08/08/08 – Gareth Porter – The Scott Horton Show

Welcome back to Antiwar Radio, Chaos 92.7 FM.
In Austin, Texas, streaming live worldwide on the Internet, ChaosRadioAustin.org and Antiwar.com slash radio.
And now it's time to welcome back our regular guest, Gareth Porter.
He writes for IPS News, and you can find all of his IPS News articles at Antiwar.com slash Porter.
He is a historian and an investigative journalist, and the expert witness that we question most often on this show.
Welcome back, Gareth.
Hi, Scott.
How are you?
I'm doing great.
How are you, sir?
Not bad.
All right, so we got brand new IPS here.
Very soon, by the time anybody hears the archive of this anyway, it will be up at Antiwar.com slash Porter.
Otherwise, for those folks listening live, it's IPSNews.net, and it's called How Tenet Betrayed the CIA on WMD in Iraq.
What you got for us here?
Well, you know, this was, of course, the story that Ron Susskind has covered in his new book, The Way of the World.
The major press coverage, of course, has been about Susskind's revelation concerning a forgery allegedly by the CIA using the former Iraqi intelligence chief, that is Saddam Hussein's intelligence chief, to backdate a forged document, which show the linkage between a 9-11 hijacker and Iraq.
And, you know, that clearly was forged.
There's no doubt about that.
I think the question remains, you know, who exactly did this?
And I think we'll see that in the coming days.
But what I was interested in particularly was a part of the story that has not really gotten much coverage.
It's really sort of been in the shadows, and that is the revelation by Susskind that this intelligence chief, Habash, actually had become a source for the U.S. intelligence and for foreign intelligence agencies on the question of Saddam's capabilities and intentions in the final months of the Saddam regime.
And this revelation, for me, sort of added yet another piece to a picture that has emerged over the last few years about how George Tenet and the CIA basically systematically eliminated from consideration any evidence, no matter how credible it was, that Saddam, in fact, had no WMD programs or programs.
And that's the story that I tried to put together in a comprehensive way.
I don't think anybody else has done this, but to show how the various dimensions of this picture have emerged and that this sort of adds the final piece to that picture.
Well, and you mentioned in here Saddam's foreign minister, Najib Sabri.
And it was unfortunate.
I tried to ask Michael Sawyer about both of these guys, Sabri and Habash, last week, and he didn't know anything about them, but he did know.
In fact, this is the first time I've heard him specifically say it was in January of 2003 that he and his team finished their report debunking any tie between Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda.
And, of course, he doesn't know whether Tenet forwarded that information on.
But anyway, this guy, Najib Sabri, this is the story that, I guess, started with NBC News two or three years back, right?
Another high-level Saddam Hussein regime source who said, no, really, we don't have anything.
Najib Sabri's story is initially based, of course, on the book by the former CIA official Tyler Drumheller.
Oh, I see.
That was original.
That was where it broke.
That's right.
He wrote the story or basically put together the story of how the CIA got in contact with Najib Sabri through what he refers to as a European government.
He doesn't identify it in his book.
And it was only identified later in a story that, clearly, I think Tyler Drumheller was involved in.
But it was Sidney Blumenthal's story in Salon.com in which he identified the government as France and then French intelligence as the intelligence agency that was cooperating with the United States, basically serving as an intermediary with Najib Sabri in basically getting him to provide documentation on Saddam's WMD program.
Now, this is where the story gets very interesting because Sabri clearly was providing evidence to the French intelligence and to the CIA through that French intelligence cutout that showed that basically what was happening was that Saddam was projecting, hinting that he had WMD program, but it was really what emerged as a Potemkin village.
That is to say, he really didn't have anything going on, but he was trying to portray his capabilities in a way that suggested that he did have WMD capabilities.
Yeah, but I thought Saddam Hussein had his hands up and gave a 12,000-page dossier to the UN that said, no, really, we destroyed it all in 1991 just like the son-in-law told you in 1995.
Absolutely, you're right.
That's exactly what was going on.
And, in fact, Sabri was honest enough to say that basically he doesn't have nuclear weapons.
There's no possibility that he could have one any time in the near future.
He's got no active program on biological and chemical weapons.
But what happened was that the CIA officials, the officers who were working on the Najib Sabri case, filed a report based on the debriefing that had been done with him even when he was in New York to speak at the United Nations.
I don't get into the specifics of that circumstances about the appearance in New York because I didn't have space in the story.
But they filed a report in the CIA about what they had learned and basically said that there is no active WMD program based on what Najib Sabri was telling them.
The report then went into the system of the CIA, and they never heard anything for quite a while.
And then they found out that a report had been circulating which used their own report but revised it, changed it, and attached a new paragraph, an opening paragraph to it, which made a claim which really was exactly the opposite of what they'd said in the report.
And they complained bitterly, but they never found out who rewrote it.
Clearly it was done on the orders of George Tenet himself.
And it was in line with what the Bush White House was ordering at that point, which was that the line is going to be that Saddam does in fact have an active WMD program and that he's actively pursuing nuclear weapons.
So in his memoirs, this is quite interesting, what Tenet says, he doesn't name Najib Sabri, but he's clearly referring to him in his memoirs when he says that they had a high-level source who was feeding them information which was giving comfort to high-level officials at the CIA, including himself, that they were right about Saddam's WMD program.
And that, of course, is a reference that is based on this expurgated, completely altered, essentially falsified report that was based originally on the report filed by the two CIA officers and based on their debriefings from Najib Sabri.
But basically it's a falsification which he's now using as a historical document to buttress his own role in essentially falsifying the issue of WMD in Iraq.
Yeah, but Gareth, George Tenet really wanted to fit in with the new guys.
Isn't that more important?
Well, Tenet, as we both know, was a political operator.
He was not a professional in the intelligence community.
He had basically made his way in Washington as a political operator up through the Senate Intelligence Committee and ingratiated himself with the right people, both on the Democratic and Republican side, and that's why he was chosen for this position.
He was chosen as somebody who was pliable.
And despite his own denials, it's very clear the record of the various components of this puzzle, if you will, this picture that has emerged in recent years since the invasion of 2003, shows very clearly that George Tenet was prepared to be used by the administration.
He didn't like to be used, but he knew that that's what he had to do or he had to resign, and he wasn't prepared to do that.
He was essentially only forced out when it turned out that his usefulness had come to an end.
Well, you know, it's funny that his excuse for the slam-dunk comment, he said, you know, they say that I said it was a slam-dunk, that all the evidence was there, that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction, so it's all my fault.
But that's not true.
What I said was a slam-dunk was that what we've put together for you, Mr. President, is enough to convince the American people that we need to have a war.
That was the slam-dunk.
And so that's his alibi for so-called getting the intelligence wrong, and yet he's admitting to a felony because, of course, it's against the law for the CIA to come up with lies to convince the American people of anything, isn't it, Garrett?
Well, in technical terms, of course, it is.
But this is one of those many crimes, high crimes and misdemeanors, that are committed in the name of U.S. national security, which will never be prosecuted simply because they are of a political nature.
And that is the way the system works, and we have to recognize that as the basis for getting somewhere to a different point.
Isn't that funny, though, because you just think of any private citizen using, I was busy committing a felony at the time as their alibi for why they didn't do something that looks bad.
That wouldn't work very well for any of us, but that's the position that the people in our government are in.
They can use a felony as an alibi and still get away with it.
All right, now tell me about James Risen's book, State of War.
He tells the story of SODTOFIC.
Yes, this, in my view, is even more serious, in the sense that the credibility of the people who were identified as experts in WMD at the earlier stage of Saddam's program, when it really was active, could hardly be regarded as having any reason to falsify the story about Saddam's capabilities and intentions with regard to WMD.
I mean, these were people who were approached by their own relatives living in the United States, or perhaps abroad somewhere else, and who were used by the CIA to get to these former experts in WMD, and to find out, obviously they claimed to believe that there was an active program, and they wanted to get the details from these people.
And according to Risen, he tells the story particularly of SODTOFIC, who was an engineer whose sister lived in Cleveland, Ohio.
He was identified as a key figure in the nuclear program of Saddam Hussein.
So she was sent to Baghdad with a mission to ask him something like 50 very specific concrete questions about the nuclear program.
Well, what she found out when she got there was that not only was he not working on high-level nuclear weapons research, he was working on a nitrate fertilizer factory.
He told her there was no nuclear program.
There hadn't been ever since 1991.
And so she came back without any information, except he continued to tell her, absolutely, there's no nuclear program.
And she couldn't believe that the CIA didn't understand that, because it was so clear, there was so much evidence to that effect.
Well, and the thing is, too, is if we go back to the 1990s, we know that they did understand that.
Saddam Hussein's son-in-law, Hussein Kamel, came and defected to Jordan.
They interviewed him on CNN.
I watched it in 1995 or 6, I forget, 1995, I think.
First of all, what he said was, it's true, we lied to the UN and tried to keep some weapons in 1991, but by the end of 1991, we destroyed every last bit of it.
And the idea that the CIA really believed that there was some advanced cascade of spinning centrifuges making weapons-grade uranium in that country, after total blockade and sanctions and UN inspection after UN inspection, after Madeleine Albright and Bill Clinton had announced, well, weapons of mass destruction or not, we'll never lift the sanctions until Saddam Hussein has gone from power, etc., etc., at least these three very high-level sources telling them, no, we don't have any nuclear program.
They knew there was no nuclear program there.
Well, you're absolutely right.
And I think it's really very interesting to try to piece together exactly how the CIA managed to justify to itself, how the people within the CIA who worked on this managed to justify the position that they took, despite the overwhelming, highly credible evidence that they got, not just from these high-level officials, but the scientists and other specialists.
And by the way, Risen reports that there were 30 cases like Taufik's case where the relatives came back and said, no, there was no nuclear or other WMD program.
Man, I should have read that book.
Okay, I'm getting it.
This is very, very important to know that storyline.
But what I'm interested in here is what were the mechanisms by which this was possible, that this was covered up and falsified.
And I think you've got two things going on.
On one hand, you have enormous pressure from the White House, and we know about how Cheney went to the CIA over and over again and berated, you know, okay, he didn't berate them, he just continued to question them.
He just continued to force them to go back and look at it again.
His political message was absolutely clear, and there's no doubt that it was interpreted as pressure by many analysts.
And so, you know, I think the analysts who had been around for a while, who understood very clearly what was going on, they knew that they had no alternative but to go along with this.
Then you had younger analysts who had no historical memory, who, you know, did not take seriously enough of the idea that there was a history here that had to be paid attention to, and who wanted very badly to show senior officials in the CIA that they were on board and that they should be paid attention to, because they were on board and they were pushing the new line within their own offices that Saddam had WMD capabilities.
These were ambitious young analysts who made their alliance very early with the vice president's staff and the vice president, and who pushed very hard on the line that he wanted.
So I think those two things together helped to understand why Tenet was successful in carrying out this falsification of the WMD issue.
Well, ultimately, the politicians run this country, and if the vice president says the policy is regime change and you guys are going to help me make the case for it, what are they all going to do?
Resign?
Well, absolutely.
The resignation is the only ultimate alternative that an analyst has, and for obvious reasons this doesn't happen very often.
But bear in mind that the chickens came home to roost, in a way, on the Iran NIE in December of 2007.
Because many of the more senior and mid-level analysts who remembered what had happened on Iraq and how Tenet and the vice president together basically forced the CIA to come out with a falsified report on Iraqi WMD, they didn't want that to happen again.
And I do believe that there were threats of resignation on the Iran NIE.
That is to say, there were threats of resignation about releasing to the public the basic fundamental finding, the conclusion, of the December 2007 NIE.
And that's why it happened, not because the Bush administration was interested in having this be released to the public.
This is what Pat Lang, the former DIA analyst chief for Middle East, has said in his own blog, and I think that's probably true.
What he said is that people on the National Intelligence Council, or somewhere close to that, said not only will we resign, we will tell the truth to the people about why we resigned and what was supposed to be in the NIE?
I think the sense of it was that I recall, and I haven't read it more recently, is that the people on the National Intelligence Council were reflecting the views that they were picking up from analysts in the CIA, that this was a very strongly held view, that if there was not a release to the public of those conclusions, there would be resignation.
Very interesting stuff there.
Now, Phil Giraldi, he's a former CIA guy, so it's not hard to imagine that it's sort of in his interest to defend the agency and that kind of thing, but he's always been a very credible guest on this show, and I read all his articles at Antiwar and et cetera.
I know that you've used him as a source, I believe, and named him before in your articles.
But he wrote a thing at the American Conservative Magazine blog yesterday that said that he had one source who was saying that the story of the forgery is true, the part about Forge Me, a link between Atta and Saddam Hussein, and even better, why don't you make it say that Al-Qaeda is going to be delivering that yellow cake from Niger that we ordered.
It's like George Bush made this plot up all by himself.
He did a twofer there, right?
Yeah, yeah, it was completely ridiculous.
I don't know if that was Libby's work or what.
But anyway, what Phil wrote was that it wasn't the CIA.
The forgery part of the story is right, but they took it to Douglas Fyffe and the Office of Special Plans, and they made the forgery over there at the DOD.
Now, obviously we don't have any evidence one way or another really on that, but I've got to tell you, it sounds like that makes a lot more sense to me that they would have taken it to the OSP, because after all, the CIA, after showing their willingness to throw good information in the trash, they still weren't making up evidence wholesale, or at least, I guess you have the aluminum tubes and that kind of thing, but apparently Cheney and Libby thought it was necessary to go ahead and have the guys in the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy to create their own little intelligence shop to dig through the CIA's trash and create their own bogus evidence and talking points, etc.
Doesn't it seem more likely that they probably would have been the ones assigned to the forgery?
What do you think?
It certainly seems like a very plausible storyline that they would have gone to Fyffe's shop and that he would certainly obviously be willing to do it and that he would have some capabilities for doing it.
I have to say, I think we have to wait, and Phil says the same thing, that we have to see how this story plays out in the future, whether Suskind actually has the tapes to prove the full story that he's told or not.
I have to say that there's one linkage here that does, in the abstract at least, support the idea that they might have relied on the CIA or might have wanted to rely on the CIA rather than Fyffe, and that they were the ones who had the direct link or indirect link certainly to Habush, and therefore it would be logical to go to them to do this particular operation.
Didn't they say they wanted him to write it in his own handwriting?
Right, exactly.
It had to be done in conjunction with him, and the CIA was the link to Habush.
So that is a point in favor of certainly Suskind's story.
You know, another thing about this, Oh, we don't want to hear this guy because he's telling us that our fake Cossus Belli is fake, and freezing him out, was he also, I guess, was already even trying, or at least could have been used, to explain, Okay, there's this guy named Muqtada al-Sadr, and there's this other guy named Abdulaziz al-Hakim, and these are the Kurdish leaders, and these are things that people are likely to fight about, and these are the efforts that we go through in order to keep them from fighting, and et cetera, et cetera.
They could have learned a lot from this henchman of Saddam, but instead they locked him away.
And, of course, it was the most catastrophic turn of events that happened, beginning with, you know, all of Paul Bremer's orders, and all that kind of thing to turn the country into catastrophe.
I thought we had discovered that they had not locked him away, but in fact he was safe and sound in Jordan.
Oh, well, yeah, that's what I mean.
They locked him away by giving him $5 million in a mansion to chill out in, yeah.
Yeah, but certainly he would presumably still be available to anybody who wanted to draw on his knowledge.
I mean, whether they did or not is another question, of course.
You're right.
Yeah.
Well, it doesn't seem like, I don't know, unless we accept the premise that they just went in there to deliberately destroy Iraq into a million pieces and create 5 million refugees and stuff, which, you know, I don't know.
I still haven't decided about that.
I don't think so.
Maybe that was plan B or C.
Well, I think we have to accept that so much that happens, most of what happens as a result of U.S. imperial policies is completely unplanned.
I mean, they don't plan it the way it turns out, because they just don't have the power that they think they have.
That has to be the fundamental understanding of the relationship between, you know, the reality of events that follow U.S. military use of force and the intentions of those who use the force, that there's very little relationship between the two things.
Yeah, it seems like with everything they do.
And if we remember back to the run-up to the war, they were so intent on selling the idea that don't you worry about what happens the next day after Baghdad falls, it's going to be great, that they didn't want to get into it at all.
They didn't even want to focus.
They just wanted to get there.
They were in complete denial, because their interest called for a particular kind of war to be fought, and they so badly needed for that to happen and for things to turn out the way they planned, that they simply were unable to get their heads around anything other than that.
All right.
Hey, thanks again for coming on the show and telling us how things are.
Pleasure as always, Scott.
Thanks.
Everybody, that's Gareth Porter from IPS News.
You can read all he writes at antiwar.com slash Porter, and we'll be right back.