Posted By Muriel Kane
The recent revelation that the CIA waterboarded two al Qaeda detainees in an attempt to force them to confess to a non-existent link between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein sheds fresh light on several puzzling episodes during the lead-up to the Iraq War.
We now know that Abu Zubaydah was waterboarded at least 83 times in August 2002, at a time when the Bush administration was actively attempting to create a rationale for the war, while Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was waterboarded an astonishing 183 times in March 2003, right around the time of the invasion.
Those two episodes appear to bear a relationship to three specific incidents whose nature and significance have previously remained vague:
1) The so-called Downing Street Memo of July 23, 2003, which reported that in the Bush administration's push for war, "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."
2) The apparent stalling out in August 2002 of the administration's attempt to sell the war to the American people. Throughout this month widespread criticisms of the impending war remaining largely unanswered, even as the military preparations were going into high gear.
3) The administration's reliance on the Niger forgeries -- which purported to show that Saddam Hussein had attempted to obtain uranium from Africa -- as one of its major pretexts for the war, starting in late September 2002. This dependence on the forgeries ultimately led to the Bush administration's outing of CIA officer Valerie Plame in an attempt to discredit her husband, Ambassador Joseph Wilson -- who know from personal experience that the information in the forgeries was false and had become a leading critic of the use of the administration's promotion of them. (more after the jump)
Plan A and Plan B
The new information about the waterboarding of Abu Zubaydah and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed suggests that the administration's Plan A all along was to justify the war by linking Saddam Hussein to al Qaeda -- and possibly even to 9/11 -- and that Plan B, involving the use of various forms of tenuous evidence for Iraqi possession of weapons of mass destruction, was never more than a backup.
If this is true, it would mean the administration pressed on with the invasion of Iraq in March 2003 even after it knew that both Plan A and Plan B had already failed. The Niger forgeries had been debunked, waterboarding Khalid Sheikh Mohammed had gotten nowhere, and they had no casus belli under international law. As a result, the invasion was consciously initiated as an illegal war of aggression -- an undoubted war crime.
The invasion of Iraq was followed by several months of desperate searches for any hint of weapons of mass destruction, in an effort to give retroactive support to the flimsy pretext that had been used for the invasion. When it became apparent that the search would come up empty-handed, the only remaining dodge was for the administration to claim that it had invaded Iraq on the basis of a good-faith belief that Saddam Hussein was pursuing nuclear weapons.
Joseph Wilson was the one person who could testify from his own experience that there had never been any basis for such a belief. He had visited Niger in February 2002, several months before the appearance of the forgeries, to check out claims by Italian intelligence that Saddam Hussein had attempted to purchase uranium there. He had reported back that what the Italians claimed was impossible -- a report that the Bush administration was aware of long before it decided to make use of the forged documents the following fall.
That was why it became essential to discredit Wilson by spreading the story that his trip to Africa had been a frivolous junket arranged by his CIA wife and not a serious fact-finding expedition. The Bush administration needed to prop up its good-faith argument to hide not one, but two dark secrets -- first, that it had gone to war without a rationale of any sort, and second, that it had intended from the start to provide such a rationale through the use of torture.
Wilson himself recently suggested a link between his own situation and the torture of Abu Zubaydah and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. He wrote on April 26, "The disinformation campaign to manipulate public opinion in favor of the invasion, the torture program, and the illegal exposure of a clandestine CIA agent -- my wife, Valerie Plame Wilson -- were linked events. In their desperate effort to gather material to whip up public support, Cheney and others resorted to torture, well known in the intelligence craft to elicit inherently unreliable information."
The search for an Iraq-al Qaeda link
Evidence to definitely prove the Plan A/Plan B scenario outlined here is not yet available. However, the timeline of events between March 2002 and March 2003 strongly supports the idea that something of that sort must have been in effect.
When Abu Zubaydah was captured in late March 2002, the Bush adminstration had already resolved on war with Iraq. According to investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, "By early March, 2002, a former White House official told me, it was understood by many in the White House that the President had decided, in his own mind, to go to war. The undeclared decision had a devastating impact on the continuing struggle against terrorism. The Bush Administration took many intelligence operations that had been aimed at Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups around the world and redirected them to the Persian Gulf."
Hersh's description of the shift in focus from al Qaeda to Iraq may explain why Abu Zubaydah was so quickly taken out of the hands of the FBI agents who had been successfully obtaining information from him about al Qaeda and handed over to inexperienced CIA interrogators who began applying increasingly harsh treatment in April and May.
By that time, the pressure to establish an al Qaeda-Saddam link was intense. Time reported on May 5, 2002, "Rumsfeld has been so determined to find a rationale for an attack that on 10 separate occasions he asked the CIA to find evidence linking Iraq to the terror attacks of Sept. 11. The intelligence agency repeatedly came back empty-handed. The best hope for Iraqi ties to the attack -- a report that lead hijacker Mohamed Atta met with an Iraqi intelligence official in the Czech Republic -- was discredited last week."
By the end of July, preparations for war were well advanced, with the administration having secretly siphoned off $700 million from a supplemental appropriation for the Afghan War to use for its buildup against Iraq. However, evidence of any Iraqi link to al Qaeda was still lacking. This may explain why the determination to force a confession out of Abu Zubaydah by any means possible intensified at that time, resulting in the issuing of the Bybee torture memo on August 1.
The so-called Downing Street Memo -- actually the minutes of a meeting between Prime Minister Tony Blair and his staff on July 23, 2002 -- cites a report from Sir Richard Dearlove, the director of MI6, about the ongoing preparations.
"C reported on his recent talks in Washington," the memo reads. "There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."
We now know that this meeting fell during precisely the period when the CIA was obtaining final approval from the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel to use waterboarding and other enhanced interrogation techniques on Abu Zubaydah.
According to a timeline recently released by the Senate Intelligence Committee, on July 17 then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice had passed along notification "that the CIA could proceed with its proposed interrogation of Abu Zubaydah ... subject to a determination of legality by OLC."
"On July 24, 2002," the timeline continues, "according to CIA records, OLC orally advised the CIA that the Attorney General had concluded that certain proposed interrogation techniques were lawful and, on July 26, that the use of waterboarding was lawful. OLC issued two written opinions and a letter memorializing those conclusions on August 1, 2002."
This sequence of events suggests a new and far more sinister interpretation of the Downing Street Memo's comment about "the intelligence and facts ... being fixed around the policy."
The August lull and the September marketing campaign
It has always been something of a mystery why the Bush administration would have waited until September 2002 to begin its major campaign for public support of a war that was already well along in the planning stages.
Throughout the month of August, a variety of old foreign policy hands -- including Brent Scowcroft, Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski, James A. Baker and others -- had spoke upn in public to either oppose the war or insist that it should be carried out with the support of a broad coalition. Aside from Vice President Cheney asserting a couple of times that Saddam Hussein was continuing to pursue a nuclear program, there was no real pushback until early September.
The only explanation ever provided for this delay was a seeming witticism by White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card, who quipped on September 7, "From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August."
This explanation never seemed worth taking seriously. However, if the administration had actually spent all of August frantically trying to waterboard a confession out of Abu Zubaydah -- as now appears to have been the case -- it would explain the timing of the PR campaign far better than Card's lame attempt at humor.
The Niger forgeries
When that long-awaited PR campaign did start up on the day following Card's remark, it began with a front page story by Judith Miller in the Sunday New York Times claiming that a shipment of aluminum tubes intercepted on its way to Iraq had been intended for use in constructing a nuclear centrifuge. Cheney, Secretary of State Colin Powell, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice immediately made the rounds of the Sunday talk shows that day, with Rice warning ominously that "we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."
However, the Energy Department had cautioned Rice months earlier that the tubes were not suitable for use in a nuclear enrichment program, and the Washington Post quickly challenged the story in public. This left the Bush administration with very little to fall back on except the Niger forgeries.
The forgeries had first surfaced in the late spring of 2002 -- after Wilson had already delivered his negative report on the Niger claims and after French intelligence had also concluded that "the American information on uranium is all bullshit." They had been peddled around Europe in the course of that summer and had been turned down by the British, German, and French intelligence services.
In early September, however, they came to the direct attention of the Bush administration. By late September, CIA Director George Tenet and Secretary of State Colin Powell were both citing them in testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee.
Even though the CIA expressed reservations, the Niger claims kept turning up over the next several months in a variety of official speeches and reports -- most notoriously Bush's State of the Union Address on January 28, 2003, in which he asserted, "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."
In early March of 2003, the International Atomic Energy Agency finally got its hands on copies of the forgeries and took only only a few hours to identify them as crude fakes. IAEA Director Mohamed ElBaradei made an announcement to that effect on March 7, and the next day Joseph Wilson went on CNN to insist that "the U.S. government should have or did know that this report was a fake before Dr. ElBaradei mentioned it in his report at the U.N. yesterday."
By then, however, the die was already cast. We do not know whether the waterboarding of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed began after ElBaradei's announcement or had already been underway during the first week of March -- but in either case it produced no dramatic last-minute confessions.
The invasion of Iraq commenced as scheduled on March 19, 2003 -- without Plan A, without Plan B, and without anything amounting to a basis in international law. The Bush administration has been trying to cover up its guilty knowledge of that fact ever since.
