-Iraq Coverup: Hire Journalists to Get facts

by Chalmers Johnson

So the Bush administration — under considerable pressure from people outraged that we invaded Iraq not only without U.N. approval but on false intelligence that Saddam Hussein had “weapons of mass destruction” — has now decided to investigate itself. For this important task it is proposing a panel of former CIA officials (Robert Gates, Richard Kerr), former Congressional members with “intelligence expertise” (Warren Rudman, Gary Hart), and David Kay, the weapons inspector whose recent report and change of heart have so discomfited the administration. Unsurprisingly, if this administration has its way, the investigation will not make public its results until well after the November election.

The whole exercise smacks of “cover-up” and is about as trustworthy as asking Enron executives to investigate themselves. A group of men, deeply protective of their former colleagues, friends, and Washington connections, will doubtless tell us in due course that U.S. intelligence on Iraq was “thin” (at the time of the war it had been two years since there had been a National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq). The now-famous misinformation about “yellow cake” being purchased from Niger will be blamed on England’s MI6, the equivalent of our CIA. The real reasons why former ambassador Joseph Wilson’s first-hand report on Niger yellow cake was ignored and Wilson’s CIA wife subsequently outed will be conveniently forgotten. The real story of how and why the Bush administration went to war in Iraq will be lost in a miasma of words – and undoubtedly an endless commission report with endless appendices, some of which will surely be declared top secret and shielded from public view — and no one in particular will be blamed (much as Robert McNamara now blames “the fog of war” and not himself for the failures of American policy in Vietnam).

Published on Thursday, February 5, 2004 by TomDispatch.com
A Modest Proposal
by Chalmers Johnson

So the Bush administration — under considerable pressure from people outraged that we invaded Iraq not only without U.N. approval but on false intelligence that Saddam Hussein had “weapons of mass destruction” — has now decided to investigate itself. For this important task it is proposing a panel of former CIA officials (Robert Gates, Richard Kerr), former Congressional members with “intelligence expertise” (Warren Rudman, Gary Hart), and David Kay, the weapons inspector whose recent report and change of heart have so discomfited the administration. Unsurprisingly, if this administration has its way, the investigation will not make public its results until well after the November election.

The whole exercise smacks of “cover-up” and is about as trustworthy as asking Enron executives to investigate themselves. A group of men, deeply protective of their former colleagues, friends, and Washington connections, will doubtless tell us in due course that U.S. intelligence on Iraq was “thin” (at the time of the war it had been two years since there had been a National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq). The now-famous misinformation about “yellow cake” being purchased from Niger will be blamed on England’s MI6, the equivalent of our CIA. The real reasons why former ambassador Joseph Wilson’s first-hand report on Niger yellow cake was ignored and Wilson’s CIA wife subsequently outed will be conveniently forgotten. The real story of how and why the Bush administration went to war in Iraq will be lost in a miasma of words – and undoubtedly an endless commission report with endless appendices, some of which will surely be declared top secret and shielded from public view — and no one in particular will be blamed (much as Robert McNamara now blames “the fog of war” and not himself for the failures of American policy in Vietnam).

Let me propose that if the Bush administration really wants to find out what went wrong with our pre-war intelligence on Iraq, it should appoint a commission consisting of first-class investigative reporters, including first and foremost the New Yorker magazine’s Seymour Hersh and the Atlantic Monthly’s James Fallows. These two journalists have, in fact, already told us in damning detail what really went on inside the Bush administration….

Full story here .