Consequential Lies

Ray McGovern

June 17, 2004

The 9/11 commission has found "no credible evidence" of an Iraq/Al Qaeda link. But that doesn't mean Bush's spin machine will be put out to pasture. In fact, Bush and Cheney gave speeches earlier this week timed to drive the connections story home once again. But beyond perpetuating election-boosting misinformation among the American people, such creativity with the truth has much more frightening consequences. Former CIA analyst Ray McGovern explains.

Ray McGovern is co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.  He had a 27-year career as a CIA analyst from 1964 to 1990.

As the notion evaporates that the United States could implant democracy in Iraq at gunpoint or that “weapons of mass destruction” will ever be found, the Bush administration has resurrected the argument that Saddam Hussein had longstanding ties to Al Qaeda.

Speeches by President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney earlier this week were timed to pre-empt and cast doubt on a 9/11 commission finding released on Wednesday that there is “no credible evidence that Iraq and Al Qaeda cooperated on attacks against the United States.”

The all-too-familiar notion fostered by Bush and Cheney, however, is that Iraq was indeed involved in the attacks of 9/11, even though this is as spurious as the claim about WMD.  Spurious or not, it has been extremely effective in playing on the trauma of 9/11 to whip up support for war on Iraq.  A year ago 69 percent of Americans believed that Iraq was largely responsible for 9/11, and polls this spring show that a majority still believe this to be the case.

Successful as its PR approach on this key issue has been in rallying support for the war, the administration is not about to cede the field to the commission.  A “senior administration official” has already reacted to the commission report, insisting, “We stand by what (Secretary of State) Powell and (CIA Director) Tenet have said" on links between Iraq and Al Qaeda.

With violence steadily increasing in Iraq and the 9/11 commission hearings about to resume, the White House spin machine shifted into a tried and tested gear—a technique described as “most brilliant” by Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels:  “It must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over.”

The refrain struck up again on Monday with Cheney claiming that Saddam Hussein had “long established ties” with Al Qaeda.  Cheney offered no details, but the president elaborated the following day, citing “evidence” on ties between Iraq and “Al Qaeda operative” Abu Musab al-Zarqawi—evidence the CIA considers inconclusive at best. George Tenet told the Senate in February that, although Zarqawi had had contacts with Al Qaeda, he appeared to be “autonomous,” and U.S. officials now say it has become increasingly clear that Zarqawi was operating independently.

As for 9/11, never mind the admission the president tucked into an impromptu interview on Sept. 17, 2003:  “We’ve had no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with September 11th.”  That admission received little play in the mainstream press, and it will be interesting to see if anyone remembers it this time around.  If need be, it can be dusted off as proof that the president never held Saddam Hussein directly responsible for 9/11, just as the administration has argued (erroneously) that it never said an attack from Iraq was “imminent.”

Consequential Lies...

The continual spinning—not only about cosmic issues like Iraqi ties to Al Qaeda and WMD but also more limited episodes like the “Jessica Lynch Story”—constitutes what might be called consequential lies, not only for what they do to U.S. credibility, but also for the effect that have day to day on the ground in Iraq.

Consider the explanation offered, with no hint of shame, by U.S. Army Corporal Michael Richardson in Iraq to the London Evening Standard in June 2003:

“There was no dilemma when it came to shooting people…I just pulled the trigger…If they were there, they were enemy, whether in uniform or not…There’s a picture of the World Trade Center hanging up by my bed and I keep one in my flak jacket.  Every time I feel sorry for these people I look at that.  I think, they hit us at home and now it’s our turn.  I don’t want to say it’s payback but, you know, it’s pretty much payback.”

The lies about WMD have been no less consequential.  Consider Iraqi Gen. Amir Saadi, a British-educated chemist and erstwhile liaison between the Iraqi government and UN weapons inspectors.  He was the first of the 55 “most wanted” senior officials to surrender.  He did so on April 12, 2003, and took pains to ensure that German TV filmed his surrender lest he disappear down the memory hole.  Yet he has been in solitary confinement ever since. 

According to Pentagon and intelligence officials, Charles Duelfer, who took over from David Kay as head of the group still searching for WMD believes that Saadi “has not fully answered questions.”  Rather, it seems to be a case of coming up with the “wrong” answer.

Saadi has been consistent in telling UN and U.S. inspectors that Iraq’s WMD were destroyed in 1991.  David Albright, president of the DC-based Institute for Science and International Security—which has longstanding relationships with Iraqi scientists—suggests that Saadi has not been released because his release would provide further acknowledgment that Iraq did not have such weapons after 1991.

Half-Truths…

What Saadi has been saying is what Saddam’s son-in-law, Hussein Kamel, told us when he defected in 1995.  Everyone from Bush and Cheney on down gave Kamel—who spent 10 years running Iraq’s nuclear, chemical, biological, and missile development programs—fulsome praise for the intelligence windfall he provided about previously unknown weaponry.  But no U.S. official told the rest of the story—i. e., that Kamel said that at his order all such weapons were destroyed in 1991, a claim now confirmed by documentary evidence (not to mention the conspicuous absence of WMD).

Benjamin Franklin said, “Half a truth is often a great lie.”

Just ask 19-year-old Abdullah Mohammed Abdulrazzaq, captured by U.S. troops at 2:30 one morning last September in the Baghdad apartment he shared with his widowed mother. Abdulrazzaq was hooded, handcuffed, tortured with electricity and shuttled back and forth among several prisons in Iraq, including Abu Graib.  What were his interrogators most interested in learning from this 19-year-old? What he could tell them about the weapons of mass destruction. And as we know, Abdulazzaq’s case is far from unusual.

…and Little Lies

These too have consequences.  Remember the unproven allegation about Jessica Lynch being raped?  Around midnight on May 12, 2003, Master Sgt. Lisa Girman and three other Army MPs decided to retaliate by abusing Iraqi prisoners at Camp Bucca in southern Iraq, according to a report by Lt. Col. Jerry Phillabaum, commander of her MP battalion.   Phillabaum wrote that Girman got it into her head that the rapist might be among the prisoners she was guarding, and decided to exact what he termed “vigilante justice.”

The inference from the disclosures of the past few weeks that the Bush administration apparently paged through the telephone books to find lawyers willing to justify torture and abuse is outrageous enough.  It is equally sobering to reflect on the fact that meretricious rhetoric from our highest officials can produce the same effect.