Inslee in Shoreline: WMDs, intelligence, public trust, the royal finger and a frog walk
during a recent forum about Iraq and
U.S. Intelligence.
It was a sunny Thursday morning in Shoreline, and George W. Bush was in Oregon trying to find an un-charred tree to stand in front of so he could tell Oregonians that the way to save their forests was to cut more of them down. The following day he would lunch in Seattle with millionaires at the mansion of a billionaire and announce that preservation of endangered salmon meant preservation of dams. Mean-while, shortly after 9 a.m,. back at Shoreline Community Center, the commonfolk were already in line to attend a forum on Iraq and U.S. intelligence scheduled to convene at noon. By 11 a.m. the line of attendees stretched out into the parking lot, and by noon the crowd had filled the 600-seat auditorium and three “overflow” rooms connected to the main venue by a video link.
Moderated by local U.S. Rep. Jay Inslee, the panel consisted of Ambassador Joseph Wilson, veteran of 23 years in the Foreign Service including service under both Presidents Bush; retired Rear Adm. Bill Center, deputy director of international negotiations for both Joint Chiefs of Staff Gens. Colin Powell and John Shalikashvili; and Professor Brewster Denny, founder and first dean of the University of Washington’s Evans School of Public Affairs. Confronting the panel were between 1,100 and 1,400 citizens apparently unanimous in their conviction that they and their representatives had been hornswoggled into and unnecessary, illegal and dishonorable war.
Inslee lead off the discussion of whether or not there was a need for a congressional investigation into the manipulation of intelligence prior to the invasion of Iraq by posing the basic questions: “Why didn’t America get the straight scoop on whether or not there was a security threat to the United States?” and “What can we do to repair the damage, injury to the credibility of the US?”
Center answered with a discourse on the nature of intelligence and the need for both a comprehensive evaluation of the intelligence process and a reassessment of the role of the United States in the international community. “Intelligence is not special knowledge. If intelligence were like a newspaper, intelligence would be the opinion page,” he stated. “When all of you were given the intelligence, that we were told that we should feel a threat from Iraq, all of us were intelligent enough that we weighed that opinion with our own knowledge of the situation. Personally, I didn’t feel very threatened.
“Always bear in mind that when its voiced [intelligence] whether its from a member of Congress, whether its from the White House or someone else in the administration, or its from a columnist in the newspaper, always bear in mind it’s someone giving their opinion about an opinion,” he added, “and I think in most courts that qualifies as hearsay.”
Center’s point, that whether by design or inadvertence the deception of the American people was not nearly as important as the politicizing of the intelligence process, was met by loud disapproval by the crowd.
“The real issue isn’t the question whether the president lied but the misuse of the policy process,” he continued. “That’s not necessarily an impeachable offense, and if we get distracted into trying to oust the president and don’t fix the basic problem, then we could well be stuck with the same problem with a Democratic president.”
On the question of a Congressional investigation, he also expressed doubts: “As important as this issue is, its not the pinnacle issue. And Congress only has so many working hours in the day. If this becomes the focus, we won’t be talking about issues like what is America’s role in the world and how the policy process ought to work. Since the end of the Cold War we haven’t had a debate about America’s role in the world, and I think this is the fundamental issue.”
Denny, while expressing outrage at the apparent lengths to which the administration had gone to exaggerate the threat from Iraq, also emphasized the need for a thorough re-evaluation of America’s place in the post-Cold War world and an effort to regain the trust and credibility of our allies.
“Was there sufficient intelligence to justify an invasion of a foreign country in violation of international law and in absence of appropriate action of the international community? No. Was there an imminent threat of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) to justify an invasion? No. Was the international-inspection regime given enough time and assistance to do the job assigned to it by the international community? No. Was the limited information on the actual threat hyped, spun or otherwise skewed to justify a decision already made? Yes. Did the U.S. pursue sufficiently actively the cooperation and support of the international community? No. It gave it the royal finger is what it did. Did the U.S. act in bad faith to its oldest and most loyal ally on the issue of the 16 words — you bet.
“The essence of the problem, the decision making process—we just haven’t done it right.
We created the UN. We created the notion that the international community should act against this kind of thing. If you go to the Hague outside of Amsterdam, you’ll see the building of the International Court of Justice, which we’re now unwilling to support. It was built by American money, by a philanthropist by the name of Andrew Carnegie. That’s who we’ve been in the world and all of a sudden we’re not that anymore. This is what we have to restore, our position.”
Of all the participants, Wilson had by far the closest involvement with events leading up to the Iraq invasion. With years of experience in Africa and, as the last U.S. diplomat to meet with Saddam Hussein, he had been sent to Niger by the CIA to investigate claims of Iraqi attempts to buy “yellow cake” (processed uranium ore). In a July 6 New York Times article, he revealed that he had reported back that such claims were dubious. He had further questioned the competence of White House officials who allowed the bogus claims to appear in Bush’s State of the Union address (the famous 16 words). As a result of this article he had become the target of a number of attacks by the Bush administration — the latest of these attacks was directed against his wife; purporting to “out” her as a covert operative for the CIA (see side bar).
Wilson, at times borrowing his sentence structure from Lincoln, was eloquent in his insistence that the misuse of intelligence was a serious breach of the public trust.
“There is no more solemn obligation for an elected representative than to ensure that every time we send American citizens to die and kill for our country that we do so in full possession of the facts, full possession of the threat we face,” he said. “In this debate in October there were very few, frankly, on either side of the aisle who stood up and gave this serious and solemn issue the thought and the polling of the conscience that it deserved.
“There was a tendency to lean toward the president, to give him the benefit of the doubt, for two reasons. One, after Sept. 11, we needed him to succeed in his capacity not just as commander-in-chief but protector-in-chief. And two, there was tremendous credibility invested in the position and person of Colin Powell. Now, in the aftermath of that war, of course, we ask ourselves whether that investment, that credibility, has yielded the desired results for our country and for our national security.”
On the perceived takeover of American foreign policy by the neo-conservative “Gang of Four” (Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Donald Rumsfeld and Karl Rove), there was unanimous disapproval:
“The answers are found in a careful look how national-security policy is made by that very small group of people who have that responsibility,” said Denny. “I spent a good deal of my life studying and teaching about the National Security Council, and I didn’t know that Karl Rove would be a member.”
Wilson anecdotally added: “My Republican friends ... in addition to offering me safe houses and flak jackets, have said, ‘Thank you. You have given us the ammunition we need to rein in this neo-conservative juggernaut.’ The Republican Party is no longer simply influenced by these radical elements; it has become the party of these radical elements.”
And later, in response to a question from the audience about the administration’s underhanded attacks on his wife, Wilson gave voice to an anger obviously shared by the audience: “I don’t think we’re going to let this drop. At the end of the day it’s of keen interest to me to see whether or not we can get Karl Rove frog-marched out of the White House in handcuffs.”
One difference which arose among the panel members concerned the degree to which members of Congress had been influenced by the administration’s claims of WMDs and Iraqi-al Qaeda connections. Center contended that congressmen and senators, as seasoned consumers of intelligence, were likely to have taken such claims with a grain of salt. They were more likely to have voted for the war out of deference to the presidential office itself.
Inslee disagreed and cited a number of conversations he had had with un-named members who had justified their vote out of fear that Saddam might have nuclear weapons. These same members, he indicated, were now more than slightly irritated to have been misled.
On whether the WMDs might ever be found, Wilson presented the case that they might well still be found, at least in some form.“My own sense … knowing the information as I knew it from when I was there in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, was that it was entirely likely, and still I think its likely we will find WMDs. We will find some chemical weapons or some vestiges of chemical weapons,” Wilson said. “We will find some chemical precursors and we will find that Saddam and his scientists had an ongoing interest in a nuclear program. So the question for me is, and always has been, whether or not that passes the threshold of ‘imminent threat to our national security,’ to quote the president and senior officials, or even the lesser threshold of grave and gathering danger, such that we had no choice other than to invade, conquer and occupy. My sense of that, I’m prepared to say, that is, no.”
Video of the Inslee forum and biographies of the participants can be viewed at http://www.house.gov/inslee/meetings.htm along with details of of House Resolution 2625, the Inslee-co-sponsored bill calling for the establishment of an Iindependent commission on intelligence about Iraq.