The CIA shouldered the blame for the US government's disinformation campaign on Iraq, writes Faiza Rady What do you do when you lie until you are blue in the face, convince the gullible folk that black is another shade of white -- but get caught in the end? No problem. Any seasoned liar knows that the easiest way out is to seek a scapegoat who will shoulder the blame. Besides, this is not like crucifying an innocent. If one digs hard enough for the dirt, someone will inevitably be found guilty. In this context, the Bush administration once again proved its political savvy this week. Charged with lying about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and its ties to Al-Qaeda, United States President George W Bush passed the buck to the CIA. On Friday, the bipartisan Senate Committee on Intelligence (SCI) duly whitewashed the Bush administration of manufacturing evidence to justify their war on Iraq, charging the CIA instead. The agency either "overstated" the evidence that Iraq had chemical and biological weapons and was refurbishing its nuclear programme, or made claims that were not supported by "underlying intelligence", said the SCI report. The administration's whitewash, however, was not comprehensive. The report absolved the agency of buying into the US government's tale of an alleged Iraq-Al- Qaeda connection, replete with stories of sinister terrorist plotting linking Iraqi agents and 9/11 masterminder Mohamed Atta in Prague, prior to the attacks on New York and Washington. On this count, it was surprising that the CIA had surprisingly dismissed the administration's fabrications and correctly assessed that "there were likely several instances of contacts between Iraq and Al-Qaeda throughout the 1990s, but these contacts did not add up to an established formal relationship." The SCI's categorical denial of a Saddam-Al-Qaeda relationship did not further perturb Vice President Richard Cheney, who continued to spin his post-9/11 tales -- regardless of evidence to the contrary in the verifiable world. In this vein, Cheney declared on Saturday that "in the early 1990s Saddam had sent a brigadier general in the Iraqi intelligence service to Sudan to train Al-Qaeda in -bomb making and document-forgery." Like his mentor Ronald Reagan, Cheney most likely believes that "facts are stupid". "Even more creatively than President Bush, Vice President Cheney defends the indefensible," comments political analyst Gary Leupp in Counterpunch. Hence it is irrelevant that Bin Laden and Saddam had irreconcilable political differences, and that the former denounced Saddam as an apostate, and had called for his overthrow. Facts irritate Cheney, not because they are true, but because they tend to be "disobedient", says Leupp. President Bush seemed equally unscathed by the slight indictment of his administration's disinformation campaign. Officials went about their business at the White House, while their boss pointed the finger at an intelligence community which had conveniently gone astray. "I want to know how to make the agencies better," said Bush at a campaign stop in Kutztown, Pennsylvania. If Cheney and Bush performed well, the US State Department did better. In defence of the administration's tale of Iraq's WMD, State Department spokesperson Richard Boucher explained that "intent" was in and of itself as incriminating as the crime. According to this logic, the war on Iraq would be justified on the basis of Saddam's perceived intentions to manufacture WMD. "The basic case was a correct one," said Boucher. "Iraq wanted weapons of mass destruction." However, over and above the US government's pre- and post-war fabrications, it is telling that the SCI report absolves the administration of pressuring the CIA to toe the line. Keeping in mind that the SCI is a bi-partisan committee -- which includes both Republicans and Democrats who voted for war -- it can hardly be described as a nonpartisan investigative body. On the other hand, a less partisan January 2004 report published by the US-based Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, WMD in Iraq: Evidence and Implications, concludes that the Bush administration "systematically misrepresented the threat from Iraq's WMD". The report also suggests that sometime in 2002 the government began to exert undue pressure on intelligence agencies to adapt their findings to the administration's war rationale. According to the report, a shift in orientation was preceded by Richard Cheney's frequent visits to CIA headquarters in 2002 and requests to access unprocessed intelligence material. Prior to October 2002, and before the heat was turned on full blast, the agency only referred to Iraq's "potential" for producing WMD. Their December 2001 report assessed that Iraq had a "knowledge base and infrastructure that could be used to produce a large amount of biological weapons at any time". The jump from "potential" to "actual" occurred in the CIA's October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), which, said WMD in Iraq, "was produced far more quickly than is normal for such documents, went far beyond the consensus intelligence assessments of the preceding five years, and had more serious dissents to its key findings than any other declassified NIE". According to the October 2002 document, Iraq had suddenly developed "an active bioweapon program that was larger than before 1991". Armed with the NIE's assessment, President Bush went on the offensive saying Iraq had a "massive stockpile of biological weapons that had never been accounted for, and [was] capable of killing millions". Similarly, and more importantly, Iraq's legendary WMD capabilities, which were dismissed as negligible in 1999 CIA reports, conveniently became threatening in 2002. Echoing the Bush administration's dire warnings, the NIE cried wolf. "Most agencies assess that Baghdad started reconstituting its nuclear weapons program," reads the document. Not one to trail behind Bush and Cheney for long, Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld, in turn, used the NIE as a springboard to confirm the sudden and bizarre mushrooming of nuclear weapons in Iraq. Thus, Rumsfeld declared in March 2003 that American officials knew the location of Iraq's WMD. Needless to add that Rumsfeld and his associates were the only people who knew the location of those menacing nukes. The thousands of UNSCOM inspectors, crawling about the countryside on the lookout for traces of Iraq's nuclear arsenal, never had a clue. Former British foreign secretary Robin Cook, who resigned over the war on Iraq, put his finger on American and British manipulations of their respective intelligence agencies. "Intelligence was not used to inform and shape policy," said Cook, "but to shape policy that was already settled."
