Manipulating the evidence

Last November, the US Senate Intelligence Committee was pressured by the Democrats to commence the long-delayed investigation of whether the Bush administration had deliberately distorted the intelligence to justify the Iraq war.

A growing body of evidence, however, is already showing that the Bush administration manipulated the evidence to bolster support for its planned war. The Bush administration claimed that Saddam Hussain tried to acquire uranium in Niger to use for the production of Iraqi nuclear weapons.

US ambassador Joseph Wilson was sent by the CIA to Niger in February 2002 to investigate. He found that the accusation was baseless. He reported to the CIA and to the State Department that the documents on which the allegation was based were forgeries. Jacques Baute, head of the International Atomic Agency's Iraq Inspection unit, reached the same conclusion: the Niger documents were fraudulent.

Subhead

But the Bush administration ignored the findings of its own envoy, corroborated by other American officials, and continued to use the false claim. Ambassador Wilson later told New Republic the Bush administration "knew the Niger story was a flat-out lie".

The Bush administration also alleged that aluminium tubes purchased by Iraq were destined for the production of Iraqi nuclear weapons fuel. Both the US Department of Energy and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), however, rejected the allegation.

Yet, Bush continued to warn against the Iraqi nuclear threat. Secretary of State Colin Powell repeated the same warning before the United Nations in February 2003.

The bogus claim that the tubes were destined to help produce nuclear weapons was put forward by a certain Joe, a low level CIA agent "who got his facts, even the size of the tubes, wrong". (NYT. October 5, 2004). The Senate Intelligence Committee's report repeatedly "questioned Joe's competence and integrity.

Verified

"Yet, the Bush administration went on to advertise the highly disputed claim as a positively verified fact. On August 26, 2002, [Vice-President Dick] Cheney told the Veterans of Foreign Wars national convention in Nashville: "We now know that Saddam has resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons."

As a source, Cheney cited Hussain Kamel Al Majid, Saddam Hussain's son-in-law who had defected in 1994. In fact, Al Majid had told the Americans, in 1995, exactly the opposite, namely that Iraq's nuclear programme had been dismantled. Moreover, Al Majid could not have offered any new information since he was assassinated upon being lured back to Iraq in 1996. (NYT, October 3, 2004).

The deception campaign received a boost when The New York Times devoted the lead article on the first page of its September 8, 2002 edition, to a detailed account of the aluminium tubes, citing only the Bush administration's claims. Cheney and others in the administration went on to refer to the Times' article as "evidence".

On September 13, The Times made another contribution to the deception campaign. In a six-paragraph article buried on Page A 13, it claimed: "The best technical experts and nuclear scientists at laboratories like Oak Ridge supported the CIA assessments."

After the war, The Times admitted the claim was unfounded and blamed the Bush administration for its manipulative use of intelligence.

On October 2, 2002 the new National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) was delivered to the Senate Intelligence Committee.

It contained the following falsehood: "All intelligence experts agree that Iraq is seeking nuclear weapons and that these tubes could be used in a centrifuge enrichment programme."

This NIE is now considered "one of the most flawed documents in the history of American intelligence". But the deception worked.

When, at the end of 2002, United Nations' arms inspectors returned to Iraq, they focused on the aluminium tubes. They found them to be destined for rocket production, as the Iraqis had said, not nuclear weapons. They found no evidence of nuclear programme production.

On January 27, 2003 the IAEA officially told the UN Security Council that it had found no evidence of an Iraqi nuclear programme.

As American troops amassed on Iraq's borders, Bush, in his January 28 speech before Congress, ignored the Atomic Agency's report the previous day, and focused on the false claim: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussain recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."

Aghast by Bush's use of forgery to start a war, ambassador Wilson went public. He wrote in The New York Times (July 6, 2003): "I have little choice but to conclude that some of the intelligence related to Iraq's nuclear weapons programme was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat".

There are now suggestions that the forgery was deliberately put together to get the US into war with Iraq (Pat Buchanan, the McLaughlin Group, July 12, 03). This is supported by the testimony of a former senior CIA official who told Seymour Hersh: "Somebody deliberately let something false get in there." (New Yorker, October 27, 03).

- Prof Adel Safty is UNESCO Chair of Leadership and President of the School of Government and Leadership, Bahcesehir University, Istanbul. He is author-editor of 14 books including From Camp David to the Gulf, and Leadership and Democracy, New York, 2004.