Our National Cataract

One of the friends we're staying with here in Hawai'i just recently had cataract surgery on one of his eyes. He's a designer who specializes in lighting design, and his vision had very slowly been clouded by cataracts (which dulls the sense of color and light that the eyes receive). After the surgery, the colors were vividly reawakened in the one eye and it was a revelation to him how long the world around him had been dulled without him fully realizing it.

Over the past four years, it seems to me that our nation's vision has suffered from a cataract-like condition. We've not been fully blinded, but our senses have been dulled and our reception of the wider picture has been clouded to the point where many have continued apace on a course that seemed both inevitable and sensible. But now, bit by bit, our vision is expanding, the hazy dullness is being replaced by focused light that brings shadings and texture to views we'd taken for granted.

There are some who wish to continue our national cataract affliction, and propose those who question the newly focused views of being unpatriotic and dangerous to our armed forces in far away nations. I disagree forcefully. I believe it's wholly unpatriotic to blindly follow leadership that allows no transparency into its mobives and inner workings. And as we continue to get drips and drabs of information that has been obscured, whether by active choice or by willful blindness, it's all the more important to pose questions as to how we got to this place and why we've been led here.

The most recent example of discovery into our dulled vision into the lead-up to the Iraq War is this bombshell from Murray Waas over at the National Journal.

Ten days after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, President Bush was told in a highly classified briefing that the U.S. intelligence community had no evidence linking the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein to the attacks and that there was scant credible evidence that Iraq had any significant collaborative ties with Al Qaeda, according to government records and current and former officials with firsthand knowledge of the matter.

The information was provided to Bush on September 21, 2001 during the "President's Daily Brief," a 30- to 45-minute early-morning national security briefing.
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One of the more intriguing things that Bush was told during the briefing was that the few credible reports of contacts between Iraq and Al Qaeda involved attempts by Saddam Hussein to monitor the terrorist group. Saddam viewed Al Qaeda as well as other theocratic radical Islamist organizations as a potential threat to his secular regime. At one point, analysts believed, Saddam considered infiltrating the ranks of Al Qaeda with Iraqi nationals or even Iraqi intelligence operatives to learn more about its inner workings, according to records and sources.
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The Senate Intelligence Committee has asked the White House for the CIA assessment, the PDB of September 21, 2001, and dozens of other PDBs as part of the committee's ongoing investigation into whether the Bush administration misrepresented intelligence information in the run-up to war with Iraq. The Bush administration has refused to turn over these documents.

Indeed, the existence of the September 21 PDB was not disclosed to the Intelligence Committee until the summer of 2004, according to congressional sources. Both Republicans and Democrats requested then that it be turned over. The administration has refused to provide it, even on a classified basis, and won't say anything more about it other than to acknowledge that it exists.

Mr. Waas's article goes on to document how administration officials went before the public and were very careful to give the impression of a link between Iraq and Al Qaeda. It's very worth your time to give it a full read. Think Progress also has a couple of helpful reminders:

The information, which was provided to Bush on September 21, 2001 during the “President’s Daily Brief,” corresponds with the accounts of two former White House counterterrorism advisers:

“One week after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, White House counterterrorism director Paul Kurtz wrote in a memo to national security adviser Condoleezza Rice that no ‘compelling case’ existed for Iraq’s involvement in the attacks and that links between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein’s government were weak.” [Washington Post, 7/23/04]
According to the 9/11 Commission report, shortly after the 9/11 attacks, Richard Clarke’s office sent a memo to the National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice, at the President’s direction, concluding that “only some anecdotal evidence linked Iraq to al Qaeda…Arguing that the case for links between Iraq and al Qaeda was weak, the memo pointed out that Bin Ladin resented the secularism of Saddam Hussein’s regime.” [9-11 Commission Report, p.334]

This information did not prevent Bush and Cheney from presenting the connection between Iraq and al Qaeda as an undisputed fact.

BUSH: “And I also mentioned the fact that there is a connection between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. The war on terror, Iraq is a part on the war on terror.” [10/14/02]
CHENEY: “There is also a grave danger that al Qaeda or other terrorists will join with outlaw regimes that have these weapons to attack their common enemy, the United States of America. That is why confronting the threat posed by Iraq is not a distraction from the war on terror.” [12/2/02]

Despite the risk of being labeled “dishonest and reprehensible,” this appears to be strong evidence that Bush and Cheney misled us.

Also, if you haven't see it yet, check out former Senator Bob Graham's op-ed in the WaPo last weekend about the administration's purported claim that all those Democratic Senators and Congressfolk who voted for the Iraq resolution had the exact same evidence before them that the White House did:

The president's attacks are outrageous. Yes, more than 100 Democrats voted to authorize him to take the nation to war. Most of them, though, like their Republican colleagues, did so in the legitimate belief that the president and his administration were truthful in their statements that Saddam Hussein was a gathering menace -- that if Hussein was not disarmed, the smoking gun would become a mushroom cloud.
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As chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence during the tragedy of Sept. 11, 2001, and the run-up to the Iraq war, I probably had as much access to the intelligence on which the war was predicated as any other member of Congress.

I, too, presumed the president was being truthful -- until a series of events undercut that confidence.

He goes on to mention Tommy Franks' comments noting that material was already being shifted from the Afghanistan theater to Iraq... despite the fact that no vote had been taken yet. As well as this nugget:

At a meeting of the Senate intelligence committee on Sept. 5, 2002, CIA Director George Tenet was asked what the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) provided as the rationale for a preemptive war in Iraq. An NIE is the product of the entire intelligence community, and its most comprehensive assessment. I was stunned when Tenet said that no NIE had been requested by the White House and none had been prepared. Invoking our rarely used senatorial authority, I directed the completion of an NIE.

Tenet objected, saying that his people were too committed to other assignments to analyze Saddam Hussein's capabilities and will to use chemical, biological and possibly nuclear weapons. We insisted, and three weeks later the community produced a classified NIE.

There were troubling aspects to this 90-page document. While slanted toward the conclusion that Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction stored or produced at 550 sites, it contained vigorous dissents on key parts of the information, especially by the departments of State and Energy. Particular skepticism was raised about aluminum tubes that were offered as evidence Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear program. As to Hussein's will to use whatever weapons he might have, the estimate indicated he would not do so unless he was first attacked.
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The American people needed to know these reservations, and I requested that an unclassified, public version of the NIE be prepared. On Oct. 4, Tenet presented a 25-page document titled "Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction Programs." It represented an unqualified case that Hussein possessed them, avoided a discussion of whether he had the will to use them and omitted the dissenting opinions contained in the classified version. Its conclusions, such as "If Baghdad acquired sufficient weapons-grade fissile material from abroad, it could make a nuclear weapon within a year," underscored the White House's claim that exactly such material was being provided from Africa to Iraq.