With every passing day, more and more "classified" evidence comes to light that suggests and reaffirms that the Bush Administration held a predetermined strategy to invade Iraq, to manipulate or fabricate evidence to justify that strategy and to attack the credibility and punish anyone who went public with criticism of the President’s strategy. Much time can be wasted arguing over who specifically initiated or approved specific acts. That effort involves microscopic examination of the trees while the forest looms large before us. Stepping back and applying simple logic leads to the conclusion that, regardless of which player assumed what specific role, the entire team and its leadership were responsible for what took place. These circumstances involve leading a country to a military invasion that has cost thousands of American soldiers their lives, tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians their lives and sucked billions of dollars from the US economic resources. This situation above all others calls for application of the Principle that “the buck stops here” at the Oval Office. The President is responsible for knowing what his administration was doing, and must be held accountable even if he lacked actual knowledge of all the specifics.
Many news reports have detailed the Fitzgerald court filing in which the revelation that Bush authorized the selective leak of “classified” information to journalists to undermine and punish former ambassador Joe Wilson for debunking the administration’s claim that Saddam Hussein was purchasing yellow cake uranium from Niger.
New reports reveal that a team of highly qualified specialists were dispatched to Iraq to examine the mobile trailers alleged to be “mobile biological weapons laboratories” by Bush administration operatives. The report filed and forwarded to Washington on May 27, 2003 stated unequivocally that the trailers were not related to anything biological and certainly were not bioweapons manufacturing facilities. A Washington Post investigative report disclosed the following:
The authors of the reports were nine U.S. and British civilian experts -- scientists and engineers with extensive experience in all the technical fields involved in making bioweapons -- who were dispatched to Baghdad by the Defense Intelligence Agency for an analysis of the trailers. Their actions and findings were described to a Washington Post reporter in interviews with six government officials and weapons experts who participated in the mission or had direct knowledge of it.
"There was no connection to anything biological," said one expert who studied the trailers.
Two days later, the President, who was under intense pressure from critics of the administration’s failure to discover any WMD’s as a result of the invasion of Iraq, went public with the following announcement:
On May 29, 2003, 50 days after the fall of Baghdad, President Bush proclaimed a fresh victory for his administration in Iraq: Two small trailers captured by U.S. troops had turned out to be long-sought mobile "biological laboratories." He declared, "We have found the weapons of mass destruction."
There will undoubtedly be a rash of finger pointing and exculpatory posturing about who had what information when. The report was classified and most likely sent to the Defense Intelligence Agency that dispatched the investigative team. The White House can be expected to take the “plausible deniability” approach and say that they had not read the report prior to the President’s public proclamation. But again we return to the trees and forest analogy. It was incumbent upon the President and his staff to know that an investigation of the mobile trailers was undertaken, particularly if those facilities were intended as justification for taking the nation into non-defensive military conflict. Further, it was not only logical but imperative that the administration check on the status of that investigation prior to making a public statement that those facilities were biological weapons labs. Instead, as the Washington Post reported:
The three-page field report and a 122-page final report three weeks later were stamped "secret" and shelved. Meanwhile, for nearly a year, administration and intelligence officials continued to publicly assert that the trailers were weapons factories.
We have heard evidence in the “Downing Street Memos” of the President’s assertion that he intended to go forward with the invasion, regardless of whether the UN Resolution supporting the attack was passed. The British Government senior officials were told that “the facts were being fixed around the policy.” Now two clear incidents of shelved or concealed critical reports directly contradicting the administration’s policy have come to light.
Former chief of counterintelligence Clark detailed how the administration used intimidation and political maneuvering to get the answers that it wanted from subordinates. When Clark reported that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center, the President ordered him repeatedly to go back and “take another look” implicitly telling Clark that he had given the wrong answer. Under this environment, it makes little difference whether the DIA report on the mobile trailers was ignored by the White House or diverted by the head of the DIA. The administration had made clear that it did not want to hear any evidence that its policy of invading Iraq was wrong. Given the intense battle that ensued after claims of faulty intelligence by the agencies vs. manipulated intelligence by the White House, it is more probable that the DIA forwarded the classified report to the White House. From that point, it is irrelevant who within the administration showed it to the President or concealed it from him while encouraging the President to make a blatantly false and misleading public pronouncement.
The administration continues to play the “classified” information shell game. The National Intelligence Estimate information leaked by Libby was, we are now told, secretly declassified by the President. Yet his administration continued for months to maintain publicly that the information was classified and that whoever leaked it would be caught and fired. The Washing Post reports: “Spokesmen for the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency both declined to comment on the specific findings of the technical report because it remains classified.”
The President has repeatedly stated that what he is doing and will do is what the American people want. The public has repeatedly spoken in poll after poll indicating that the President should be held accountable and possibly impeached if evidence showed that he misled the country into war in Iraq. At the very least, it is time for the President to come clean and disclose the evidence that was available and the information he relied upon to make the determination to use “preemptive war” as a strategy and policy of the United States. There is no legitimacy to the argument that declassification of such information at this point aids the “enemy.” Publication of the reports is historical and has no current strategic value to the Iraqi insurgency. The only “enemy” that could possibly be aided by release of the information is the American people. If that is how this administration perceives us, then it is time to deal with the problem and resolve it.
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