes that cross into Syrian territory and are hostile to the Syrian ruling elite.

King Hussein may have ideas for Israel in bringing its Lebanon problem under control. The predominantly Shia population of southern Lebanon has been tied for centuries to the Shia leadership in Najf, Iraq rather than Iran. Were the Hashemites to control Iraq, they could use their influence over Najf to help Israel wean the south Lebanese Shia away from Hizballah, Iran, and Syria.  – Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies (emphasis added)

            In 1999, Wurmser wrote, “Tryanny’s Ally: America’s Failure To Defeat Saddam Hussein.” The Forward was written by none less than Richard Perle. (Click on the hyperlink to order the book from Amazon.com – the cheapest price found on the internet).

            Nicholas Lemann of the New Yorker distills Wurmser’s major points: -- New Yorker (emphasis added).

It provides a detailed description of a dramatically improved Middle East, from the hawk point of view, after regime change in Iraq. Although Wurmser certainly doesn't lack moral fervor, he is a strategic thinker who wants to realign the power relationships in the region. For Wurmser, the larger enemy is the ideology of Pan-Arabism, which he presents as the Middle East's version of the various forms of totalitarianism that swept across Europe in the twentieth century. The true choice in the region is between "the traditional Arab elite and revolutionary Arab nationalists." In the latter category are Saddam Hussein, the Assad family of Syria (who, like Saddam, subscribe to the Pan-Arabist ideology of Baathism), and the mullahs of Iran—even though those countries have, at times, been mortal enemies. Bringing down Saddam, Wurmser predicts, would have the happy effect of destabilizing both Syria and Iran. "A collapse in either Syria or Iraq would affect the other profoundly," he writes. "Ideologically, a failure of Ba'thism in one implicitly indicts the regime of the other as well." As for Iran: "Launching a policy and resolutely carrying it through until it razes Saddam's Ba'thism to the ground will send terrifying shock waves into Teheran." In Wurmser's scenario, a post-Saddam government in Iraq that includes meaningful participation by Iraq's Shiite majority will remove the Iranian mullahs' most powerful claim to legitimacy, which is that they represent the only regional power center for Shiites. (It's a sign of how rapidly Washington opinion has moved that, writing only four years ago, even Wurmser considered it inadvisable for the United States "to go to war solo, to liberate and occupy an Arab capital," and recommended the empowerment of the Iraqi National Congress to overthrow Saddam.)

One can easily derive from Wurmser's book a crisp series of post-Saddam moves across the chessboard of the Middle East. The regime in Iran would either fall or be eased out of power by an alliance of the radical students and the more moderate mullahs, with the United States doing what it could to encourage the process.

After regime change, the United States would persuade Iran to end its nuclear-weapons program and its support for terrorists elsewhere in the Middle East, especially Hezbollah. Syria, now surrounded by the pro-American powers of Turkey, the reconfigured Iraq, Jordan, and Israel, and no longer dependent on Saddam for oil, could be pressured to coöperate with efforts to clean out Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and Hezbollah. As Syria moved to a more pro-American stand, so would its client state, Lebanon. That would leave Hezbollah, which has its headquarters in Lebanon, without state support. The Palestinian Authority, with most of its regional allies stripped away, would have no choice but to renounce terrorism categorically. Saudi Arabia would have much less sway over the United States because it would no longer be America's only major source of oil and base of military operations in the region, and so it might finally be persuaded to stop funding Hamas and Al Qaeda through Islamic charities.

A few things should be said about this vision of the near-term future in the Middle East. It is breathtakingly ambitious and optimistic. It might plausibly be described as a spreading of democracy but, perhaps more important, it would also involve, as the "Clean Break" paper said, forcefully altering the regional balance of power. And it differs greatly from the vision of the future of the Middle East that will prevail among liberals, both here and abroad, after the war in Iraq. It treats Pan-Arab nationalism as illegitimate. It does not accept the widespread assumption that no regional good can follow the fall of Saddam unless peace talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority begin immediately. And it sees the fall of Saddam Hussein less as the end of a great diplomatic and military effort than as a step in an ongoing process.

                The point of all of this is relatively simple.  Wurmser headed the Secret Intelligence Unit that apparently controlled the flow of intelligence information throughout Bush’s administration according to Robert Dreyfuss and Jason Vest’s article in Mother Jones.  With the history of advocating the overthrow of Saddam prior to his appointment to lead the Secret Intelligence Unit, is there any reason to question why the intelligence information necessary to fabricate the Iraq war was “cherry picked?”  The flow of intelligence information was simply “rigged” to produce the result that the neoconservatives had already mandated was necessary.

                Is there any surprise that in early September 2003, Wurmser was moved to serve Vice President Cheney?   

                Any fair and impartial investigation may need only to look down to Wurmser.

Last Update: 03/23/2006