The Road To War
Bill Moyer's NOW
October 29, 2004
Video 100; 3:35:40 - 3:59:50

BRANCACCIO: Welcome to NOW.

With insurgents mounting as many as one hundred attacks a day, the news from Iraq has been so distressing ÷ "heartbreaking and outrageous" in the words of the SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE ÷ that President Bush has made a high-risk gamble. He sent his national security advisor out on the hustings to defend the war. In critical battleground states stretching from Florida and Ohio to Michigan and Washington, Condoleezza Rice has been repeating the themes we heard again and again in the buildup to the invasion of Iraq. Here is what she said on Monday in Florida:

RICE [10/25/04]: When people ask whether Iraq is a part of the war on terror, well, of course. Not only did Saddam support terrorists, not only was he a weapons of mass destruction threat and all of those things, but he was a tremendous barrier to change in the Middle East.

MOYERS: The risk for President Bush in this is two-fold: by turning his national security advisor ÷ a position not usually embedded in partisan politics ÷ into a surrogate campaigner in a close and heated election, he further polarizes foreign policy. And by sending Condoleezza Rice into the fray, he is calling attention to the credibility gap between what his administration told Americans about the invasion of Iraq before it happened, and what we have learned since. Our colleague Peter Meryash prepared this report on the issue.

MOYERS: In making the case for invading Iraq, the Bush administration was unequivocal·

CHENEY [8/26/02]: Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us.

MOYERS: The warnings were ominous.

RUMSFELD [9/19/02]: No terrorist state poses a greater or more immediate threat to the security of our people than the regime of Saddam Hussein and Iraq.

MOYERS: There was an occasional caveat, as on this CNN news program but officials always came to the identical conclusion.

RICE [9/8/02]: You will get different estimates about precisely how close he is. We do know that he is actively pursuing a nuclear weapon.

MOYERS: The President himself conjured the most chilling image.

BUSH [10/7/02]: America must not ignore the threat gathering against us. Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof ÷ the smoking gun ÷ that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.

MOYERS: Days after that speech, Congress gave Bush what he asked for, authority to use force against Iraq.

It fell to Secretary of State Colin Powell to convince the world when he went before the United Nations' Security Council.

POWELL [UN]: The gravity of the moment is matched by the gravity of the threat that Iraq's weapons of mass destruction pose to the world. Let me now turn to those deadly weapons programs and describe why they are real and present dangers to the region and to the world.

MOYERS: Using surveillance video and telephone intercepts and satellite photos, Powell spoke with certitude·

POWELL [UN]: We know that Saddam Hussein is determined to keep his weapons of mass destruction, is determined to make more.

MOYERS: Much of the world remained skeptical but the speech dazzled most of America's mainstream media.

The NEW YORK TIMES called it "the most powerful case to date" against Hussein. USA TODAY said it provided "new and forceful evidence" of Iraq's weapons programs and terrorism links. The DALLAS MORNING NEWS proclaimed "only the blind could ignore Powell's evidence."

Six weeks later, the United States went to war to disarm what the Secretary of State had called a "threat to international peace and security."

But the press and the public had not been told the truth, that the imminent threat had been exaggerated.

THIELMANN: So much of what has been said about the imminent and ominous danger posed by Iraq was simply not justified by the sensitive intelligence that I saw.

MOYERS: Greg Thielmann spent 25 years in the foreign service before retiring in mid-2002. As a member of the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, he led a team of analysts examining the secret intelligence on Iraq leading up to the war.

I first talked to Thielmann about that intelligence three months after the war started·

THIELMANN [6/03]: I think the credibility of the intelligence community has taken a real hit because of the way the information has been used by senior officials.

BUSH: The tyrant has fallen and Iraq is free.

MOYERS: As the President was proclaiming the war's end, Thielmann was telling us the American people had been misled.
He should know; the work of his office analyzing the Iraqi threat would later be singled out by a key oversight committee in Congress for being more accurate than that of the CIA or any other intelligence agency. Today events have confirmed for Thielmann just how extensively that intelligence was misused.

THIELMANN: The way it was presented, the way the Administration talked about it, the American people got exactly the wrong understanding of what the specialists knew to be the case.

MOYERS: The most serious distortion, says Thielmann, concerned the most ominous of threats.

CHENEY [8/26/02]: Many of us are convinced that Saddam Hussein will acquire nuclear weapons fairly soon.

MOYERS: That possibility had been addressed in this top secret National Intelligence Estimate, given to the administration in October 2002, as the best assessment of all fifteen U.S. intelligence agencies.

A pared-down version has now been declassified and it shows that Vice President Cheney had not mentioned a crucial caveat in the report.

The assertion that Iraq "probably will have a nuclear weapon during this decade" was clearly prefaced by the condition "if left unchecked."

THIELMANN: If left unchecked, which is an amazing qualifier and something that no one noticed in· but it was in the very first paragraph of the key judgments of that estimate. Because the situation in Iraq in March of 2003 was by no means unchecked. Not only was there a fairly effective system of sanctions and arms embargo which frustrated any ability of Saddam to acquire the kind of· especially the very sophisticated kinds of equipment he would need to pursue nuclear weapons.

But there were U.N. inspectors on the ground going virtually anywhere in the country to take samples, to talk to scientists. So, the "if left unchecked" qualifier for that 2007 to 2009 best estimate meant that the clock had not even started ticking yet.

MOYERS: What's more, the top secret estimate included a strongly worded dissent from Thielmann's office of intelligence at the State Department: "The activities we have detected do not add up to a compelling case that Iraq is currently pursuing an integrated and comprehensive approach to acquire nuclear weapons."

THIELMANN: Our conclusion at the time was both that Iraq did not pose the kind of the same magnitude of threat as a country like North Korea. And also that even if Iraq possessed biological and chemical weapons it did not pose an imminent security threat to the United States.

MOYERS: The administration never told the public there was a major disagreement within America's top intelligence ranks.

THIELMANN: Most intelligence analysts are professional and disciplined in holding to their security oaths, not revealing to the public information which is classified, top secret special compartmented information. And it is classified like that to basically protect the source and methods that are used to acquire the information so we don't jeopardize that.

I'm afraid to say that I believe the Administration abused their end of the bargain here. The intelligence officials kept silent because it was their job to keep silent. But one would think it was also the job of the political leadership not to misrepresent what the intelligence professionals were saying.

MOYERS: Case in point. Reports that Saddam Hussein was trying to purchase uranium in Africa. The administration said this was proof of Iraq's efforts to build nuclear weapons.

RUMSFELD [1/29/03]: His regime has the design for a nuclear weapon, was working on several different methods of enriching uranium, and recently was discovered seeking significant quantities of uranium from Africa.

MOYERS: But that's not what the nation's top intelligence analysts were saying.

The CIA had been tracking that story of uranium from Africa and in 2001, 15 months before Rumsfeld spoke, the CIA had concluded, "There is no corroboration from other sources that such an agreement [to buy uranium from Africa] was reached or that uranium was transferred.

Then, a year later, in October 2002, the director of the CIA himself, George Tenet, followed up with two memos and a phone call to the national security team at the White House.

Tenet wrote: "the evidence is weak" and "the Africa story is overblown."

At the same time, State Department experts weighed in with their own warning: "The claims of Iraqi pursuit of natural uranium in Africa are highly dubious."

THIELMANN: When the reports first started coming in that the Iraqis seemed to be trying to procure uranium from the state of Niger, that after some examination, that didn't last very long, our own bureau felt comfortable advising the Secretary of State that these reports were likely to be bogus.

Because they just didn't fit together. They didn't correspond to the nature of uranium economy in Niger, to the pattern of Iraqi efforts to procure things illegally. All kinds of reasons that made this a very suspicious report.

MOYERS: Nonetheless, three months later, on January 28, 2003, in his State of the Union message, President Bush told Americans.

BUSH [1/28/03]: The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.

MOYERS: What did you think when you heard the President mention it in the State of the Union message long after both the CIA and your State Department Intelligence Bureau had challenged that evidence?

THIELMANN: I was shocked and at first confused.

Because I thought they must have new information on this. Something must have crossed the desks here that I hadn't been privy to. But then it slowly dawned on me that he was referring to that same bogus report that we had seen earlier.

MOYERS: Eventually, the White House admitted it had been a mistake to include the bogus report in the President's State of the Union speech. The admission came three months after the invasion of Iraq.

What had gone wrong? Condoleezza Rice said she didn't remember the warnings from the CIA.

But what about the State Department's warning? The one in the National Intelligence Estimate.

An un-named, senior administration official told the press: the President and the National Security Advisor "did not read footnotes in a 90-page document."

MOYERS: Wouldn't you expect the national security advisor to know what's in the footnotes of a critical national intelligence estimate?

THIELMANN: I would. The normal way that policymakers at least those familiar with estimates read them is, you want to know that the arguments were in the intelligence community, not only what everyone could quickly agree on, but where is the evidence a little bit shaky, or where is a fast conclusion a little bit suspicious here. Because someone actually wants to record for posterity that they're not in agreement with the majority opinion.

Because estimates try pretty hard to produce consensual and unanimous judgments about what's happening in the world. So any time that system breaks down and you have someone setting themselves apart, it arouses interest, or it should, by anyone who is savvy about this process.

And one has to suspect that if in fact it really wasn't read, then the whole intelligence estimate wasn't taken seriously. Then it's almost as if they already knew what the answer was before the intelligence community produced anything, and they didn't want to be confused by the facts.

Then there is the case of those famous aluminum tubes.

BUSH [10/7/02]: Iraq has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes and other equipment needed for gas centrifuges, which are used to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons.

MOYERS: This was the closest the administration ever came to a smoking gun · probably the most significant evidence presented in the lead-up to war.

It was leaked to an obliging NEW YORK TIMES which quoted government officials saying "it was the intelligence agencies' unanimous view" that the tubes "are used to make·centrifuges" that will enrich uranium for nuclear weapons.

The paper quoted one senior but un-named official as saying, "the best technical experts and nuclear scientists supported [that] assessment."

Vice President Dick Cheney hailed the tubes as "irrefutable evidence" that Saddam has "once again set up and reconstituted his program" to build a nuclear weapon.

Condoleezza Rice said the tubes "are only really suited for nuclear weapons programs."

And the President drove the message home.

BUSH [9/12/02]: Iraq has made several attempts to buy high-strength aluminum tubes used to enrich uranium for a nuclear weapon. Should Iraq acquire fissile material, it would be able to build a nuclear weapon within a year.

THIELMANN: He just stated it flatly as a fact. And I was astounded when he did that. Because I had been witnessing for months a very vigorous and extended debate within the intelligence community on whether or not those tubes would be suitable for use in centrifuges to enrich uranium. And as the months accumulated and as we sat, in effect, as a jury listening to the experts, it became more and more obvious to us that they were not suited for use in centrifuges and were indeed being used for artillery rocket casings. So·

MOYERS: Conventional weapons?

THIELMANN: That's right. And so this sort of deepened my surprise when the President said this.

MOYERS: In fact, the government's foremost nuclear experts at the Department of Energy disputed the White House position.

After their technical analysis, the best experts on the subject concluded the tubes were "poorly suited for use in gas centrifuges" and as a result they found "unpersuasive the arguments that they are intended for that purpose."

That was enough to convince the State Department's intelligence experts that "the tubes are not intended for use in Iraq's nuclear weapon program."

But that's not what the President said.

BUSH [1/28/03]: Our intelligence sources tell us that he has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production.

MOYERS: Secretary of State Colin Powell, in his address to the Security Council, did make a rare acknowledgement of the disagreement among the experts.

POWELL [2/5/03]: By now, just about everyone has heard of these tubes and we all know that there are differences of opinion. There is controversy about what these tubes are for.

MOYERS: But in the end, he presented the worst case scenario, even though his own experts had discounted it.

POWELL [2/5/03]: Let me tell you what is not controversial about these tubes. All the experts who have analyzed the tubes in our possession agree that they can be adapted for centrifuge use.

MOYERS: The world was listening to that speech. The press was almost universally favorable in this response to that speech. What did you think when he used the aluminum tubes as evidence?

THIELMANN: Well, I was sympathetic to the spot that he was in. Because a lot of us assumed that Colin Powell had been arguing behind closed doors about the dangers of a unilateral approach and arguing for diplomatic and alternative methods of dealing with this problem. So, he was obviously in a political spot.

Because the President had, I think it's obvious now, had already decided to go to war when Colin Powell made his February, 2003 speech. Having said that, it was deeply disappointing on a personal level. Because I was among the vast majority of my colleagues, was a big admirer of the way Colin Powell has run the State Department.

But one would think that there comes a point when you simply cannot go on participating in a distortion.

And I'm personally sorry that Secretary Powell never reached that point, because I believe that he's probably the only American, short of President Bush, that could have prevented the invasion of Iraq.

MOYERS: But even after Powell's Security Council speech, there was still time to get the real story of those aluminum tubes.
By now, the weapons inspectors had returned to Iraq among their assignments, to solve the mystery of the tubes.

The head of the agency that monitors nuclear matters around the world reported back to the Security Council on what the weapons inspectors had found.

EL BARADEI [3/7/03]: There is no indication that Iraq has attempted to import aluminum tubes for use in centrifuge enrichment.

MOYERS: What did the Administration do with this new evidence?

THIELMANN: It ignored it completely.

MOYERS: That was 19 months ago, just days before the invasion.

Just this month, it was revealed that long before the war started, Condoleezza Rice had known that government experts disagreed about the aluminum tubes.

The NEW YORK TIMES broke the story and Rice was asked about it on ABC news.

RICE [on This Week]: At the time, I knew that there was a dispute. I actually didn't really know the nature of the dispute. We learned that, I learned that later.

MOYERS: When you hear and see Condoleezza Rice say that, one has to ask doesn't one, wasn't it her job to find out the nature of that dispute?

THIELMANN: It is incredible to me that the President's National Security Advisor would not at least satisfy herself in understanding the broad dimension of a very vigorous dispute inside the U.S. government on the most important evidence behind an allegation about the most important category of weapons of mass destruction.

I mean, if you don't understand the details of this and at least in broad outline, what issues do you understand with regard to justifying a war against Iraq. This was the mother of all intelligence disagreements for this subject. And so she was either irresponsible in not acquainting herself with those broad outlines of the dispute. Or else she's not telling the truth.

MOYERS: Condoleezza Rice, is on the road right now, stumping, in effect, for the President. They've got Secretary Powell on the talk shows again making his case.

THIELMANN: Well, at least in terms of some of the assurances, I think their credibility has been spent. I mean, it wasn't just that they said that we believe this is happening.

They assured the American people, looking us in the eye, that we know this is happening, that there's no doubt that the evidence is solid, multiple sources, and all of those phrases used by Secretary of State Powell. And unfortunately, what that means is when we talked about real problems with the Iranian nuclear weapons program or the situation in North Korea, it makes it so much harder like the boy who cried wolf, to take them seriously, even when they're accurately describing what the intelligence information says. You know, once you've been misled on a very significant issue, you're very reluctant to give someone the benefit of the doubt.

MOYERS: Do you give the President some benefit of the doubt? Do you say he is the Commander in Chief, he is charged with the security of the United States, with protecting us against all foreign threats? That he has to follow his instinct when the intelligence is inconclusive?

THIELMANN: I certainly think there is a role for instinct. And because intelligence never produces the kind of confidence level that policy makers would like to have, there is an element of truth in what you say. One has to give the President a little bit of running room and a little bit of slack in taking the information as far as the intelligence community can provide. And then going a little bit beyond that.

So I'm sympathetic to all of that. What I'm not sympathetic to is distorting information so completely that in the end, the public gets exactly the opposite understanding of a situation than you believe to be the case.

But I also understand that there is a psychological element here for the American people, a desire to believe the President of the United States.

The realization that the President of the United States would distort ÷ would knowingly distort issues or even negligently misinform them on issues that will result in the death of America's sons and daughters is so monstrous, that most good and decent and patriotic Americans can't believe that. They don't want to believe that. That's just too awful to contemplate, that the President would do that to them.

MOYERS: Something else to consider. You'll no doubt recall that in making the case for invading Iraq, the administration also pinned Saddam Hussein to Al Qaeda. It became the mantra.

CHENEY [1/30/03]: His regime aids and protects terrorists, including members of Al Qaeda. He could decide secretly to provide weapons of mass destruction to terrorists for use against us.

BUSH [9/25/02]: The war on terror, you can't distinguish between Al Qaeda and Saddam when you talk about the war on terror.

MOYERS: And defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld said there was "solid evidence of the presence in Iraq of Al Qaeda members," and that the administration had "very reliable reporting" of "contacts going back a decade, and of possible chemical and biological agent training."

It worked. They said it so many times, and it's been repeated so often on by the echo chamber of the WALL STREET JOURNAL, Fox News and right-wing talk radio, that the latest Harris poll reports that 62 percent of Americans still believe Saddam Hussein had strong links to Al Qaeda and 41 percent believe that he actually helped plan and support the attacks on 9/11.

But this summer, the most extensive federal investigation in history - the bipartisan commission investigating what happened on 9/11 revealed that it had found "no evidence indicating Iraq cooperated with Al Qaeda in developing or carrying out any attacks against the United States."

Earlier this month, Secretary Rumsfeld back-tracked on his earlier statements.

RUMSFELD [10/4/04]: To my knowledge, I have not seen any strong, hard evidence that links the two.

MOYERS: As for Condoleezza Rice, well, the President's National Security Advisor continues on the campaign trail, recently in the battleground state of Pennsylvania. The PITTSBURGH POST-GAZETTE says that she "did not deviate from the misleading contentions" put forth by the Bush-Cheney ticket and that she sought once again, quote, "to make the non-existent link between 9/11 and the Iraq war."