Something it would have been nice to know

Much has been made, lately, of the Bush administration's selective release of information while trying to build its case to go to war. It turns out that - in all liklihood, prior to the start of the campaign to go to war - and definately before the war started - the administration had intelligence from one, and probably two, top al-Qaeda operatives saying that Osama bin Laden had rejected the idea of working with Saddam Hussein.

Abu Zubaydah, a Qaeda planner and recruiter until his capture in March 2002, told his questioners last year that the idea of working with Mr. Hussein's government had been discussed among Qaeda leaders, but that Osama bin Laden had rejected such proposals, according to an official who has read the Central Intelligence Agency's classified report on the interrogation.

In his debriefing, Mr. Zubaydah said Mr. bin Laden had vetoed the idea because he did not want to be beholden to Mr. Hussein, the official said.

Separately, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the Qaeda chief of operations until his capture on March 1 in Pakistan, has also told interrogators that the group did not work with Mr. Hussein, officials said.

The Bush administration has not made these statements public, though it frequently highlighted intelligence reports that supported its assertions of links between Iraq and Al Qaeda as it made its case for war against Iraq.

Now, I can't say for sure how reliable either of these sources are, not being an intelligence officer and all, but if I recall correctly, Zubaydah is the one who gave the administration information on possible al Qaeda plans which resulted in the issuance of warnings or raising the threat level to orange on various occasions, so the administration obviously has some faith in the information he provides. Yet even though he told them quite a while ago that Saddam and bin Laden were not working together, they have continued to - at the very least - try to create a clear impression that they were.

In an editorial in the NY Times today, Bill Keller writes about the selective use of intelligence in making the case for war.

What the Bush administration did was gild the lily — disseminating information that ranged from selective to preposterous. The president himself gave credence to the claim that Iraq was trying to buy uranium in Africa, a story that (as Seymour Hersh's investigations leave little doubt) was based on transparently fraudulent information. Colin Powell in his February performance at the U.N. insisted that those famous aluminum tubes Iraq bought were intended for bomb-making, although the technical experts at the Department of Energy had made an awfully strong case that the tubes were for conventional rocket launchers. And as James Risen disclosed in The Times this week, two top Qaeda planners in custody told American interrogators — one of them well before the war was set in motion — that Osama bin Laden had rejected the idea of working with Saddam. That inconclusive but potent evidence was kept quiet in the administration's zeal to establish a meaningful Iraqi connection to the fanatical war on America.

The motives for the dissembling varied. The hawks hyped the case (profusely) to prove we were justified in going to war, with or without allies. Mr. Powell hyped it (modestly) in the hope that the war, which he knew the president had already decided to wage, would not be a divisive, unilateral exercise. The president either believed what he wanted to believe or was given a stacked deck of information, and it's a close call which of those possibilities is scarier.

He also points out why even those who supported the war and believe the it was justified should be concerned if the government suppressed information that was less-than-favourable to their goals.

The truth is that the information-gathering machine designed to guide our leaders in matters of war and peace shows signs of being corrupted. To my mind, this is a worrisome problem, but not because it invalidates the war we won. It is a problem because it weakens us for the wars we still face.

Regardless of where one stands on the war itself, this is something that should be of grave concern to every American - and it is perhaps the most important reason we need to send a message to the government that we, the people, will not tolerate an administration that so carelessly spends the capital of America's crediblity, leaving us vulnerable to doubts and hesitation on the part of the rest of the world in the event we truly do face an imminent threat sometime in the future.

Posted by thorswitch at June 15, 2003 07:17 PM | TrackBack