A Legacy of Lies
News: President Bush misled the nation about the threat Iraq posed. But he wasn't the first to do so.
February 20, 2004
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It was a devastating blow to the White House. David Kay, the man hand-picked by the Bush administration to lead the search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, confirmed to a Senate committee in late January that the intelligence supporting Washington's case for war against Saddam Hussein was baseless.
"It turns out we were all wrong… and that is most disturbing," Kay declared.
But who exactly got it wrong? Intelligence agencies obviously exaggerated Iraq's WMD potential, and it's well known that they were egged on by their political masters in the Bush administration. But that's not the whole story. In fact, Bush's manipulation of Iraq intelligence was built on a foundation established during the late 1990's, when Bill Clinton was in the White House.
Faced with the need to justify an economically devastating and internationally unpopular embargo of Iraq, the Clinton administration engaged in a pattern of stretching and distorting weapons data to bolster their claim that Saddam Hussein was still hiding an illicit arsenal. The Clinton White House never used that "intelligence" to push for an invasion of Iraq, as Bush so effectively did. But in its desperate quest to salvage a crumbling Iraq policy, the Clinton White House laid the groundwork for the deceptions of their successors.
In a November 1997 Sunday morning appearance on ABC, Defense Secretary William Cohen held up a five-pound bag of sugar for the cameras to dramatize the threat of Iraqi anthrax: "This amount of anthrax could be spread over a city -- let's say the size of Washington. It would destroy at least half the population of that city. One breath and you are likely to face death within five days."
"It could wipe out populations of whole countries!" Cokie Roberts gasped as Cohen described the Iraqi arsenal. "Millions, millions," Cohen responded, "if it were properly dispersed."
A year later, at a nationally televised town hall meeting on Iraq at Ohio State University, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright brought home the dangers: "Iraq is a long way from Ohio, but what happens there matters a great deal here. For the risk that the leaders of a rogue state will use nuclear, chemical or biological weapons against us or our allies is the greatest security threat we face. The evidence is strong that Iraq continues to hide prohibited weapons and materials."
These claims from the Clinton team, we now know, were every bit as wrong as the exaggerated assertions of the Bush administration.
In recent weeks, at least one former Clinton official – former White House advisor Kenneth Pollack -- has dutifully acknowledged that fact. An influential supporter of Bush's invasion plans, Pollack's best-selling 2002 book 'The Threatening Storm,' published just as the debate over war was heating up, convinced many waverers of the dangers posed by Saddam's supposed WMD arsenal.
Now, Pollack has revisited his prewar arguments. In a sort of analytical mea culpa published in The Atlantic, he tries to explain how he and his Clinton colleagues so badly misread the WMD evidence. Everyone outside Iraq, he admits, missed important signs that Saddam had abandoned serious efforts at WMD capability. Pollack chalks up this intelligence blunder to a straightforward case of assuming the worst. The Clinton administration and others simply "assumed that Iraq's earlier behavior was continuing more or less in a straight line. This misperception took on considerable weight" as the years passed.
In fact, there is compelling evidence to suggest that the Clinton administration's false alarms on Iraqi weapons, like Bush's, were much more than just honest mistakes. One astonishing series of events in particular illustrates the ways in which the Clinton White House cleared the path for Bush's war.
The Defector's Tale
In August of 1995, Hussein Kamel, son-in-law of Saddam Hussein and head of Iraq's weapons industries, defected to Jordan carrying crate-loads of secret documents on weapons of mass destruction in tow. He announced that he would work for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, and he began cooperating with officials from the CIA, British intelligence and the U.N. inspectors.
The defection was front-page news worldwide. In a panic, the Iraqi regime handed over millions of additional documents it had previously kept hidden. It was the most damaging exposure of Saddam's secret weapons programs since Operation Desert Storm. The information proved, once and for all, that Iraq had been lying about its weapons programs: its pre-Gulf War efforts to build and perfect biological weapons had progressed much further than the regime had ever admitted, and Iraq still retained some production equipment .
In February 1996, Kamel, an unstable man disillusioned with his reception in the West, tried to return to Iraq. Upon arriving, he and his family were gunned down by militias allied with the regime. But by that time, he had already spilled the beans on Iraq's weapons programs to the U.N. and the CIA.
Over the next three years, as the Clinton team barnstormed the media to warn of the WMD threat from Saddam, they repeatedly invoked the Kamel episode as proof that Iraq was still concealing a dangerous arsenal. For example, in February 1998, President Clinton gave a major policy speech arguing that Iraq must be threatened with force. He explained that "Saddam has spent the better part of the past decade trying to cheat" on his disarmament obligations and that "meeting the threat posed by Saddam Hussein is important to our security." "Iraq still has stockpiles of chemical and biological munitions," he said, including "an offensive biological warfare capability -- notably 5,000 gallons of botulinum, which causes botulism; 2,000 gallons of anthrax; 25 biological-filled Scud warheads; and 157 aerial bombs."
As evidence of the threat, Clinton solemnly recounted the defector's tale: "In 1995, Hussein Kamel, Saddam's son-in-law, and the chief organizer of Iraq's weapons-of-mass-destruction program, defected to Jordan. He revealed that Iraq was continuing to conceal weapons and missiles and the capacity to build many more.” Kamel's defection was similarly invoked virtually every time a senior Clinton policy maker addressed the Iraq issue during the inspections crises of 1997-98. Sandy Berger said it "forced [Iraq] to reveal additional weapons stockpiles and production capacity it had insisted it did not have." Madeleine Albright said it "marked a turning point" in Saddam's efforts at deception. And William Cohen said that as a result, "Iraq confessed to having materials and munitions it had lied about for years."
Kamel became the poster child for Iraq's strategy of deceit and concealment. His name was bandied around on Sunday morning talk-shows and newspaper op-eds. He featured prominently in a Frontline documentary on Iraq and he turned up in articles in The New Republic and The Weekly Standard.
And Kamel's usefulness even outlasted the Clinton years. When Bush administration officials made their case for an invasion in 2002 and 2003, they repeated Kamel's story even more frequently than the Clinton team had -- this time to argue that Saddam's hidden weapons were so expertly concealed that inspections were of little value.
Testifying before Congress, Donald Rumsfeld declared: "Unless we have people inside the Iraqi program who are willing to tell us what they have and where they have it - as we did in 1995 with the defection of Saddam's son in law, Hussein Kamel - it is easy for the Iraqi regime to hide its capabilities from us."
Bush's United Nations address also cited Kamel's defection, as did Dick Cheney's August 2002 speech, which argued for skipping inspections and jumping straight to war. Kamel's story "should serve as a reminder to all that we often learned more as a result of defections than we learned from the inspection regime itself," Cheney warned.
Eight years after his defection Hussein Kamel was dead, but his story had become immortal.
But Kamel's revelations had not been what they seemed.
In February 2003, as the worldwide debate over war was just reaching a crescendo, Newsweek reporter John Barry obtained a classified copy of the original U.N. transcript of Hussein Kamel's 1995 debriefing by Rolf Ekeus and his UNSCOM colleagues. Barry, a veteran of the Iraqi WMD beat, wrote up his scoop in a little item, a mere six paragraphs long, that appeared in the magazine's "Periscope" section. Although it received virtually no notice at the time, what Barry wrote seemed to turn the whole Iraq story on its head:
"Hussein Kamel, the highest-ranking Iraqi official ever to defect from Saddam Hussein's inner circle, told CIA and British intelligence officers and U.N. inspectors in the summer of 1995 that [in 1991] after the Gulf War, Iraq destroyed all its chemical and biological weapons stocks and the missiles to deliver them.
The stocks had been destroyed to hide the programs from the U.N. inspectors, but Iraq had retained the design and engineering details of these weapons. Kamel talked of hidden blueprints, computer disks, microfiches and even missile-warhead molds.
Still, the defector's tale raises questions about whether the WMD stockpiles attributed to Iraq still exist."
When the story failed to win exposure in the media, a handful of writers and analysts on both sides of the Atlantic (including this writer), viewing the news as a major bombshell, took it upon themselves to publicize it. One of the group, Glen Rangwala, a Middle East specialist at Cambridge University, managed to obtain a copy of the transcript himself. He immediately posted it on his website.
A fifteen-page typewritten U.N. document stamped "SENSITIVE," the transcript made it clear that almost everything the world thought it knew about Iraq's WMD was wrong. It was minutely detailed and often quite technical, a cross-examination of one specialist by another. And although Kamel used different words at different points in the interview, his story was always the same. He stated it most simply on page 13:
"All weapons -- biological, chemical, missile, nuclear were destroyed." The destruction took place in the summer of 1991.
What about chemical weapons?
"I ordered destruction of all chemical weapons."
An inspector inquired about anthrax. "Were weapons and agents destroyed?"
"Nothing remained."
How about the 819 Soviet-made missiles Iraq was known to have purchased in the 1980's?
"Not a single missile left, but they [kept] blueprints and molds for production. All missiles were destroyed."
In other words, the defector who had been cited time after time, over eight years, by two presidents and their cabinets, as the source that proved Saddam was still hiding a deadly arsenal of chemical and biological weapons -- that defector had actually said the opposite: Not only did the weapons not exist, they had been destroyed before Clinton was even elected.
Take, for example, the "5,000 gallons of botulinum. 2,000 gallons of anthrax, 25 biological-filled Scud warheads and 157 aerial bombs" -- the weapons Bill Clinton had listed in 1998. Or consider the "26,000 liters of anthrax, 38,000 liters of botulin, one and a half tons of nerve agent VX, 6,500 aerial chemical bombs" -- the weapons rattled off by Bush spokesman Ari Fleischer as the U.N. was inspecting Iraq in 2003.
"We don't know where those [weapons] are," Fleischer claimed. "We have yet to see any accounting for all of these." In fact, it was these very stockpiles that Kamel attested had been destroyed in 1991.
There is now little doubt that Kamel was telling the truth. The strongest evidence -- evidence so unimpeachable it invites the word "proof" -- came in the form of a captured Iraqi document obtained in January by Barton Gellman of The Washington Post. The memo was composed five days after Kamel's defection, on August 13, 1995, and its author was Hossam Amin, Iraq's chief liaison to the U.N. inspectors. It was addressed to Qusay Hussein, Saddam's son.
The letter was a piece of damage assessment. Kamel was expected to blow all Iraq's cover stories to the inspectors, and the regime needed to prepare itself for the fallout. So Amin proceeded to lay out for his boss, in minute detail, two separate storylines: The version Iraq had told the inspectors about each weapons program, and what the truth was. (Or, as the memo itself put it: "the matters that are known to the traitor and not declared" to the U.N.)
Among the memo's statements of fact was that "destruction of the biological weapons agents took place in the summer of 1991" In a comprehensive evaluation of the evidence, Gellman stood Kamel's 1995 briefing to the U.N. against the real story laid out in Amin's memo. The comparison, he concluded, "suggests that Kamel left little or nothing out."
Iraq had eliminated all its weapons of mass destruction by the summer of 1991, and the U.S. had been told of it in 1995.
Protecting the Embargo
The Bush team had an obvious motive for misrepresenting Iraq's WMD: They were pushing for an invasion of Iraq. But why did the Clinton administration distort Kamel's statements to exaggerate the Iraqi threat? Answering this question requires an understanding of the profound contradiction at the heart of Clinton's policy toward Iraq.
The terms of the 1991 Gulf War ceasefire had stated that economic sanctions against Iraq were to be lifted once it had complied with its postwar obligations, chiefly disarmament. Yet in the years after the war, Washington had quietly made clear that it would never contemplate lifting sanctions as long as Saddam remained in power -- whether or not he had disarmed.1
The tension between these two parallel policies -- the official U.N. line, which the United States formally supported, and Washington's real policy -- was a constant source of embarrassment for American diplomats in New York. As the devastating humanitarian impact of the embargo mounted, Arab public opinion clamored for an end to the sanctions and France and Russia joined the chorus calling for a change in U.S. policy.
But for the Clinton administration, and for the Bush administration before it, the embargo was the heart and soul of postwar policy toward Iraq. When the Gulf War began, policy had been built around the assumption -- and the goal -- that Saddam would soon be forced to depart from the scene. When that scenario failed to materialize, even after the Shia uprisings of 1991, Washington adopted a fall-back position: to sit it out and wait for the embargo to do the work of deposing Saddam. Lifting the embargo while Saddam was still in Baghdad was as unthinkable for Clinton as it had been for Bush. It was, in essence, a quiet but de facto policy of regime change.
Of course, as long as the world saw Iraq as obstructing and deceiving the inspectors, the contradictions in the policy remained manageable. The problem was what to do if, at some point, Iraq seemed to be heading toward compliance with the disarmament regime. In such a scenario, the pressure from allies to dismantle the policy would become overwhelming.
A few days after Kamel's defection, veteran foreign policy aide Richard Haass, a leading figure in the Powell wing of the GOP, appeared at a Mideast policy think tank to analyze the dilemma facing policymakers. U.S. officials, he observed, "have talked about trying to keep sanctions in place so long as Saddam is in power. That might be something the United States wants. But we're on political and legal thin ice when we say that because, alas, others don't agree with us -- particularly the French and the Russians. And they do have the text [of U.N. resolutions] to support them."
"I think we have to guard against the possibility that one day we may not be able to keep the French and Russians in line," Haass told his audience. "That, if you will, Saddam does comply with so much of the resolutions that the United States can't sustain the policy. It's possible at some point the United States will find itself totally isolated. And I think we have to have in our hip pocket what would be a fallback strategy at that point."
As far as Washington was concerned, Kamel's defection and his exposure of Iraqi lying could not have come at a better time. Increasingly, members of the U.N. Security Council were pointing to the weapons inspectors' progress in Iraq to argue that sanctions needed to be eased. Huge stockpiles of chemical weapons had been destroyed. According to an optimistic progress report from top inspector Rolf Ekeus, in the areas of chemical, nuclear and missile weapons, "most of the work was now done." And by early 1995, work had been completed on what The New York Times called "the most sophisticated and comprehensive technological and human monitoring system ever imposed on a country." Its purpose was to ensure that even after inspectors had destroyed Iraq's weapons, it could not rebuild them using dual-use equipment. The system was permanent. Even after sanctions were lifted, the monitoring regime would stay in place.
In light of all the headway the U.N. had made, the task for the Clinton administration was now clear. Haass outlined the strategy: "So long as we have reason to believe that there is information or actual physical items [of WMD] out there, I think the United States continues to make the case the sanctions need to stay in place." Kamel's defection, and his disclosure that Iraq had been lying about its past programs, were invaluable in making that case.
The result was years of deception.
There can be no doubt that the Clinton administration knew of Kamel's testimony -- all of it – immediately. An August 1995 CIA intelligence report on Kamel's weapons briefing, in redacted form, was declassified in 1996, along with millions of other documents, as part of the Defense Department's investigation into Gulf War illness. The cable, headlined "Comments On Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction," is still publicly available on an online Defense Department database.
MotherJones.com has obtained a copy. It relayed to CIA headquarters the key points of Kamel's testimony: "Iraq has no Scuds left and is hiding no Scud missile components." Missile research was being conducted, but "the work is limited to what can be done on paper." On chemical weapons, "none remained in Iraq. Kamil stressed that no agent was hidden in Iraq, either VX or any other.”2
Months afterward, a procession of Clinton officials appeared on Capitol Hill and told Congress that they had full confidence in Kamel's disclosures -- but they were remarkably selective in their use of his statements.
Even now, the distortions continue. In his what-went-wrong article in The Atlantic, Pollack tersely acknowledged, almost in passing, that Kamel had in fact revealed that "all actual weapons had been eliminated." But this acknowledgment came almost a year after the Kamel briefing was leaked on the Internet. As for Pollack's widely read 2002 book, in which several pages are devoted to Kamel's revelations, no such admission can be found there. On the contrary, Pollack had portrayed the defector's testimony as further proof that Iraq "still possessed considerable equipment, documentation, and even weapons."
Even Pollack's recent mea-culpa article blatantly distorted the meaning of Kamel's disclosures to make it appear that at the time, Iraq still retained an effective WMD capability. For example, Pollack said Kamel's most important revelation was the "fact" that "a very large biological-weapons plant at al-Hakim, whose existence had been concealed from UN inspectors, was still functional in 1995." That was flatly untrue. Al-Hakam had never been concealed from the inspectors; they had known about it from the moment they arrived in Iraq. The first inspection of the facility (led by David Kelly, the British scientist who committed suicide last year) took place in September 1991. Kelly and his colleagues immediately suspected it had been used for bioweapons production and they swiftly put it under strict monitoring. The plant was indeed "still functional" in 1995, but producing only chicken feed under the watchful eye of the U.N.
In other words, as of 1995, Iraq was left with practically nothing from its past programs. Virtually all its old dual-use equipment was now under U.N. monitoring, and, as Kamel told the U.N., the regime's WMD stockpiles were destroyed. While Iraq could not be declared officially "disarmed" until the inspectors had accounted for every detail of its byzantine prewar weapons programs, in practice even the most hawkish inspectors admitted that once the monitoring system was up and running, Iraq lost its entire ability to rebuild the arsenal that it had destroyed in 1991.
In fact, since the mid-1990's some inspectors privately argued that Iraq had been effectively disarmed. But they were subject to intense pressure from Washington not to give Iraq a clean bill of health. According to Ron Cleminson, a senior Canadian arms control expert who served on UNSCOM's College of Commissioners throughout the 1990's, the inspectors could have declared Iraq disarmed of nuclear, missile, and chemical weapons as early as 1992, but Washington's hardline position prevented such a move.
"I used to say: 'You know, we basically know amongst ourselves there are no weapons and we're unlikely to find any,'" Cleminson said in an interview. "My take on it is that this information was known, and in spades. But this stuff was being pushed on a political level. They [in Washington] were just absolutely ignoring what was obvious. My guess is that with full American cooperation and without all this politics, [UNSCOM's mission] could have been wrapped up in three to four years."
John Deutch, the former CIA director who served under Clinton and presided during Kamel's defection, has called the WMD fiasco "an intelligence failure of massive proportions.” But the roots of the failure go far deeper than intelligence. They extend to the heart of America's decade-old policy toward Iraq and the dishonesty of two administrations.
Although this was Clinton's policy from almost the start of his term, it was enunciated most explicitly in March 1997, when Madeleine Albright, in her first major policy address as Secretary of State, declared: "We do not agree with the nations who argue that if Iraq complies with its obligations concerning weapons of mass destruction, sanctions should be lifted. Our view, which is unshakable, is that Iraq must prove its peaceful intentions. And the evidence is overwhelming that Saddam Hussein's intentions will never be peaceful."
As for biological weapons, only "two aspects of the BW program remain hidden": the fact that an experimental agent had been developed at an Iraqi research facility before the Gulf War, and that anthrax had been weaponized in fiberglass-coated bombs in the 1980's. However, the report made clear that the facility in question had been known to UNSCOM from the beginning and was under strict monitoring. The biological bombs were destroyed by Iraq in the summer of 1991.
Seth Ackerman is a freelance journalist whose work has appeared in Harper's, In These Times, and The Washington Times. He is also a contributing writer for the media watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting.
Photo: Associated Press/Wide World Photos
