Exclusive: In September 2002, as the Bush-43 administration was rolling out its ad campaign for invading Iraq because of alleged WMD, the Joint Chiefs of Staff received a briefing about the paucity of WMD evidence. But the report was shelved and the war went on, as ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern explains.
By Ray McGovern
There is a lot more than meets the eye in the newly revealed Joint Chiefs of Staff intelligence briefing of Sept. 5, 2002, which showed there was a lack of evidence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (WMD) just as President George W. Bush’s administration was launching its sales job for the Iraq War.
The briefing report and its quick demise amount to an indictment not only of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld but also of Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Richard Myers, who is exposed once again as a Rumsfeld patsy who put politics ahead of his responsibility to American soldiers and to the nation as a whole.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld at a press briefing with Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Richard Myers. (State Department photo)
In a Jan. 24 report at Politico entitled “What Donald Rumsfeld Knew We Didn’t Know About Iraq,” journalist John Walcott presents a wealth of detail about the JCS intelligence report of Sept. 5, 2002, offering additional corroboration that the Bush administration lied to the American people about the evidence of WMD in Iraq.
The JCS briefing noted, for example: “Our knowledge of the Iraqi (nuclear) weapons program is based largely perhaps 90% on analysis of imprecise intelligence.”
Small wonder that the briefing report was dead on arrival in Rumsfeld’s in-box. After all, it proved that the intelligence evidence justifying war was, in Rumsfeldian terms, a “known unknown.” When he received it on Sept. 5 or 6, the Defense Secretary deep-sixed it but not before sending it on Sept. 9 to Gen. Richard Myers (who he already knew had a copy) with a transparently disingenuous CYA note: “Please take a look at this material as to what we don’t know about WMD. It is big. Thanks.”
Absent was any notation such as “I guess we should tell the White House to call off its pro-war sales campaign based on Iraq possessing WMD since we don’t got the goods.” Without such a direct instruction, Rumsfeld could be sure that Gen. Myers would not take the matter further.
Myers had already proven his “company man” mettle by scotching a legal inquiry that he had just authorized to provide the armed forces with guidance on permitted interrogation techniques. All that it took to ensure a hasty Myers retreat was a verbal slap-down from Rumsfeld’s general counsel, William James Haynes II, as soon as Haynes got wind of the inquiry in November 2002. (More on that below.)
The more interesting story, in my view, is not that Rumsfeld was corrupt (yawn, yawn), but that so was his patsy, Air Force Gen. Richard Myers, the country’s top uniformed military officer at the time. Myers has sported a well-worn coat of blue Teflon up until now.
Even John Walcott, a member of the Knight-Ridder team that did the most responsible pre-Iraq-War reporting, lets the hapless Myers too easily off the hook in writing: “Myers, who knew as well as anyone the significance of the report, did not distribute it beyond his immediate military colleagues and civilian boss, which a former aide said was consistent with the role of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs.”
Principal Military Adviser to the President
That “former aide” is dead wrong on the last point, and this is key. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs works directly for two bosses: the President of the United States, whom he serves as the principal military adviser, and the Secretary of Defense. The JCS Chairman has the statutory authority indeed, the duty to seek direct access to the President to advise him in such circumstances, bearing on war or peace.
Indeed, in his 2009 memoir, Eyes on the Horizon, Gen. Myers himself writes, “I was legally obligated to provide the President my best military advice, not the best advice as approved by the Secretary of Defense.”
But in reality, Myers wouldn’t and he didn’t. And that quite simply is why Rumsfeld picked him and others like him for leading supporting roles in the Pentagon. And so the Iraq War came and, with it, catastrophe for the Middle East (with related disorder now spreading into Europe).
Could Gen. Myers have headed off the war had he had the courage to assert his prerogative to go directly to President Bush and tell him the truth? Sad to say, with Bush onboard as an eager “war president” and with Vice President Dick Cheney and Rumsfeld intimidating the timid Secretary of State Colin Powell and with National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice and CIA Director George Tenet fully compliant, it is not likely that Myers could have put the brakes on the rush to invade Iraq simply by appealing to the President.
After all, the JCS briefing coincided with the start of the big sales pitch for the Iraq War based on alarming claims about Iraq possessing WMD and possibly developing a nuclear bomb. As White House chief of staff Andrew Card explained the September timing of the ad campaign, “From a marketing point of view, you don’t introduce new products in August.”
Just three days after the date of the JCS intelligence report depicting the shallowness of the intelligence on the issue of WMD in Iraq, the White House, with the help of The New York Times and other “mainstream media,” launched a major propaganda offensive.
On Sept. 8, 2002, a New York Times front-pager headlined “US Says Hussein Intensifies Quest for A-Bomb Parts” by Judith Miller and Michael Gordon got the juggernaut rolling downhill to war. Their piece featured some aluminum tubes that they mistakenly thought could be used only for nuclear centrifuges (when they were actually for conventional artillery). Iraq’s provocative behavior, wrote the Times, has “brought Iraq and the United States to the brink of war.”
Or as NSC Advisor Rice summed it up on the Sunday talk shows later that day, “we don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.”
But it was clear the fix was in even earlier. The British “Downing Street Minutes” of July 23, 2002, show that Tenet told his British counterpart, Richard Dearlove, that as Dearlove described the message to Prime Minister Tony Blair that “Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.”
However, despite the obstacles, Richard Myers, like so many of us, took a solemn oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies foreign and domestic. For many of us who wore the uniform and took “duty, honor, country” seriously, it is hard to give Myers a get-out-of-jail-free card when it comes to blame for the Iraq War.
No matter the odds against success, his duty was to go directly to the President and make the case. If he was rebuffed, he should have quit and gone public, in my view. (How long has it been since anyone of high rank has quit on principle?)
The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs quitting over plans for an unnecessary war? Not even The New York Times and The Washington Post as fully in the tank as they were for the Iraq War would have been able to suppress that story in 2002. And, had Myers gone public he might have succeeded in injecting slippery grease under the rollout of Card’s “new product.”
Imagine what might have happened had Myers gone public at that point. It is all too easy to assume that Bush and Cheney would have gotten their war anyway. But who can tell for sure? Sometimes it takes just one senior official with integrity to spark a hemorrhage of honesty. However the outcome would have turned out at least Myers would been spared the pain of looking into the mirror every morning and thinking back on what might have been.
A Modern Rumsfeld General
This was not the first time that Myers, who served as JCS chairman from 2001 to 2005, was derelict in duty by playing the toady. He had acquiesced in Bush’s and Rumsfeld’s approval of torture in February 2002, even before going along with a gross violation of international law launching the attack on Iraq absent any imminent threat and without the required approval by the UN Security Council.
On torture, the seldom mentioned smoking gun was a two-page executive memorandum signed by George W. Bush on Feb. 7, 2002, in which the President declared that Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions did not apply to Al Qaeda and Taliban detainees. Instead, they would be treated “humanely and, to the extent appropriate and consistent with military necessity, in a manner consistent with the principles of Geneva,” the memo said, using vague and permissive language that, in effect, opened the door to torture and other abuses. Gen. Myers was one of eight addressees.
On May 11, 2009 Myers was in Washington peddling his memoir Eyes on the Horizon and spoke at a Harvard Business School Alumni dinner. I seldom go to such affairs, but in this case I was glad I had paid my dues, for here was a unique opportunity to quiz Myers. I began by thanking him for acknowledging in his book “the Geneva Conventions were a fundamental part of our military culture.” Then I asked what he had done when he received Bush’s Feb. 7, 2002 memorandum unilaterally creating exceptions to Geneva.
“Just read my book,” Myers said. I told him I had, and cited a couple of sentences from my copy: “You write that you told a senior Pentagon official, Douglas Feith, ‘I feel very strongly about this. And if Rumsfeld doesn’t defend the Geneva Conventions, I’ll contradict him in front of the President.’ Did you?”
Myers claimed that he had fought the good fight before the President decided. But there was no tinge of regret. The sense the general left with us was this: if the President wanted to bend Geneva out of shape, what was a mere Chairman of the Joint Chiefs to do?
Pushing my luck, I noted that a Senate Armed Services Committee report, “Inquiry Into the Treatment of Detainees in U.S. Custody,” had been issued just two weeks earlier (on April 23, 2009). It found that Myers had abruptly aborted an in-depth legal review of interrogation techniques that all four armed services had urgently requested and that he authorized in the fall of 2002. They were eager to get an authoritative ruling on the lawfulness of various interrogation techniques some of which were already being used at Guantanamo.
Accordingly, Myers’s legal counsel, Navy Captain Jane Dalton, had directed her staff to initiate a thorough legal and policy review of interrogation techniques. It had just gotten under way in November 2002 when Rumsfeld’s general counsel, William James Haynes II, ordered Myers to stop the review.
Haynes “wanted to keep it much more close-hold,” Dalton told the Senate committee, so she ordered her staff to stop the legal analysis. She testified that this was the only time in her career that she had been asked to stop working on a request that came to her for review.
I asked Gen. Myers why he halted the in-depth legal review. “I stopped the broad review,” Myers replied, “but I asked Dalton to do her personal review and keep me advised.” When Senate committee members asked him about stopping the review, Myers could not remember.
On Nov. 27, 2002, shortly after Haynes told Myers to stop Dalton’s review despite persisting legal concerns in the military services Haynes sent Rumsfeld a one-page memo recommending that he approve all but three of 18 techniques requested by the interrogators in Guantanamo.
Techniques like stress positions, nudity, exploitation of phobias (like fear of dogs), deprivation of light, and auditory stimuli were all recommended for approval. On Dec. 2, 2002, Rumsfeld signed Haynes’s recommendation, adding a handwritten note referring to the use of stress positions: “I stand for 8-10 hours a day. Why is standing limited to 4 hours?”
A Different JCS Chairman
Other JCS chairmen have not been as compliant as Myers was. For instance, a decade after Myers acceded to Bush’s rush to war in Iraq, JSC Chairman Martin Dempsey smelled a rat when Secretary of State John Kerry along with neocons, liberal hawks and the mainstream media rushed toward full-scale war on Syria by pinning the blame on President Bashar al-Assad for the fatal sarin gas attack outside Damascus on Aug. 21, 2013.
Comparisons can be invidious, but Dempsey is bright, principled, and no one’s patsy. It did not take him long to realize that another “regime change” scheme was in play with plans to get the U.S. directly involved in a shooting war with Syria. As more intelligence came in, the sarin attack increasingly looked like a false-flag attack carried out by radical jihadists to draw the U.S. military in on their side.
This new war could have started by syllogism: (a) get President Barack Obama to draw a “red line” against the use of chemical weapons in Syria; (b) stage a chemical attack that would be quickly blamed on Assad for violating the red line; and (c) mousetrapping Obama into making good on his threat of “enormous consequences.”
That Obama pulled back at the last minute was a shock to those who felt sure they had found a way to destroy the Syrian army and clear the way for Assad’s violent removal even if the result would have been a likely victory for Al Qaeda and/or the Islamic State. After all, neocon/liberal-hawk thinking has long favored “regime change” whatever the consequences, as the wars in Iraq and Libya have demonstrated.
But Gen. Dempsey became a fly in the regime-changers’ ointment. In contrast to Myers, Dempsey apparently saw the need to go directly to the President to head off another unnecessary war. The evidence suggests that this is precisely what he did and that he probably bypassed Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel in the process since time was of the essence.
Dempsey had already told Congress that a major attack on Syria should require congressional authorization and he was aware that the “evidence” adduced to implicate the Syrian government was shaky at best. Besides, according to investigative reporter Seymour Hersh, British intelligence told the JCS that they had obtained a sample of the sarin used in the Aug. 21 attack and it did not match the sarin known to be in Syrian army stocks.
Actually, it is no secret that Dempsey helped change President Obama’s mind between when Kerry spoke on the afternoon of Aug. 30, accusing Damascus of responsibility and all but promising an imminent U.S. attack on Syria, and when Obama announced less than a day later that he would not attack but rather would seek authorization from Congress.
On the early afternoon of Aug. 31, Obama was unusually explicit in citing Dempsey as indicating why there was no need to rush into another war. Obama said, “the [JCS] Chairman has indicated to me that our capacity to execute this mission is not time-sensitive: it will be effective tomorrow, next week, or one month from now.”
The failure to stampede Obama and the U.S. military into a bombing campaign against Syria was a major defeat for those who wanted another shot at a Mideast “regime change,” primarily the neocons and their “liberal interventionist” allies who still hold sway inside the State Department as well as Washington’s top think tanks and the mainstream U.S. news media not to mention the Israelis, Saudis, Turks and others who insist that “Assad must go.”
Not surprisingly, on Sept. 1, 2013, as the plans to bomb, bomb, bomb Syria were shoved into a drawer at the Pentagon, Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham were in high dudgeon particularly at Dempsey’s audacity in putting the kibosh on their clearly expressed desire to attack Syria post-haste.
(By happenstance, I was given a personal window into the widespread distress over the outbreak of peace, when I found myself sharing a “green room” with some of the most senior neocons at CNN’s main studio in Washington. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “How War on Syria Lost Its Way.”])
Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing ministry of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. He served as an Army infantry/intelligence officer in the Sixties and then for 27 years as a CIA analyst. He is co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).
Excellent work, Alexander. 2.7 trillion? Guess a guy could get bye on a weekend with that.
If I may, I’d like to make a few points. Though you may think me one, my source around a dozen years ago who gave me a GENERAL rundown on why U.S. went into Iran wasn’t Bozo the Clown. (Understand Bozo would do a much better job informing us than the so called mainstream media, which I term the warfare state media.) So I stand by what I was told a dozen years ago.
I accepted the SPECIFIC info from a journalist I recently heard broadcast from Paris based on two conceptions. One, what she said (BP, EXXON, bankers, wall street, Bush, etc) fit perfectly into the general info. Two, I considered an historical tie. 50 years before Mosaadegh was overthrown by Anglo-Iranian oil, MI-6, American oil interests and Dulles’ CIA. The Iranian had to endure 26 yars of horror under the Shah.
We also have the great lie about weapons of mass destruction which was the excuse to murder many people. CIA has think tanks with very intellitgent albeit amoral folks which come up wit scenarios. The banks, oil companies, wall street, etc. are only interested in bottom line. No one would want too many folks to know about the lie.
The point is powerful folks wanted absolute power. They apparently didn’t have it with Sadaam.
If I have offered faulty reasoning and therefore passed on erroneous info, my apologies.
Once again. Geat work, Alexander.
Dust
No worries , Dust.
Ditto: Great article, Mr. McGovern!
Thanks for an excellent article Mr McGovern.
Good to point out the connection between the Iraq WMD and Syria Sarin frauds. They were conspicuous at the outset, because they were both unlikely (Iraq was far behind Iran’s nuclear potential, if it had any at all, and Assad least likely to use an unfocused weapon that would generate unnecessary enemies and violate the Obama red line). The timing.was also convenient to US warmongers alone. The fact that destruction of Iraq’s chemical weapons by agreement with Iraq had no effect on US invasion plans proves that the whole issue was US right wing propaganda to trick the people of the US.
If there had been any humanitarian intent of the US, it would have a long history of humanitarian and development aid to the entire world, long before and after any use of force. But in fact the US has the lowest per capita aid budget of any Western nation, less than one meal per year per capita to the rest of the world, a disgrace by any standard. Why would the right wing pay for justice overseas when it is dedicated to robbing its own citizens? The US has no humanitarian purposes whatsoever, and never has.
The US has also never established a working democracy (possible exception in the Philippines over a century ago), and has overthrown or subverted many democracies on grounds that they were socialist (Iran, Chile, etc.). The right wing everywhere schemes to overthrow the institutions of democracy, the mass media and elections, by economic power. Democracy is the enemy of the right wing warmongers, whose path to power requires creating foreign enemies to pose as protectors so as to demand power from the people.
So any alleged US concern about WMD and democratization can be categorically rejected with complete confidence.
How these people live with themselves is beyond the comprehension of honorable,rational citizens. It is up to the honorable to put these psychopaths behind bars, for life, for the dishonor they have brought to our country and the terror, death and destruction the have caused millions of people to endure. These people are the true definition of evil.
How these people live with themselves is beyond the comprehension of honorable,rational citizens.
They and many before and since made and make Faustian bargains to achieve “successful” careers. In many cases, it appears this was a way to compensate for a lack of competence. And, it isn’t just the military. Congress, the White House and the corporate world have and are being defiled by others.
Initiating a war of aggression is the supreme crime under international law, which, by the Constitution, is also the law of the United States. There is no apparent honour amongst the senior members of the Bush administration, a distinction which now also stains Myers and others serving as Joint Chiefs at that time.
Myers was also acting Chairman of the Joint Chiefs on the morning of 9-11. After hearing initial reports of perhaps a small aircraft hitting the first tower, Myers went into a meeting with Senator Max Cleland and was said to have stayed in that meeting up until the time the Pentagon was hit, apparently completely unaware of what was transpiring. (Armed Forces Press Service October 23, 2001). The failure to scramble military aircraft in response to the hijackings – Myers’ responsibility that morning – remains without explanation.
Has anyone from the CIA quit and come out publicly when they knew that the INTELLIGENCE was being fixed around the POLICY? Just asking……..YES, Rumsfeld and Myers and many others in the George “Picasso” Bush administration are corrupt but why didn’t people from the CIA come out? Their own boss was part of the plot because he wanted to be a team player!!
Stephen Colbert recently interviewed Donald Rumsfeld
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Z3z7DvoA-M
“That leads me to your most famous saying,†said Colbert, “That there are known-knowns, things we know we know—and tell me if I get this wrong, because I know this is your baby. There are known-unknowns, things we know that we don’t know. And there are also unknown-unknowns—â€
“They’re the ones that get you,†Rumsfeld said.
“But in this case,†Colbert continued, “Isn’t the one that got us something that—there’s a fourth option, that no one ever talks about, which is the unknown-knowns. Which is the things that we know, and then we choose not to know them, or not let other people know we know.â€
Rumsfeld said, “The president had available to him intelligence from all elements of the government. And the national security council members had that information. It was all shared, it was all supplied. And it’s never certain. If it were a fact, it wouldn’t be called intelligence.â€
All the medals of Arabia can’t sweeten these tiny hands.
Richard Myers is not the only one who passed on a chance to be a profile in courage. Colin Powell was certainly another when he spoke to the UN on February 5, 2003. The members of the senate and house intelligence (sic) committees who were getting honest intelligence that contradicted the stories for public consumption were surely others. Senator Dick Durbin explained this contrast during a senate speech when he claimed he/they couldn’t say anything because of an oath of secrecy they took to get access to the truth.
I was advised at the time that the invasion of Iraq was about oil. I figured Sadaam had to have made big people mad. Latest word I have is he was going to dump BP and Exxon and look for other oil partners. The warfare state went into action. (It didn’t hurt to have an oil co. president). Another example of the Shadow Govt. ruling.
Dust
Dust,
The Iraq war fraud may have been ,in part, about oil……but not in the way you suggest.
Prior to the Iraq invasion, the price Americans paid for a barrel of oil was about thirty five dollars….the price at the pump was a buck twenty nine. The Iraq war, once it began, sent the price of oil skyrocketing to ,at one point,over a hundred and fifty dollars a barrel, and the price at the pump, in some areas, over five and a half dollars.
The way the war worked had far less to do about securing the supplies of oil, but in creating the global instability that jacked up its price, thus creating hundreds of billions of dollars in sweet windfall profits, for big oil, OPEC, and any on Wall Street,who bet big and long on oil futures contracts.
I actually did an analysis on it….. where I took the yearly US consumption of oil and gasoline,multiplied it times the average price we paid over the six year period during the war, then subtracted the same amount we would have paid had the price of oil increased along a normalized inflation rate, absent a war, during the same period.
Are you ready for the estimated difference(hold onto your hat)…..Two trillion seven hundred billion dollars.
2.7 trillion dollars of Americans money(hard earned or otherwise) went out of our pockets into the hands of the war/ oil profiteers.
Big dough, Dust.
Big dough.
A lengthy title, but it tells the story. The story of the world’s deplorable condition as we find it today!
Cynthia McKinney writes a piece in which she tells the rest, quite clearly and persuasively, in detail.
Cynthia McKinney was an excellent head, representative of and speaker for the thousands of angry, grieving and tormented mothers who gave up their sons in sacrifice to the false gods of a phony war, and I have never credited her with much credibility as a spokesperson when it comes to discussing economic and world issues which were the basis of all those wars, but she does a creditable job here. Perhaps she is learning as she goes along, which so many other “Americans” are not… and damned well ought to be.
Perhaps this will help.
Banking and The Economics of the Invasion of Libya, as a Continuation of the US/Israeli/Zionist Economic War Against The Rest of The World.
http://www.veteranstoday.com/2011/04/27/banking-and-the-economics-of-the-invasion-of-libya/
It seems to me that the invasion of Iraq occurred because Saddam had threatened to abandon the US dollar as the unit of petro-currency and go to some other medium, and again a few years later that Iran was next on the list because they had threatened to abandon the US Petrodollar and shift to some other currency such as the Euro.
This would have been terribly upsetting to the US and Israeli Economic and Banking concerns, and the ultimate justification for the absolute necessity of waging war against these people and their stance and destroying them, for the entire wealth, power and banking success of all US and Israeli/Zionist economic Empire is based upon preserving the nomination and strength of the US dollar, as the medium of monetary exchange unit employed for petroleum energy exchange and profit, upon which it depends solely for its value.
Sink the US Petrodollar and the Mighty Ship of Zion and US Rule of the Seven Seas sinks along with it! They are all in the same boat… their eggs all in the Rothschild basket!
I must commend the authors who are prolifically researching and writing facts and truths that have been purposely hidden from us, even while in plain view. Another often-overlooked important aspect of logistics that facilitates the neocon (and neolib) agenda is finance. And so, I wanted to write a piece on finance and the crisis in Libya. To remind readers of the multi-faceted strands of U.S. policy formulation that in many instances can be traced to powerful individuals and this notion of O.I.L., instead of just oil. Picking up on this theme, many articles landed in my inbox before I got to write the perfect piece, so I want to share them with you because I believe they are very important and cover necessary ground if we are to truly understand what we see.
Ellen Brown, author of the must-read “Web of Debt,” wrote a masterful piece entitled, “All About Oil, or All About Banking?” (http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=24306) Here, Ellen breaks down the importance of Libya’s oil revenues and sovereign fund and the important tidbit of information that forms the core of her thesis: Colonel Qaddafi’s monetary policies constitute an important factor in him being attacked and the subsequent establishment by the NATO allies of an alternative Libyan central bank.
After reminding the readers that under The Green Book form of governance, Libya has achieved what we in the United States do not enjoy: universal health care paid for by the state; universal education subsidized through the Ph.D. level by the state; oil revenue sharing; subsidized housing; subsidized automobile purchases; $50,000 marriage subsidy for newlyweds; and more. The more just happens to be what Libya has in common with six other countries that General Wesley Clarke announced were on a list for war that he saw from the Pentagon: neither Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Somalia, Sudan, Iran, nor Libya belong to the Bank of International Settlements, the Central Bankers’ bank.
Remember, a Project Censored award went to the young man who wrote the first story about Saddam Hussein switching from the dollar to the Euro for oil sales. That was just before certain neocons inside the United States manufactured a reason to attack Iraq. Iraq down; Sudan dismembered, Somalia dysfunctional: only Syria, Lebanon, Libya, and Iran to go.
read on: http://www.veteranstoday.com/2011/04/27/banking-and-the-economics-of-the-invasion-of-libya/