Cheating Justice (7 page)

The president continued to assert that Iraq had refused to allow in weapons inspectors. On July 14, 2003, months after the war was launched, he said: “We gave [Saddam Hussein] a chance to allow the inspectors in and he wouldn't let them in,” reported CNN.
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In an “exit” interview with ABC's Charlie Gibson on December 1, 2008, the president said, “Saddam Hussein was unwilling to let the inspectors go in to determine whether or not the UN resolutions were being upheld.”
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In his 2010 book
Decision Points
, President Bush claimed that Hussein had not cooperated with weapons inspectors.
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In response, Walter Pincus of the
Washington Post
wrote on November 15, 2010, “Bush fails to mention two subsequent Blix [director of UN inspections Hans Blix] pre-invasion reports in February and early March, weeks before U.S. bombs struck Baghdad. Those show Iraq cooperating with inspectors and the inspectors finding no significant evidence that Hussein was hiding WMD programs.”
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Vice President Cheney also continued to conceal the truth and repeat false statements. The
Boston Globe
carried an article on June 16, 2004, quoting a speech by Vice President Cheney at the Madison Institute in Orlando earlier that month. The vice president falsely told his audience that Saddam “had long-established ties with al Qaeda.” Asked about it, President Bush backed him up, according to the
Boston Globe.
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In 2009 in a speech to the American Enterprise Institute, Vice President Cheney, referring to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, declared that they were conducted “to confront the regimes . . . that had the capacity to build weapons of mass
destruction, and might transfer such weapons to terrorists.”
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Since no allegation has ever been made that Afghanistan had WMD, Cheney was simply repeating the same Iraq falsification.

For a prosecution under Section 371 to proceed, the government itself must be the target of the fraud. Of course, Congress is a branch of the U.S. government, and the Bush administration aimed its expansive conspiracy at defrauding Congress into signing off on a war in Iraq. The war “marketing” campaign targeted Congress using “full-scale lobbying.” Karl Rove, the president's political advisor, said in a book he released in spring 2010, “Congress was very unlikely to have supported the use-of-force resolution without the W.M.D. threat.”
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President Bush, Vice President Cheney, and the many officials inside the Bush administration who collaborated with them had good reason to fear that Congress would say no if the truth were known about why they intended make war on Iraq. Instead, the president and his team decided to defraud Congress so that they could do what they wanted to do—enter into a war and the occupation of Iraq.

In lying, they not only committed the crime of conspiring to defraud Congress, they slashed away at our democracy. The framers of the Constitution attempted to protect against unnecessary war making and military adventurism by refusing to give the executive branch the right to start a war on its own (except to repel an imminent attack, not a factor here). Deceiving Congress into issuing an authorization to go to war on false pretexts unravels the Constitution and obstructs, disrupts, and undermines our democracy. A prosecutor will have no difficulty proving that the target of the conspiracy was the Congress.

Nor will a prosecutor have any problem meeting the final element of Section 371—“overt acts.” The people inside the Bush administration committed not one, but many overt acts as they engaged in the serial falsification of statements, information, and documents to deceive Congress. The conspirators, all powerful people, used their positions of trust to drive the nation into a war in Iraq come hell or high water, and without regard to the law, the Constitution, or the truth.

President Bush and Vice President Cheney have pointed the finger at bad “intel” from the CIA and other government intelligence agencies for their
misrepresentations, claiming, in effect, that they are innocent victims of others. To defend themselves from accountability and prosecution for conspiracy to defraud, they will likely play the same blame game that they have used numerous times to protect themselves by setting up others as the culprits.

In an interview with Charlie Gibson on ABC's
World News
on December 2, 2008, the president said, “The biggest regret of all the presidency has to have been the intelligence failure in Iraq. A lot of people put their reputations on the line and said the weapons of mass destruction is [
sic
] a reason to remove Saddam Hussein.”
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In his book, President Bush wrote that he was completely surprised that there were no WMD in Iraq. “No one was more shocked or angry than I was when we didn't find weapons of mass destruction. I had a sickening feeling every time I thought about it.”
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But the president recognized six weeks before the invasion of Iraq, in a meeting with British prime minister Tony Blair, that there were no weapons of mass destruction and another pretext for war might be needed.
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This is not, however, the same information that the president gave to the nation on March 17, 2003, days before the entering Iraq. Then he declared, “Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised. . . . The danger is clear.”
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Other intelligence information was manipulated and falsified, as well. The Senate Intelligence Committee said that the suggestion of an Iraq–al Qaeda connection, repeatedly made by the Bush administration, was “contradicted by available intelligence information.”
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Human intelligence was seriously misrepresented in at least three cases. A statement from one detainee, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, about a supposed al Qaeda training camp sponsored by Iraq, was delivered after he was subjected to torture, reported
Newsweek
writer Michael Isikoff.
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The statement was retracted by al-Libi, and it was determined to be untrue by Defense Department analysts as early as February 2002. But that didn't stop the president and others from using it as “evidence” of a connection between al Qaeda and Iraq. On October 7, 2002—eight months after analysts concluded that the al-Libi comment was false—President Bush used him as the sole “source” for a statement in a major speech in Cincinnati. “We've learned that Iraq has trained al Qaeda members in bomb-making
and poisons and deadly gases,” the president said.
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New York Times
reporter Douglas Jehl wrote in December 2005, “The Defense Intelligence Agency had identified Mr. Libi as a probable fabricator months before the Bush administration began to use his statements as the foundation for its claims about ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda.”
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A second piece of manipulated intelligence came from a man codenamed—incredibly—“Curveball.” During a period in which anthrax raised red alerts for Americans, President Bush, Vice President Cheney, and Secretary of State Colin Powell all described, with great fanfare, information about mobile biological weapons labs operating in Iraq. The source was a single Iraqi expatriate interviewed by German agents. Before the start of the war, Tyler Drumheller, the head of the CIA in Europe, repeatedly warned top U.S. officials in Washington that the man was not reliable, but Drumheller's alerts were rebuffed. Later, “Curveball” (real name: Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi) admitted to the
Guardian
newspaper that he had lied.
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Intel was also falsified to assert that Mohamed Atta, one of the 9/11 hijackers, colluded with Iraq. Vice President Cheney made this claim on
Meet the Press
on September 8, 2002, a half year before the Iraq invasion. Cheney said that Atta had met in Czechoslovakia with “a senior Iraqi intelligence official a few months before the attacks on the World Trade Center.”
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But intelligence agencies had completely discredited the Atta meeting six to nine months before the vice president's TV appearance, according to Michael Isikoff in “The Phantom Link to Iraq.”
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The FBI found that Atta was in Florida at the time of the supposed Prague meeting.

The president's team disregarded the intelligence that didn't fit the plan for marketing the war, while at the same time, intelligence failures that did emerge were, in large part, a result of White House pressures on intelligence agencies to support the case for war. In a comprehensive assessment of prewar intelligence on Iraq, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace determined that the intelligence on Iraq when President Bush first took office was “generally accurate” and that it reported no immediate threats. Beginning in 2002, the assessments changed—but not because the situation on the ground had changed, the Carnegie Endowment said. Instead, some errors seem to have emerged because the intelligence community was politicized by repeated visits to CIA headquarters by Vice President Cheney, the establishment of a separate intelligence operation in
the Department of Defense operated by Bush appointees without intelligence experience, and an environment in which agencies likely felt pressure to reach more threatening judgments.

Even then, the Carnegie Endowment found, the available intelligence information was distorted, conflated, and misrepresented by the Bush administration. “Administration officials systematically misrepresented the threat from Iraq's nuclear, chemical and biological weapon programs, beyond the intelligence failures noted,” the report said.
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As Senator Rockefeller said, “There is a fundamental difference between relying on incorrect intelligence and deliberately painting a picture to the American people that you know is not fully accurate.”
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The president's efforts to blame faulty intel for his repeated deceptions and misrepresentations will not hold up to the light of day, or serve to protect him from prosecution.

After deceiving Congress with false information, the president and vice president used the success of their fraudulent scheme as another alibi, claiming that they had the full backing of Congress.

In his speech to the nation on March 17, 2003, two days before the invasion of Iraq, President Bush said, “Recognizing the threat to our country, the United States Congress voted overwhelmingly last year to support the use of force against Iraq.”
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But he failed to mention that the Congress had demanded that certain preconditions be met, and that they had not been met.

On November 11, 2005, in a speech in Pennsylvania, President Bush said, “Democrats and anti-war critics are now claiming we manipulated the intelligence and misled the American people about why we went to war. . . . More than a hundred Democrats in the House and the Senate—who had access to the same intelligence—voted to support removing Saddam Hussein from power.”
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Of course, the Congress did not vote to remove Saddam Hussein from power; Congress voted to permit military intervention against terrorists who had attacked the United States on 9/11 and Saddam Hussein was not on that list. Aside from that, Congress did not have the same access to intelligence information as the president, who
refused to declassify some of the most important documents, leaving Congress in the dark.

Senator Rockefeller, in an introduction to the Senate Intelligence Committee Report of June 2008—five years after the war had begun—wrote that “members of Congress did not have the same ready access to intelligence as senior Executive Branch policymakers.”
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In the Senate Intelligence Committee report, Senator Rockefeller describes how Congress had to demand the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iraq, and got it in October 2002, only ten days before a vote on the authorization to go to war. “During the course of its investigation, the Committee uncovered that the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction was based on stale, fragmentary, and speculative intelligence reports and replete with unsupported judgments. Troubling incidents were reported in which internal dissent and warnings about the veracity of intelligence on Iraq were ignored in the rush to war.”
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The full NIE was classified, so even if members of Congress were shown it, they were not permitted to refer to it or quote from it. The version that was unclassified skipped over important details, in particular, dropping references to analysts who dissented from the summaries given and turning uncertain information into declarative certainties. “The intelligence community was far from unified. The administration concealed that fact by classifying the dissents in the intelligence community until after the war and continuing to make false claims about the immediacy of the danger,” wrote the late senator Edward Kennedy in a letter to the
Los Angeles Times
on March 15, 2004.
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A
New York Times
editorial on November 15, 2005, summed up the situation. In “Decoding Mr. Bush's Denials,” the editors said, “To avoid having to account for his administration's misleading statements before the war with Iraq, President Bush has tried . . . to share the blame, claiming that Congress had the same intelligence he had,” wrote the
Times.
“Congress had nothing close to the president's access to intelligence,” wrote the paper, and some information, like the National Intelligence Estimate, was “sanitized,” it said. “The president . . . did not allow the American people, or even Congress, to have the information necessary to make reasoned judgments
of their own. It's obvious the Bush administration misled Americans.”
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Finally, the question of whether members of Congress had the same information or could have been more aggressive in their search for information is a sideshow: it does nothing to relieve the president and vice president of their own culpability for conspiracy to commit fraud under Section 371.