Post by sms on Dec 12, 2005 20:33:54 GMT -5
December 12,2005-Vice President Dick Cheney spent the second half of November ranting against Administration critics who dare accuse him of lying the United States into a disastrous war with Iraq. Speaking on Nov. 21 at the American Enterprise Institute, Cheney snarled that anyone making such accusations is "reprehensible" and practically guilty of high treason. His scheduled 90-minute appearance at the primo neo-con think-tank in Washington, where his wife Lynne is a resident fellow, lasted a total of 19 minutes. Cheney came, he ranted, and he departed, without taking a single question.
The Vice President is a man with something to hide. The simple truth is: Cheney did lie, repeatedly, to bludgeon the U.S. Congress into approving an unnecessary and disastrous invasion and occupation of Iraq. According to several eyewitness accounts, Cheney personally lied to scores of members of the U.S. Senate, claiming that the White House had rock-solid proof that Saddam Hussein was close to building a nuclear bomb, and that war was the only option. No such evidence existed—and Cheney knew it.
Cheney's favorite Iraqi liar, Dr. Ahmed Chalabi of the Iraqi National Congress (INC), now a deputy prime minister, all but gloated over his and Cheney's war-by-deception scam in an infamous Feb. 19, 2004 interview with the Daily Telegraph. Confronted on the piles of INC-fabricated intelligence that helped lead the United States to war in Iraq, Chalabi shrugged his shoulders, and said, "We are heroes in error. As far as we're concerned, we've been entirely successful. That tyrant Saddam is gone and the Americans are in Baghdad. What was said before is not important."
Not so. Now, despite Cheney's campaign of obstruction, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) is scheduled to produce a Phase II report on the role of policymakers, starting with the Vice President, in the so-called "intelligence failures" leading up to the Iraq invasion. No doubt, there were some significant intelligence failures—notably, failures of nerve by senior intelligence community bureaucrats, to resist White House pressure to "spin" the intelligence to justify invasion. But the overriding factor in the rush to war was a campaign of lies by Cheney, and by what Col. Lawrence Wilkerson (USA-ret.), former Secretary of State Colin Powell's former chief of staff, dubbed the "Cheney-Rumsfeld Cabal."
In a Los Angeles Times op-ed on Oct. 25, 2005, Colonel Wilkerson declared: "In President Bush's first term, some of the most important decisions about U.S. national security—including vital decisions about postwar Iraq—were made by a secretive, little-known cabal. It was made up of a very small group of people led by Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.... Its insular and secret workings were efficient and swift—not unlike the decision-making one would associate more with a dictatorship than a democracy.... But the secret process was ultimately a failure. It produced a series of disastrous decisions and virtually ensured that the agencies charged with implementing them would not or could not execute them well.... It's a disaster. Given the choice, I'd choose a frustrating bureaucracy over an efficient cabal every time."
While the SSCI probe is expected to take months, and a parallel investigation by the Pentagon's Inspector General into the role of former Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith in intelligence fakery is not expected to be completed until March, there are already public caches full of "smoking guns," proving that the Cheney-Rumsfeld Cabal wittingly lied America into the Iraq War. And many of those lies had already been refuted by the U.S. intelligence community before the first bombs dropped on Baghdad on March 19, 2003.
SADDAM AND AL-QAEDA
Senate Democrats have demanded that the White House provide the SSCI with the text of a Sept. 21, 2001 President's Daily Briefing (PDB), and a more in-depth CIA analysis delivered to the White House shortly afterwards, dealing with the alleged links between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. The White House has refused.
Why? One of Dick Cheney's favorite arguments for invading Iraq and overthrowing Saddam was that Iraq was behind the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington. And according to news accounts, the Sept. 21, 2001 PDB made clear that there was no evidence of any Saddam/al-Qaeda ties. In fact, the intelligence estimate presented to President Bush, Cheney, and other top national security officials on Sept. 21, was that Saddam was an arch enemy of al-Qaeda, and had spied on it.
Despite this, and the more in-depth CIA study on why the Saddam/al-Qaeda ties were bogus, Cheney and company kept on lying that Saddam was behind 9/11.
Now, Lynne Cheney has brought the White House deception campaign to a new low. Appearing on Nov. 28 on National Public Radio, she launched into an hysterical defense of "her man," claiming that "Dick never said" that there were any links between Saddam Hussein and the 9/11 attacks! Nothing could be further from the truth.
The Sept. 21, 2001 PDB came in response to demands from the White House for all available evidence of a Saddam link to the authors of the 9/11 attack. Five days before the PDB was delivered, President Bush had convened a War Cabinet meeting at Camp David, where the planned attack on Afghanistan was finalized. At that meeting, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, speaking for the Cheney-Rumsfeld Cabal, had called for an invasion of Iraq, claiming that Saddam was at the center of global terror and should be America's first target. The next day, President Bush signed a secret order, authorizing the military campaign against Afghanistan, but also ordering the Pentagon and CIA to begin plans for future action against Iraq.
On Sept. 19, the Defense Policy Board (DPB), a Pentagon advisory panel then chaired by neo-con Richard Perle, and populated by a collection of like-minded war hawks, convened a closed-door session. Both Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz attended the meeting, which was addressed by INC head Ahmed Chalabi and Dr. Bernard Lewis, the octogenarian British intelligence Arab Bureau spook, who was a longtime booster of Chalabi. The topic was the need to overthrow Saddam Hussein in retaliation for 9/11. As the direct result of the session, one DPB member, former CIA Director R. James Woolsey, was dispatched on a mission to London, to round up evidence that Saddam was behind the recent terror attacks, as well as the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. London was the headquarters of the INC.
ATTA IN PRAGUE
Shortly after Woolsey's first Defense Policy Board sojourn to London, the first news stories appeared, alleging that 9/11 plotter Mohammed Atta had been in the Czech capital, Prague, on April 8, 2001, meeting with Ahmed Khalil Ibrahim Samir al-Ani, the Second Secretary of the Iraqi Embassy and an officer in the Iraqi foreign intelligence service. The "Atta in Prague" urban legend would serve as Cheney's favorite "smoking gun" on the issue of Saddam's hand in 9/11.
The ostensible source of the information was an "Arab student," working undercover for Czech intelligence, who had spotted the two men in a restaurant. The "student" would later relocate to London, raising some speculation that he may have been part of the INC disinformation machine from the outset. Later versions of the story claimed that Czech intelligence had photographed the meeting, because al-Ani was under surveillance as the result of an earlier alleged terror plot against American targets in the Czech capital. One well-placed U.S. military intelligence source recently told EIR that Czech intelligence had indeed surveilled the meeting, but had later determined that the man with al-Ani was not Atta.
Despite conflicting evidence, showing that Atta was in the United States on the date of the alleged Prague meeting, Vice President Cheney was among the first Bush Administration officials to jump the gun and proclaim the Atta-Baghdad ties. On Dec. 9, 2001, in an appearance on "Meet the Press," Cheney declared, "It's been pretty well confirmed that [Atta] did go to Prague and he did meet with a senior official of the Iraqi intelligence service in Czechoslovakia last April, several months before the attack."
On April 30, 2002, FBI Director Robert Mueller gave a speech in San Francisco, in which he publicly refuted the Atta-in-Prague story, citing the FBI's detailed evidence that Atta was in Virginia Beach, Va. on that date. "We ran down literally hundreds of thousands of leads and checked every record we could get our hands on," he explained.
The FBI trashing of the Atta links to Iraq did nothing to deter Cheney. On another "Meet the Press" appearance on Sept. 8, 2003, the Vice President reiterated, "There has been reporting that suggests that there have been a number of contacts over the years. We've seen, in connection with the hijackers, of course, Mohammed Atta, who was the lead hijacker, did apparently travel to Prague on a number of occasions. And on at least one occasion, we have reporting that places him in Prague with a senior Iraqi intelligence official a few months before the attack on the World Trade Center." Cheney went so far as to describe Iraq as "the geographic base of the terrorists who have had us under assault for many years, but most especially on 9/11."
CHENEY'S PARALLEL INTELLIGENCE STOVEPIPE
To further counter the assessments of the official U.S. intelligence establishment that there were no Iraqi ties to the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, in October 2001, the Cheney-Rumsfeld Cabal created a secret "Iraq intelligence unit" in the office of Undersecretary Feith, Wolfowitz's policy deputy. This Policy Counter-Terrorism Evaluations Group (PCTEG) initially consisted of two well-known neo-cons with no intelligence backgrounds: David Wurmser and Michael Maloof. They produced scores of reports, based on a combination of "cherry-picked" raw intelligence from the community's data base, and information gathered from outside sources, particularly from the Iraqi National Congress. Their reports claimed that the CIA, DIA, and other agencies had ignored "proof" of Saddam's role in the 9/11 attacks, and similar "proof" of Saddam's nuclear weapons and other WMD programs. Wurmser would later serve as executive assistant to John Bolton, the State Department's top arms control official and a leading neo-con, and then move on to Cheney's office as the key Mideast aide, a post he still holds.
Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz kept the existence of the PCTEG secret for over a year, to conceal the fact that they had created a parallel intelligence organization, working behind the back, and at cross-purposes with the official agencies, including the Pentagon's own Defense Intelligence Agency. On Oct. 24, 2002, Rumsfeld finally admitted that he had commissioned "a small team of defense officials outside regular intelligence channels to focus on unearthing details about Iraqi ties with al-Qaeda and other terrorist networks."
Chalabi/INC-generated disinformation was "stovepiped" to Feith's office and to senior staff in the Office of the Vice President. Even when the Chalabi fabrications were passed to the CIA and DIA for official vetting, they often appeared in Cheney speeches before the agencies did their work. More often than not, DIA and CIA detailed vetting efforts showed that the purported intelligence was fabricated, grossly exaggerated, or impossible to independently corroborate.
A most revealing handwritten note by Dick Cheney has recently surfaced on a PCTEG document from the period. It reads: "This is very good indeed.... Encouraging.... Not like the crap we are all so used to getting out of CIA."
The Feith stovepipe ultimately became a bone of contention between the Administration and the Congress—especially after it was learned that officials of the Office of Special Plans (OSP), an Iraq war planning cell in the Office of Near East and South Asia (NESA), had given power-point intelligence briefings to Cheney's Chief of Staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, and Deputy National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley behind the back of the CIA and DIA. NESA/OSP, which was housed in Feith's office, was headed by William Luti, a transplant from Cheney's staff, who boasted to colleagues that he reported "directly to Scooter." Luti has since returned to Cheney's office.
On Sept. 16, 2002, as Cheney was cranking up the agitprop for an Iraq invasion, OSP briefers presented the "proof" of a Saddam/al-Qaeda connection—retreading the already-discredited Atta-in-Prague gibberish. What highlighted the briefing, however, was a diatribe against the CIA, for "flawed" intelligence gathering and analysis methods. It was not until July 8, 2004—16 months after the invasion of Iraq—that Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), the ranking Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, was able to get the Pentagon to declassify one of the three slides in question. It was headlined "Fundamental Problems With How Intelligence Community Is Assessing Information." The slide accused the intelligence community of applying too high a standard in vetting intelligence leads; and of overstating the frictions between "secularists and Islamists."
Following Rumsfeld's admission that he had created his own parallel intelligence and analysis team, the SSCI demanded that Feith submit a classified report, detailing the findings of the unit. Feith stalled for months, but finally produced a 16-page memo, citing 50 itemized instances where the PCTEG had found intelligence citations of the Saddam/al-Qaeda links.
That Oct. 27, 2003 memo was not just passed to Senators Pat Roberts (R-Kan.) and Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.), the ranking members of the SSCI. It was promptly leaked to Stephen F. Hayes, a reporter for the neo-con Weekly Standard, who was, according to intelligence community sources, then working on a book on Saddam's alleged ties to the 9/11 attacks.
The Vice President is a man with something to hide. The simple truth is: Cheney did lie, repeatedly, to bludgeon the U.S. Congress into approving an unnecessary and disastrous invasion and occupation of Iraq. According to several eyewitness accounts, Cheney personally lied to scores of members of the U.S. Senate, claiming that the White House had rock-solid proof that Saddam Hussein was close to building a nuclear bomb, and that war was the only option. No such evidence existed—and Cheney knew it.
Cheney's favorite Iraqi liar, Dr. Ahmed Chalabi of the Iraqi National Congress (INC), now a deputy prime minister, all but gloated over his and Cheney's war-by-deception scam in an infamous Feb. 19, 2004 interview with the Daily Telegraph. Confronted on the piles of INC-fabricated intelligence that helped lead the United States to war in Iraq, Chalabi shrugged his shoulders, and said, "We are heroes in error. As far as we're concerned, we've been entirely successful. That tyrant Saddam is gone and the Americans are in Baghdad. What was said before is not important."
Not so. Now, despite Cheney's campaign of obstruction, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) is scheduled to produce a Phase II report on the role of policymakers, starting with the Vice President, in the so-called "intelligence failures" leading up to the Iraq invasion. No doubt, there were some significant intelligence failures—notably, failures of nerve by senior intelligence community bureaucrats, to resist White House pressure to "spin" the intelligence to justify invasion. But the overriding factor in the rush to war was a campaign of lies by Cheney, and by what Col. Lawrence Wilkerson (USA-ret.), former Secretary of State Colin Powell's former chief of staff, dubbed the "Cheney-Rumsfeld Cabal."
In a Los Angeles Times op-ed on Oct. 25, 2005, Colonel Wilkerson declared: "In President Bush's first term, some of the most important decisions about U.S. national security—including vital decisions about postwar Iraq—were made by a secretive, little-known cabal. It was made up of a very small group of people led by Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.... Its insular and secret workings were efficient and swift—not unlike the decision-making one would associate more with a dictatorship than a democracy.... But the secret process was ultimately a failure. It produced a series of disastrous decisions and virtually ensured that the agencies charged with implementing them would not or could not execute them well.... It's a disaster. Given the choice, I'd choose a frustrating bureaucracy over an efficient cabal every time."
While the SSCI probe is expected to take months, and a parallel investigation by the Pentagon's Inspector General into the role of former Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith in intelligence fakery is not expected to be completed until March, there are already public caches full of "smoking guns," proving that the Cheney-Rumsfeld Cabal wittingly lied America into the Iraq War. And many of those lies had already been refuted by the U.S. intelligence community before the first bombs dropped on Baghdad on March 19, 2003.
SADDAM AND AL-QAEDA
Senate Democrats have demanded that the White House provide the SSCI with the text of a Sept. 21, 2001 President's Daily Briefing (PDB), and a more in-depth CIA analysis delivered to the White House shortly afterwards, dealing with the alleged links between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. The White House has refused.
Why? One of Dick Cheney's favorite arguments for invading Iraq and overthrowing Saddam was that Iraq was behind the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington. And according to news accounts, the Sept. 21, 2001 PDB made clear that there was no evidence of any Saddam/al-Qaeda ties. In fact, the intelligence estimate presented to President Bush, Cheney, and other top national security officials on Sept. 21, was that Saddam was an arch enemy of al-Qaeda, and had spied on it.
Despite this, and the more in-depth CIA study on why the Saddam/al-Qaeda ties were bogus, Cheney and company kept on lying that Saddam was behind 9/11.
Now, Lynne Cheney has brought the White House deception campaign to a new low. Appearing on Nov. 28 on National Public Radio, she launched into an hysterical defense of "her man," claiming that "Dick never said" that there were any links between Saddam Hussein and the 9/11 attacks! Nothing could be further from the truth.
The Sept. 21, 2001 PDB came in response to demands from the White House for all available evidence of a Saddam link to the authors of the 9/11 attack. Five days before the PDB was delivered, President Bush had convened a War Cabinet meeting at Camp David, where the planned attack on Afghanistan was finalized. At that meeting, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, speaking for the Cheney-Rumsfeld Cabal, had called for an invasion of Iraq, claiming that Saddam was at the center of global terror and should be America's first target. The next day, President Bush signed a secret order, authorizing the military campaign against Afghanistan, but also ordering the Pentagon and CIA to begin plans for future action against Iraq.
On Sept. 19, the Defense Policy Board (DPB), a Pentagon advisory panel then chaired by neo-con Richard Perle, and populated by a collection of like-minded war hawks, convened a closed-door session. Both Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz attended the meeting, which was addressed by INC head Ahmed Chalabi and Dr. Bernard Lewis, the octogenarian British intelligence Arab Bureau spook, who was a longtime booster of Chalabi. The topic was the need to overthrow Saddam Hussein in retaliation for 9/11. As the direct result of the session, one DPB member, former CIA Director R. James Woolsey, was dispatched on a mission to London, to round up evidence that Saddam was behind the recent terror attacks, as well as the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. London was the headquarters of the INC.
ATTA IN PRAGUE
Shortly after Woolsey's first Defense Policy Board sojourn to London, the first news stories appeared, alleging that 9/11 plotter Mohammed Atta had been in the Czech capital, Prague, on April 8, 2001, meeting with Ahmed Khalil Ibrahim Samir al-Ani, the Second Secretary of the Iraqi Embassy and an officer in the Iraqi foreign intelligence service. The "Atta in Prague" urban legend would serve as Cheney's favorite "smoking gun" on the issue of Saddam's hand in 9/11.
The ostensible source of the information was an "Arab student," working undercover for Czech intelligence, who had spotted the two men in a restaurant. The "student" would later relocate to London, raising some speculation that he may have been part of the INC disinformation machine from the outset. Later versions of the story claimed that Czech intelligence had photographed the meeting, because al-Ani was under surveillance as the result of an earlier alleged terror plot against American targets in the Czech capital. One well-placed U.S. military intelligence source recently told EIR that Czech intelligence had indeed surveilled the meeting, but had later determined that the man with al-Ani was not Atta.
Despite conflicting evidence, showing that Atta was in the United States on the date of the alleged Prague meeting, Vice President Cheney was among the first Bush Administration officials to jump the gun and proclaim the Atta-Baghdad ties. On Dec. 9, 2001, in an appearance on "Meet the Press," Cheney declared, "It's been pretty well confirmed that [Atta] did go to Prague and he did meet with a senior official of the Iraqi intelligence service in Czechoslovakia last April, several months before the attack."
On April 30, 2002, FBI Director Robert Mueller gave a speech in San Francisco, in which he publicly refuted the Atta-in-Prague story, citing the FBI's detailed evidence that Atta was in Virginia Beach, Va. on that date. "We ran down literally hundreds of thousands of leads and checked every record we could get our hands on," he explained.
The FBI trashing of the Atta links to Iraq did nothing to deter Cheney. On another "Meet the Press" appearance on Sept. 8, 2003, the Vice President reiterated, "There has been reporting that suggests that there have been a number of contacts over the years. We've seen, in connection with the hijackers, of course, Mohammed Atta, who was the lead hijacker, did apparently travel to Prague on a number of occasions. And on at least one occasion, we have reporting that places him in Prague with a senior Iraqi intelligence official a few months before the attack on the World Trade Center." Cheney went so far as to describe Iraq as "the geographic base of the terrorists who have had us under assault for many years, but most especially on 9/11."
CHENEY'S PARALLEL INTELLIGENCE STOVEPIPE
To further counter the assessments of the official U.S. intelligence establishment that there were no Iraqi ties to the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, in October 2001, the Cheney-Rumsfeld Cabal created a secret "Iraq intelligence unit" in the office of Undersecretary Feith, Wolfowitz's policy deputy. This Policy Counter-Terrorism Evaluations Group (PCTEG) initially consisted of two well-known neo-cons with no intelligence backgrounds: David Wurmser and Michael Maloof. They produced scores of reports, based on a combination of "cherry-picked" raw intelligence from the community's data base, and information gathered from outside sources, particularly from the Iraqi National Congress. Their reports claimed that the CIA, DIA, and other agencies had ignored "proof" of Saddam's role in the 9/11 attacks, and similar "proof" of Saddam's nuclear weapons and other WMD programs. Wurmser would later serve as executive assistant to John Bolton, the State Department's top arms control official and a leading neo-con, and then move on to Cheney's office as the key Mideast aide, a post he still holds.
Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz kept the existence of the PCTEG secret for over a year, to conceal the fact that they had created a parallel intelligence organization, working behind the back, and at cross-purposes with the official agencies, including the Pentagon's own Defense Intelligence Agency. On Oct. 24, 2002, Rumsfeld finally admitted that he had commissioned "a small team of defense officials outside regular intelligence channels to focus on unearthing details about Iraqi ties with al-Qaeda and other terrorist networks."
Chalabi/INC-generated disinformation was "stovepiped" to Feith's office and to senior staff in the Office of the Vice President. Even when the Chalabi fabrications were passed to the CIA and DIA for official vetting, they often appeared in Cheney speeches before the agencies did their work. More often than not, DIA and CIA detailed vetting efforts showed that the purported intelligence was fabricated, grossly exaggerated, or impossible to independently corroborate.
A most revealing handwritten note by Dick Cheney has recently surfaced on a PCTEG document from the period. It reads: "This is very good indeed.... Encouraging.... Not like the crap we are all so used to getting out of CIA."
The Feith stovepipe ultimately became a bone of contention between the Administration and the Congress—especially after it was learned that officials of the Office of Special Plans (OSP), an Iraq war planning cell in the Office of Near East and South Asia (NESA), had given power-point intelligence briefings to Cheney's Chief of Staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, and Deputy National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley behind the back of the CIA and DIA. NESA/OSP, which was housed in Feith's office, was headed by William Luti, a transplant from Cheney's staff, who boasted to colleagues that he reported "directly to Scooter." Luti has since returned to Cheney's office.
On Sept. 16, 2002, as Cheney was cranking up the agitprop for an Iraq invasion, OSP briefers presented the "proof" of a Saddam/al-Qaeda connection—retreading the already-discredited Atta-in-Prague gibberish. What highlighted the briefing, however, was a diatribe against the CIA, for "flawed" intelligence gathering and analysis methods. It was not until July 8, 2004—16 months after the invasion of Iraq—that Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), the ranking Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, was able to get the Pentagon to declassify one of the three slides in question. It was headlined "Fundamental Problems With How Intelligence Community Is Assessing Information." The slide accused the intelligence community of applying too high a standard in vetting intelligence leads; and of overstating the frictions between "secularists and Islamists."
Following Rumsfeld's admission that he had created his own parallel intelligence and analysis team, the SSCI demanded that Feith submit a classified report, detailing the findings of the unit. Feith stalled for months, but finally produced a 16-page memo, citing 50 itemized instances where the PCTEG had found intelligence citations of the Saddam/al-Qaeda links.
That Oct. 27, 2003 memo was not just passed to Senators Pat Roberts (R-Kan.) and Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.), the ranking members of the SSCI. It was promptly leaked to Stephen F. Hayes, a reporter for the neo-con Weekly Standard, who was, according to intelligence community sources, then working on a book on Saddam's alleged ties to the 9/11 attacks.
