More About Lie By Lie: A Chronicle of a War Foretold
March 1, 2008
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At a June 2006 congressional hearing examining the march to war in Iraq, Republican congressman Walter Jones posed “a very simple question” about the administration’s manipulation of intelligence: “How could the professionals see what was happening and nobody speak out?”
Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell’s former chief of staff, responded with an equally simple answer: “The vice president.” It is easy to pass judgment on Dick Cheney, for there is no longer any reasonable doubt that the vice president willfully distorted the threat posed by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq while abusing the power of his office to suppress countervailing information. The administration’s dead certainty about the righteousness of “regime change” was like a cancer: Al Qaeda and Saddam were in league—they just had to be. So detainees would be tortured. And torture would breed false confessions—of collaboration and chemical weapons training—providing essential lies that girded the case for a preordained war.
But the blame for Iraq does not end with the vice president, President Bush, or even Donald Rumsfeld’s Pentagon. Nor is it limited to the intelligence operatives who sat silent as the administration cherry-picked its case for war, or to those, like Colin Powell or Hans Blix, who, in the name of loyalty or statesmanship, did not give full throat to their misgivings.
It is shared by useful idiots from the Fourth Estate. The New York Times’ Judith Miller, to be sure. But also the editors of the Washington Post who routinely relegated vital reporting on the flimsiness of the administration’s Iraq intel to Page A13. Blame also belongs squarely on the shoulders of the 94 U.S. senators who could not be bothered to read the full 92-page National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq—which contained far more dissenting intelligence than had ever been made public in the national debate—before voting to send American troops to war.
And it lies, inescapably, with we the American people, who, in our fear and rage over the catastrophic events of September 11, 2001, allowed ourselves to be suckered into the most audacious bait and switch of all time. Half a trillion dollars later, Saddam may be in jail, but Osama’s still at large—and nearly 60,000 Iraqis civilians and Americans troops are dead.
How did it happen? This timeline is, in part, an effort to answer that question. It draws upon the essential news reporting of America’s finest journalists. And it is rounded out by tales of whistleblowers and administration turncoats—by the firsthand accounts of former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill, ex-counterterror czar Richard Clarke, and, yes, Colonel Wilkerson.
The first drafts of history are, by their nature, fragmentary. They arrive tragically late, and too often out of order. Here, then, we have stripped the history of the Iraq War to its bare bones, and reconstructed a skeleton that we hope will be a key to resolving open questions of the Bush era. What did our leaders know, and when did they know it? And, perhaps just as important, what red flags did we miss, and how could we have missed them?
~THE EDITORS
Note: In some ways this project began on January 28, 2003, when the staff of Mother Jones ducked out of our offices to catch The State of the Union address, wherein Bush uttered his “16 words” about Saddam Hussein buying Niger yellowcake to build a nuclear bomb. This claim had already been reported to be demonstrably false, yet such objections went unheeded in the climate of fear that still gripped the country 16 months after 9/11. Almost two years later, we resolved to reconstruct the truth, combining our clipping files, obsessions, insights, and efforts to produce this timeline.
More than anyone's, the timeline’s entries up through the first hundred days are the work of Tim Dickinson, a former editor at Mother Jones now with Rolling Stone, where he writes the National Affairs blog, and Jonathan Stein, now a Mother Jones reporter in our Washington, D.C. Bureau. The third installment, covering the Abu Ghraib scandal, Abu Zubaydah, waterboarding, and other revelations on torture, is the work of contributing writer JoAnn Wypijewski, assistant editor Celia Perry, and D.C. bureau senior fellow, Nick Baumann.
This project would not have been possible without the reporting and analysis of our journalistic colleagues. The list is far too long to render here (though the timeline itself links to original news reports and source documents), but it includes the New York Times’ David Barstow, William Broad, Jeff Gerth, Frank Rich, and James Risen; The New Yorker’s Seymour Hersh, Jane Mayer, and George Packer; the Washington Post’s Dana Priest, Dana Milbank, Thomas Ricks, Walter Pincus, and Bob Woodward; the Los Angeles Times’ Bob Drogin and John Goetz; Knight Ridder’s Jonathan Landay, Warren Strobel, and John Walcott; the producers and staff of Frontline; Karen J. Greenberg and Joshua L. Dratel, editors of The Torture Papers; the Times of London’s Michael Smith; author Ron Suskind; the National Journal’s Murray Waas; many bloggers, including Juan Cole, Kevin Drum, and Josh Micah Marshall; and all those who guided and inspired them and us.
