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hTruth and Dissembling on Central Asian Oil Politics By Brendan Nyhan (brendan*spinsanity.org) October 15, 2001
What role do oil politics play in the war against the Taliban rulers of Afghanistan? That question has emerged in the liberal press in the last few days, and rightly so. Afghanistan is strategically crucial in the race to develop large oil and gas reserves in Central Asia - both as part of a potential route for oil and gas pipelines and as a source of political instability hindering any major energy development in the region. Such considerations are thus undoubtedly a part of the strategic calculus of American policymakers and yet have received little attention in the mainstream US press.
However, the issue is regrettably being twisted into anti-Bush screeds already. Notably, nationally syndicated columnist Ted Rall has written one of the most irresponsible pieces since the September 11 attacks, making a number of unsupportable allegations about US involvement in the region. These include a claim that US taxpayers funded the salaries of Taliban government officials as recently as 1999 and the absurd argument that the war is "solely" motivated by the desire to build a gas pipeline through Afghanistan.
Afghanistan and the race for Central Asian energy in the 1990s In just the last few days, Rall (10/12), Nina Burleigh of TomPaine.com (10/12), Brooke Shelby Biggs of MotherJones.com (10/12), James Ridgeway of the Village Voice (10/10) and Benjamin Soskis of The New Republic (10/11) have all written about the importance of oil in Central Asian regional politics. This marks the first time the issue had received significant attention in the US press since the September 11 attacks.
The story is that the former Soviet republics in Central Asia - Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan - sit on some of the largest undeveloped oil and gas reserves in the world. These landlocked countries need a method of transporting these fossil fuels to market in order to make full-scale development economically feasible, leading to contemplation of a pipeline during the 1990s.
There are a number of possible routes for a pipeline, all fraught with political implications. The shortest route runs through Iran, which is under US sanctions. Other routes - also opposed by the US - would go through China and Russia. Most attention focussed, however, on a proposal from a consortium led by Unocal, a US oil company, to build a gas pipeline from Turkmenistan to Pakistan, and possibly an oil pipeline as well. These routes would pass through southern Afghanistan, which has been controlled by the Taliban since the proposal was first made. As a result, Unocal courted the Taliban for several years. The company gave the regime some non-financial aid as part of that process before eventually abandoning the project in the wake of the US attacks on Osama bin Laden's camps in 1998. After that, the US backed a pipeline project that run from Azerbaijan through Georgia to Turkey.
Up until 1997-1998, the US government's position on the Taliban was muddled and at times came close to tacit support. Why? Soskis cites a lack of good intelligence; deference to Pakistan, a key ally which backed the Taliban; hope for stability in the region and, possibly, a crackdown on opium production; and, finally, the possibility of building the pipeline. However, by 1997, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright condemned the Taliban, and the administration's position hardened as opposition by American feminists to the regime grew.
Clearly, the energy reserves of Central Asia are a factor that has to be considered when analyzing the US war in Afghanistan, particularly in examining the issues facing American policymakers considering post-war plans for the country. In fact, Pakistan recently lobbied the new US ambassador to the country on behalf of the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan pipeline. President Bush and Vice President Cheney, as former oilmen, certainly understand the importance of the pipeline projects, but these are surely only part of a complex set of factors being weighed by the administration.
Rall's outlandish column Universal Press Syndicate syndicated columnist Ted Rall's newest column twists these facts into a smear of President Bush and the US government. It is a regrettable sequel to his notorious comment last month as part of a diatribe against President Bush and the "imperial presidency [he] is shoving down our throats": "It may have seemed meaningless at the time, but now we know why 7,000 people sacrificed their lives -- so that we'd all forget how Bush stole a presidential election."
Consider Rall's account of recent history in Afghanistan:
As Central Asian expert Ahmed Rashid describes in his book Taliban, published last year, the U.S. and Pakistan decided to install a stable regime into place in Afghanistan around 1994-a regime that would end the country's civil war and thus ensure the safety of the Unocal pipeline project. Impressed by the ruthlessness and willingness of the then-emerging Taliban to cut a pipeline deal, the U.S. State Department and Pakistan's ISI intelligence service agreed to funnel arms and funding to the Taliban in their war against the ethnically Tajik Northern Alliance. As recently as 1999, U.S. taxpayers paid the entire annual salary of every single Taliban government official, all in the hopes of returning to the days of dollar-a-gallon gas. However, Rashid's book - generally considered the authoritative account of the rise of the Taliban - tells a different story. There is no evidence of the supposed US-Pakistan decision. In fact, there is much evidence of indecision in US policy up to and after 1994, rather than some plan to "install a stable regime". There is similarly no evidence that State Department (or the US government in general) helped provide arms or funds to the Taliban. Rashid explicitly notes that while there were rumors that the CIA supported the Taliban directly during the 1990s, he found no evidence of this.
The third claim - that American taxpayers paid Taliban government salaries - is based on Rashid's account of Pakistan allocating $6 million for this purpose in late 1998. But Rall is simply dissembling when he implicates the US in this. Rall provides no evidence that Pakistan used US aid for the salary funds and additionally fails to make an explicit argument that it would be fair to assign responsibility in this way.
To understand just how weak Rall's case is, consider that he argued that the US has oppressed Afghanistan in his previous column, claiming that "[w]e've been at war with Afghanistan for years" and that "[t]his New War is merely an escalation of genocide by trade sanction." How the US could be both "at war with Afghanistan for years" and paying the salaries of Taliban government officials "[a]s recently as 1999" is never explained or even acknowledged.
Rall goes on to call bin Laden's Al Qaeda network, bizarrely, "an Egyptian group" (in fact, it is transnational, and not all the hijackers were Egyptian) and falsely labels the Taliban "[Washington's] former client":
When an Egyptian group whose members had trained in Afghanistan hijacked four airplanes and used them to kill more than 6,000 Americans on September 11, Washington's patience with its former client finally expired. From there, the column devolves into more unsupportable allegations and smears:
Finally the Bushies had the perfect excuse to do what the U.S. had wanted all along: invade and/or install an old-school puppet regime in Kabul. Realpolitik no more cares about the 6,000 dead than it concerns itself with oppressed women in Afghanistan; this ersatz war by a phony president is solely about getting the Unocal deal done without interference from annoying local middlemen. There is simply no indication that the US wanted to invade Afghanistan prior to the attacks of September 11. In fact, its neglect of the region is one of the historical facts upon which almost everyone (US critics included) agrees. Rall also makes the absurd suggestion that the war is "solely" about an oil deal, trivializing the overriding motive of the attacks - going after Osama bin Laden's terrorist network and the regime that harbors bin Laden. Oil may be a factor, but Rall's argument is ridiculous. Finally, note the insinuation that US policymakers don't care about the victims of the September 11 terrorist attacks or the oppressed women of Afghanistan.
A responsible dialogue on oil in the current crisis The significance of oil politics in Central Asia is very real, and should not be ignored by the press or the public. But a responsible dialogue should be based on facts, not dissembling and a reversion to lazy stereotypes about President Bush's devotion to oil to the exclusion of all other interests. At this time of crisis, we need to be smarter than Ted Rall.
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OSAMA BIN LADEN and Saddam Hussein had an operational relationship from the early 1990s to 2003 that involved training in explosives and weapons of mass destruction, logistical support for terrorist attacks, al Qaeda training camps and safe haven in Iraq, and Iraqi financial support for al Qaeda--perhaps even for Mohamed Atta--according to a top secret U.S. government memorandum obtained by THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
The memo, dated October 27, 2003, was sent from Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas J. Feith to Senators Pat Roberts and Jay Rockefeller, the chairman and vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. It was written in response to a request from the committee as part of its investigation into prewar intelligence claims made by the administration. Intelligence reporting included in the 16-page memo comes from a variety of domestic and foreign agencies, including the FBI, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the National Security Agency. Much of the evidence is detailed, conclusive, and corroborated by multiple sources. Some of it is new information obtained in custodial interviews with high-level al Qaeda terrorists and Iraqi officials, and some of it is more than a decade old. The picture that emerges is one of a history of collaboration between two of America's most determined and dangerous enemies.
According to the memo--which lays out the intelligence in 50 numbered points--Iraq-al Qaeda contacts began in 1990 and continued through mid-March 2003, days before the Iraq War began. Most of the numbered passages contain straight, fact-based intelligence reporting, which in some cases includes an evaluation of the credibility of the source. This reporting is often followed by commentary and analysis.
The relationship began shortly before the first Gulf War. According to reporting in the memo, bin Laden sent "emissaries to Jordan in 1990 to meet with Iraqi government officials." At some unspecified point in 1991, according to a CIA analysis, "Iraq sought Sudan's assistance to establish links to al Qaeda." The outreach went in both directions. According to 1993 CIA reporting cited in the memo, "bin Laden wanted to expand his organization's capabilities through ties with Iraq."
The primary go-between throughout these early stages was Sudanese strongman Hassan al-Turabi, a leader of the al Qaeda-affiliated National Islamic Front. Numerous sources have confirmed this. One defector reported that "al-Turabi was instrumental in arranging the Iraqi-al Qaeda relationship. The defector said Iraq sought al Qaeda influence through its connections with Afghanistan, to facilitate the transshipment of proscribed weapons and equipment to Iraq. In return, Iraq provided al Qaeda with training and instructors."
One such confirmation came in a postwar interview with one of Saddam Hussein's henchmen. As the memo details:
4. According to a May 2003 debriefing of a senior Iraqi intelligence officer, Iraqi intelligence established a highly secretive relationship with Egyptian Islamic Jihad, and later with al Qaeda. The first meeting in 1992 between the Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS) and al Qaeda was brokered by al-Turabi. Former IIS deputy director Faruq Hijazi and senior al Qaeda leader [Ayman al] Zawahiri were at the meeting--the first of several between 1992 and 1995 in Sudan. Additional meetings between Iraqi intelligence and al Qaeda were held in Pakistan. Members of al Qaeda would sometimes visit Baghdad where they would meet the Iraqi intelligence chief in a safe house. The report claimed that Saddam insisted the relationship with al Qaeda be kept secret. After 9-11, the source said Saddam made a personnel change in the IIS for fear the relationship would come under scrutiny from foreign probes. A decisive moment in the budding relationship came in 1993, when bin Laden faced internal resistance to his cooperation with Saddam.
5. A CIA report from a contact with good access, some of whose reporting has been corroborated, said that certain elements in the "Islamic Army" of bin Laden were against the secular regime of Saddam. Overriding the internal factional strife that was developing, bin Laden came to an "understanding" with Saddam that the Islamic Army would no longer support anti-Saddam activities. According to sensitive reporting released in U.S. court documents during the African Embassy trial, in 1993 bin Laden reached an "understanding" with Saddam under which he (bin Laden) forbade al Qaeda operations to be mounted against the Iraqi leader. Another facilitator of the relationship during the mid-1990s was Mahmdouh Mahmud Salim (a.k.a. Abu Hajer al-Iraqi). Abu Hajer, now in a New York prison, was described in court proceedings related to the August 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania as bin Laden's "best friend." According to CIA reporting dating back to the Clinton administration, bin Laden trusted him to serve as a liaison with Saddam's regime and tasked him with procurement of weapons of mass destruction for al Qaeda. FBI reporting in the memo reveals that Abu Hajer "visited Iraq in early 1995" and "had a good relationship with Iraqi intelligence. Sometime before mid-1995 he went on an al Qaeda mission to discuss unspecified cooperation with the Iraqi government."
Some of the reporting about the relationship throughout the mid-1990s comes from a source who had intimate knowledge of bin Laden and his dealings. This source, according to CIA analysis, offered "the most credible information" on cooperation between bin Laden and Iraq.
This source's reports read almost like a diary. Specific dates of when bin Laden flew to various cities are included, as well as names of individuals he met. The source did not offer information on the substantive talks during the meetings. . . . There are not a great many reports in general on the relationship between bin Laden and Iraq because of the secrecy surrounding it. But when this source with close access provided a "window" into bin Laden's activities, bin Laden is seen as heavily involved with Iraq (and Iran). Reporting from the early 1990s remains somewhat sketchy, though multiple sources place Hassan al-Turabi and Ayman al Zawahiri, bin Laden's current No. 2, at the center of the relationship. The reporting gets much more specific in the mid-1990s:
8. Reporting from a well placed source disclosed that bin Laden was receiving training on bomb making from the IIS's [Iraqi Intelligence Service] principal technical expert on making sophisticated explosives, Brigadier Salim al-Ahmed. Brigadier Salim was observed at bin Laden's farm in Khartoum in Sept.-Oct. 1995 and again in July 1996, in the company of the Director of Iraqi Intelligence, Mani abd-al-Rashid al-Tikriti. 9 . . . Bin Laden visited Doha, Qatar (17-19 Jan. 1996), staying at the residence of a member of the Qatari ruling family. He discussed the successful movement of explosives into Saudi Arabia, and operations targeted against U.S. and U.K. interests in Dammam, Dharan, and Khobar, using clandestine al Qaeda cells in Saudi Arabia. Upon his return, bin Laden met with Hijazi and Turabi, among others.
And later more reporting, from the same "well placed" source:
10. The Director of Iraqi Intelligence, Mani abd-al-Rashid al-Tikriti, met privately with bin Laden at his farm in Sudan in July 1996. Tikriti used an Iraqi delegation traveling to Khartoum to discuss bilateral cooperation as his "cover" for his own entry into Sudan to meet with bin Laden and Hassan al-Turabi. The Iraqi intelligence chief and two other IIS officers met at bin Laden's farm and discussed bin Laden's request for IIS technical assistance in: a) making letter and parcel bombs; b) making bombs which could be placed on aircraft and detonated by changes in barometric pressure; and c) making false passport [sic]. Bin Laden specifically requested that [Brigadier Salim al-Ahmed], Iraqi intelligence's premier explosives maker--especially skilled in making car bombs--remain with him in Sudan. The Iraqi intelligence chief instructed Salim to remain in Sudan with bin Laden as long as required. The analysis of those events follows:
The time of the visit from the IIS director was a few weeks after the Khobar Towers bombing. The bombing came on the third anniversary of a U.S. [Tomahawk missile] strike on IIS HQ (retaliation for the attempted assassination of former President Bush in Kuwait) for which Iraqi officials explicitly threatened retaliation.
IN ADDITION TO THE CONTACTS CLUSTERED in the mid-1990s, intelligence reports detail a flurry of activities in early 1998 and again in December 1998. A "former senior Iraqi intelligence officer" reported that "the Iraqi intelligence service station in Pakistan was Baghdad's point of contact with al Qaeda. He also said bin Laden visited Baghdad in Jan. 1998 and met with Tariq Aziz."
11. According to sensitive reporting, Saddam personally sent Faruq Hijazi, IIS deputy director and later Iraqi ambassador to Turkey, to meet with bin Laden at least twice, first in Sudan and later in Afghanistan in 1999. . . . 14. According to a sensitive reporting [from] a "regular and reliable source," [Ayman al] Zawahiri, a senior al Qaeda operative, visited Baghdad and met with the Iraqi Vice President on 3 February 1998. The goal of the visit was to arrange for coordination between Iraq and bin Laden and establish camps in an-Nasiriyah and Iraqi Kurdistan under the leadership of Abdul Aziz.
That visit came as the Iraqis intensified their defiance of the U.N. inspection regime, known as UNSCOM, created by the cease-fire agreement following the Gulf War. UNSCOM demanded access to Saddam's presidential palaces that he refused to provide. As the tensions mounted, President Bill Clinton went to the Pentagon on February 18, 1998, and prepared the nation for war. He warned of "an unholy axis of terrorists, drug traffickers, and organized international criminals" and said "there is no more clear example of this threat than Saddam Hussein."
The day after this speech, according to documents unearthed in April 2003 in the Iraqi Intelligence headquarters by journalists Mitch Potter and Inigo Gilmore, Hussein's intelligence service wrote a memo detailing coming meetings with a bin Laden representative traveling to Baghdad. Each reference to bin Laden had been covered by liquid paper that, when revealed, exposed a plan to increase cooperation between Iraq and al Qaeda. According to that memo, the IIS agreed to pay for "all the travel and hotel costs inside Iraq to gain the knowledge of the message from bin Laden and to convey to his envoy an oral message from us to bin Laden." The document set as the goal for the meeting a discussion of "the future of our relationship with him, bin Laden, and to achieve a direct meeting with him." The al Qaeda representative, the document went on to suggest, might provide "a way to maintain contacts with bin Laden."
Four days later, on February 23, 1998, bin Laden issued his now-famous fatwa on the plight of Iraq, published in the Arabic-language daily, al Quds al-Arabi: "For over seven years the United States has been occupying the lands of Islam in the holiest of places, the Arabian Peninsula, plundering its riches, dictating to its rulers, humiliating its people, terrorizing its neighbors, and turning its bases in the Peninsula into a spearhead through which to fight the neighboring Muslim peoples." Bin Laden urged his followers to act: "The ruling to kill all Americans and their allies--civilians and military--is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it."
Although war was temporarily averted by a last-minute deal brokered by U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, tensions soon rose again. The standoff with Iraq came to a head in December 1998, when President Clinton launched Operation Desert Fox, a 70-hour bombing campaign that began on December 16 and ended three days later, on December 19, 1998.
According to press reports at the time, Faruq Hijazi, deputy director of Iraqi Intelligence, met with bin Laden in Afghanistan on December 21, 1998, to offer bin Laden safe haven in Iraq. CIA reporting in the memo to the Senate Intelligence Committee seems to confirm this meeting and relates two others.
15. A foreign government service reported that an Iraqi delegation, including at least two Iraqi intelligence officers formerly assigned to the Iraqi Embassy in Pakistan, met in late 1998 with bin Laden in Afghanistan. 16. According to CIA reporting, bin Laden and Zawahiri met with two Iraqi intelligence officers in Afghanistan in Dec. 1998.
17. . . . Iraq sent an intelligence officer to Afghanistan to seek closer ties to bin Laden and the Taliban in late 1998. The source reported that the Iraqi regime was trying to broaden its cooperation with al Qaeda. Iraq was looking to recruit Muslim "elements" to sabotage U.S. and U.K. interests. After a senior Iraqi intelligence officer met with Taliban leader [Mullah] Omar, arrangements were made for a series of meetings between the Iraqi intelligence officer and bin Laden in Pakistan. The source noted Faruq Hijazi was in Afghanistan in late 1998.
18. . . . Faruq Hijazi went to Afghanistan in 1999 along with several other Iraqi officials to meet with bin Laden. The source claimed that Hijazi would have met bin Laden only at Saddam's explicit direction.
An analysis that follows No. 18 provides additional context and an explanation of these reports:
Reporting entries #4, #11, #15, #16, #17, and #18, from different sources, corroborate each other and provide confirmation of meetings between al Qaeda operatives and Iraqi intelligence in Afghanistan and Pakistan. None of the reports have information on operational details or the purpose of such meetings. The covert nature of the relationship would indicate strict compartmentation [sic] of operations. Information about connections between al Qaeda and Iraq was so widespread by early 1999 that it made its way into the mainstream press. A January 11, 1999, Newsweek story ran under this headline: "Saddam + Bin Laden?" The story cited an "Arab intelligence source" with knowledge of contacts between Iraq and al Qaeda. "According to this source, Saddam expected last month's American and British bombing campaign to go on much longer than it did. The dictator believed that as the attacks continued, indignation would grow in the Muslim world, making his terrorism offensive both harder to trace and more effective. With acts of terror contributing to chaos in the region, Turkey, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait might feel less inclined to support Washington. Saddam's long-term strategy, according to several sources, is to bully or cajole Muslim countries into breaking the embargo against Iraq, without waiting for the United Nations to lift if formally."
INTELLIGENCE REPORTS about the nature of the relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda from mid-1999 through 2003 are conflicting. One senior Iraqi intelligence officer in U.S. custody, Khalil Ibrahim Abdallah, "said that the last contact between the IIS and al Qaeda was in July 1999. Bin Laden wanted to meet with Saddam, he said. The guidance sent back from Saddam's office reportedly ordered Iraqi intelligence to refrain from any further contact with bin Laden and al Qaeda. The source opined that Saddam wanted to distance himself from al Qaeda."
The bulk of reporting on the relationship contradicts this claim. One report states that "in late 1999" al Qaeda set up a training camp in northern Iraq that "was operational as of 1999." Other reports suggest that the Iraqi regime contemplated several offers of safe haven to bin Laden throughout 1999.
23. . . . Iraqi officials were carefully considering offering safe haven to bin Laden and his closest collaborators in Nov. 1999. The source indicated the idea was put forward by the presumed head of Iraqi intelligence in Islamabad (Khalid Janaby) who in turn was in frequent contact and had good relations with bin Laden. Some of the most intriguing intelligence concerns an Iraqi named Ahmed Hikmat Shakir:
24. According to sensitive reporting, a Malaysia-based Iraqi national (Shakir) facilitated the arrival of one of the Sept 11 hijackers for an operational meeting in Kuala Lumpur (Jan 2000). Sensitive reporting indicates Shakir's travel and contacts link him to a worldwide network of terrorists, including al Qaeda. Shakir worked at the Kuala Lumpur airport--a job he claimed to have obtained through an Iraqi embassy employee. One of the men at that al Qaeda operational meeting in the Kuala Lumpur Hotel was Tawfiz al Atash, a top bin Laden lieutenant later identified as the mastermind of the October 12, 2000, attack on the USS Cole.
25. Investigation into the bombing of the USS Cole in October 2000 by al Qaeda revealed no specific Iraqi connections but according to the CIA, "fragmentary evidence points to possible Iraqi involvement." 26. During a custodial interview, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi [a senior al Qaeda operative] said he was told by an al Qaeda associate that he was tasked to travel to Iraq (1998) to establish a relationship with Iraqi intelligence to obtain poisons and gases training. After the USS Cole bombing in 2000, two al Qaeda operatives were sent to Iraq for CBW-related [Chemical and Biological Weapons] training beginning in Dec 2000. Iraqi intelligence was "encouraged" after the embassy and USS Cole bombings to provide this training.
The analysis of this report follows.
CIA maintains that Ibn al-Shaykh's timeline is consistent with other sensitive reporting indicating that bin Laden asked Iraq in 1998 for advanced weapons, including CBW and "poisons." Additional reporting also calls into question the claim that relations between Iraq and al Qaeda cooled after mid-1999:
27. According to sensitive CIA reporting, . . . the Saudi National Guard went on a kingdom-wide state of alert in late Dec 2000 after learning Saddam agreed to assist al Qaeda in attacking U.S./U.K. interests in Saudi Arabia.
And then there is the alleged contact between lead 9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta and an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague. The reporting on those links suggests not one meeting, but as many as four. What's more, the memo reveals potential financing of Atta's activities by Iraqi intelligence.
The Czech counterintelligence service reported that the Sept. 11 hijacker [Mohamed] Atta met with the former Iraqi intelligence chief in Prague, [Ahmed Khalil Ibrahim Samir] al Ani, on several occasions. During one of these meetings, al Ani ordered the IIS finance officer to issue Atta funds from IIS financial holdings in the Prague office. And the commentary:
CIA can confirm two Atta visits to Prague--in Dec. 1994 and in June 2000; data surrounding the other two--on 26 Oct 1999 and 9 April 2001--is complicated and sometimes contradictory and CIA and FBI cannot confirm Atta met with the IIS. Czech Interior Minister Stanislav Gross continues to stand by his information. It's not just Gross who stands by the information. Five high-ranking members of the Czech government have publicly confirmed meetings between Atta and al Ani. The meeting that has gotten the most press attention--April 9, 2001--is also the most widely disputed. Even some of the most hawkish Bush administration officials are privately skeptical that Atta met al Ani on that occasion. They believe that reports of the alleged meeting, said to have taken place in public, outside the headquarters of the U.S.-financed Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, suggest a level of sloppiness that doesn't fit the pattern of previous high-level Iraq-al Qaeda contacts.
Whether or not that specific meeting occurred, the report by Czech counterintelligence that al Ani ordered the Iraqi Intelligence Service officer to provide IIS funds to Atta might help explain the lead hijacker's determination to reach Prague, despite significant obstacles, in the spring of 2000. (Note that the report stops short of confirming that the funds were transferred. It claims only that the IIS officer requested the transfer.) Recall that Atta flew to Prague from Germany on May 30, 2000, but was denied entry because he did not have a valid visa. Rather than simply return to Germany and fly directly to the United States, his ultimate destination, Atta took pains to get to Prague. After he was refused entry the first time, he traveled back to Germany, obtained the proper paperwork, and caught a bus back to Prague. He left for the United States the day after arriving in Prague for the second time.
Several reports indicate that the relationship between Saddam and bin Laden continued, even after the September 11 attacks:
31. An Oct. 2002 . . . report said al Qaeda and Iraq reached a secret agreement whereby Iraq would provide safe haven to al Qaeda members and provide them with money and weapons. The agreement reportedly prompted a large number of al Qaeda members to head to Iraq. The report also said that al Qaeda members involved in a fraudulent passport network for al Qaeda had been directed to procure 90 Iraqi and Syrian passports for al Qaeda personnel. The analysis that accompanies that report indicates that the report fits the pattern of Iraq-al Qaeda collaboration:
References to procurement of false passports from Iraq and offers of safe haven previously have surfaced in CIA source reporting considered reliable. Intelligence reports to date have maintained that Iraqi support for al Qaeda usually involved providing training, obtaining passports, and offers of refuge. This report adds to that list by including weapons and money. This assistance would make sense in the aftermath of 9-11. Colin Powell, in his February 5, 2003, presentation to the U.N. Security Council, revealed the activities of Abu Musab al Zarqawi. Reporting in the memo expands on Powell's case and might help explain some of the resistance the U.S. military is currently facing in Iraq.
37. Sensitive reporting indicates senior terrorist planner and close al Qaeda associate al Zarqawi has had an operational alliance with Iraqi officials. As of Oct. 2002, al Zarqawi maintained contacts with the IIS to procure weapons and explosives, including surface-to-air missiles from an IIS officer in Baghdad. According to sensitive reporting, al Zarqawi was setting up sleeper cells in Baghdad to be activated in case of a U.S. occupation of the city, suggesting his operational cooperation with the Iraqis may have deepened in recent months. Such cooperation could include IIS provision of a secure operating bases [sic] and steady access to arms and explosives in preparation for a possible U.S. invasion. Al Zarqawi's procurements from the Iraqis also could support al Qaeda operations against the U.S. or its allies elsewhere. 38. According to sensitive reporting, a contact with good access who does not have an established reporting record: An Iraqi intelligence service officer said that as of mid-March the IIS was providing weapons to al Qaeda members located in northern Iraq, including rocket propelled grenade (RPG)-18 launchers. According to IIS information, northern Iraq-based al Qaeda members believed that the U.S. intended to strike al Qaeda targets during an anticipated assault against Ansar al-Islam positions.
The memo further reported pre-war intelligence which "claimed that an Iraqi intelligence official, praising Ansar al-Islam, provided it with $100,000 and agreed to continue to give assistance."
CRITICS OF THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION have complained that Iraq-al Qaeda connections are a fantasy, trumped up by the warmongers at the White House to fit their preconceived notions about international terror; that links between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden have been routinely "exaggerated" for political purposes; that hawks "cherry-picked" bits of intelligence and tendentiously presented these to the American public.
Carl Levin, a senior member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, made those points as recently as November 9, in an appearance on "Fox News Sunday." Republicans on the committee, he complained, refuse to look at the administration's "exaggeration of intelligence."
Said Levin: "The question is whether or not they exaggerated intelligence in order to carry out their purpose, which was to make the case for going to war. Did we know, for instance, with certainty that there was any relationship between the Iraqis and the terrorists that were in Afghanistan, bin Laden? The administration said that there's a connection between those terrorist groups in Afghanistan and Iraq. Was there a basis for that?"
There was, as shown in the memo to the committee on which Levin serves. And much of the reporting comes from Clinton-era intelligence. Not that you would know this from Al Gore's recent public statements. Indeed, the former vice president claims to be privy to new "evidence" that the administration lied. In an August speech at New York University, Gore claimed: "The evidence now shows clearly that Saddam did not want to work with Osama bin Laden at all, much less give him weapons of mass destruction." Really?
One of the most interesting things to note about the 16-page memo is that it covers only a fraction of the evidence that will eventually be available to document the relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda. For one thing, both Saddam and bin Laden were desperate to keep their cooperation secret. (Remember, Iraqi intelligence used liquid paper on an internal intelligence document to conceal bin Laden's name.) For another, few people in the U.S. government are expressly looking for such links. There is no Iraq-al Qaeda equivalent of the CIA's 1,400-person Iraq Survey Group currently searching Iraq for weapons of mass destruction.
Instead, CIA and FBI officials are methodically reviewing Iraqi intelligence files that survived the three-week war last spring. These documents would cover several miles if laid end-to-end. And they are in Arabic. They include not only connections between bin Laden and Saddam, but also revolting details of the regime's long history of brutality. It will be a slow process.
So Feith's memo to the Senate Intelligence Committee is best viewed as sort of a "Cliff's Notes" version of the relationship. It contains the highlights, but it is far from exhaustive.
One example. The memo contains only one paragraph on Ahmed Hikmat Shakir, the Iraqi facilitator who escorted two September 11 hijackers through customs in Kuala Lumpur. U.S. intelligence agencies have extensive reporting on his activities before and after the September 11 hijacking. That they would include only this brief overview suggests the 16-page memo, extensive as it is, just skims the surface of the reporting on Iraq-al Qaeda connections.
Other intelligence reports indicate that Shakir whisked not one but two September 11 hijackers--Khalid al Midhar and Nawaq al Hamzi--through the passport and customs process upon their arrival in Kuala Lumpur on January 5, 2000. Shakir then traveled with the hijackers to the Kuala Lumpur Hotel where they met with Ramzi bin al Shibh, one of the masterminds of the September 11 plot. The meeting lasted three days. Shakir returned to work on January 9 and January 10, and never again.
Shakir got his airport job through a contact at the Iraqi Embassy. (Iraq routinely used its embassies as staging grounds for its intelligence operations; in some cases, more than half of the alleged "diplomats" were intelligence operatives.) The Iraqi embassy, not his employer, controlled Shakir's schedule. He was detained in Qatar on September 17, 2001. Authorities found in his possession contact information for terrorists involved in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the 1998 embassy bombings, the 2000 attack on the USS Cole, and the September 11 hijackings. The CIA had previous reporting that Shakir had received a phone call from the safe house where the 1993 World Trade Center attacks had been plotted.
The Qataris released Shakir shortly after his arrest. On October 21, 2001, he flew to Amman, Jordan, where he was to change planes to a flight to Baghdad. He didn't make that flight. Shakir was detained in Jordan for three months, where the CIA interrogated him. His interrogators concluded that Shakir had received extensive training in counter-interrogation techniques. Not long after he was detained, according to an official familiar with the intelligence, the Iraqi regime began to "pressure" Jordanian intelligence to release him. At the same time, Amnesty International complained that Shakir was being held without charge. The Jordanians released him on January 28, 2002, at which point he is believed to have fled back to Iraq.
Was Shakir an Iraqi agent? Does he provide a connection between Saddam Hussein and September 11? We don't know. We may someday find out.
But there can no longer be any serious argument about whether Saddam Hussein's Iraq worked with Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda to plot against Americans.
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Nope, no serious question, since the U.S. military and Bush's hand picked weapons imspectors PROVED, along with the fact that Bush was full of prunes about the WMDs, there was NO direct connection between Ben laden and Hussain. Indeed, Saddam Hussain's refusal to allow religious infiltration into the Iraqi government was the force that had prevented Ben Laden from moving into Iraq.
Posts: 11304 | From: Fort Worth, Texas | Registered: Mar 2005
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Prague Revisited The evidence of an Iraq/al-Qaida connection hasn't gone away. By Edward Jay Epstein Updated Wednesday, Nov. 19, 2003, at 12:58 PM ET Partners in crime?This month, I went to Prague to meet with Czech officials who had directly handled the pre-9/11 expulsion of a senior Iraqi diplomat, a case that would became known as the Prague Connection. Because it goes to the heart of the issue of whether Saddam Hussein might have played a role in the attack on the World Trade Center, this controversy has continued to rage, without any satisfying conclusion, for more than two years.
The background: On April 21, 2001, the CIA's liaison officer at the U.S. Embassy in Prague was briefed by the Czech counterintelligence service (known by its Czech acronym, BIS) about an extraordinary development in a spy case that concerned both the United States and the Czech Republic. The subject of the briefing was Ahmad Khalil Ibrahim Samir al-Ani, the consul at Iraq's embassy in Prague.
The reason there had been joint Czech-American interest in the case traced back to the December 1998 when al-Ani's predecessor at the Iraq Embassy, Jabir Salim, defected from his post. In his debriefings, Salim said that he had been supplied with $150,000 by Baghdad to prepare a car-bombing of an American target, the Prague headquarters of Radio Free Europe. (This bombing never took place because Salim could not recruit a bomber.)
So when al-Ani replaced Salim at the Iraq Embassy in Prague in 1999, both the United States and the Czech Republic wanted him closely watched in case he had a similar assignment. The BIS handled the surveillance through its own full-time teams and its network of part-time "watchers" at hotels, restaurants, and other likely locations. Then, on April 8, 2001, a BIS watcher saw al-Ani meeting in a restaurant outside Prague with an Arab man in his 20s. This set off alarm bells because a BIS informant in the Arab community had provided information indicating that the person with whom al-Ani was meeting was a visiting "student" from Hamburg—and one who was potentially dangerous.
On my trip, I spoke to Jan Kavan, who in 2001 was foreign minister and coordinator of intelligence. According to Kavan—who to my knowledge has not spoken publicly about this episode before—al-Ani had previously been spotted taking photos of the headquarters of Radio Free Europe. In this context, the restaurant meeting suggested that al-Ani might be recruiting someone to resume the bombing plot. Adding to the tension, the BIS lost track of the "student." So Kavan decided to act: He ordered al-Ani out of the Czech Republic.
During the next 48 hours, as al-Ani prepared his hasty departure, the CIA liaison called both the BIS liaison and the Czech National Security Office for further details about the expulsion, which presumably he then passed on to the FBI and other relevant parties. Kavan's able deputy, Hynek Kmonicek, arranged for al-Ani to exit via Vienna, Austria. As far as Kavan was concerned, the al-Ani problem was, if not resolved, then in the hands of American intelligence
The issue re-emerged three days after the 9/11 attack when the CIA intelligence liaison was told by the BIS that the Hamburg "student" who had met with al-Ani on April 8 had been tentatively identified as the 9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta. Since al-Ani was an officer of Saddam Hussein's intelligence (and diplomatic) service, this identification raised the possibility that Saddam might have had a hand in the 9/11 attack. It could also be potentially embarrassing, as Kavan pointed out, "if American intelligence had failed before 9/11 to adequately appreciate the significance of the April meeting."
Kavan, in the newly created position of coordinator for intelligence, was in the center of the ensuing "crisis," as he termed it. He gave the FBI full access to the Czech side of the investigation. Two Czech-speaking FBI agents were allowed not only to sit in on the high-level task force evaluating the intelligence but to examine source material. If Atta was at the meeting, he could not have used his own passport to enter the Czech Republic, so the BIS assumed he had used a false identity and began checking through visa records for suspicious visitors in April, examining grainy videotapes from cameras at airports, bus stations, and game arcades. As the investigation was still in an early stage, the FBI had been asked to keep the identification of Atta secret, but within a week, the Prague connection was leaked to the press—from Washington. On Sept. 18, 2001, the Associated Press reported, "A U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the United States has received information from a foreign intelligence service that Mohamed Atta, a hijacker aboard one of the planes that slammed into the World Trade Center, met earlier this year in Europe with an Iraqi intelligence agent." CBS then reported that Atta had been seen with al-Ani.
In Washington, the FBI moved to quiet the Prague connection by telling journalists that it had car rentals and records that put Atta in Virginia Beach, Va., and Florida close to, if not during, the period when he was supposed to be in Prague. The New York Times, citing information provided by "federal law enforcement officials," reported that Atta was in Virginia Beach on April 2, 2001, and by April 11, "Atta was back in Florida, renting a car." Newsweek reported that, "the FBI pointed out Atta was traveling at the time [in early April 2001] between Florida and Virginia Beach, Va.," adding, "The bureau had his rental car and hotel receipts." And intelligence expert James Bamford, after quoting FBI Director Robert Mueller as saying that the FBI "ran down literally hundreds of thousands of leads and checked every record we could get our hands on," reported in USA Today, "The records revealed that Atta was in Virginia Beach during the time he supposedly met the Iraqi in Prague."
All these reports attributed to the FBI were, as it turns out, erroneous. There were no car rental records in Virginia, Florida, or anywhere else in April 2001 for Mohamed Atta, since he had not yet obtained his Florida license. His international license was at his father's home in Cairo, Egypt (where his roommate Marwan al-Shehhi picked it up in late April). Nor were there other records in the hands of the FBI that put Atta in the United States at the time. Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet testified to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in June 2002, "It is possible that Atta traveled under an unknown alias" to "meet with an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague." Clearly, it was not beyond the capabilities of the 9/11 hijackers to use aliases.
But just because Atta could have been in Prague did not mean that he met al-Ani there on April 8, 2001. Eyewitness identification can often be mistaken. It was known, however, that Atta had business in Prague prior to the 9/11 attack. Kmonicek, the deputy foreign minister, had found a paper trail of passport records showing that Atta had applied for a visa to visit the Czech Republic on May 26, 2000 in Bonn, Germany. Atta must have had business there, since he could have transited through the Czech Republic on Czech Air without a visa.
Atta's business appeared to be extremely time sensitive and specific to May 30. When Atta learned in Hamburg that his Czech visa would not be ready until May 31, he nevertheless flew on May 30 to the Prague International Airport, where he would not be allowed to go beyond the transit lounge. Although a large part of this area is surveiled by cameras, he managed to spend all but a few minutes out of their range. After some six hours, he then caught a flight back to Hamburg. From this visaless round trip, Czech intelligence inferred that Atta had a meeting on May 30 that could not wait, even a day—and that whoever arranged it was probably familiar with the transit lounge's surveillance. Finally, the BIS determined that the Prague connection was not limited to a single appointment since Atta returned to Prague by bus on June 2 (now with visa BONN200005260024), and, after a brief wait in the bus station, disappeared for nearly 20 hours before catching a flight to the United States.
The Czechs reviewing these visits in retrospect further assumed that Atta's business in Prague was somehow related to his activities in the United States, given that large sums of laundered funds began to flow to the 9/11 conspiracy in June 2000, after Atta left Prague. Even more ominous, if the BIS's subsequent identification of Atta in Prague was accurate, then some part of the mechanism behind the activities of hijacker-terrorists may have been based in Prague at least until mid April 2001.
Czech intelligence services could not solve this puzzle without access to crucial information about Atta's movements in the United States, Germany, and other countries in which the plot unfolded, but it soon became clear that such cooperation would not be forthcoming. Even after al-Ani was taken prisoner by U.S. forces in Iraq in July 2003 and presumably questioned about Atta, no report was furnished to the Czech side of the investigation. "It was anything but a two-way street," a top Czech government official overseeing the case explained. "The FBI wanted complete control. The FBI agents provided us with nothing from their side of the investigation."
Without those missing pieces—including cell phone logs, credit card charges, and interrogation records in the FBI's possession—the jigsaw puzzle remains incomplete
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This guy who apparently dislikes the author of the above article says there is a 65% chance that the Attta meeting happened... don't know if I'd stake my claim on a 65% chance, but nteresting none the less. He is responding to the above article.
Christopher Hitchens Responds:
I have only just read Edward Epstein's contribution to the continuing argument about an Iraq-Al Quaeda connection. Anyone who knows either of us knows that Mr. Epstein and I dislike each other intensely, so I thought it only right that I should confirm one aspect of his essay from my own knowledge.
Last fall I paid a visit to Jan Kavan, the former Czech foreign minister who had become chairman of that session of the United Nations General Assembly. Mr Kavan and I have been friends for many years. My ostensible reason for accepting his invitation to call upon him was this: I wanted to introduce him to a Kurdish official who had observer status at the UN. Only later in the conversation did I think to ask him about the much-debated and seemingly-discredited story of a meeting in Prague between Mohammed Atta and the Ba'athist envoy al-Ani. To my surprise, Mr Kavan was able to give direct evidence of his own role in this investigation (including the deportation order he had served on al-Ani) and to say that in his opinion there was at least a "sixty five per cent chance" that the meeting with Atta had in fact occurred.
I know that Jan Kavan is a very meticulous person and so I asked him why he had chosen the "sixty five per cent", rather than, say, fifty. He replied that it was because he thought the likelihood of the meeting was at least that high. He added that he had no idea what was discussed, or would have been discussed, had the meeting been confirmed beyond doubt.
It may not be irrelevant to mention that Mr Kavan, though highly professional as a diplomat and as a minister, is very far from being a sympathiser of the Bush administration. At the time we met, the rift between the administration and the UN over Iraq was in the process of becoming acute.
Last fall, I did not feel I had his permission to quote him on a subject which had not been part of our original agenda, and so I refrained from citing him by name. Now that he has gone on record I would like to add this earlier indication that he knew what he was talking about - a rare quality in the present debate.
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The commission issued its report on al Qaeda's history at the start of a two-day round of hearings this morning. In a separate report on the planning and deliberations for the Sept. 11 plot, the panel cited numerous pieces of FBI evidence in concluding that ringleader Mohamed Atta never met with an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague on April 9, 2001, as Cheney and some other Bush administration officials have alleged. "Based on the evidence available -- including investigation by Czech and U.S. authorities plus detainee reporting -- we do not believe that such a meeting occurred," the second report said.
But taken from this article.....
On Sept. 18, 2001, the Associated Press reported, "A U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the United States has received information from a foreign intelligence service that Mohamed Atta, a hijacker aboard one of the planes that slammed into the World Trade Center, met earlier this year in Europe with an Iraqi intelligence agent." CBS then reported that Atta had been seen with al-Ani.
In Washington, the FBI moved to quiet the Prague connection by telling journalists that it had car rentals and records that put Atta in Virginia Beach, Va., and Florida close to, if not during, the period when he was supposed to be in Prague. The New York Times, citing information provided by "federal law enforcement officials," reported that Atta was in Virginia Beach on April 2, 2001, and by April 11, "Atta was back in Florida, renting a car." Newsweek reported that, "the FBI pointed out Atta was traveling at the time [in early April 2001] between Florida and Virginia Beach, Va.," adding, "The bureau had his rental car and hotel receipts." And intelligence expert James Bamford, after quoting FBI Director Robert Mueller as saying that the FBI "ran down literally hundreds of thousands of leads and checked every record we could get our hands on," reported in USA Today, "The records revealed that Atta was in Virginia Beach during the time he supposedly met the Iraqi in Prague."
All these reports attributed to the FBI were, as it turns out, erroneous. There were no car rental records in Virginia, Florida, or anywhere else in April 2001 for Mohamed Atta, since he had not yet obtained his Florida license. His international license was at his father's home in Cairo, Egypt (where his roommate Marwan al-Shehhi picked it up in late April). Nor were there other records in the hands of the FBI that put Atta in the United States at the time. Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet testified to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in June 2002, "It is possible that Atta traveled under an unknown alias" to "meet with an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague." Clearly, it was not beyond the capabilities of the 9/11 hijackers to use aliases.
Claiming the FBI reports were erronous and there where no FBI records putting Atta in America at the time. Now, you guys know me, I believe the FBI is above suspicion here, but they are human, just a simple mistake. I should say now the FBI is above suspicion. Hoover era, not quite so sure!
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Christopher Hitchens has exactly two credentials:
1) He hates Bill Clinton with an insane passion.
2) He adores anything republican without question.
Neither of those positions is supported by anything but meanness or bias and he is known to fudge facts to make something appear to be supported by research and others opinions and research. Anything he says belongs in a fishbowl of swimming wiggling conspiracy theory, which he deals to his neoconservative audience in "Vanity Fair".
Posts: 11304 | From: Fort Worth, Texas | Registered: Mar 2005
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Ok Bdgee- So in your opinion government representatitives, ie the Senate Intelligance committee, can at times give an honest report, the FBI, the CIA etc, etc does have the capacity for honesty. IE everything is not a conspiracy or bungled, or hidden etc. Just trying to figure out where you stand on the black helicpoter ideas.
Glassman - would you agree? Cause it sure seems we are have taken opposite sides of government trustworthiness on this issue.
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-------------------- Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results Posts: 491 | Registered: Jun 2006
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quote:Originally posted by Johnwayne: Ok Bdgee- So in your opinion government representatitives, ie the Senate Intelligance committee, can at times give an honest report, the FBI, the CIA etc, etc does have the capacity for honesty. IE everything is not a conspiracy or bungled, or hidden etc. Just trying to figure out where you stand on the black helicpoter ideas.
Glassman - would you agree? Cause it sure seems we are have taken opposite sides of government trustworthiness on this issue.
Anyone that trust the Senate Intellegence Committee reports since 2000 is dangerously naive. What comes out as reports from that committee is passed on by a republican majority that has refused to consider anything that didn't originate with the RNC or the Bush team or conform to Bush doctrines on government.
Many times reports from various other government agencies and sources have been rewritten or edited to conform to republican propaganda, particularly to make dubya's actions look successful, reasonable, or legal, when in fact the opposite was the actual result of the study leading to the report (such as what was done to the NOAA studies on globaal warming which ended up being published with the exact opposite of the conclusions actually reached).
In general, I do not accept ANY conspiracy theory, particularly those supposedly championed by reporters.
Posts: 11304 | From: Fort Worth, Texas | Registered: Mar 2005
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While there is no way to assess to what extent these resources are a strategic factor in Bush's calculations, those who assert a simple link between oil and the war almost always fail to deal with a number of inconvenient facts. First, if the US wanted its oil companies to have access to the Iraqi market, it could have simply pressed the United Nations to drop sanctions against Iraq. Also, oil is a commodity whose price is set on the world market, as Peter Ferrara points out on National Review Online. Since Iraq has been allowed to sell oil in order to purchase food and other key commodities, it is already contributing to the world supply of oil and thereby lowering the price Americans pay. Finally, as energy expert Daniel Yergin argues, Iraq has only three percent of world production capacity, and to double that "could take more than a decade. In the meantime, growth elsewhere would limit Iraq's eventual share to perhaps 5 percent, significant but still in the second tier of oil nations."
No basis has ever been cited for this accusation — perhaps because the accusation makes no sense, as a matter of basic economics.
Unless the Iraqis drill and sell their oil, it is worthless to them. They must sell it somewhere on the world oil market to get any gain out of it.
But oil is a fungible commodity, so once they sell it — anywhere — it becomes part of the world oil supply. That increased supply in turn reduces the world oil price, until some equilibrium is reached between supply and demand.
From that point on, it doesn't matter to anyone where the Iraqi oil actually goes. If it goes to Japan, the Japanese will buy less oil from Venezuela and Nigeria. More oil from those countries would then go to the U.S. Indeed, as the oil supply sloshes around on world markets, no one really cares — or keeps track of — where it originated, so long as it meets quality standards. For all anybody knows or cares, every drop of Iraqi oil could end up at southern California gas stations.
Moreover, just who do the "war protesters" think Iraq would sell its oil to, in any event? The Western oil companies, primarily American companies, would be the primary purchasers of Iraqi oil, whether they buy it directly or circuitously through various middlemen. Who else is going to refine, distribute, and sell the stuff to the huge Western (and particularly American) consumer market? Have you ever seen or heard of any Iraqi gas stations?
In short, the oil companies already ultimately get the oil now. They don't need Bush to go to war to get it for them.
The proportion of the world oil supply currently consumed by America will continue to get here one way or another through world oil markets. If oil producers tried to cut off the huge American consumer market, there would effectively be a huge drop in the total world demand for their oil — and, consequently, a huge reduction in the world price.
Who else is going to consume world oil output except American consumers (and those gas-guzzling SUVs)? The truth is that Middle Eastern oil producers — including Iraq — need America and its consumers a lot more than we need them. We can always figure out other ways of powering our transportation and warming our homes, technologically. But has the Middle East ever figured out any way of getting dollars other than pumping and selling oil?
That is why an oil boycott is ultimately no real threat either. Again, Iraq and other oil producers must sell the oil somewhere on the world market to get anything out of it. And once they do, they add to the world oil supply and reduce the price to approach a new supply/demand equilibrium. The world oil market then distributes the available oil supply to wherever the demand is — which means America and the rest of the West.
Indeed, it is the West that has been restraining Iraqi oil supply since the Gulf War, with various restrictions on Iraqi oil sales. And it has been the Iraqis who have been pleading to open up their production and sales. An Iraqi oil boycott is not even remotely an issue today.
So the contention that the impending war is really about oil is senseless as well as being baseless. Which leaves us with this question: Why is the American Left joining with its foreign comrades to defame America with this silly and transparently false accusation? Is it really all just about anti-Americanism? Is it really just rooted in a hatred of American power and an attempt to stop its exercise? Isn't it time they came clean and told the truth?
— Peter Ferrara is director of the International Center for Law and Economics in Fairfax, Va.
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We would like to briefly respond to a common theme in criticism of the section above regarding "war for oil." Readers (and others) have argued that Iraq has the second-largest oil reserves in the world and that the US wants direct control of that oil for three reasons: 1) to lessen dependence on Saudi Arabian oil, freeing the US to put pressure on the kingdom's rulers; 2) to increase production, drive down the price of oil and thereby weaken the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) cartel; and 3) to gain access to lucrative development contracts for American oil companies. All of these could be motivations for the war - they are essentially non-falsifiable - but they are not necessarily implied by suggestions that the war is "for oil," which as we described above could have been obtained easily from Iraq on the world market. These arguments describe (unproven) strategic calculations that extend significantly beyond oil. Moreover, the burden is on those who blithely assert hidden motivations for war to make a reasoned argument as to why President Bush would launch a war and create a major international controversy simply for control of oil reserves that will not be effectively tapped for years to come.
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Another source saying Atta meeting did take place:
Spain links suspect in 9/11 plot to Baghdad
David Rose Sunday March 16, 2003 The Observer
An alleged terrorist accused of helping the 11 September conspirators was invited to a party by the Iraqi ambassador to Spain under his al-Qaeda nom de guerre, according to documents seized by Spanish investigators. Yusuf Galan, who was photographed being trained at a camp run by Osama bin Laden, is now in jail, awaiting trial in Madrid. The indictment against him, drawn up by investigating judge Baltasar Garzon, claims he was 'directly involved with the preparation and carrying out of the attacks ... by the suicide pilots on 11 September'.
Evidence of Galan's links with Iraqi government officials came to light only recently, as investigators pored through more than 40,000 pages of documents seized in raids at the homes of Galan and seven alleged co-conspirators. The Spanish authorities have supplied copies to lawyers in America, and this week the documents will form part of a dossier to be filed in a federal court in Washington, claiming damages of approximately $100 billion on behalf of more than 2,500 11 September victims.
The lawsuit lists Saddam's government in Iraq as one of its principal defendants, claiming it provided 'material support' to the al-Qaeda terrorists. Under US law, the victims' families do not have to prove active direction or involvement in the details of the 9/11 conspiracy by Iraq, only that Saddam's regime gave al-Qaeda more general assistance in the knowledge that it was planning to attack American targets.
Although some Western intelligence officials have expressed scepticism about an al-Qaeda-Iraq link, in recent months George Tenet, the Director of the CIA, has made increasingly strong statements alleging such a connection. In Congressional testimony last month, he said that Iraq had co-operated with al-Qaeda for 10 years, and that it had trained al-Qaeda members in bombmaking and the use of chemical and biological weapons. In an apparent attempt to refute the sceptics, he said this information 'comes from reliable sources'.
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Pose a skeem, with sopposed events, that claims to support some political view, get a bunch of news people talking about it and shortly there will appear thousands of eye witnesses, whether or not the supposed events ever happened.
The news people advertise it and the kooks supply "evidence.
It's like the cops chasing the stolen ttruck through here yesterday. For a time they had it live on the national tv chanel. The cable channels had it for a couple of hours and all the local channels were locked to nothing else through the whole 5 or 6 hour chase. The real smart TV reporters kept complaining about the thousands of people that were coming line the sides of the highway to watch the procession, led by the 18-wheeler, followed by 30 - 40 cop cars, and with a couple of helicopters overhead. If the idiots hadn't been giving it all that free advertising, most of those thousands would never have heard of it.
Posts: 11304 | From: Fort Worth, Texas | Registered: Mar 2005
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The amazing thing is Bdgee, like with the 9/11 WTC thread, the information to answer most of these questions is out there for everyone to see. Alot of people don't want to see. That works both ways though. On the other side you have people like me, that don't want to see any of the bad things government does either so I can't cast stones there.
But really if you think about it, the burden of proof lies with the conspiracy theorists, but yet they never hold themselves to that standard. In fact many of the unanswered questions conspiracy theorists put forth are, in my opinion, one's they know can't or won't be answered. The FBI,CIA, Secret Service and other agencies usually won't tell you anything they don't have to, conspiracy or not.
One I found is what did Kissinger talk about at the Bildenburg meeting in 2001. Now how in the hell is anybody going to find out the answer to that one? And would they believe Kissinger if he told them he described taking a crap in the White House back in '72? No.
Than you have people saying even after questions are answered "Well the government got to them."
Problem is I do believe these conspiracy theories are damaging to the country. I'm fascinated as hell about them. Seems I haven't come across one yet I could swallow but we'll see.
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Be careful, JW. Most of that information is BS and has no more relation to the truth than the political whims of the writers.
Add to that that in this present "government" are officials that intend to slant and direct the results by changing the facts to suit their agenda.
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Quite possibly true, but it seems more evidence than the conspiracy theorists are giving. And again the burden of proof lies with the accuser. If someone is going to accuse, they dang well need some evidence to back it up. Not just a bunch of strung together questions that either can't be answered, Bildeberg Question, or won't be answered, FBI, CIA, National Secirty etc. I believe that it takes a generation before this stuff starts to come out and questions can be answered. But than again look at the kennedy assasination. 43 years later and I am in the minority in thinking even the most basic government assertion, that Oswalt at least shot by himself. Now did someone put him up to it who knows.
Think I might take a shot at the moon landing soon. Now I know we where on that sucker.
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I posit that those who attribute to Lee Oswald the craft of cooperation are granting him such a quixotic talent in order to make some at best fantastic tale they want to foster seem feasable.
Where else but in those imagined skemes is there any example of Oswald's subjugation to harmony.
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Smedley Butler on Interventionism -- Excerpt from a speech delivered in 1933, by Major General Smedley Butler, USMC.
War is just a racket. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small inside group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the masses.
I believe in adequate defense at the coastline and nothing else. If a nation comes over here to fight, then we'll fight. The trouble with America is that when the dollar only earns 6 percent over here, then it gets restless and goes overseas to get 100 percent. Then the flag follows the dollar and the soldiers follow the flag.
I wouldn't go to war again as I have done to protect some lousy investment of the bankers. There are only two things we should fight for. One is the defense of our homes and the other is the Bill of Rights. War for any other reason is simply a racket.
There isn't a trick in the racketeering bag that the military gang is blind to. It has its "finger men" to point out enemies, its "muscle men" to destroy enemies, its "brain men" to plan war preparations, and a "Big Boss" Super-Nationalistic-Capitalism.
It may seem odd for me, a military man to adopt such a comparison. Truthfulness compels me to. I spent thirty- three years and four months in active military service as a member of this country's most agile military force, the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from Second Lieutenant to Major-General. And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high class muscle- man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.
I suspected I was just part of a racket at the time. Now I am sure of it. Like all the members of the military profession, I never had a thought of my own until I left the service. My mental faculties remained in suspended animation while I obeyed the orders of higher-ups. This is typical with everyone in the military service.
I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912 (where have I heard that name before?). I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.
During those years, I had, as the boys in the back room would say, a swell racket. Looking back on it, I feel that I could have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.
Posts: 6008 | From: phoenix az | Registered: Mar 2005
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Like most great private banks, Brown Brothers Harriman didn't start out in finance. Begun nearly 200 years ago as an importer of Irish Linen, the company entered the banking business as a by-product of its success as a dry-goods merchant.
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-- We can't be going to war to get Saddam to sell us oil because he already does.
-- Do we want him to sell us MORE oil? Well then all we'd have to do is ask. Iraq is desperate to acquire more revenue.
-- Do we want to increase the price of oil to make the oil companies more profitable? Again, that's easy to do. We could simply destroy the Iraqi oil fields in retaliation for their attacks on our planes in the "no fly" zone. That would cause a large temporary spike in the price of oil.
-- Do we want to get more oil on the world market so we can buy cheaper oil? We could easily convince the UN to remove the sanctions and Iraq would quickly double their oil production. They're currently producing way under capacity.
-- Do we want to get the oil field contracts that the French and Russians have? Behind the scenes, Bush could have offered to have the sanctions lifted if Hussein would have torn up the contracts he had with the French and Russians. If we didn't want the sanctions in place they'd be gone and the contracts Saddam made with the French and the Russians? They don't mean anything when you're dealing with a dictator like Hussein -- unless you've got a military capable of enforcing the deal. Also, just as a side note, the war, the occupation, and aid we'll give Iraq will end up costing us much more than those oil fields are worth even if we would have gotten them all (which we won't).
-- Do we want to control the country that has the 2nd largest supply of oil in the world so we'll still have a source of oil after much of the rest of the planet has gone dry? Well, this makes no sense at all in world where relationships between nations change regularly. Think about how our relationships with Pakistan, Russia, South Korea, & Germany have changed just since 9/11. The only way we could insure that we would still have access to Iraq's oil decades from now would be to make them into a US colony with a puppet ruler who actually takes orders from us. Is there anyone out there who actually thinks this is going to happen despite the fact that we're not doing it anywhere else in the world today?
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What's common to all these theories, from the most delusional to the more sophisticated, is that their authors display little understanding of the Caspian or of energy markets. Many of the heavy-breathing conspiracy theorists don't even realize that the major Unocal pipeline would have moved natural gas, not oil. Like Pilger, some also seem to believe that the Caspian's energy reserves are going to be shipped to America, presumably to warm our homes and fuel our SUVs, when in fact most of the oil and gas from the Caspian is destined for markets in Russia, Europe and Central Asia itself.
The Caspian region is home to huge energy resources -- by some estimates, it may produce 5 percent of the world's oil within a decade -- but Afghanistan is almost entirely irrelevant to their exploitation. In fact, the country is today less likely to be a player in the Caspian sweepstakes than it was before the fall of the Taliban. "The idea of Afghanistan re-emerging as a transit corridor for Caspian oil and gas is not remotely realistic in today's circumstances -- even in a best-case scenario in which Afghanistan were to emerge from the present conflict with a vigorous, broadly based and stable government with strong international support," says Laurent Ruseckas, a Caspian expert at Cambridge Energy Research Associates.
Afghanistan itself has very small reserves of natural gas and virtually no oil. The country's only importance, at least in theory, is that it could serve as a transit point for energy from neighboring countries.
Yet oddly enough, this isn't the first time that conspiracy theorists have sought to portray Afghanistan as the energy linchpin of Western civilization. Back in 1980, following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan when the Cold War was raging, the Carter administration and the press argued that the occupation had dramatically altered the world balance of power. To take but one example, Newsweek said at the time that control of Afghanistan had "put the Russians within 350 miles of the Arabian Sea, the oil lifeline of the West and Japan. Soviet warplanes based in Afghanistan could cut the lifeline at will."
This was pure rubbish. Seven years earlier, when detente was near its zenith, The Wall Street Journal ran a rare story on Afghanistan headlined, "Do the Russians Covet Afghanistan? If So, It's Hard to Figure Why." Reporter Peter Kann, later the Journal's chairman and publisher, wrote that "great power strategists tend to think of Afghanistan as a kind of fulcrum upon which the world balance of power tips. But from close up, Afghanistan tends to look less like a fulcrum or a domino or a stepping-stone than like a vast expanse of desert waste with a few fly-ridden bazaars, a fair number of feuding tribes and a lot of miserably poor people."
That's pretty much what Afghanistan looks like today, yet to the conspiracy theorists the country is every bit as important as Newsweek claimed two decades back. To understand the fallacy of their argument requires a bit of background on the Caspian and a trip back in time to the early 1990s, when the Caspian's potential importance as a source of global energy was first recognized.
At that time, everyone recognized that Iran offered the cheapest and most practical transport route for the Caspian's reserves. But the Clinton administration was obsessed with preventing that outcome, as it (like the current Bush team) sought to isolate the regime in Tehran. The United States also opposed plans to run oil and gas pipelines across Russian territory, fearing that Moscow would assume control of the region's energy supplies.
One potential alternative, at least for gas, emerged in October of 1995 when Turkmenistan's president, Saparmurat Niyazov, signed an agreement with Unocal to build a $3 billion pipeline. It was a significant deal because Turkmenistan has significant proven gas reserves of almost 3 trillion cubic meters. (Still, that's small next to Russia, Iran and Qatar, which have reserves of 48 trillion, 23 trillion and 14 trillion cubic meters, respectively.)
The Unocal pipeline would have transported gas from the Dauletabad Field in southeastern Turkmenistan, across Afghanistan and on to Multan in central Pakistan, with a possible onward link to India. The Clinton administration backed the plan and in 1996, Assistant Secretary of State for South Asia Robin Raphael traveled to Pakistan and Afghanistan to lobby for the pipeline.
Despite the official U.S. support, many within the energy industry looked upon Unocal's project as utterly ridiculous. Using Afghanistan as a pipeline route made sense only if one completely ignored the political risks. Pipelines are highly vulnerable installations; building and maintaining one requires a good deal of stability. Afghanistan was a country in complete chaos after nearly two decades of continuous warfare. The Taliban rolled into Kabul in September of 1996, several months after Raphael's visit, and controlled most of the country, but dozens of warlords and factions -- some backed by Iran, Russia and other outside powers -- continued to undermine the Taliban's rule.
The Clinton administration and Unocal kept touting the pipeline, but the project never moved beyond the planning stages. In October of 1997, Ahmed Rashid -- who later became known for his book Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia -- authored a paper on the Unocal project for the Petroleum Finance Company, a private energy consulting firm. He wrote: "The future prospects of constructing the pipeline and mitigating the high risks involved depend almost entirely on relative stability in Afghanistan, which does not appear likely any time soon. ... Although the Taliban say they will guarantee security for foreign construction workers, nobody can actually guarantee security at this time in a country like Afghanistan. Thus, winning the Taliban's support or signing a contract with them would not be the end of the problems for any company, but just the beginning."
By the following year, the United States had largely dumped Unocal's plan and had shifted its backing to a competing project. This one, called the Trans-Caspian Gas Pipeline, has greatly excited the conspiracy theorists as well, because Enron did the feasibility study and was closely involved with the planning. Thus it has been portrayed in some accounts as reflective of the United States' long-standing need to control Afghanistan. This is a particularly stupid assertion because the Trans-Caspian pipeline's route wouldn't even have crossed Afghanistan. Rather, it would have moved Turkmen gas across Azerbaijan and Georgia into Turkey. Furthermore, though Enron had been expected to lead a consortium of energy companies behind the project, a joint venture between Amoco, Bechtel and GE capital was selected in the end.
After al-Qaeda bombed U.S. Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, the Clinton administration focused its Afghanistan policy almost exclusively on Osama bin Laden, not on winning support for a pipeline project that by then was effectively dead. The Trans-Caspian project that Enron was involved in, meanwhile, died just as it was picking up steam. The reason was that Azerbaijan discovered large gas fields of its own. The Azeri government was no longer interested in furnishing a transit route for Turkmen gas to Turkey, where Azerbaijan could now could sell its own reserves.
The conspiracy theorist's notion that Afghanistan provides a critical throughway for Caspian oil is even more dubious. In the late 1990s, after its gas project had fallen apart, Unocal developed plans to run an oil pipeline from Central Asian sources, primarily Kazakhstan, via Afghanistan and Pakistan to the Indian Ocean port of Gwadar. The pipeline would have moved only a modest amount of oil, estimated at about 700,000 barrels per day.
The oil project never received any serious backing from the United States. The Clinton administration lobbied hard for a competing British Petroleum plan in which Afghanistan had no role. Instead, BP called for constructing a pipeline between Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, through Georgia to the Mediterranean port of Ceyhan in Turkey, a NATO ally.
What about today? given the friendly regime of Hamid Karzai now installed in Kabul, might Afghanistan come to emerge as a bustling thoroughfare for Caspian energy resources?
Don't bet on it. Afghanistan never made much sense as a transit point for energy, and today less than ever. In the mid-1990s, when the Unocal project arose, Turkmenistan was desperate to find new export markets for its gas. Russia, which had traditionally bought almost all Turkmen gas, was in a prolonged post-communist recession, and its purchases had plummeted from 88 billion cubic meters in 1992 to about 15 billion cubic meters in 1996. Furthermore, Moscow was refusing to allow Turkmenistan to use its vast pipeline network to send gas to non-Russian customers -- despite the fact that Pakistan and India faced gas shortages and were eager to buy from Turkmenistan. Hence there was at least a commercial logic to the Unocal proposal.
Today the situation has completely changed. In 2000 the Russian economy emerged from its deep slump, prompting the country to sign a special arrangement with Turkmenistan for gas imports. Since then, Turkmen exports to Russia have climbed steadily and now stand at around 31 billion cubic meters. As part of the deal the Russians have become more generous in allowing Turkmen exporters to utilize their pipeline system.
At the same time, the customers that Unocal had foreseen for Turkmen gas have disappeared. Turkey has lined up sufficient future supplies from Russia and Azerbaijan, while Pakistan has discovered domestic supplies and no longer needs to import gas. That leaves only India, which has cheaper alternatives than buying Turkmen gas that's been shipped across three countries. It's also highly unlikely that India would buy gas from a pipeline that runs through its archenemy Pakistan -- which in addition to collecting transit fees could cut the flow at any time.
A final obstacle to a Unocal-style pipeline is that Turkmen President Niyazov is an unstable megalomaniac. An old Communist Party hack, Niyazov has built a cult of personality that rivals Stalin's. His portraits are ubiquitous in Turkmenistan, the country's currency bears his image, and cities, towns and businesses have been renamed after him. In his spare time, Niyazov makes grandiose plans such as building an artificial lake in the middle of the desert, issues presidential decrees on issues such as the title of a women's magazine, and erects monumental palaces. He has reportedly contacted embassies of Islamic countries and asked how they would react if he called himself a prophet. Niyazov's madness, combined with his total control of the economy, has left few Western companies willing to invest in Turkmenistan, much less put up billions for a gas pipeline.
Brisard, co-author of Bin Laden: The Forbidden Truth, makes much of the fact that the leaders of Afghanistan, Pakistan and Turkmenistan decided in late May to revive the old Unocal pipeline project. In an article he penned for Salon on June 5, Brisard wrote that this basically proved his thesis about the critical importance of the Unocal pipeline to American war policy, claiming that "In the end ... the U.S. got its way."
Yet no major energy firm has expressed any interest in working with the three countries. Even Unocal has stated forthrightly that it has abandoned its old project and that its priorities have shifted outside of Central Asia. "The fact that Karzai, Niyazov and the Pakistanis have agreed to build a pipeline is meaningless," says Robin Bhatty, an independent energy analyst whose focus is the Caspian region. "None of them have the money or skills to build the thing, and no international firm will be involved given the availability of already-built pipelines and alternative routes."
Ruseckas shares that opinion, saying that all the new opportunities for Turkmen and other Central Asian gas to move north -- to and through Russia -- have removed pressure that could have pushed the gas to South Asian markets via Afghanistan. "A revival of the old Unocal project is unlikely for at least a decade, and then it could become only one of many alternatives," he says. "The economics don't make sense on the supply or the demand side."
The Trans-Afghan oil route of the mid-1990s is also dead in the water, and for virtually identical reasons. At the time, Kazakhstan had problems getting its oil to market. But in the past three years, Moscow has allowed Kazakh exporters to quadruple the flow of oil through Russia's existing pipelines to about 300,000 barrels per day. Last year, Chevron, ExxonMobil and others began operating the Caspian Pipeline Consortium, which links the giant Tengiz Field in western Kazakhstan to a new Russian port on the Black Sea. The consortium won't reach its initial capacity of 600,000 barrels per day until about 2005, at which point it can more than double its capacity if necessary.
In other words, just as Turkmenistan has surplus export capacity for gas, Kazakhstan has surplus capacity to export oil. (That could change if the country's undeveloped Kashagan Field turns out to be a blockbuster, but that development, if it occurs, is at least a decade away.) Meanwhile, several other Caspian oil pipeline projects are moving forward -- most notably the old Baku-Ceyhan route favored by the United States -- and they all bypass Afghanistan.
Market factors aside, an Afghan pipeline route remains highly unattractive for a number of reasons. Few people would bet on a long-term settlement to the fighting there, and if peace does take hold it won't be for a long time. Throwing a pipeline into the mix will only make matters worse. "When you talk about pipelines you create an atmosphere of expectation of money," says Julia Nanay, a Caspian expert at the Petroleum Finance Company. "All the warlords are going to want a piece of the action."
Contrary to the views of many hand-wringing conspiracy theorists, the Taliban regime never posed a threat to America's position in the Caspian. The region's oil reserves are mostly distant from Afghanistan, located in countries such as Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan, where the threat of radical Islam is quite small. (The governments there sometimes claim otherwise as a means of justifying their oppressive rule.)
In some ways, the fall of the Taliban has been bad for American business interests. Nanay points out that the Taliban ruled most of Afghanistan and were trying to establish a strong central government. Today the warlords are back and the Karzai regime controls a far smaller slice of the country. "If bin Laden hadn't come along, we would have dealt with the Taliban," Nanay says. "Now there's a lot more insecurity and lawlessness." She adds that neither Caspian energy reserves nor control of Afghanistan were goals of the war, saying, "We didn't care about Afghanistan, we cared about bin Laden."
During a January 2002 visit to Afghanistan, Secretary of State Colin Powell said that U.S. companies should now consider investing in Afghanistan. "This country needs everything," he told reporters. "It needs a banking system. It needs a health-care system. It needs a sanitation system. It needs a phone system. It needs road construction. Everything you can imagine." To aid the reconstruction effort, the United States, Japan, Russia, Britain and other donors have pledged $1.3 billion.
But the war in Afghanistan is unlikely to bring on a wave of corporate profiteering by American firms. Much of the international aid will go toward the repatriation and resettlement of refugees, counternarcotics efforts and the rehabilitation of the agricultural sector, and the country is simply too poor, undeveloped and chaotic to become an attractive site for private investment. Thus far the Overseas Private Investment Corporation has issued a paltry $50 million line of credit to support American investment in Afghanistan. A January 2002 Associated Press story quoted New York business analyst Jeffrey Rogers as saying he couldn't imagine any major corporation making a significant investment in Afghanistan. "It's just not the kind of risk anyone is prepared to take right now," he said. "I can't imagine they will take a risk like that for some time."
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JIM LEHRER: Now to our newsmaker interview with David Kay. Until last Friday, he was in charge of the U.S. search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. He left that post saying none was found, and that he no longer believed Iraq had any at the time of the U.S.-led invasion last spring.
Mr. Kay, welcome.
DAVID KAY: Thank you, Jim.
JIM LEHRER: What exactly did you expect to find?
DAVID KAY: Going in we expected to find large stocks of chemical and biological agents, weaponized, ready for use on the battlefield, as well as a fairly substantial nuclear program. We did not find that. We have found it a lot. We have found program activities in those areas. We found a resurgent missile program. But, the large stockpile of actual weapons, chemical and biological weapons simply have not yet been found.
JIM LEHRER: Why did you expect to find them? Why did you think they were there?
DAVID KAY: Well, I think, first of all, because that were the estimates -- not just the estimates by the CIA or the Defense Intelligence Agency, we were going in against the background in which the U.N. had spoken of large numbers of missing material that could have been weaponized. There were intelligence reports from the British, the French, the Germans and even the Russians which painted a picture of Iraq armed with weapons of mass destruction.
JIM LEHRER: And you looked at all of this before you went?
DAVID KAY: Yes, I did.
JIM LEHRER: And what was it the accumulation of all of this -- or were there specific things that really convinced you as an experienced weapons inspector that, my goodness these things are there?
DAVID KAY: Well, there were on paper very specific things with regard to the reports of movement in the weapons, a protection of weapons, of weapons being assigned to specific units as well as specific locations on paper. When we got there, they certainly didn't exist then.
The main source of the prewar intelligence JIM LEHRER: Now, what was this intelligence based on? DAVID KAY: Well, multiple sources but when it gets right down to it, it was made -- based mostly on the reports of people coming out of Iraq, that is, defectors.
And that's an interesting question to raise about how much you can rely on that. One has to say, though, that very often that's the most valuable intelligence. In the case of Iran, for example the Iranian nuclear program that we now know about, the one that the U.N. has been currently investigating, was not found by the U.N. nor found by U.S. intelligence. It was initially reported by a group of Iranian dissidents outside of the country.
So you can't dismiss that sort of intelligence out of hand but in the case of Iraq, it was a combination of technical intelligence and that sort of reporting.
JIM LEHRER: How could so many people be so wrong about this? That's what the lay people are asking.
DAVID KAY: That was my question as well. And that's the question I think we need to have an answer to. And I'm the first to say, I don't have all the answers to that -- nor even probably all the proper questions to it. I think it will turn out to be an over-reliance on technical intelligence. A lack of our own --
JIM LEHRER: Technical meaning what -- satellite stuff?
DAVID KAY: Spy satellites and communication intercepts.
A lack of our own dedicated secret agents, clandestine officers operating in Iraq, as well as there's going be a deeper one in which the Iraqis bear considerable responsibility. We tend to when we analyze a failure look at our own failures and forget there's another side to the equation. I'm convinced the Iraqis tried to deceive us and in part they tried to deceive us and others into believing that they really did have those weapons.
They also quite clearly during the U.N. days particularly '91 to '95 lied and cheated the U.N. about what they had. So you based up a record of lies and deceits on behalf of the Iraqis that made it hard to believe even when they told the truth.
JIM LEHRER: But let's go back to that. They were under sanctions. They were under heat from the international community. Why would they want to claim they had these weapons if they didn't have them?
DAVID KAY: Well, I think Saddam had at least two reasons. One, he did not want to seem in the Arab world as an individual who had caved in on the most valuable weapons that he believed you could have in the world, the most intimidating weapons. Those are chemical and biological arms and even the potential nuclear arms. He thought that would be devastating to Iraq's position.
Secondly, we forget, chemical weapons Saddam used against his own people. The Kurds and the Shia were potential disruptions of Sunni rule there and the most effective tool he had was chemical weapons and the threat of it. I think he was afraid to give it because it would seem internally in terms of the internal political mix that he had backed off and he had backed off by giving the weapon most likely to be used against an uprising.
JIM LEHRER: So he was bluffing?
DAVID KAY: I think if you want a simple term it's bluffing, yes. I think it's a more complex game than the usual parlor bluff.
JIM LEHRER: You looked at all this material from all these many sources. Was there not one discordant voice in any of them? Was there not one analyst from some agency who said wait a minute this guy may be bluffing, wait a minute, those stockpiles may no longer be there, or was it unanimous that they were all there?
DAVID KAY: There were discordant voices about individual pieces of information. For example was he producing remote piloted vehicles capable of spreading biological agents? But with regard to the weight of argument he has or does not have weapons of mass destruction, there were very, very discordant voices and most of those were outside the government.
A flawed understanding of prewar Iraq? JIM LEHRER: Why? How does that -- when you think on it now and looking back on all the material things, recalling all the material you looked at and how you came to this conclusion, why wouldn't experienced people picked have picked up on this? What was missing, what was missing in the equation that led to such a false finding?
DAVID KAY: I think part of it, Jim, is because we got in the habit of believing that the Iraqis always lied because they did lie and cheat to a large extent in the early '90s; made it hard to accept pieces of information that the Iraqis provided that showed they didn't have it.
Secondly, I think we really miss a deterioration of Iraqi society that took place beginning around 1998 in which they spun into a vortex of corruption and graft that made their own interest in requiring more money and taking care of each individual and in not producing weapons in society.
And, that's the reason we're having trouble in Iraq today. The social glue of that society was destroyed by Saddam Hussein. Saddam himself, we now know of about $6.5 billion of money illegally skimmed off the oil for food program -- by the Iraqis' own accounting 60 percent of that went into new palace construction and as explained to me that was because that's how could you take care of your friends new construction. It was a society that had simply fallen apart and we didn't detect that. We should have.
JIM LEHRER: We should have. Why didn't we? What is your analysis of why we didn't?
DAVID KAY: The strange thing, Jim, is this isn't the first time we failed to understand what is going on as a society. You can go back to the Second World War. We missed what was going on in Germany under strategic bombing; we found out only afterwards -- much more recently the Soviet Union.
When the Soviet Union fell, this giant, this superpower, we suddenly discovered we had a basket case on our hands. They couldn't feed its own people, couldn't care for it. I didn't have power. It was falling apart. In Vietnam for those of us who started our career sort of -- students of that era or creatures of that era more than students -- we misread Vietnamese society as well.
We are not very good as a nation in our intelligence capability at reading the most fundamental secrets of a society, what are its capabilities, what are it's intentions? You can't photograph those. You need Americans on the ground penetrating those societies and people who are speaking their languages.
The politics of the prewar intelligence JIM LEHRER: Yesterday at the Senate hearing you appeared before and Senator Collins of Maine said this has cast doubts with her at least on whether we know what is going on in North Korea for instance, on nuclear weapons. Is that a message here that everybody should say, wait a minute we can't get this right, whether or not Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, what can we get right as far as intelligence goes? Is that what you are saying?
DAVID KAY: Jim, I think that's the important message, far more important than the "gotchaism" of U.S. politics, of who did what to whom which we always like to focus on because it seems to be our interest in personalities. Our credibility, our credibility as a nation and that credibility is what allows us to cooperate with others and influence others towards our own ends. If they doubt the honesty and the objectivity of what we're telling, we're going to be in a world of hurt.
JIM LEHRER: So the next time we sound an alarm about country blank has got blank the world may say, oh, is this another Iraq deal? Is what you mean?
DAVID KAY: I think they will say, "Is this true or are you wrong on this one, too?"
JIM LEHRER: Is it your feeling that this is a system problem or is it a matter of people? It is a matter of priorities. Where is the failure here?
DAVID KAY: I'm convinced, Jim, it was a system problem. There was an interesting discussion in the hearing yesterday when Senator Roberts, the chairman of Senate Intelligence Committee, said he was tired of what he called oh-my-God hearings, and then he laid out a string: the U.S.S. Cole, the embassy bombings..
JIM LEHRER: Ones in Africa?
DAVID KAY: In Africa. And he had a whole litany of the all -- the World Trade Center -- all of these. What he was saying is we treat these as individual cases. There has to be a commonality and a system to this problem. I hope he treat it as a systems issue, a fundamental fault issue, as opposed to gocha politics.
JIM LEHRER: Speaking of gocha politics you are right in the middle of it now. You notice that both sides. David Kay said this: the administration uses your statements to prove that there was not as big a problem here as people have said. The Democrats who are attacking the administration said David Kay said this. How do you feel about that?
DAVID KAY: Well, I like Senator McCain yesterday when he explained to everyone that I was a technical person and I was a knave and terrible in politics. I thought Senator McCain had it about right. Yesterday, I had the experience as I was sitting there and I was watching two or three simultaneous games only one of which I was playing in and the other two I was the ball in. It was a strange, almost an out of body experience watching that.
JIM LEHRER: This is your future for the immediate -- the immediate future, is it not?
DAVID KAY: I hope I have an immediate future. I had a friend of mine call up today and say you know that book "What Color Is Your Parachute," a job change book -- he said you better buy it, and my response to him was I just want to find a parachute, I don't care what color it is.
Calls for an outside investigation JIM LEHRER: You also in your back and forth with Senator McCain yesterday, you said -- and I mentioned in the news summary -- that you are now in favor of an outside investigation of the intelligence failures on Iraq. The White House says no, Condoleezza Rice said no, no, no, no, the inspections are not even over yet. It's too early to talk about that. Does that make sense to you, the White House position? DAVID KAY: It really doesn't. In some ways I'm brought back to Apollo 13 in which the response was Houston we have a problem and if the response back from Houston had been, well, ride it out, we'll see how serious it is when you get to the moon.
I think we know enough to know we have a problem and now is the time to start the investigation. My reason for believing it has to be outside -- there are many variations of how you can do it outside -- is my reading on history is that closed orders and secret societies, whether they are private, religious or governmental, do not reform themselves internally very often.
JIM LEHRER: What is going on here?
DAVID KAY: I'll take the McCain did defense of character. I'm probably not bright enough politically to know because it's a mystery to me.
JIM LEHRER: Do you believe if there's no independent investigation we might never find out what the failures are that led you and other professionals to believe there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq?
DAVID KAY: Jim, that's not my worst fear. My worst fear is that we'll have other disasters of that sort. Walking the cat back and explaining Iraq I think is politically important to the country as a leader in the world. But my real fear as an American is if we don't straighten out the systematic failures, we'll repeat them in other disasters.
JIM LEHRER: This is a very serious matter to you, is it not?
DAVID KAY: It is absolutely the most serious matter I think I can deal with.
JIM LEHRER: And do you feel that the political on both -- the political folks on both sides share your serious feeling or is it too -- this is just an awkward time. It's called a presidential election campaign time. Is it possible to do what you want right now?
DAVID KAY: It's certainly an awkward time, but I think if you listened to yesterday's hearing in full as I had to as I was sitting there, there was obviously a political game being played by both sides but on the other hand every senator I think had serious questions that they raised and wanted answers to.
That's what gives me hope is that if we can transcend this -- and I think it's really going to require the American people speaking out and demanding it. Quite frankly very few answers come from Washington on their own. This is a democracy and it is a government that responds, regardless of political party to pressure from the outside. If the American people do not demand an answer through their elected representatives, wait for the next crisis and the next event I'm afraid.
JIM LEHRER: Based on the reaction you have had to what you have been doing the last few days, do you think the American people want this?
DAVID KAY: Jim, I'm just not in a position -- mostly when I turn on the television today, I'm watching political polls about campaigns so maybe not. But I'm more hopeful than that actually.
JIM LEHRER: David Kay, thank you very much.
DAVID KAY: Thank you, Jim.
Please note his response to the question "Why did you expect to find them?" to paraphrase: UN thought it was possible they had them British intelligence - Iraq had them French intelligence - Iraq had them Germans intelligence - Iraq had them Russians intelligence - Iraq had them
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