LONDON -- The postwar travails of the Bush and Blair regimes
have been moving at roughly the same tempo. Last Saturday, the Financial
Times announced on its front page, "Blow for Blair as 50 percent want him to
go." At that same moment, U.S. headlines were assigning the same collapse in
popular esteem for Bush.
On the business of faked intelligence, the chickens have been
slowly but inexorably coming home to roost, albeit with much irksome
pomposity about some supposed new corruption of such intelligence estimates
from former high standards. Never forget, U.S. intelligence created or
endorsed some of the most brazen lies of the twentieth century, starting
with Kennedy's "missile gap" thrown in Eisenhower's face.
Now, from the U.S. Congress, indeed from a former CIA officer,
have come indignant charges that U.S. intelligence estimates were willfully
perverted.
The British inquiry by Lord Hutton into the circumstances of
scientist Dr. David Kelly's death was intended by the Blair government as a
detour from the main issue of bogus, government-endorsed "intelligence"
about Saddam's nuclear and CBW arsenal. But the grudging testimony of men
like John Scarlett, chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee has
provoked fierce derision in the press here about the quality of the infamous
government dossier "Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction," published by the
British government on Sept. 24, last year.
An easy way of appreciating the dossier's true intentions
(misrepresentation, the prime function of government intelligence) is to
compare the final draft of this dossier with an earlier one, prepared on
Sept. 2. We can do this because the Hutton inquiry extracted the earlier
draft from Whitehall and Ewen MacAskill, and Richard Norton-Taylor did a
good job in the Guardian last Saturday of underscoring the contrasts.
It becomes clear that as the deadline for publication of the
final dossier approached, its editors in 10 Downing St, with Blair the
editor in chief, decided it was not, from the desired alarmist point of
view, cutting the mustard as an exercise in alarmism.
The earlier proposed title of the dossier was amended from
"Iraq's Program for Weapons of Mass Destruction" to the brusquer, more vivid
"Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction." Blair, via Alastair Campbell, forced
Scarlett to say that Saddam could produce a nuclear weapon between one and
two years," whereas the earlier draft merely said that were sanctions
against Iraq to be lifted, it would take Saddam's Iraq "at least five years
to produce a weapon."
The notorious 45-minute gap was created, giving the eager
British press the impression that British troops in Cyprus could be peppered
with nuclear and chemical munitions within 45 minutes of Saddam's order to
deploy them. In the original draft, itself entirely inaccurate, the
45-minute reference was to deployment of short-range battlefield weapons and
the phraseology was cautious: "could deploy," or "could be ready to deploy."
Such phrases were tossed out, and "are deployable" substituted.
On Sept. 19, Jonathan Powell, Blair's chief of staff, e-mailed
both the pliant Scarlett and Blair's PR chief at the time, Alastair
Campbell, "I think the statement . that 'Saddam is prepared to use chemical
and biological weapons if he believes his government is under threat' is a
bit of a problem . It backs up the argument that there is no CBW threat and
we will only create one if we attack him. I think you should redraft the
para(graph)." He was obeyed.
In a furious column last Monday in The Independent, that
newspaper's founding editor, Andreas Whittam Smith, not a rabble-rouser by
instinct or avocation, announced, "I am ashamed of my country's leader." He
called the Sept. 24 dossier "the most worthless state paper ever published,"
stressing simultaneously "The dossier was Mr. Blair's dossier and nobody
else's." He concluded, "I believe that Mr. Blair should honorably accept
responsibility for one of the worst foreign policy disasters which the
country has ever experienced, and resign forthwith."
In the United States, too, there's every sign that the
prostitution of the intelligence services under the direction of the White
House and Defense Department will simmer and boil, to the lasting damage of
the Bush presidency.
But we who said at the time of the publication of the British
government's dossier, and after Secretary of State Colin Powell's briefing
to the U.N. Security Council on the threat posed by Iraq, that they were
manifestly deceptive, can permit ourselves a wry smile at the belated hubbub
in the press. It was obvious to any objective soul months ago what was going
on.
And then we have to ask, Will there be no proper airing of the
role of the press in all this?
For example: On Monday, the New York Times ran a story to the
effect that the value of Iraqi defectors as informants on WMDs was scant,
albeit costly to the U.S. taxpayer. The story mentioned in passing, near the
end, that the Times had relayed such claims. This scarcely does justice to
the role of New York Times reporter Judith Miller in touting uncritically,
con amore, the myths of the defectors. The Times went after Jayson Blair and
beat its breast. Not Miller, who did far, far worse.
Soon we will be reading thoughtful stories about the public's
cynicism toward the claims of government. Will we hear much about the
culpability of the press? I would have said, a couple of months ago, no. But
maybe the dismal performance has tortured some decent souls. Not long ago,
Christiane Amanpour of CNN said publicly her own network had been
intimidated by the Bush administration and by the bellicose coverage of its
rival, Fox. She was brave to do that. Press proprietors relish criticism a
lot less than does someone like the thin-skinned Rumsfeld. Amanpour showed
the way. Let's have others, from the network anchors down, step up to the
plate. It would clear the air of a lot of hypocrisy.
Alexander Cockburn is coeditor with Jeffrey St. Clair of the
muckraking
newsletter CounterPunch. To find out more about Alexander Cockburn and read
features by other columnists and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate
Web page at
www.creators.com.
COPYRIGHT 2003 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.
