Review of Film: Uncovered: The Whole Truth About the Iraq War

[Steve Schear]

     Case For War Confected, Say Top U.S. Officials
      By Andrew Gumbel
      Independent UK
<http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/story.jsp?story=461953>
      Sunday 09 November 2003

      An unprecedented array of US intelligence professionals, diplomats and
former Pentagon officials have gone on record to lambast the Bush
administration for its distortion of the case for war against Iraq. In their
view, the very foundations of intelligence-gathering have been damaged in
ways that could take years, even decades, to repair.

      A new documentary film beginning to circulate in the United States
features one powerful condemnation after another, from the sort of people
who usually stay discreetly in the shadows - a former director of the CIA,
two former assistant secretaries of defence, a former ambassador to Saudi
Arabia and even the man who served as President Bush's Secretary of the Army
until just a few months ago.

      Between them, the two dozen interviewees reveal how the pre-war
intelligence record on Iraq showed virtually the opposite of the picture the
administration painted to Congress, to US voters and to the world. They also
reconstruct the way senior White House officials - notably Vice-President
Dick Cheney - leaned on the CIA to find evidence that would fit a
preordained set of conclusions.

      "There was never a clear and present danger. There was never an
imminent threat. Iraq - and we have very good intelligence on this - was
never part of the picture of terrorism," says Mel Goodman, a veteran CIA
analyst who now teaches at the National War College.

      The case for accusing Saddam Hussein of concealing weapons of mass
destruction was, in the words of the veteran CIA operative Robert Baer,
largely achieved through "data mining" - going back over old information and
trying to wrest new conclusions from it. The agenda, according to George
Bush Senior's ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Chas Freeman, was both highly
political and profoundly misguided.

      "The theory that you can bludgeon political grievances out of existence
doesn't have much of a track record," he says, "so essentially we have been
neo-conned into applying a school of thought about foreign affairs that has
failed everywhere it has been tried."

      The hour-long film - entitled Uncovered: The Whole Truth About the Iraq
War - was put together by Robert Greenwald, a veteran TV producer in the
forefront of Hollywood's anti-war movement who never suspected, when he
started out, that so many establishment figures would stand up and be
counted.

      "My attitude was, wow, CIA people, I thought these were the bad guys,"
Mr Greenwald said. "Not everyone agreed on everything. Not everyone was
against the war itself. But there was a universally shared opinion that we
had been misled about the reasons for the war."

      Although many elements in the film are not necessarily new - the forged
document on uranium sales from Niger to Iraq, the aluminium tubes falsely
assumed to be parts for nuclear weapons, the satellite images of "mobile
biolabs" that turned out to be hydrogen compression facilities, the
"decontamination vehicles" that were in fact fire engines - what emerges is
a striking sense of professional betrayal in the intelligence community.

      As the former CIA analyst Ray McGovern argues with particular force,
the traditional role of the CIA has been to act as a scrupulously accurate
source of information and analysis for presidents pondering grave
international decisions. That role, he said, had now been "prostituted" and
the CIA may never be the same. "Where is Bush going to turn to now? Where is
his reliable source of information now Iraq is spinning out of control? He's
frittered that away," Mr McGovern said. "And the profound indignity is that
he probably doesn't even realise it."

      The starting point for the tarnishing of the CIA was a speech by
Vice-President Cheney on 26 August 2002, in which he told the Veterans of
Foreign Wars in Nashville that Saddam was reconstituting his nuclear weapons
programme and was thus threatening to inflict "death on a massive scale - in
his own region or beyond".

      According to numerous sources, Mr Cheney followed up his speech with a
series of highly unorthodox visits to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia,
in which he badgered low-level analysts to come up with information to
substantiate the extremely alarming - but entirely bogus - contents of his
speech.

      By early September, intelligence experts in Congress were clamouring
for a so-called National Intelligence Estimate, a full rundown of everything
known about Iraq's weapons programmes. Usually NIEs take months to produce,
but George Tenet, the CIA director, came up with a 100-page document in just
three weeks.

      The man he picked to write it, the weapons expert Robert Walpole, had a
track record of going back over old intelligence assessments and reworking
them in accordance with the wishes of a specific political interest group.
In 1998, he had come up with an estimate of the missile capabilities of
various rogue states that managed to sound considerably more alarming than a
previous CIA estimate issued three years earlier. On that occasion, he was
acting at the behest of a congressional commission anxious to make the case
for a missile defence system; the commission chairman was none other than
Donald Rumsfeld, now Secretary of Defence and a key architect of the Iraq
war.

      Mr Walpole's NIE on Iraq threw together all the elements that have now
been discredited - Niger, the alumin- ium tubes, and so on. It also gave the
misleading impression that intelligence analysts were in broad agreement
about the Iraqi threat, relegating most of the doubts and misgivings to
footnotes and appendices.

      By the time parts of the NIE were made public, even those few
qualifications were excised. When President Bush's speechwriters got to work
- starting with the address to Congress on 7 October that led to a
resolution authorising the use of force against Iraq - the language became
even stronger.

      Mr Tenet fact-checked the 7 October speech, and seems to have played a
major role in every subsequent policy address, including Colin Powell's
powerful presentation to the United Nations Security Council on 5 February.
Of that pivotal speech, Mr McGovern says in the film: "It was a masterful
performance, but none of it was true."


More info on the Film:

http://www.truthuncovered.com/


"[I]t is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is 
always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, 
or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. 
Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the 
leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being 
attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing 
the country to danger. It works the same in any country."
--Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering