A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse of America's Intelligence Agencies

This is an old book, but I wanted a hard copy for my library.You've got to read his latest - current - SPY FAIL!

This book must be read in conjunction with many others such as Halper and Clarke's more scholarly study of the same topic entitled "America Alone" as well as Chalmers Johnson's "Sorrows of Empire" and the less important books by Richard Clarke, John Dean, Paul O'Neill, Kevin Philips, etc.While Halper and Clarke place the topic of going to war into an historical scholarly framework, Bamford, a journalist, gives us a contemporary account of the major events in the formation of Al Qaeda and the activities in the intelligence services leading to the war against Iraq.This historian, before all of these books were published, had already spent many hours researching and reading domestic and foreign assessments of Bush's maneuvering to divert the war against terrorism into a war against Saddam Hussein.The American Enterprise Institute's Project for a New American Century was a good start and led to more clues and into the right directions. (Even the creation in 2000 of the CETO, Center for Emerging Threats and Opportunities, a Marine Corps think tank, gives clues, in various articles and studies, to the torture policies).The foreign media outmatched ours by far in getting the story right. Now we have lots of books that corroborate and clarify the issue even more and hold those accountable who caused an enormous burden for America's workers, taxpayers and armed forces.Bamford is particularly good at exposing Bush's abuse of intelligence information and both he and Halper and Clarke agree on the crucial and irresponsible manipulation of the "Clean Break" proposals of getting rid of Saddam which had been commissioned in Israel and submitted to Netanyahu, who rejected it, and Bush who enacted it. It envisioned a complete rearrangement of the Mideast with the U.S. acting as a modern Rome. It is incontestably true that David Wurmser, Douglas Feith, Abram Shulksy, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle et al. were maneuvering a compliant Bush to attack Iraq. There is no doubt that they wanted the U.S. to serve Israel's interest. Feith's Office of Special Plans, created by Rumsfeld in 2000 to crank out justification for an attack on Iraq, fed phony and concocted info to the Pentagon and apprised the American-Israeli Public Action Committe (AIPAC) which presumably forwarded it to Israel. The recent disclosure of this spy story, coming after Bamford's book, supports the author's position.Interestingly enough, Feith's Office of Special Plans has already been disbanded and Feith, so far, is cooperating in the Investigation, which is likely to be forgotten and covered up just like the Israeli attack on the U.S. naval vessel the "Liberty" in l967, which killed some 36 sailors, was covered up and forgotten.This spy story also invalidates much of the criticism some reviewers have of his book.Bamford is excellent on intelligence activities and the tracing of Al Qaeda's tranformation of being an ally of the U.S. into an enemy. This happened in l996, in reaction to Israel's massacre of hundreds of innocent civilians in southern Lebanon, the so-called Qana massacre, which was widely broadcast in Moslem and European countries but totally neglected here. As Senior CIA officials, charged with analyzing the causes of 9-ll would say later on, the Israeli-Palestinain conflict is "central" to the causes, though not the only one.For those interesting in historical synthesizing here is a thought--Bush, Sr., presumably, ordered Saddam to be assassinated in 1991. Saddam may have planned to assassinate Bush, Sr. in Kuwait in '93 and, therefore Bush, Jr., got to Saddam in '03. It sort of recalls what LBJ told a reporter, who asked him what he thought of the Kennedy assassination. LBJ said "let me tell you something,son, Kennedy tried to get at Castro, but Castro got to Kennedy first." While this may be only LBJ's opinion, there may be parallels in Kennedy-Castro, Bush-Saddam connections.

Tendentious is the word for James Bamford's newest book. Selective and slanted are other good ones. Overall, his conclusions - presented as fact - can best be characterized as bad analysis. This doesn't mean he has failed to consider facts that are, indeed, facts. What it does mean is that he has both ignored other facts, believed his sources' assertions that may not stand up as fact, and extrapolated unnecessary conclusions from the facts he likes, based not on the facts themselves, but on his neon-sign-obvious political bent. Don't be surprised that this is precisely what he accuses the Bush administration of doing. Bamford will never be held accountable for the vacuity of many of his conclusions; intelligence professionals ARE, every day of the week. This is a fact that makes a difference.Bamford has mastered the art of provoking reaction in his reader, which is then used to carry the reader lightly over what is often quicksand. He does this by hyperventilating, and throwing pieces of information into proximity for the apparent purpose of implying that they are related, even though he doesn't draw a credible link between them. Examples abound in the book; here's one: on pp. 33-34 he launches a multi-paragraph discussion of the Defense Special Missile and Astronautics Center (DEFSMAC), which he erroneously characterizes as "among [the National Security Agency's] most secret units." He introduces this excursion from the baseline story by lamenting that NSA finding out about the 9/11 attacks from CNN "was not the way it was supposed to be." Bamford's discussion of DEFSMAC seems to imply that the intelligence community was under the impression DEFSMAC would provide it warning when terrorists hijacked commercial airplanes with the intention of flying them into buildings in New York and Washington.Bamford knows enough about DEFSMAC to "get" that it relates in some way to air early warning, and breezily tells the reader how the cognoscenti pronounce its acronym ("deaf-smack"). But he either doesn't know or doesn't care that the 9/11 intelligence problem was not one of air early warning, but of knowing the intentions in the minds of terrorists. The intelligence community has known for decades that DEFSMAC is not a tool for deciphering that. It's weird to even mention it in this context.Bamford in fact ignores information that has been available to the public for years on the whole community's effort to improve its collection and analysis capabilities against terrorism (primarily as a result of the Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia in 1996). Both Bush II and Clinton increased antiterrorism intelligence funding every year after 1996, and both Congress and the executive agencies were well aware that better forms of intelligence were needed to interdict terror plots - and labored to cultivate them. No one in the federal government thought DEFSMAC was either appropriate or adequate to provide warning against a non-military terrorist attack. One cannot deduce anything complimentary to Bamford from the "free association" drive-by perpetrated here.Perhaps I just got tired of hearing over and over again how individual X or agency Y "didn't bother" to perform action Z that is now obvious in hindsight. These are the exact words used repeatedly: "didn't bother"; applied with equal dismissiveness to politicians, intelligence personnel, and senior government staffers. The words cheapen and distort the fact that we do indeed have shortcomings in our national intelligence collection and analysis; and one of these shortcomings is, indeed, agency parochialism and poor information sharing. Perhaps there were, indeed, policy missteps in the Bush administration's handling of intelligence and decision-making. But in neither case is the problem that people "didn't bother." That sanctimonious shorthand is highly misleading and unhelpful; it certainly throws suspicion for me on the case Bamford is making against Bush's senior advisors.So many, many questionable assertions or genuine errors. On p. 210: "All along [Osama bin Laden's] goal, and that of his top leadership, was to draw the United States deeper and deeper into the sinkhole of a war in the Middle East." On the contrary, bin Laden's goal all along has been to get the US, and other Western nations, OUT of the Middle East. On p. 301, apropos of an informant report that 500 tons of uranium were to be shipped from Niger to Iraq: "Then it was supposed to be 'transshipped in international waters.' Apparently this meant that somehow, while two ships were bobbing alongside each other more than a dozen miles out in the ocean, five hundred tons of metal would be moved from one ship to another - an amazing feat." Well, er, yeah. It happens every day, actually. The report was erroneous, but not because it's impossible to transfer cargo at sea.On p. 313, Bamford implies that the following report from an Israeli intelligence informant was false: a report that Iraqi mobile weapons labs were labeled as "Tip Top Ice Cream" trucks, and that they transferred items to tractor trailers labeled "Segada Transportation Co." His basis for suggesting this is the same as that of the UN inspectors who first received the information: "it was found that neither company, in fact, existed in Iraq." It never seems to have crossed his mind (or even the UN inspectors') that Saddam's Iraq was not a place where a company had to be registered in order for a government entity to paint its name on the side of a truck. There are, however, plenty of intelligence analysts throughout the world who could have told them that.I won't bore you with further iterations. It goes on and on. Bamford uses a loose footnoting scheme that gives him a lot of latitude in attribution, and of course does not name some unrevealed number of his sources (whose motives in giving him classified information ought to figure as a big block of salt perched on top of this book). Overall, he does a lot of things that a career Naval intelligence officer, like me, would have been fired for. You won't know any more about WMD in Iraq after reading this book - you might read some things you haven't read before, but any belief that therefore you KNOW any more would be unfounded.

This book is worth buying just for Chapters 11-14 alone. If anyone has any doubts that the Iraq war is massive fraud perpertrated by a neocon cabal of mainly Jews (see "The Israel Lobby," by Mearsheimer and Walt online in the London Review of Books for 23 March 2006 for more detail) in the interests of Israel's security, then all the insiders Bamford quotes in support of this view are in some giant conspiracy. Not possible. As Bamford discusses at great length with copious quotations from people on the inside, not one reason given by Bush and the cabal for going to war was true. Not one. No WMD's, no connection to Al Qaeda, no nuclear, biological or chemical threat to anyone, no pilotless drones launced from ships, no uranium purchases from Niger. Nothing. In fact, the war was planned before 9/11. 9/11 provided the 'pretext for war,' as Bamford has it in his title.Now what? How do we get out of this mess? Is Israel any more secure because Saddam Hussein is gone? I doubt it. How many dead Jews because of the war? None, as far as I know. How many dead American soldiers? As of 3/15/06, about 2300. How many dead Iraqis? According to the British medical journal, The Lancet, between 60,000 and 100,000. All for what?If you don't believe these guys--Bamford, one of the world's experts on surveillance and intelligence, and Mearsheimer and Walt, professors at the Univ of Chicago and Harvard, respectively--then nothing will persuade you that the war in Iraq is a cruel fraud perpetrated on America by a group of people more loyal to Israel than to the US.

A cracking read from the very beginning.