Why truth matters
When I raised the Mystery of the
Missing W.M.D. recently, hawks fired barrages of reproachful e-mail at
me. The gist was: “You *&#! Who cares if we never find
weapons of mass destruction, because we’ve liberated the Iraqi
people from a murderous tyrant.”
But it does matter, enormously, for American
credibility. After all, as Ari Fleischer said on April 10 about W.M.D.:
“That is what this war was about.” I rejoice in the
newfound freedoms in Iraq. But there are indications that the U.S.
government souped up intelligence, leaned on spooks to change their
conclusions and concealed contrary information to deceive people at
home and around the world. Let’s fervently hope that tomorrow we
find an Iraqi superdome filled with 500 tons of mustard gas and nerve
gas, 25,000 liters of anthrax, 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin, 29,984
prohibited munitions capable of delivering chemical agents, several
dozen Scud missiles, gas centrifuges to enrich uranium, 18 mobile
biological warfare factories, long-range unmanned aerial vehicles to
dispense anthrax, and proof of close ties with Al Qaeda.
Those are the things that President Bush or his aides
suggested Iraq might have, and I don’t want to believe that top
administration officials tried to win support for the war with a
campaign of wholesale deceit. Consider the now-disproved claims by
President Bush and Colin Powell that Iraq tried to buy uranium from
Niger so it could build nuclear weapons. As Seymour Hersh noted in The
New Yorker, the claims were based on documents that had been forged so
amateurishly that they should never have been taken seriously.
I’m told by a person involved in the Niger caper that more than a
year ago the vice president’s office asked for an investigation
of the uranium deal, so a former U.S. ambassador to Africa was
dispatched to Niger. In February 2002, according to someone present at
the meetings, that envoy reported to the C.I.A. and State Department
that the information was unequivocally wrong and that the documents had
been forged.
The envoy reported, for example, that a Niger minister
whose signature was on one of the documents had in fact been out of
office for more than a decade. In addition, the Niger mining program
was structured so that the uranium diversion had been impossible. The
envoy’s debunking of the forgery was passed around the
administration and seemed to be accepted — except that President
Bush and the State Department kept citing it anyway. “It’s
disingenuous for the State Department people to say they were
bamboozled because they knew about this for a year,” one insider
said.
Another example is the abuse of intelligence from
Hussein Kamel, a son-in-law of Saddam Hussein and head of Iraq’s
biological weapons program until his defection in 1995. Top British and
American officials kept citing information from Mr. Kamel as evidence
of a huge secret Iraqi program, even though Mr. Kamel had actually
emphasized that Iraq had mostly given up its W.M.D. program in the
early 1990’s. Glen Rangwala, a British Iraq expert, says the
transcript of Mr. Kamel’s debriefing was leaked because insiders
resented the way politicians were misleading the public.
Patrick Lang, a former head of Middle Eastern affairs in
the Defense Intelligence Agency, says that he hears from those still in
the intelligence world that when experts wrote reports that were
skeptical about Iraq’s W.M.D., “they were encouraged to
think it over again.” “In this administration, the pressure
to get product `right’ is coming out of O.S.D. [the Office of the
Secretary of Defense],” Mr. Lang said.
He added that intelligence experts had cautioned
that Iraqis would not necessarily line up to cheer U.S. troops and that
the Shiite clergy could be a problem.
“The guys who tried to tell them that came to understand that this advice was not welcome,” he said.
“The intelligence that our officials was given
regarding W.M.D. was either defective or manipulated,” Senator
Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico noted. Another senator is even more blunt
and, sadly, exactly right: “Intelligence was manipulated.”
The C.I.A. was terribly damaged when William Casey, its director in the
Reagan era, manipulated intelligence to exaggerate the Soviet threat in
Central America to whip up support for Ronald Reagan’s policies.
Now something is again rotten in the state of Spookdom.
New York Times.
