Chalmers Johnson - The Sorrows of Empire - Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic

Probably the most corrupt function of information warfare is to fabricate intelligence to justify the policies of a president and his staff. This is a criminal offense, even if it is rarely prosecuted. It involves a conspiracy among technical experts, field agents, supervisors, and leaders to counterfeit evidence and foist it onto sometimes unwitting politicians, complicit or timorous journalists, and a trusting public. When it is exposed, it inevitably undermines the credibility of government officials and the agencies that perpetrated the fraud. It also makes it likely that subsequently, if intelligence should reveal a genuine impending threat to the nation, the public will not believe the president when he warns them about it.

Over the years many governments have manufactured pretexts for going to war. Perhaps the classic instance was the German invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939—Germany claimed that it was avenging attacks by Polish soldiers, who it said had seized a German radio station and broadcast hostile statements. After the war it was revealed that the “raiders” were actually German SS troops dressed in Polish uniforms. The U.S. government also has a long, sad record of inventing pretexts for military action, ranging from the manufactured hysteria over the 1898 sinking of the battleship Maine in Havana harbor to President Lyndon Johnson’s use of a nonexistent attack on a U.S. destroyer in the Gulf of Tonkin in 1965 to get Congress to endorse a massive bombing campaign against North Vietnam.

During the 1960s, the Joint Chiefs of Staff actually delivered to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara a proposal, dubbed Operation North-woods, that the military clandestinely shoot innocent people on American streets, sink boats carrying refugees from Cuba, and carry out terrorist attacks in Washington, Miami, and elsewhere and then pin the blame on Cuban agents. The intent, after the failed Bay of Pigs operation, was to provide an excuse for a new invasion of Cuba. Every member of the Joint Chiefs signed off on it. McNamara silently refused to act on it and a few months later forced the retirement of General Lyman Lemnitzer, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs. 38

On February 5, 2003, Secretary of State Colin Powell went before the U.N. Security Council to set the stage for war by presenting what he called “definitive” American secret intelligence proving the existence of chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons in Iraq. The secretary of state even went out of his way to try to emulate the famous occasion in 1962 when U.N. ambassador Adlai Stevenson introduced photographs taken by a low-flying U-2 spy plane showing Russian nuclear missile emplacements in Cuba. Powell came with his own blowups of satellite reconnaissance photos. Apparently to add to the credibility of his presentation, Powell placed the director of central intelligence, George Tenet, in a chair directly behind him. Tenet appeared in all television pictures of Powell speaking. He made no comment, but his presence seemed to imply that what Powell had to say came with the full backing of the CIA.

In his statement to the Security Council, Powell pointed to a satellite photograph dated November 10, 2002, and said, “Look at the image on the left. On the left is a close-up of one of the four chemical bunkers.... The truck you also see is a signature item. It’s a decontamination vehicle in case something goes wrong. This is characteristic of those four bunkers.” Powell showed another photo of U.N. vehicles arriving at the same site on December 22,2002, and said that “the signature trucks are gone.... Iraq had been tipped off to the forthcoming inspections.” On February 14, 2003, chief United Nations weapons inspector Hans Blix directly countered this testimony, commenting that his inspectors had visited the site in the Powell photo often and that the truck was just a truck. He also said, “Since we arrived in Iraq, we have conducted more than 400 inspections covering more than 300 sites. All inspections were performed without notice, and access was almost always provided promptly. In no case have we seen convincing evidence that the Iraqi side knew in advance that the inspectors were coming.” 39

At the United Nations, Powell claimed, “It took years for Iraq to finally admit that it had produced four tons of the deadly nerve agent VX. A single drop on the skin will kill in minutes. Four tons. The admission only came out after inspectors collected documentation as a result of the defection of Hussein Kamel, Saddam Hussein’s late son-in-law.” Similar statements had been made by President Bush in an October 7, 2002, speech and by Vice President Cheney in an August 27,2002, speech. What all three knew was that Lieutenant General Hussein Kamel had also said, “After the Gulf War, Iraq destroyed all its chemical and biological weapons stocks and the missiles to deliver them.” A military aide who defected with him backed his assertions. Kamel was debriefed in Jordan by the CIA, British intelligence (MI6), and the head of the U.N. inspection team at the time, Rolf Ekeus. All three agreed to keep Kamel’s statements secret, allegedly to prevent Saddam Hussein from finding out how much they had learned. On February 26,2003, a complete copy of the transcript of Kame’s statements was obtained from U.N. sources by Glen Rangwala, a Cambridge University specialist in Middle Eastern affairs. In the transcript, Kamel says bluntly, “All weapons—biological, chemical, missile, nuclear—were destroyed.” 40This is what Scott Ritter, a senior American member of the team of U.N. weapons inspectors in Iraq during the 1990s, had said all along. 41

Hussein Kamel, who defected from Iraq in August 1995, was easily the single most important source of intelligence on Iraq since the first Gulf War. In a January 25,1999, letter to the U.N. Security Council, Rolf Ekeus reported that the entire eight years of disarmament work since the end of that war “must be divided into two parts, separated by the events following the departure ... of Lt. Gen. Hussein Kamel.” As Saddam Hussein’s son-in-law, Kamel was for ten years the man in charge of Iraq’s nuclear, chemical, biological, and missile programs. When he defected to Jordan, he took with him crates of secret documents in the apparent belief that his revelations would lead to Saddam’s overthrow and that he would then replace him. After six months, he concluded that his plan was not working and returned to Baghdad to try to reconcile with his father-in-law. Instead, Saddam had him executed. Since 1995, any number of American officials have cited information Kamel gave to Western intelligence without ever including the fact that he offered equally compelling evidence that Saddam’s weapons no longer existed.

Among Secretary of State Powell’s numerous statements on February 5,2003, he incautiously complimented British intelligence for coming up with a dossier on how Saddam Hussein was concealing his weapons. “I would call my colleague’s attention,” he said, “to the fine paper that the United Kingdom distributed ... which describes in exquisite detail Iraqi deception activities.” Two days after Powell spoke, the British press, acting on a tip from Rangwala of Cambridge University, reported that the document Powell praised had been plagiarized from articles published in Jane’s Intelligence Review, one of them six years old, and from a paper written by Ibrahim al-Marashi, an American student of Iraqi Shi’ite ancestry at the Monterey Institute for International Affairs, a small graduate school in California. Marashi published his article in the September 2002 issue of the Middle East Review of International Affairs, an Israeli scholarly journal. British intelligence not only quoted verbatim from these previously published sources, without attribution, but even repeated typographic and punctuation mistakes in the originals. 42