Twenty years ago, it was a lonely time in Washington. That is, lonely for anyone—particularly a journalist—who questioned the Bush-Cheney’s administration rush to war in Iraq. I was one such person, doing so in columns and media appearances. In the months prior to the US invasion of Iraq, as George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and their comrades in and out of government beat the drums for war, only a few reporters and pundits in the capital challenged their argument that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction; was tied to al Qaeda, the perpetrators of the horrific 9/11 attack; and posed a direct and immediate threat to the United States that could only be neutralized by full-scale war. In the aftermath of September 11, with patriotism rampant and fear affecting much of the land, few denizens of the commentariat wanted to buck the consensus for war.
I was then the Washington editor for The Nation magazine and no expert on the Middle East. But it was clear that many of the folks pushing the country to war were also no experts on the Middle East and likely would not wage war wisely or manage post-invasion Iraq competently. Consequently, it seemed obvious that an all-out attack on Iraq ought to have been a true last resort. First, the UN weapons inspection teams searching for WMDs should have been permitted to complete their mission. Then, if military action was deemed necessary, limited options or strikes ought to have been considered before a full conquest of Iraq was green-lighted. Short-circuiting the inspections, which had unearthed no significant WMDs or weapons programs, seemed foolish. Moreover, many of the administration’s claims that Saddam was loaded to the gills with WMDs and working covertly with al Qaeda were disputed by experts within and outside the federal government. Even worse, Bush and his crew talked little of their post-invasion plans. One did not have to be an experienced foreign policy professional or military strategist to fret that the war—predicated on contested accusations—could be a disaster.
Yet in post-9/11 Washington, not many pundits or politicians wanted to get in the way of the stampede toward war. (About half of the Democrats in the House and Senate voted for a measure granting Bush the authority to invade Iraq. And many prominent leaders of the liberal intelligentsia were on the side of war.) Most aggravating was that support for the coming war was often based on uncritical acceptance of the administration’s prevailing spin. At one dinner party, a close friend (and a well-known reporter) said there was no choice but to support the pending invasion because maybe Saddam possessed WMDs and opposing the war would brand one as not fully committed to American security. “You’ve got to be for this,” he said.
A few weeks before the invasion, I was doing a radio appearance with another friend who was working for an important newspaper. (He’s now a prominent media figure who has been a passionate foe of Trumpism.) He confided that he was uncertain how to assess the Bush administration’s argument for war. But, he said, since New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman was for it, he, too, supported the attack. At the time, Friedman had an odd stance. He believed a war would ignite progressive change throughout the Arab world, though he noted he was “troubled” that Bush was justifying the war by falsely alleging Saddam was allied with al Qaeda. “You don’t take the country to war on the wings of a lie,” Friedman insisted. Nonetheless, this important influencer backed the invasion. I was disheartened to see my friend, a smart fellow and usually an independent thinker, cede his opinion to Friedman. But like many in Washington, he decided that sticking with the herd provided adequate cover.
An aside: Two months into the war, Friedman asserted in an interview with Charlie Rose that the invasion was a necessary response to 9/11, despite the fact that Saddam had nothing to do with that attack: “We needed to go over there basically and take out a very big stick, right in the heart of that world, and burst that [terrorism] bubble. And there was only one way to do it…What they needed to see was American boys and girls going house to house, from Basra to Baghdad, and basically saying, ‘Which part of this sentence don’t you understand?…Well, suck on this.’”
Suck on this? That was the level of thought that fueled backing for the war.
In the fall of 2002 and winter of 2003, it was tough to counter the fearmongering, magical thinking, and unsophisticated analysis that drove the cheerleading for war. During the run-up to the invasion, I appeared on Bill O’Reilly’s Fox News show with Bill Kristol, the godfather of the neoconservative movement and a leading advocate for clobbering Iraq. I pointed out that the WMD inspections in Iraq could be useful in preventing Saddam from reaching the “finish line” in developing nuclear weapons. Kristol responded by exclaiming, “He’s past that finish line! He’s past the finish line!” He was saying that Saddam already had his mitts on a nuclear weapon, bolstering the White House’s assertion that Saddam presented a nuclear threat to the United States.
But Saddam wasn’t past any “finish line.” There was no evidence he possessed nuclear weapons. The UN inspectors had so far found no sign of an Iraqi program to develop them. (Post-invasion reviews confirmed Saddam had not been running a nuclear weapons project.) But in those dreadful months before the invasion of Iraq, the proponents of for war could say anything—and get away with it. The day before we jousted on O’Reilly’s show, Kristol declared that . . .
These days, when we think of George W. Bush, we think mostly of what a horrible mess he made of the economy. But his even more tragic legacy is the loss of our moral authority, and the transformation of the United States of America from global champion of human rights into an outlaw nation.
History is likely to judge Bush most harshly for two things in particular: Launching a war against a country that had not attacked us, and approving the use of cruel and inhumane interrogation techniques.
And that’s why the two most essential lies — among the many — in his new memoir are that he had a legitimate reason to invade Iraq, and that he had a legitimate reason to torture detainees.
Neither is remotely true. But Bush must figure that if he keeps making the case for himself — particularly if it goes largely unrebutted by the traditional media, as it has thus far — then perhaps he can blunt history’s verdict.
It may even be working. Extrapolating from the response to the book, former vice president Dick Cheney on Tuesday told a crowd gathered for Bush’s presidential library groundbreaking in Dallas that “judgments are a little more measured than they were” and that “history is coming around.”
The ‘Decision’ to Go to War
In “Decision Points,” Bush describes the invasion of Iraq as something he came to support only reluctantly and after a long period of reflection. This is a flat-out lie. Anyone who paid any attention to the news at the time knew Bush was dead-set on war long before he sent in the troops in March 2003. And there is now an abundant amount of documentation, in the form of leaks, unclassified memos, witness interviews and other people’s memoirs to prove it.
The historical record clearly shows that Bush had long harbored a desire to strike out at Saddam Hussein, was trying to link Iraq to 9/11 within a day of the terrorist attacks, and finally found the excuse he was looking for in skewed intelligence about alleged Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.
The only real question is whether he actively deceived the American public and the world — or whether he was so passionate about selling the public on the war that he intentionally blinded himself to how brazenly Vice President Cheney had politicized and abused the intelligence process.
* * *
Bush repeatedly insists in his memoir that he tried to avoid war. He describes his preferred approach to Iraq as “coercive diplomacy” and tries to explain away the military planning, the troop movements and the constant saber-rattling as being intended primarily to scare Saddam into “disarming”. He even tries to retroactively justify one of his notoriously long vacations by suggesting that he needed the time to think. “I spent much of August 2002 in Crawford, a good place to reflect on the next decision I faced: how to move forward on the diplomatic track,” he writes.
Two former CIA officials spoke to Insider before the 20th anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq. They gave a firsthand account of the George W. Bush administration’s attempts to misrepresent intelligence and assert a connection between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda. In fact, the evidence assembled by the CIA suggested that no such connection existed.
One of these false connections was a supposed meeting that had occurred between Mohamed Atta, the chief 9/11 hijacker, and Iraqi intelligence agents in Prague. In December 2001, then-Vice President Dick Cheney went on “Meet the Press” and falsely claimed that the meeting was “pretty well confirmed.” A 2003 CIA cable states that “not one” official within the US government had evidence that the Prague meeting actually happened. Nevertheless, it became a key part of the administration’s public case for launching the Iraq invasion on March 20, 2003, a conflict that would cost an estimated 300,000 lives.
The officials’ combined years of service at CIA totals up to more than four decades. Their identities are known to Insider, and are referred to below by pseudonyms due to the sensitivity of their positions. Their discussion has been edited for brevity.
Bush, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Lewis Libby, and John McLaughlin did not immediately reply to requests for comment.
Alice: Nobody in Washington comes out and calls Bush a liar. Everybody is too polite. They use some other term for what he did. But he lied. I want to be clear about what I mean by that. He knew what he was saying was not true. He took judgements from the intelligence community that were very uncertain, judgements that we put out there with very clear caveats — “we believe Iraq is continuing its nuclear program, but we have a low degree of certainty, blah blah blah” — he would just come out and state those things as fact. He did this over and over again. Just like Cheney saying that Mohamed Atta met with Iraqi intelligence in Prague, as a fact. When the truth was, there was a great deal of doubt about it. It was our job at CIA to stand fast, to keep those ridiculous notions under control. And we tried. But there was only so much we could do. The White House wanted a justification for the invasion. The closest they came was this alleged, and apparently nonexistent, help that Iraq gave al-Qaeda [via Atta] in bringing about the attacks. So they tried to trace any kind of contacts between al-Qaeda and Iraq.
Bob: Meanwhile, our Iraqi analysts were saying, quite truthfully, that al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein’s regime were so far apart in their ideologies — Saddam was a pure secularist, al-Qaeda was a messianic vision of a caliphate and self-consciously Islamic, at least purportedly. That is like cats and dogs, you can’t mix those. Of course, Saddam knew al-Qaeda was in his country. He knew everything that happened in his country. As a matter of simply staying in power he had to know. So it’s perfectly natural that he would know who was al-Qaeda and what they were up to and that kind of thing. But this was not a working relationship. It was about surveillance.
Alice: Today, people say that Bush was looking to justify the invasion of Iraq. He wasn’t. What he was looking for is something different — selling points. The decision to invade had already been made, and there was not any intelligence that was going to change their opinion. So this was not an effort to justify the war. It was an effort to sell the war publicly. That’s an important distinction. The Bush administration was very explicit about their Iraq obsession almost immediately when they took power.
Bob: There was a group of analysts who were looking at the hijackers. Many of us were Russia analysts — for them, the Arab field was totally new. Pretty soon it became clear that the administration was focused on this alleged meeting between Atta and Iraqi intelligence in Prague. We couldn’t substantiate it. The hope was expressed pretty clearly to us, early on, that we could find something. The White House was obsessed with finding any evidence at all.
Alice: A lot of that pressure on the agency comes down through the briefers. They come back from their meetings with the president and other senior officials, give feedback. On a contentious issue you might go to a meeting upstairs on the seventh floor, with the briefers, where everybody is in the room. Once, I was writing a PDB [item for the President’s Daily Brief] on what going into Iraq would likely do to our terrorism cooperation with allies. The message I got back was, the president doesn’t want to hear about this. Iraq was a done deal.
Bob: They were all saying that. I mean, the US was moving our forces over to the Middle East big-time. You’re not going to waste all that fuel and transport power and then listen to Saddam. British intelligence realized it first. They essentially said, “My god, these people are going to invade. It doesn’t matter what we write. It doesn’t matter what their own intelligence analysts tell them about the consequences. They’re going to invade.”
Pundits get paid for the words they write even when those words are worthless — or even worse than worthless: not just wrong, but wrong in a way that cost lives. Parker Molloy presents a rogues’ gallery of mendacious pundits who were so wrong about the US invasion of Iraq but never acknowledged any error and continue to exude words and opinions to this day. Molloy writes in The Present Age:
I was 16 years old when the U.S. invaded Iraq — old enough to have a general sense of what was happening in the world, but too young and ignorant to actually do anything about it. As then-recent graduates of my high school enlisted in the military or got involved in political activism on college campuses, I became more interested in what had already been a lifelong obsession of mine: the news media. 1
I distinctly recall being astounded by the certainty of both reporters and pundits. Things like whether or not Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (or the capabilities to create them) were treated as foregone conclusions by many in the news, and opposition to the invasion was openly talked about as being “anti-American.”
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been reading through 2002-2003 newspapers and blog posts, and I wanted to take a look back at some of the pro-war takes of the time. The lack of TV clips has to do with my lack of media monitoring tech that I’d have otherwise checked out.
Where are they now? Mostly still churning out ignorant takes that will affect the lives of millions of people.
One would think that cheering on the disaster that was the Iraq invasion would be a career-destroying mistake. As it turns out, the opposite seems to be true. Anyway, let’s look back at some of the terrible pro-war opinions (this is nowhere near a comprehensive list, but feel free to drop additional examples in the comments and I’ll try to go back to add them if I can — stick to media voices, please, as we all know that many politicians on both sides of the aisle were publicly in support of the invasion).
Matthew Yglesias, writer at Slow Boring and co-host of the Bad Takes podcast
I think the administration has things exactly wrong in trying to solve the Israel situation as a precursor to moving on Iraq. The only way a negotiated settlement will be possible there is if Arafat feels that his position is weakening. The only way for that to happen is for the other Arab leaders to start becoming less supportive of him. The only way for that to happen is for our Arab “allies” to recognize that US-Saudi, US-Egyptian, US-Qatari, etc. relations are two way streets, not just an endless dialogue about what we need to do to prop up their regimes.
What better way to show that than to go do something they really, really don’t want us to do like, say, invade Iraq?
Plus, if we invade Iraq, we can create at least one reasonable regime in the area. If some “moderate” government get toppled (or just become outright hostile) as the worriers always worry, then we can just topple them again and set up some more supportive regimes.
Fareed Zakaria, CNN host and Washington Post columnist
The threat Iraq poses is not overwhelming–yet. Saddam’s chemical and biological arsenal is difficult to use. He has rarely cooperated with terrorists in the past, and there is no evidence that he has any links with Al Qaeda. But he is a potential threat, particularly if he manages to acquire nuclear weapons, which is certainly his goal. Pollack makes a persuasive case that given leaky sanctions, at some point the world will have to deal with Saddam, nuclear-armed and dangerous. Why not now, when he is weak?
Still, a pre-emptive invasion of a country gives one pause. But there is another massive benefit to it. Done right, an invasion would be the single best path to reform the Arab world. The roots of Islamic terror reside in the dysfunctional politics of the region, where failure and repression have produced fundamentalism and violence. For reform to spread, the Arab world needs a success story. It needs one major country that embraces modernity, maintains its identity and inspires the region, just as Japan did for East Asia.
Iraq could be that country. Before it became a playpen for Saddam Hussein’s gruesome ambitions, it was one of the most secular, advanced, literate and civilized countries in the Middle East. Alone in the Arab world, it has both water and oil–a developed river-valley civilization and natural-resource wealth. Were Saddam’s totalitarian regime to be replaced by a state that respected human rights, enforced the rule of law and created a market economy, it could begin to transform that world.
Although I dislike the modern tendency to compare every mad dictator to Hitler, in this narrow sense, the comparison to Saddam might be apt. Are you sure Saddam would not risk the destruction of his country, if he thought, for some reason, that he or his regime was in danger? Do you want to wait and find out? In my view, Saddam’s personality—which I would really like to see more carefully and more frequently dissected by people who know him and his regime—ought to be as much a part of the debate about whether to intervene as his putative nuclear arsenal. We really don’t know whether deterrence will work in the case of Iraq. Megalomaniacal tyrants do not always behave in the way rational people do, and to assume otherwise is folly.
Moving away from substance, back to public relations: If I have any real qualms about the potential war in Iraq, they are not so much about the central issue—should we fight or should we not (I think, with caveats, that we should be prepared to do so)—but about the peculiar way in which the administration has until now gone about making its case for the war. There have, it is true, been a few . . .
And yet, at the time, it was perfectly clear to me and to many that the case for an invasion had NOT been made, and the Bush Administration’s “evidence” was suspiciously thin and unsupported (for example, the aluminum tubes that Bush claimed were for atomic enrichment were — at the time — evaluated simply to be for making rockets). I was reading Knight-Ridder, which poked holes in the Administration’s arguments, and James Fallows wrote a feature article for the Atlantic that argued (soundly) against the invasion. But there were too many cheering on the (stupid, costly, and evil) war that killed so many hundreds of thousands of Iraqis (those the US was claiming to “save”). We were Russia; Iraq was Ukraine — as George W. Bush admitted in a slip of the tongue even as Joe Biden tries to erase the whole war from history (“no invasion of another country by 100,000 troops since WW II” except for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — and the US invasion of Iraq).
In a nation that considers itself peaceful and civilized, the case for military action should be overwhelmingly stronger than the case against. It must face, and survive, aggressive questioning.
When political leaders are too timid to push back, that responsibility falls entirely to the media.
But in 2002 and 2003, covering the run-up to war in Iraq, our nation’s top reporters and editors blew it badly. Their credulous, stenographic spreading of the administration’s deeply deceptive arguments made them de facto accomplices to a war undertaken on false pretenses.
I’ve written about this failure countless times, but – believe it or not — the best thing I’ve ever read about it was actually written by Scott McClellan, the former Bush White House press secretary. In an era of almost universally self-congratulatory memoirs from government officials, McClellan’s 2008 book, “What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception,” was full of confessions and accusations.
I first wrote about it for NiemanWatchdog.org, a since-shuttered website from the Nieman Foundation for Journalism, where I served as deputy editor.
As press secretary, McClellan was a robotic and iconic source of deception himself. But then he came clean. This is what he wrote in his book:
In the fall of 2002, Bush and his White house were engaging in a carefully-orchestrated campaign to shape and manipulate sources of public approval to our advantage. We’d done much the same on other issues–tax cuts and education–to great success. But war with Iraq was different. Beyond the irreversible human costs and substantial financial price, the decision to go to war and the way we went about selling it would ultimately lead to increased polarization and intensified partisan warfare…
And through it all, the media would serve as complicit enablers. Their primary focus would be on covering the campaign to sell the war, rather than aggressively questioning the rationale for war or pursuing the truth behind it… the media would neglect their watchdog role, focusing less on truth and accuracy and more on whether the campaign was succeeding. Was the president winning or losing the argument? How were Democrats responding? What were the electoral implications? What did the polls say? And the truth–about the actual nature of the threat posed by Saddam, the right way to confront it, and the possible risks of military conflict–would get largely left behind…
If anything, the national press corps was probably too deferential to the White House and to the administration in regard to the most important decision facing the nation during my years in Washington, the choice over whether to go to war in Iraq. The collapse of the administration’s rationales for war, which became apparent months after our invasion, should have never come as such a surprise. The public should have been made much more aware, before the fact, of the uncertainties, doubts, and caveats that underlay the intelligence about the regime of Saddam Hussein. The administration did little to convey those nuances to the people, the press should have picked up the slack but largely failed to do so because their focus was elsewhere–on covering the march to war, instead of the necessity of war.
In this case, the “liberal media” didn’t live up to its reputation. If it had, the country would have been better served.
It took members of the elite media a remarkably long time after the invasion and the resulting chaos to realize just how credulous and wrong they had been. In a February 2004 piece in the New York Review of Books, media observer Michael Massing then asked the obvious follow-up question: Why?
In recent months, US news organizations have rushed to expose the Bush administration’s pre-war failings on Iraq. “Iraq’s Arsenal Was Only on Paper,” declared a recent headline in The Washington Post. “Pressure Rises for Probe of Prewar-Intelligence,” said The Wall Street Journal. “So, What Went Wrong?” asked Time. In The New Yorker, Seymour Hersh described how the Pentagon set up its own intelligence unit, the Office of Special Plans, to sift for data to support the administration’s claims about Iraq. And on “Truth, War and Consequences,” a Frontline documentary that aired last October, a procession of intelligence analysts testified to the administration’s use of what one of them called “faith-based intelligence.”
Watching and reading all this, one is tempted to ask, where were you all before the war? Why didn’t we learn more about these deceptions and concealments in the months when the administration was pressing its case for regime change—when, in short, it might have made a difference?…
The nearer the war drew, and the more determined the administration seemed to wage it, the less editors were willing to ask tough questions.
How mainstream journalists suspended skepticism and scrutiny remains an issue of significance that the media has not satisfactorily explored. How the administration marketed the war to the American people has been well covered, but critical questions remain: How and why did the press buy it, and what does it say about the role of journalists in helping the public sort out fact from propaganda?
The heroes of Moyers’s story are editor John Walcott and reporters Jonathan Landay and Warren Strobel, then of the Knight Ridder Washington bureau. Their relentlessly skeptical reporting was nearly unique in Washington – and almost entirely ignored.
We asked him and other astute observers – among them New Yorker reporter Jane Mayer, author Tom Rosenstiel, and Massing – how to encourage the kind of courageous journalism practiced during that period by Knight Ridder.
In Mother Jones David Corn describes how President George W. Bush, Vice-President Cheney, the Bush cabinet, and complaisant pundits lied the US into a war that too hundreds of thousands of lives and got away with it, facing no accountability at all. He writes:
Before there was Donald Trump’s Big Lie, there was George W. Bush’s Big Lie.
Twenty years ago this week, Bush and his sidekick Vice President Dick Cheney launched a war against Iraq. They greased the way to this tragic conflagration with the false claims that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein possessed an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction that directly threatened the United States, and that he was in league with al Qaeda, the perpetrators of the horrific September 11 attack. Their invasion, which led to the deaths of over 4,000 American soldiers and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians—and the violence and instability in the region that resulted in ISIS—is now widely considered to have been a strategic blunder of immense proportions. Three months before he died in 2018, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz), a leading advocate of the war and the post-invasion troop surge, published his final book, The Restless Wave, which included a self-damning verdict: “The principal reason for invading Iraq, that Saddam [Hussein] had WMD, was wrong. The war, with its cost in lives and treasure and security, can’t be judged as anything other than a mistake, a very serious one, and I have to accept my share of the blame for it.”
Other one-time cheerleaders for the Iraq war have voiced regret and, occasionally, shame. In a 2018 book, Max Boot, an analyst who was once deeply ensconced in the world of neocon foreign policy, wrote, “I can finally acknowledge the obvious: It was all a big mistake. Saddam Hussein was heinous, but Iraq was better off under his tyrannical rule than the chaos that followed. I regret advocating the invasion and feel guilty about all the lives lost.” Three years earlier, New York Times columnist David Brooks, who had been a loud (and naive) beater of the war drums in 2003, opined, “[T]he decision to go to war was a clear misjudgment.” Last week, in the Atlantic, David Frum, the pro-war speechwriter for Bush who coined the “Axis of Evil” phrase that justified targeting Iraq (and North Korea and Iran), noted the decision to invade was “plainly” unwise and that the war was a “misadventure.”
Let’s give one or two hurrahs for those who can declare they got it wrong. Yes, this conclusion is now obvious, given that no significant WMDs were found in Iraq after American bombs and troops were unleashed on the country and that the invasion, contrary to the assurances of the Bush-Cheney administration and its cocksure neoconservative allies, did not trigger a flowering of democracy in the Middle East.
Yet it’s one thing to acknowledge a misstep in policy judgment; it’s quite another to admit to abetting a fraud. Many of the Iraq War regretters insist they pursued the war in good faith predicated on solid assumptions and propelled by genuine concern for US security. What they don’t confess to is being part of an effort to purposefully bamboozle the American public and whip up support for the war with scare-’emtactics and disinformation. Frum, who has become a pal of mine during the Trump era, provides a good example. In his essay, he challenges the Bush-lied-and-people-died view, noting, “I don’t believe any leaders of the time intended to be dishonest. They were shocked and dazed by 9/11. They deluded themselves.”
This self-delusion argument—we believed what we said—is often packaged with the contention that the Bush-Cheney crowd rendered their decisions on the basis of flawed intelligence that stated Iraq had WMDs, and, thus, these leaders did not intentionally misrepresent the threat.
But this is a phony narrative. The intelligence assessments that suggested Iraq possessed significant amounts of WMDs and was close to developing a nuclear weapon—produced under tremendous pressure from the Bush White House—were often disputed by experts within the intelligence community. (And later, but before the invasion, these findings were challenged by UN WMD inspectors who were scrutinizing Iraq.) Yet Bush, Cheney, and their top aides (Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Scooter Libby, and others) embraced these problematic evaluations, as well as assorted and unproven (or disproven) reports, in order to justify the case for war and—here’s the key point—oversold these findings to the public. Meanwhile, they issued overwrought statements about the supposed threat from Iraq that either were unsupported by the faulty intelligence or utterly baseless. In short, Bush and Cheney did lie, and those that marched with them toward war were part of a campaign deliberately fueled with falsehoods. (At one point, Bush even discussed with British Prime Minister Tony Blair concocting a phony provocation that could be used to start the war.)
In our 2006 book, Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War, Michael Isikoff and I chronicled numerous instances when Bush and his lieutenants mischaracterized the WMD threat and the purported (but largely nonexistent) tie between Saddam and al Qaeda. Let’s start with . . .
Twenty years ago, the George W. Bush administration invaded Iraq to topple Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and eliminate the weapons of mass destruction (WMD) officials said he had. Getting the American public to support a war against a country that had not attacked the United States required the administration to tell a convincing story of why the war was necessary. For that, it needed the press.
I was Knight Ridder’s Washington, D.C., bureau chief at the time, and among other duties handled our national security coverage. This gave me a front-row seat to Washington’s march to war and the media’s role in it. As the Bush administration began making its case for invading Iraq, too many Washington journalists, caught up in the patriotic fervor after 9/11, let the government’s story go unchallenged. At Knight Ridder’s Washington bureau, we started asking questions and publishing stories that challenged the Bush administration’s claims that Iraq had an active WMD program and ties to al Qaeda. One thing that set Knight Ridder’s coverage apart was our sourcing—forgoing senior officials in Washington for experts and scientists inside and outside the Beltway and more junior staffers and military officers much closer to the relevant intelligence.
Such an approach also would have helped U.S. policymakers. The failed wars in Afghanistan and Iraq show what happens when top officials ignore their subordinates or assemble their own teams of analysts to confirm their biases—and when journalists become stenographers for them. Unfortunately, 20 years on, there is little evidence that the Washington press corps has learned this lesson. If anything, today’s bleak media environment has only made it harder to get the story right.
IS THIS TRUE?
On the morning of September 11, 2001, as a pillar of smoke rose from the Pentagon across the Potomac, Knight Ridder’s Washington bureau set out, like our competitors, to confirm what we all suspected—that al Qaeda was behind the attacks. We were an experienced group of journalists, with years spent developing sources in the intelligence community and the military. I had reported and edited for Newsweek, The Wall Street Journal, and U.S. News and World Report.
Knight Ridder also had two superb national security reporters in Jonathan Landay and Warren Strobel, who later were reinforced by Joe Galloway, arguably the greatest war correspondent of the Vietnam era. Other news organizations also had formidable talent, along with larger staffs, bigger budgets, better reputations, and broader reach. Yet in the early days after 9/11, they didn’t seem to be noticing the red flags that the Knight Ridder team already had started seeing.
The first flag appeared just days after the attacks, when Strobel came back to the office and reported that Bush administration officials had been discussing not only the al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and his Taliban hosts in Afghanistan, but also Iraq. That made little sense. Saddam’s history of supporting terrorism was less compelling than that of the dictators Muammar al-Qaddafi of Libya or Hafez al-Assad of Syria, not to mention Iran’s ayatollahs. Saddam had given Abu Nidal, one of the most notorious Palestinian terrorists, limited support—but had expelled him in 1983. Abu Nidal returned to Iraq in 2002, only to die under mysterious circumstances. Some U.S. intelligence officials thought Saddam ordered his death in an attempt to deprive the United States of one casus belli.
Although some senior administration officials began trying to link Saddam to al Qaeda, their more knowledgeable subordinates in the intelligence community and the State Department were questioning why bin Laden, a Salafi extremist, would link arms with Saddam, a secular ruler whose likely heirs were his two booze-swilling, skirt-chasing sons, Uday and Qusay.
In the days and weeks after the attacks, there were early warnings that something was amiss. They were easy to spot if you were looking for them, but few people in the upper levels of the Bush administration or at other major news organizations, riding the patriotic wave sweeping the country, were looking.
We were. On September 22, 11 days after the attacks, Strobel reported that some administration officials and outside experts were skeptical that Iraq had played any role in them. On October 11, he reported that nevertheless, Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy U.S. secretary of defense, had dispatched a former CIA director, James Woolsey, to Wales to search for evidence that Saddam was linked to an earlier attack on the World Trade Center. A senior U.S. official told Strobel that Wolfowitz and others at the Pentagon were “seized” with the idea that Iraq was behind the attacks.
That same month, Washington reporters covering the story began receiving . . .
Two decades ago, I sabotaged my career at The New York Times. It was a conscious choice. I had spent seven years in the Middle East, four of them as the Middle East Bureau Chief. I was an Arabic speaker. I believed, like nearly all Arabists, including most of those in the State Department and the CIA, that a “preemptive” war against Iraq would be the most costly strategic blunder in American history. It would also constitute what the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg called the “supreme international crime.” While Arabists in official circles were muzzled, I was not. I was invited by them to speak at The State Department, The United States Military Academy at West Point and to senior Marine Corps officers scheduled to be deployed to Kuwait to prepare for the invasion.
Mine was not a popular view nor one a reporter, rather than an opinion columnist, was permitted to express publicly according to the rules laid down by the newspaper. But I had experience that gave me credibility and a platform. I had reported extensively from Iraq. I had covered numerous armed conflicts, including the first Gulf War and the Shi’ite uprising in southern Iraq where I was taken prisoner by The Iraqi Republican Guard. I easily dismantled the lunacy and lies used to promote the war, especially as I had reported on the destruction of Iraq’s chemical weapons stockpiles and facilities by the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) inspection teams. I had detailed knowledge of how degraded the Iraqi military had become under U.S. sanctions. Besides, even if Iraq did possess “weapons of mass destruction” that would not have been a legal justification for war.
The death threats towards me exploded when my stance became public in numerous interviews and talks I gave across the country. They were either mailed in by anonymous writers or expressed by irate callers who would daily fill up the message bank on my phone with rage-filled tirades. Right-wing talk shows, including Fox News, pilloried me, especially after I was heckled and booed off a commencement stage at Rockford College for denouncing the war. The Wall Street Journal wrote an editorial attacking me. Bomb threats were called into venues where I was scheduled to speak. I became a pariah in the newsroom. Reporters and editors I had known for years would lower their heads as I passed, fearful of any career-killing contagion. I was issued a written reprimand by The New York Times to cease speaking publicly against the war. I refused. My tenure was over.
What is disturbing is not the cost to me personally. I was aware of the potential consequences. What is disturbing is that the architects of these debacles have never been held accountable and remain ensconced in power. They continue to promote permanent war, including the ongoing proxy war in Ukraine against Russia, as well as a future war against China.
The politicians who lied to us — George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden to name but a few — extinguished millions of lives, including thousands of American lives, and left Iraq along with Afghanistan, Syria, Somalia, Libya and Yemen in chaos. They exaggerated or fabricated conclusions from intelligence reports to mislead the public. The big lie is taken from the playbook of totalitarian regimes.
Many of these same pundits are pushing further escalation of the war in Ukraine, although most know as little about Ukraine or NATO’s provocative and unnecessaryexpansion to the borders of Russia as they did about Iraq.
“I told myself and others that Ukraine is the most important story of our time, that everything we should care about is on the line there,” George Packer writes in The Atlantic magazine. “I believed it then, and I believe it now, but . . .
Two decades ago, the United States invaded Iraq, sending 130,000 US troops into a sovereign country to overthrow its government. Joe Biden, then chairman of the Senate foreign relations committee, voted to authorize the war, a decision he came to regret.
Today another large, world-shaking invasion is under way. Biden, now the US president, recently traveled to Warsaw to rally international support for Ukraine’s fight to repel Russian aggression. After delivering his remarks, Biden declared: “The idea that over 100,000 forces would invade another country – since world war II, nothing like that has happened.”
The president spoke these words on 22 February, within a month of the 20th anniversary of the US military’s opening strike on Baghdad. The White House did not attempt to correct Biden’s statement. Reporters do not appear to have asked about it. The country’s leading newspapers, the New York Times and Washington Post, ran stories that quoted Biden’s line. Neither of them questioned its veracity or noted its hypocrisy.
Did the Iraq war even happen?
While Washington forgets, much more of the world remembers. The flagrant illegality of bypassing the United Nations: this happened. The attempt to legitimize “pre-emption” (really prevention, a warrant to invade countries that have no plans to attack anyone): this mattered, including by handing the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, a pretext he has used. Worst of all was the destruction of the Iraqi state, causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and nearly 4,600 US service members, and radiating instability and terrorism across the region.
The Iraq war wasn’t the only law- or country-breaking military intervention launched by the US and its allies in recent decades. Kosovo, Afghanistan and Libya form a tragic pattern. But the Iraq war was the largest, loudest and proudest of America’s violent debacles, the most unwarranted, and the least possible to ignore. Or so it would seem. Biden’s statement is only the latest in a string of attempts by US leaders to forget the war and move on.
Barack Obama, who came into the White House vowing to end the “mindset” that brought America into Iraq, decided that ending the war was good enough. “Now, it’s time to turn the page,” he said upon ordering the withdrawal of US forces from the country in 2011. Three years later, he sent troops back to Iraq to fight the Islamic State, which had risen out of the chaos of the invasion and civil war. It fell to Donald Trump to harness public outrage over not only the war but also the refusal of elites to hold themselves accountable and make policy changes commensurate with the scale of the disaster.
Tempting though it is to look forward, not backward, the two are not mutually exclusive. And it might not be possible to reach a better future without understanding and appreciating why past attempts failed.
Ukrainians are now paying part of the price for western misdeeds. Russia’s invasion was an act of blatant aggression. Moscow violated the UN charter and seeks to annex territory as part of an explicitly imperial project (in this respect unlike America’s war in Iraq). Few people outside Russia have genuine enthusiasm for Putin’s effort. Yet, much of the world sees the conflict as a proxy war between Russia and the west rather than a fight for sovereignty and freedom.
According to the Economist Intelligence Unit, approximately 58% of . . .
This article by Spencer Ackerman in The Nation bears a pointed subheading: “You don’t have to reflect on a war if that war doesn’t end, let alone pay reparations for your crimes.”
eave it to George W. Bush to misspeak his way to the truth about the Iraq War that he launched 20 years ago. Last May, in a speech addressing Ukraine, he lambasted Vladimir Putin’s “wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq.”
Bush, stammering, quickly corrected himself but then conceded the point, murmuring, “And Iraq, too. Anyway…” His audience laughed awkwardly, allowing the former commander in chief, then 75, to deflect the significance of the moment with a senility joke.
It was indicative of how deeply the United States has avoided reckoning with the barbarism of invading, occupying, and privatizing Iraq, a reckoning that might have cast Putin’s war in an uncomfortably familiar light. Instead, Iraq demonstrates an innovation in American imperial amnesia: You don’t have to consider the lessons of a war if that war doesn’t end—let alone pay reparations for those you killed, tortured, and displaced.
There are all manner of differences between Ukraine and Iraq, but little difference in the imperial ambitions of their invaders. Both the US and Russia resorted to violence to bring a resource-rich country within their sphere of influence, and both underestimated the will and capacity of locals to resist. Whether phantom weapons of mass destruction or phantom Nazi regimes, the invading power resorted to paranoid pretexts to justify a war of aggression in unambiguous violation of the United Nations Charter. But where Bush claimed breaching the charter would strengthen the international order, Putin, unburdened by global hegemony and its necessary posture of lawfulness, didn’t bother with such ridiculous assertions.
Two other key differences concern Russia’s inability to take Kyiv and the support Ukraine enjoys from the NATO juggernaut. But both Putin and Bush found their militaries placed within a crucible while hawkish voices back in the metropole, seized with fears of humiliation, demanded escalation. Little wonder Bush found himself unable to remember which war he was discussing.
Bush’s escalation, the 2007–8 troop surge, never produced the promised political reconciliation among Iraqis. Instead, it entrenched Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who persecuted the disempowered Iraqi Sunnis. But because it substantially reduced US troop deaths, the surge produced something subtler: a narrative that the Iraq War, after five agonizing years, had been functionally resolved—although to stay resolved, US troops, paradoxically, needed to remain in Iraq. It was a useful contradiction, forestalling not just an unambiguous defeat but the prospects for reconsidering what Barack Obama once called “the mindset that got us into war in the first place.” Now the only lessons of the war would be operational. And so Obama exported the surge to Afghanistan and pursued a new war in Libya, all while troops remained in Iraq.
In 2011, a fractious Iraqi parliament declined to extend legal protections to the remaining US forces, prompting Obama to recall the troops. Many in US national security circles decried the withdrawal as a failure of Obama’s diplomacy rather than as a verdict on the viability of a US presence from Iraqi leaders willing to work with Washington. When the Islamic State conquered Mosul in 2014, the blame in Washington went to the withdrawal, not the war that created ISIS’s parent entity, Al Qaeda in Iraq. . .
The US invasion of Iraq was, like the Russian invasion of Ukraine, a war of choice, justified by falsehoods and pretense. And the US press — like the Russian press — for the most part cooperated. Dan Froomkin wrote at Nieman Watchdog in 2008:
The blistering critique of an overly credulous press corps by former White House press secretary Scott McClellan in his new book has reignited a debate over the performance of mainstream journalists during the run-up to war in Iraq. But it’s really not a debate at all.
Here’s what McClellan wrote, in excerpts from his new book:
In the fall of 2002, Bush and his White house were engaging in a carefully-orchestrated campaign to shape and manipulate sources of public approval to our advantage. We’d done much the same on other issues–tax cuts and education–to great success. But war with Iraq was different. Beyond the irreversible human costs and substantial financial price, the decision to go to war and the way we went about selling it would ultimately lead to increased polarization and intensified partisan warfare…
And through it all, the media would serve as complicit enablers. Their primary focus would be on covering the campaign to sell the war, rather than aggressively questioning the rationale for war or pursuing the truth behind it… the media would neglect their watchdog role, focusing less on truth and accuracy and more on whether the campaign was succeeding. Was the president winning or losing the argument? How were Democrats responding? What were the electoral implications? What did the polls say? And the truth–about the actual nature of the threat posed by Saddam, the right way to confront it, and the possible risks of military conflict–would get largely left behind…
If anything, the national press corps was probably too deferential to the White House and to the administration in regard to the most important decision facing the nation during my years in Washington, the choice over whether to go to war in Iraq. The collapse of the administration’s rationales for war, which became apparent months after our invasion, should have never come as such a surprise. The public should have been made much more aware, before the fact, of the uncertainties, doubts, and caveats that underlay the intelligence about the regime of Saddam hussein. The administration did little to convey those nuances to the people, the press should have picked up the slack but largely failed to do so because their focus was elsewhere–on covering the march to war, instead of the necessity of war.
In this case, the “liberal media” didn’t live up to its reputation. If it had, the country would have been better served.
That’s actually only one part of McClellan’s media critique. There’s more in these excerpts:
The permanent campaign … ensnares the media, who become complicit enablers of its polarizing effects. They emphasize conflict, controversy and negativity, focusing not on the real-world impact of policies and their larger, underlying truths but on the horse race aspects of politics – who’s winning, who’s losing, and why…
The press amplifies the talking points of one or both parties in its coverage, thereby spreading distortions, half-truths, and occasionally outright lies in an effort to seize the limelight and have something or someone to pick on. And by overemphasizing conflict and controversy and by reducing complex and important issues to convenient, black-and-white story lines and seven-second sound bites the media exacerbate the problem, thereby making it incredibly hard even for well-intentioned leaders to clarify and correct the misunderstandings and oversimplifications that dominate the political conversation. Finally, it becomes much more difficult for the general public to decipher the more important truths amid all the conflict, controversy and negativity. For some partisans, that is fine because they believe they can maneuver better in such a highly politicized environment to accomplish their objectives. But the destructive potential of such excessively partisan warfare would later crystallize my thinking.
This second part of McClellan’s critique is at least somewhat controversial. The first part, by now, certainly shouldn’t be. A flurry of self-examinations by the media have all reached pretty much the same conclusion McClellan did.
Yet because many of the cable-TV pundits talking about McClellan’s book were themselves members of the White House press corps during the time in question, some of them have been responding with unseemly defensiveness.
Consider this exchange on MSNBC’s Hardball on Wednesday evening, when host Chris Matthews asked his colleague David Gregory, who previously covered the White House for NBC, and Mike Allen, a Politico reporter who previously covered the White House for The Washington Post, to respond to McClellan’s critique:
Pat Tillman was shot to death by US troops in a friendly-fire incident, a fact that the military worked hard to conceal — a prime component of the military conception of “honor” being to lie immediately and over time. (That is not the common understanding of “honor” and honorable behavior, but the military, which prides itself on its “honor” consistently lies about its errors and shortcomings.)
Hunter DeRensis reports in Responsible Statecraft:
On Super Bowl Sunday, over 113 million people tuned in live to watch the Philadelphia Eagles face off against the Kansas City Chiefs on the gridiron. When the third most watched television event of all time ended, those millions took to social media to complain about the anticlimactic holding penalty that concluded the game.
But others went to social media to object to the opening of the Super Bowl — the invocation of the late Pat Tillman.
Before kickoff, the National Football League aired a short video eulogizing Tillman, the Arizona Cardinals safety who left his burgeoning sports career to join the U.S. Army Rangers following the September 11, 2001 attacks.
“[He] ultimately lost his life in the line of duty,” narrates actor Kevin Costner, before shifting the focus of the video to the Pat Tillman Foundation scholars who participated in the opening coin toss.
For viewers who knew the full story of Pat Tillman, this was a grievous whitewashing.
First deployed to Iraq during the first days of the invasion, Tillman was then sent to Afghanistan where on April 22, 2004 he was tragically killed in a friendly-fire incident. But that’s not what the U.S. military told the public (or his family).
Within days, it became apparent this was a case of accidental fratricide. But, concerned about a public relations backlash following the inadvertent death of such a high-profile recruit, the chain of command manufactured a narrative where Pat Tillman was killed heroically in battle. They forged witness testimony, attempted to pass off a fake autopsy report, and even awarded Tillman a posthumous Silver Star for his “gallantry” against “enemy fire.” His uniform, body armor, and diary were destroyed contrary to all regulations.
The cover-up went at least as high as Lieutenant General Philip Kensinger, then-Chief of the Army Special Operations Command. There’s open debate about when U.S. Central Command head John Abizaid learned the truth and what responsibility he shared.
For Pat’s family, it was over a month after his media-engrossed funeral services when they learned the truth. As father Patrick Tillman Sr. told The Washington Post in May 2005: “After it happened, all the people in positions of authority went out of their way to script this. They purposely interfered with the investigation, they covered it up. I think they thought they could control it, and they realized that their recruiting efforts were going to go to hell in a handbasket if the truth about his death got out. They blew up their poster boy.”
Men more concerned with saving face for a failing war than common decency sullied Pat Tillman’s legacy, and contorted a narrative around him he never asked for. By all accounts, Pat was kind, humble, intelligent, courageous, and well-intentioned. According to his brother and other members of his unit, Pat had conflicting feelings about the utility of the Global War on Terror, and referred to the invasion of Iraq as illegal.
Materially, the NFL’s video tribute is correct; Pat Tillman was killed in the line of duty, and deserves as much respect as if he had died on the battlefield. Accidents, equipment malfunctions, negligence, and yes, even friendly fire, are risks a soldier incurs when they sign up.
But what instinctually offended viewers on Sunday was how a truncated version of Tillman’s death feeds a false narrative about what he was doing there and how our government operates.
We’re a month away from the 20-year anniversary of the invasion of Iraq that Pat Tillman played an unhappy part in. This war occurred because the White House conceived of a preemptive attack justified around fabricated intelligence that violated both domestic and international law. . .
ProPublica has a striking story of the CIA’s night raids in Afghanistan, which routinely murdered civilians. The report is by Lynzy Billing with a video by Mauricio Rodríguez Pons. The written report begins:
CHAPTER 1
Prologue
MARCH 2019 • RODAT DISTRICT, NANGARHAR PROVINCE
On a December night in 2018, Mahzala was jolted awake by a shuddering wave of noise that rattled her family’s small mud house. A trio of helicopters, so unfamiliar that she had no word for them, rapidly descended, kicking up clouds of dust that shimmered in their blinding lights. Men wearing desert camouflage and black masks flooded into the house, corralling her two sons and forcing them out the door.
Mahzala watched as the gunmen questioned Safiullah, 28, and 20-year-old Sabir, before roughly pinning them against a courtyard wall. Then, ignoring their frantic protests of innocence, the masked men put guns to the back of her sons’ heads. One shot. Two. Then a third. Her youngest, “the quiet, gentle one,” was still alive after the first bullet, Mahzala told me, so they shot him again.
Her story finished, Mahzala stared at me intently as if I could somehow explain the loss of her only family. We were in the dim confines of her home, a sliver of light leaking in from the lone window above her. She rubbed at the corner of her eyes; her forehead creased by a pulsing vein. The voices of her sons used to fill their home, she told me. She had no photos of them. No money. And there was no one who would tell her, a widow in her 50s, why these men dropped out of the sky and killed her family or acknowledge what she insisted was a terrible mistake.
But now there was me. I had ended up in Rodat in the heart of Nangarhar province while researching my own family’s story of loss in this desolate rural region in eastern Afghanistan.
Mahzala’s neighbors had pressed me to meet her; I was a foreigner, I must be able to help. Three months had passed since the raid. The neighbors believed it was the work of the feared Zero Units — squadrons of U.S.-trained Afghan special forces soldiers. Two more homes in the area were targeted that night, they said, though no one else was killed. Everyone acknowledged the Taliban had been in the area before; they were everywhere in Nangarhar province. But Mahzala’s sons? They were just farmers, the neighbors told me.
That trip was the first time I’d heard of the secretive units, which I’d soon learn were funded, trained and armed by the CIA to go after targets believed to be a threat to the United States. There was something else: The Afghan soldiers weren’t alone on the raids; U.S. special operations forces soldiers working with the CIA often joined them. It was a “classified” war, I’d later discover, with the lines of accountability so obscured that no one had to answer publicly for operations that went wrong.
Back in Kabul, I tried to continue my personal hunt, but Mahzala’s story had changed the trajectory of my journey. Her words and her face, with its deep-set wrinkles that mirrored the unforgiving landscape, lingered in my thoughts. Who were these soldiers? And what were they doing in remote farming villages in Afghanistan executing young men under the cover of night? Did anyone know why they were being killed?
As a journalist, I knew that Afghanistan’s story was most often told by outsiders, by reporters with little cause to explore barren corners like Rodat. Far from the world’s eyes, this story felt like it was being buried in real time. It was clear no one would be coming to question what happened that night or to relieve Mahzala’s torment.
Mahzala’s sons’ lives, it seemed, were being shrugged away, without acknowledgement or investigation, disappearing into the United States’ long war in Afghanistan. I began to focus on a basic question: How many more Mahzalas were there?
As I write this today, America’s war in Afghanistan is already being consigned to history, pushed from the world’s consciousness by humanity’s latest round of inhumanity. But there are lessons to be learned from the West’s failures in Afghanistan. Other reporters, notably at The New York Times, have documented the cover-up of casualties from aerial bombardment and the drone war in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan. This story is a deep look inside what happened after America embraced the strategy of night raids — quick, brutal operations that went wrong far more often than the U.S. has acknowledged.
As one U.S. Army Ranger ruefully told me after the Taliban’s triumph last year: “You go on night raids, make more enemies, then you gotta go on more night raids for the more enemies you now have to kill.”
I earlier blogged about the counterproductive incompetence manifested by DHS. That turns out to be the tip of the iceberg. Amanda Chicago Lewis reports in The Verge:
Just a week after 9/11, while the country was still reeling, a series of letters began arriving at news organizations and Senate offices. The envelopes were innocuous, indistinguishable from other mail, but inside was a white powder, a rare bacteria that can be fatal if inhaled — anthrax. Five people died, and 17 were sickened in one of the most deadly biological attacks in US history. Yet anthrax had the potential to inflict far more harm: if the spores had been released from a rooftop in downtown Washington, DC, it might have infected hundreds of thousands of people. One letter included the message, “DEATH TO AMERICA,” perhaps indicating more to come. But how could we plan for a silent, odorless killer?
Responding to the universe of new threats facing the country soon became an all-out scramble, consuming the public and the federal government’s attention for several years. The man that President George W. Bush chose to manage America’s preparation for a chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear incident was a renowned physicist and weapons expert named Penrose “Parney” Albright.
Albright is exactly the kind of guy you’d want in charge of protecting the country from a devastating attack. Known for his candor and ingenuity, he is one of those people with a talent for both hard science and political science. He had excelled at places like the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) because he knew how to bring big, complex projects across the finish line.
So as the Bush administration finalized its plans for a new Department of Homeland Security, ultimately bestowing him the title of assistant secretary for science and technology, Albright was alarmed to find that the people around him were not as prepared.
“There was almost nobody in the senior leadership at the Department of Homeland Security who really understood the details of what it took to run a cabinet agency,” he told me. When DHS officially began operations on March 1st, 2003, everything was so haphazard that one undersecretary worked out of a former cleaning closet with a shower curtain for a door. There was no human resources professional to help Albright hire people and no bank account for his budget. When he tried to type out an email, an orange bar would pop up, freezing everything for three to four minutes; DHS employees soon took to calling this the “orange screen of death.”
The dysfunction might have been funny, in a Dilbert-meets-Veep way, if the stakes weren’t so high. Albright was overseeing a project called BioWatch, a system intended to detect traces of biological and chemical weapons of mass destruction. Bush described BioWatch in his 2003 State of the Union as “the nation’s first early warning network of sensors,” which would initiate processes to mobilize hospitals, alert the public, and deploy supplies from the national stockpile.
There was only one problem: BioWatch never functioned as intended. The devices were unreliable, causing numerous false positives. “It was really only capable of detecting large-scale attacks,” Albright explained, because of “how big a plume would have to be” for the sensors to pick it up. And the system was prohibitively slow: every 24 hours, someone had to retrieve a filter and then send it to a laboratory for testing, which might then take another 24 hours to discover a pathogen.
“The time required after BioWatch might pick up evidence of a toxin and the time required to get it to somebody who might be able to reach a conclusion there might be a terrorist attack — my God, by that time, a lot of people would have gotten sick or died,” former Senator Joe Lieberman told me.
Albright did his best to make it work. He ramped up . . .
. . . These days, the mess at the Department of Homeland Security is one of the only things that all of Washington can agree on. Disliked by both Democrats and Republicans, DHS has metastasized into the worst version of what we imagine when we think of bureaucracy: rigid, ineffective, wasteful, chaotic, cruel. Since its inception, DHS has been on the Government Accountability Office’s “High Risk List,” which highlights programs vulnerable to “fraud, abuse, and mismanagement.” It consistently has the lowest morale of any federal agency with more than a thousand employees, according to the Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey.
“It’s like an agency no one wanted and everyone is stuck with,” said Juliette Kayyem, assistant secretary for intergovernmental affairs at DHS from 2009–2010.
“Even for someone who is kind of cynical, it was shocking,” said John Roth, the DHS inspector general from 2014–2017. “You do a little scratching, and there was just rot underneath.”
We see the downstream effects of the Kafkaesque ineptitude at DHS every day, even if we don’t recognize the connection between headlines about alleged sexual abuse at migrant detention centers, billions of dollars disappearing into fraudulent disaster aid, and the erasure of text messages likely detailing an attempted coup. DHS functions as a loose confederation of subagencies, meaning that the absurdity of security procedures at airports is attributed to the Transportation Security Administration, not to DHS, and the anemic response to Hurricane Katrina was blamed on the Federal Emergency Management Agency, not its parent organization. Yet the tensions between these satellite operations and the cabinet secretary’s headquarters in Washington, DC, are crucial to understanding DHS.
“I would call it unwieldy,” said Kevin McAleenan, who served as acting secretary of homeland security in 2019 after working at the department since it was founded. McAleenan recalled moments when he saw people at headquarters “trying to direct activities they didn’t understand very well and mission sets they weren’t familiar with and legal frameworks they hadn’t studied, and I thought, ‘This isn’t going to work. We’re not going to overcome the problem of expertise or, in this case, the lack of expertise.’”
Some consider the Department of Homeland Security successful because there has not been another major terrorist attack in the United States since 9/11. And it’s true that only about a hundred people have died on US soil from Islamic terrorism in the past two decades. But domestic terrorism and mass shootings are on the rise, with Americans now justifiably afraid of malls, parades, supermarkets, churches, and elementary schools. Militias plot against democracy. A deadly virus has killed over a million Americans. Foreign governments infiltrate social media and snatch our data. Storms and wildfires grow bigger and more frequent every year. Tens of thousands of migrants linger in refugee camps at the southern border. Those that make it across face what one high-level whistleblower called “a system that involves widespread abuse of human beings.”
ON WEDNESDAY, AS the eyes of the U.S. public were focused on Tuesday’s midterm election results, a U.S. government panel quietly released a newly declassified summary of an Oval Office joint interview conducted with President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney about the September 11 attacks. The interview, carried out by members of the 9/11 Commission, was not recorded and the summary document constitutes the only known official record of the meeting. The meeting took place on April 29, 2004.
“The President and Vice President were seated in chairs in front of the fireplace. The President’s demeanor throughout was relaxed. He answered questions without notes,” according to the document drafted by the commission’s Executive Director Philip Zelikow. “The portrait of Washington was over the fireplace, which was flanked by busts of Lincoln and Churchill. Paintings of southwestern landscapes are on the wall. It was a beautiful spring day.” The document, whose declassification was first reported by the Wall Street Journal, is not an official transcript but is described as “a memorandum for the record.” It was authorized for release by the Interagency Security Classification Appeals Panel.
One of the most striking aspects of the declassified document is the apparent absence of even a glimmer of self-awareness by Bush about the significance of the death and destruction he was unleashing with his global war. The interview took place just as a massive insurgency was erupting in Iraq against a U.S. occupation that would kill thousands of U.S. soldiers and tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians. While the document is a rough transcript and summary, Bush comes off as almost childishly simplistic in his insights and analysis. The lack of any sensitive information contained within the document should spur questions as to why it took more than 18 years to be made public.
The declassified document does not contain any groundbreaking revelations, but it does offer some new texture to the internal events immediately following the attacks. That morning, after the first plane had hit the World Trade Center, Bush was reading “The Pet Goat” with second grade students at Emma E. Booker Elementary School in Sarasota County, Florida. Bush told the commissioners that he had seen the first plane hit but thought it was an accident. “He recalled that he and others thought the building had been hit by a twin engine plane. He remembered thinking, what a terrible pilot.” Soon after the second plane hit the south tower of the World Trade Center at 9:03 a.m., chief of staff Andy Card approached Bush as he sat listening to the students reciting more passages from “The Pet Goat” and informed him that it appeared the U.S. was under attack.
The commissioners asked the commander-in-chief why he continued to sit in the classroom. “He was trying to absorb the news. He remembered a child, or someone, reading. He remembered watching the press pool and noticing them . . .
Clinton and Obama gave away the store to monopolies, and we are suffering the consequences of their lack of action. Biden seems so far much more aggressive, but there is much ground that must be regained — and of course, Republicans will defend monopolies strongly and attempt to block and undercut effective government action against monopolies. Thus neither the George W. Bush administration nor the Trump administration took any action against monopolies
I wonder what it would be like if the US government tried — actually made an attempt — to stop lying. I imagine we’ll never know. Lies and the lying liars who tell them seem to be deeply embedded within the political system. In the Intercept Jon Schwarz takes a brief look at two of the most brazen of the liars and calls out their lies. He writes:
AT THE BEGINNING of a new “MasterClass” on diplomacy with Condoleezza Rice and the late Madeleine Albright, Rice explains that “some people have even said, ‘The diplomat lies for their country.’”
Soon afterward, Albright makes similar remarks: “There are some incredible definitions of diplomacy, which is, it gives you the capability to go and lie for your country.”
If this is in fact what diplomacy is all about — and presumably Rice and Albright would be in a position to know — this MasterClass shows that they are both incredibly committed diplomats.
Albright, who died earlier this year, was America’s first female secretary of state, serving during the Bill Clinton administration. Rice was the second, during the administration of George W. Bush.
It’s not all lies, of course. The entire Rice/Albright video lasts almost 3.5 hours, the same length as the extended DVD version of “The Fellowship of the Ring.” Most of the time, the two emit a quiet murmur of mind-obliterating platitudes, accompanied by what seems to be the music from C-SPAN and stock footage of a chessboard. For instance, Albright tells us that “Americans didn’t recognize well enough how fragile democracy was, but at the same time how resilient democracy was,” which is somehow both banal and incomprehensible.
In fact, the lies are just as boring as the parts that are true. You might assume Rice and Albright would mislead viewers in cunning, complex ways that would require extensive effort to refute. Instead, they both just straightforwardly deny reality.
All in all, watching the languorous, dull-but-accurate parts is like being forced to eat eight gallons of stale banana pudding. Then the lies are like a batch of botulism mixed in. By the end, you will definitely feel ill, but you can only ascribe it to the entire experience, rather than being able to narrow it down to one specific cause.
Explicating all of Rice and Albright’s deceptions would require an article that would take longer to read than the running time of the MasterClass itself. So let’s just hit the highlights.
The cruelest segment of the video, as measured by the chasm between the promised content and what’s actually delivered, is called “Learning From Failed Decisions.” The text below this title claims that Rice will share “her mistakes on 9/11 and Iraq.”
However, it turns out the only mistake Rice made was believing her incompetent underlings. “I was in two situations,” she begins, “where the intelligence turned out in one case to be lacking, and in another case to be wrong.”
The first, of course, is the 9/11 attacks. On September 11, 2001, Rice was Bush’s national security adviser — i.e., arguably the person most responsible in the U.S. government for addressing any threats of terrorism. Here’s her explanation for how she and her colleagues missed what was going on:
All that the intelligence reports were saying … was, something big is going to happen. “There will be a wedding,” which was terrorist code for some kind of attack. But all of the intelligence actually pointed to something happening outside of the country.
When I heard Rice say this, my brain seized up and ground to a confused halt. My thought process went something like:
I — Wha HOW?!?!?!? where am i. have i slipped into an alternate universe where up is down & the sky is green & giraffes sing hit duets with taylor swift?
This was because — although it may be fading from living memory — the most famous moment of Condoleezza Rice’s life occurred in 2004, when she acknowledged in front of the 9/11 Commission that the entire U.S. intelligence apparatus warned Bush that an Al Qaeda attack might be imminent inside America. Here, watch it for yourself:
That’s right: The presidential daily brief delivered to Bush on August 6, 2001, one month before the 9/11 attacks, was headlined “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” You can read the whole thing here. The very first sentence states, “Bin Laden since 1997 has wanted to conduct terrorist attacks in the U.S.” Later, the brief warns that “FBI information … indicates patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings.”
So here, Rice put essentially no effort into her deceit. But what she says next is somehow even worse:
We had a pretty bright wall between what the FBI could do and what the CIA could do. They didn’t talk to each other. So just to give an example — probably by now everybody knows the case of [Zacarias] Moussaoui, who was the flight student in Arizona who only wanted to learn to fly one way. That might have been a signal. He was known to the FBI. He was not known to the CIA.
Almost everything about this is inaccurate. Rice is correct that Moussaoui was a member of Al Qaeda who came to the U.S. and attended flight school, where he did behave in peculiar ways. However, he did not go to flight school in Arizona, as Rice says; it was in Oklahoma and Minnesota. It’s not the case that he “only wanted to fly one way.” (According a report by the Justice Department inspector general, “Media reports later incorrectly reported that Moussaoui had stated that he did not want to learn to take off or land a plane.”)
Most importantly, whatever wall prevented some information from passing between the FBI and the CIA, it did not stop Moussaoui from being caught. His . . .
Mission accomplished? Not quite. In this May 2003 photo, George W. Bush declares the end of major combat in Iraq as he speaks aboard an aircraft carrier off the California coast. The war dragged on for many years after that. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, File)
The US invasion of Iraq was an act of hubris that killed hundreds of thousands and cost hundreds of billions of dollars and left a stain on the US that persists to this day. Jason Opal, Associate Professor of History and Chair, History and Classical Studies, McGill University, writes in The Conversation:
At the start of 2022, the right to vote, the rule of law and even the existence of facts seemed to be in grave peril in the United States.
Explanations for this crisis ranged from the decades-long decline of the American middle class to the more recent rise of social media and its unique capacity to spread lies.
In truth, many factors were at play, but the most direct cause of America’s harrowing descent — the one event that arguably set the others in motion — began 19 years ago.
War by choice
On March 19, 2003, George W. Bush and his neoconservative brain trust launched the Iraq war because of the alleged threat of Saddam Hussein’s mothballed weapons [and many pointed out that this threat was fictitious – LG]. Bush and his advisers believed in using military force to spread American political and economic might around the globe.
It was an ideology both foolish and fanatical, the pet project of a tiny circle of well-connected warmongers. Bush himself had lost the popular vote in 2000 and was slumping in the polls before Sept. 11, 2001.
But no one wanted to look weak after the terrorist attacks, and so, in one of the last bipartisan gestures of the past two decades, U.S. senators from Hillary Clinton to Mitch McConnell voted for war in the Middle East.
Having sold the invasion with bad faith and bluster, the neocons planned it with hubris and incompetence. Against the professional advice of the U.S. military, they sought to destroy Saddam Hussein’s regime with minimal ground forces, whereupon they would dismantle the Iraqi state and invite private contractors to somehow rebuild the place.
At first, their fantasies swept to victory. But by 2004, the country they had shattered began to lash out at both the invaders and itself, and by 2006 the singular disaster of our times began to spread.
Butterfly effects
Some two million Iraqis decamped to Syria and Jordan and even more fled to places within Iraq, where the ghoulish seeds of ISIS began to grow.
When ISIS spread following the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq in 2011, a second wave of refugees sought shelter in Europe. This stoked nationalism and helped propel Brexit to a stunning win in the United Kingdom. . .
The US started the sequence, and the dominoes continued to topple in turn. Karl Rove famously said that Bush administration created its own reality, but he failed to recognize what a slipshod job it was doing.
Directed by Roman Polanski, with Ewan MacGregor, Pierce Brosnan, Olivia Williams, Kim Cattrall, Timothy Hutton, Tom Wilkinson, et al. Worth watching closely. Netflix. From 2010
Later On 