June 9, 2003
NEW YORK - When I lived in Jamaica many moons ago, there occurred a bizarre national panic known as the Three Wheeled Coffin.
According to a storm of rumors, a black, three-wheeled coffin, surmounted by three black doctor birds (crows), was moving along Jamaica's back roads. Villages emptied in terror at reports the coffin was nearing. The Three Wheeled Coffin was never found. The panic subsided.
North Americans and Brits have just experienced their own version of the Three Wheeled Coffin — a national panic attack called Iraq. It is now clear the Bush and Blair governments actively deceived their citizens over Iraq, concocted false information, and misled Congress and Parliament. Both governments now face a rising storm of criticism and demands for full-scale inquiries.
This column has been contacted by a number of retired intelligence officers, both individuals and groups, backing up assertions made here two weeks ago that a cabal of neo-conservatives in the Bush Administration had distorted or faked information that formed the basis of claims that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction (wmd's) that imminently threatened the US and all mankind.
According to MI6 (British intelligence) officers and British press reports, Tony Blair's government was fed this same tainted information and even sent orders to MI6 to make it `sexier.' Former British foreign secretary, Robin Cook, who resigned to protest the Bush-Blair war on Iraq, calls the intelligence reports used to justify the aggression `wrong' and `forged.'
President Bush cited a crudely forged document about uranium sales from Niger to Iraq in his State of the Union Address. Blair claimed Iraq could attack the west with wmd's `within 45 minutes.' Secretary Colin Powell's embarrassing UN Philippic against Iraq turned out to be hot air.
To date, no wmd's have been found in Iraq. France had the best human intelligence sources in pre-war Iraq. President Jacques Chirac warned Bush and Blair there were no such weapons, and rightly refused to join their illegal invasion of Iraq. Blair foolishly listened to Bush instead of Chirac.
According to intelligence sources outraged by the corruption and perversion of the national intelligence function for political reasons, the main source of lies and distortions about Iraq was Iraqi exiles, many in the pay of the US government. These anti-Saddam exiles, led by Ahmed Chalabi and his Iraq National Congress, and former Iraqi scientist Khider Hamza, fed the Pentagon and `NY Times' a stream of phony claims about Iraqi wmd's.
Chalabi and Hamza, who were scorned by CIA as frauds, are closely linked to American neo-conservatives Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, and James Woolsey, and through the US neo-con network, to Israel's hawkish Likud Party.
When CIA couldn't find hard evidence of Iraqi wmd's Administration neo-cons needed to justify war, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, a super hawk, created a new intelligence unit, the Office of Special Plans, putting his deputy, and fellow neo-con hawk, Paul Wolfowitz in charge. Intelligence community protests over this blatant politicization of national security were ignored.
Wolfowitz created two more intelligence teams to funnel disinformation from Iraqi exiles to the White House. They were led by Pentagon neo-con hawks Douglas Feith and Abraham Shulsky. The three teams reportedly fed distorted or exaggerated information to Bush and Blair. More spurious reports came to Powell from VP Dick Cheney's neo-con chief of staff, Lewis Libby. Neo-cons like William Kristol and William Safire provided pro-war media propaganda.
Many of the senior officials involved in this apparent fraud were members of the Project for the New American Century, a hawkish, far-right group close to Israel's Likud Party that called in 2000 (before 9/11) for the invasion of Iraq, Syria, Libya, and Iran, and worldwide American dominion. Given the lack of wmd's in Iraq, these red-faced neo-cons now claim the weapons were moved to Syria and/or Iran, or even Pakistan, their next war targets.
A few cans of poison or mustard gas and flasks of germs may yet be discovered in Iraq (or, more likely, planted). Even so, these are not weapons of mass destruction. Mustard and nerve gas are battlefield weapons. They are inefficient weapons, and, for long-ranged use, must be dispensed by special aircraft or missiles, none of which Iraq possessed in 2003. The US and Britain supplied Iraq with gas and germs in the 1980's for battlefield use against Iran. Napalm and fuel air explosives kill far more effectively. The only real wmd's are nuclear weapons. The UN long-ago confirmed Iraq had none.
The US House Intelligence Committee's senior democrat, Jane Harmon, calls Bush's claims about Iraq, `conceivably …the greatest intelligence hoax of all time.' One akin, perhaps, to Dr Goebbel's claim Poland was about to attack Germany in 1939.
The president of the United States and prime minister of Britain are accused of lying to their people to embark on a war whose real justification was, as war architect Wolfowitz recently noted, `for bureaucratic reasons' and `because Iraq was swimming on a sea of oil.'
Britons are in an uproar. Many Americans, by contrast, seem indifferent. Former President Bill Clinton was impeached by Republicans in Congress for lying about sex. President Bush misled the American people, deceived Congress, violated the UN Charter, blew billions of dollars and many lives, Americana and Iraqi, on a phony war, turned much of the world against the United States — and will likely be re-elected.
Foreign Correspondent