David Corn is promoting his new book hard. But it looks like a must read. Below the fold I have put the highlights he sent me. It reads like articles of impeachment. In fact, it’s impossible to read them without concluding that impeachment is the only possible remedy for these sins. Here’s a minor one, just as a teaser:
When told that reporter Helen Thomas
was questioning the need to oust Saddam by force, Bush snapped: “Did
you tell her I intend to kick his sorry mother fucking ass all over the
Mideast?” In a meeting with congressional leaders, the President
angrily thrust his middle finger inches in front of the face of Senator
Tom Daschle to illustrate Saddam’s attitude toward the United States.
(pp. 1-3, 116-117)
HUBRIS
The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War
by Michael Isikoff and David Corn
What was really behind the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq? As George W. Bush
steered the nation to war, who spoke the truth and who tried to hide
it? HUBRIS: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War
(Crown, September 8, 2006) takes us behind the scenes at the Bush White
House, the CIA, the Pentagon, the State Department, and Congress to
answer all the vital questions about how the Bush administration came
to invade Iraq. HUBRIS, a gripping narrative, is filled with new revelations. The book disclosures include:
* President Bush was driven by a visceral hatred of Saddam Hussein,
which he privately demonstrated in expletive-laden tirades against the
Iraqi dictator. In May 2002–months before he asked Congress for
authority to attack Saddam-Bush bluntly revealed his ultimate game plan
in a candid moment with two aides. When told that reporter Helen Thomas
was questioning the need to oust Saddam by force, Bush snapped: “Did
you tell her I intend to kick his sorry mother fucking ass all over the
Mideast?” In a meeting with congressional leaders, the President
angrily thrust his middle finger inches in front of the face of Senator
Tom Daschle to illustrate Saddam’s attitude toward the United States.
(pp. 1-3, 116-117)
* As part of an aggressive prewar covert action program–codenamed
Anabasis (after an ancient text about a botched invasion of
Babylon)–the CIA was authorized by the White House in the winter of
2002 to blow up targets in Iraq and engage in “direct action” (an
agency euphemism for assassination) to weaken Saddam’s regime and to
prepare for his ouster by the U.S. military. For Anabasis, the agency
smuggled Iraqi exiles to a top-secret site in the Nevada desert and
trained them in sabotage and explosives. The Iraqi force, known as the
Scorpions, was being trained to seize an isolated Iraqi military
post-in order to create a provocation that could trigger a war with
Iraq. (pp. 6-12, 153-156)
* When Bush was first briefed that no WMDs had been found in Iraq, he
was totally unfazed and asked few questions. “I’m not sure I’ve spoken
to anyone at that level who seemed less inquisitive,” the briefer told
the authors. (pp. 310-311)
* Colin Powell remains intensely bitter and angry about his UN Security
Council Speech, during which he presented the case for war. After it
became clear that much of his speech was wrong, he refused to have
anything to do with CIA director George Tenet. “It’s annoying to me,”
Powell told the authors. “Everybody focuses on my presentation….Well
the same goddamn case was presented to the U.S. Senate and the Congress
and they voted for [Bush’s Iraq] resolution….Why aren’t they
outraged….The same case was presented to the President. Why isn” the
President outraged? It’s always, ‘Gee, Powell, you made this speech to
the UN.'” (pp. 189-190)
* After the invasion, Dick Cheney’s aides desperately sifted through
raw intelligence nuggets in search of any evidence that would justify
the war. On one occasion they sent the WMD hunters in Iraq a satellite
photo that they suspected showed a hiding place for WMDs. But it was
only an overhead photo of a watering hole for cows. (pp. 303-304)
* A critical memo in the CIA leak case was based on notes of a State
Department official that were (as this official told the authors)
inaccurate. This memo reported that former ambassador Joseph Wilson’s
wife was a CIA employee who played a key role in sending him on his
trip to Niger. Yet the State Department official now acknowledges his
notes did not describe Valerie Wilson’s role accurately. (pp. 94-95)
* At the time of her outing, Valerie Wilson was an undercover officer
in the CIA whose mission had been to gather intelligence about WMDs in
Iraq. She was the operations manager of the Joint Task Force on Iraq, a
unit in the clandestine service of the CIA. This unit desperately tried
to obtain evidence to back up the Bush administration’s assertions
about Saddam’s WMDs, yet it found no such evidence. (pp. 12-15)
* Richard Armitage, the deputy secretary of state, was the original
leaker in the CIA leak case. But as he was disclosing information to
columnist Robert Novak, Karl Rove, Scooter Libby and other top White
House aides were engaged in a fierce campaign to discredit Joseph
Wilson. Rove even told MSNBC anchor Chris Matthews that the Wilsons
“were trying to screw the White House so the White House was going to
screw them back.” (pp. 263-264, 297)
* Many of the White House’s most dramatic claims about the threat posed
by weapons of mass destruction were repeatedly questioned by senior
members of the U.S. intelligence community-but these dissents and views
were suppressed or ignored by the White House. Admiral Thomas Wilson,
the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency until May 2002, is
quoted in the book as casting doubt on virtually the entire White House
case for an invasion of Iraq. “I didn’t really think [Iraq] had a
nuclear program,” retired Admiral Wilson told the authors. “I didn’t
think [Saddam and Iraq] were an immediate threat on WMD.” (pp. 26-27)
* The CIA missed an obvious clue that showed that the infamous Niger
documents–the basis for Bush’s false statement in a State of the Union
speech–were crude forgeries. The clue was a bizarre companion document
detailing a supposed global alliance of rogue nations (including Iraq
and Iran)–a notion so unlikely that one State Department intelligence
analyst immediately labeled it a hoax. The CIA also blew the call on
these documents partly because an officer misplaced the papers. (pp.
147-148, 162-164)
* U.S. intelligence officials suspected Iranian intelligence was trying
to influence U.S. decision-making through Ahmad Chalabi’s Iraqi
National Congress-yet they felt they could do nothing about it because
the INC had support within the White House and Pentagon. (pp. 51-54)
* Congressional leaders on both sides of the aisle seriously doubted
the case for war-and questioned the top-secret briefings they received
directly from Cheney. One senior Republican, House Majority Leader Dick
Armey, warned the President in a September 2002 meeting that Bush would
be stuck in a “quagmire” if he invaded Iraq. But Armey and others were
afraid for political reasons to challenge the White House on the prewar
intelligence. (pp. 24-25, 30-32, 124-125, 149, 151)
* An obscure academic, derided as a virtual crackpot by U.S. law
enforcement and the intelligence community, greatly influenced top Bush
administration officials, who adopted her farfetched theory that Saddam
was the source of most of the terrorism in the world, including the
9/11 attacks. But, oddly, this researcher, Laurie Mylroie, had once
been a Saddam apologist and had engaged in secret, back-door diplomacy
aimed at brokering a peace accord between Israel and Iraq. After Saddam
invaded Kuwait, Mylroie developed bizarre allegations about Saddam and
terrorism. Her theories were debunked by the CIA and FBI, yet Deputy
Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz embraced them, cited them in official
meetings, and repeatedly pressed the agency and bureau to come up with
evidence to substantiate Mylroie’s work. (pp. 66-84)
* The intelligence community’s top nuclear experts were afraid to
challenge publicly the Bush administration’s claim that Iraq had
obtained aluminum tubes for a nuclear weapons program, though they
disagreed with this assessment. The tubes case was relentlessly pressed
by one CIA analyst whose technical expertise did not match those of
these scientists and whose name is revealed for the first time in HUBRIS. (pp. 37, 61)
* The CIA came close to recruiting Saddam Hussein’s foreign minister,
Naji Sabri, to be an American spy. Through a Lebanese journalist, Sabri
passed word to the CIA’s station chief in Paris that Iraq had no active
nuclear or WMD programs. But senior CIA and White House officials
dismissed the intelligence and opposed the effort to recruit Sabri,
fearing it would undercut the case for an invasion. The chief of the
CIA’s Iraq Operations Group told the Paris station chief, “One of these
days you’re going to get it. This is not about intelligence. This is
about regime change.” (pp. 45-46, 62-64)
* Even as colleagues of Judith Miller at The New York Times were suspicious of her reporting on Iraq’s WMDs, her editors stubbornly stood by her. HUBRIS details how some of the Times‘ most significant-and wrong-stories about Saddam’s WMDs came to be written. (pp. 34-37, 54-62, 215-218)
* CIA analysts, over the objections of other intelligence community
analysts, rigged a post-invasion report to show that a trailer found in
Iraq was a mobile bioweapons lab. (pp. 226-229)
* Before the invasion, Bush and General Tommy Franks only briefly
discussed how Iraq would be secured after the invasion-and did so in
the most general terms. The one idea they discussed–appointing a “lord
mayor” in each Iraqi city and town–was not even shared with the
military officers in charge of drawing up the plans for a post-invasion
Iraq. (pp. 195-196)
* Karl Rove and his lawyer did not turn over a critical piece of
evidence in the CIA leak case (a document covered by a subpoena from
the special prosecutor) for nearly a year. (pp. 377-378, 401-402)
