US Vice-President Cheney’s Apparatus

After David Kay, former head of the inspection group in Iraq, declared that Iraq did not have “weapons of mass destruction”, George Tenet, the CIA director, assumed the defense of his agency.

Mr. Tenet, who had not spoken in public since May 23, 2003, launched an offensive on February 5, 2004, during his annual conference in Georgetown. This prestigious university in Washington DC, founded by the Jesuits, has contributed many CIA agents. Tenet himself studied there. The current links between the US Jesuits and the CIA include Cardinal Avery Dulles, nephew of the CIA founder.

George Tenet recognized [1] that his audience had the «right to know how the issue of the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction had ended up adding that they would need time and patience» and concluded saying that «when all the information gathered is analyzed, it will show that we were neither completely wrong nor completely right». The students applauded this pro domo defense but anyone can not do less than wondering, what’s the use of an intelligence agency that contents itself with inaccurate information?

Nothing less was expected from Tenet, who has a reputation for “covering up” his subordinates when the agency is attacked [2]. However, he is reproached, not so much for being wrong, but for allowing the Pentagon to leak false information. The CIA and the State Department always maintained an evasive position regarding the Iraqi weapons, while the Defense Department created an ad hoc commission that caused the deception.

Actually, Tenet is trapped in his own game. During the crisis, his services issued several notes warning about the exaggerations of the Defense Department. However, in order to save his own budget, he ended up accepting the publication of a document of convenience that gave credit to something he knew was false. Here, we are going to explain how the politicians took the intelligence services in hand and forced them to accept the speech they wanted.

The Organization of the Intoxication System

First, we have to recall that the decision to attack Iraq was not made in 2002 but on September 29, 1998 when the US Congress passed a law about the liberation of Iraq [3] as a result of a campaign carried out by the ultra-conservative clan of the Project for a New American Century (PNAC) [4] , the electoral think-tank (center of investigation, propaganda and spreading of ideas, generally of a political nature) of George W. Bush. Then, it was about overthrowing Saddam Hussein, not about disarming him [5] .

President Clinton had refused to implement this decision of Congress. However, since his nomination as candidate, and even before he assumed power, President Bush planned its implementation. In effect, during the transfer of powers in the Pentagon, on January 9, 2001, Bush interrupted the generals who were briefing him and asked them about what plans they had prepared to attack Iraq [6] .

George W. Bush hesitated to use the September 11 attacks as a pretext to invade Iraq but he finally decided to take advantage of them to attack Afghanistan [7] . In order to please the domestic public opinion, the Bush administration had to find a way to present such a colonial expedition as an answer of legitimate defense. Therefore, a pretext for war was necessary.

The intoxication operation was carried out following direct orders from the White House and the Pentagon. It was directly headed by Lewis “Scotter” Libby, head of the Vice-President’s Office, and by Douglas J. Feith, Defense Under-Secretary in charge of political planning, both under the command of Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld.

Being an international lawyer, Libby became known defending Jewish personalities of the mafia, such as Marc Rich [8]. Douglas J. Feith is also an international attorney, awarded by the US Zionist Organization. His partner in the Feith & Zell association is the spokesman of an organization of Israeli settlers. Feith himself was an advisor to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and he advocates for Israel’s annexation of all Palestinian territories and the deportation to Iraq of the inhabitants of Gaza and the West Bank.

The operation was initially entrusted to Harold Rhode, of Lithuanian origin and a specialist in the final solution (Holocaust), who presided over the Jewish Genealogy Society of Greater Washington [9]. Rhode is also a renowned specialist in the Middle East. He speaks Arabic, Farsi, Hebrew and Turkish. He works at the Office of Net Assessment in the Pentagon [10], a bureaucratic group in charge of assessing the validity of the implemented programs. Andrew Marshall heads this group since its creation, in 1973. Exasperated by Marshall’s old fashioned and primitive anti-Communism, Bill Clinton in vain tried to close this bureau.

With the pretext of an assessment, Rhode and Marshall began to purge the Pentagon services in charge of Iraq: firstly, the Middle East and South Asian Affairs Section, headed by William Luti.

By the end of 2001, Harold Rhode began to recruit new collaborators. In order to do it in a discreet manner, the interviews did not even take place in the Pentagon offices but in the American Enterprise Institute [11]. Some of them took place with the presence of Richard Perle and all candidates selected had to be approved by Douglas J. Feith.

One of the first and important recruits was David Wurmser, who worked in the American Enterprise Institute, for which he published in March 1999 “Tyranny’s Ally: America’s failure to Defeat Saddam Hussein” [12], with a preface by Richard Perle. He was also one of the seven authors of the political-mystical study entitled: A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm [13], which inspired the policy of Benjamin Netanyahu. The other authors include Richard Perle and Douglas J. Feith, as well as his wife Meyrav Wurmser who is one of the persons in charge of MEMRI, a press agency directed by Tsahal officials.

The second recruit was F. Michael Maloof, a Lebanese Maronite who had been Perle’s assistant in the Pentagon in the 1980s.

Around 20 people were thus recruited in a short period. In early 2002, Feith created a Special Plans Bureau in the Pentagon, with all that personnel, under the direction of Abram N. Shulsky, a veteran in psychological operations and a university specialist in the neo-conservatives’ favorite philosopher: Leo Strauss.

Shulsky began his career as assistant to Senator Daniel P. Moynihan in the Intelligence Commission of the Senate. Then, he worked with Gary Schmitt (currently the director of the Project for a New American Century) and they became friends. Together, in 1991, they published Silent Warfare: Understanding the World of Intelligence [14] .

Later, Shulsky worked in the National Strategy Information Center [15] , an anti-communist think-tank headed by Prescott Bush Jr. Finally, he wrote several studies for the Rand Corporation at the time when Donald Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice were its managers, particularly one report about the remodeling of Central Asia that he signed with Zalmay Khalilzad, currently George W. Bush’s special representative for Afghanistan and Iraq [16] .

In order to validate its false information, the Special Plans Bureau used witnesses who had seen the “weapons of mass destruction” and knew their hiding places. These witnesses were recruited among exiled Iraqis by Colonel William Bruner with the help of Ahmed Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress.

The Iraqi National Congress is a puppet organization created by the Rendon Group public relations office following orders from the CIA and the Pentagon. After the fall of Baghdad, the Iraqi National Congress could have played the role of a provisional Iraqi government if the French and the Russians had not expressed their opposition. Its president, Ahmed Chalabi, has been often described as an international fraudster after the Petra bank that he managed in Jordan went bankrupt. Very few people know that Chalabi was chosen by Richard Perle, who knew him thanks to his father-in-law, Albert Wohlstetter, the theorist of the US atomic bomb. At that time, Chalabi studied math in Chicago. Nowadays, he is sponsored by James Woosley, former CIA director [17] .

For example, it was in that way that Hussain al-Shahristani was recruited. His pseudo-revelations nurture the reports of the British Foreign Office and several spectacular press conferences [18] .

The Neutralization of the Opposition

The “information” gathered by the Special Plans Bureau of the Pentagon were denied, one by one, by the Middle East and South Asian Affairs Bureau of the State Department. However, Dick Cheney, who had foreseen the presentation of this counter-report, had also foreseen the way to neutralize it. Cheney had forced General Colin Powell to appoint and to include his own daughter, Elizabeth Cheney, in the heart of its direction. Thus, the manipulation would not seem his. Then, Elizabeth expelled the rebel officials, including Greg Thielmann.

The same problem could have emerged in the National Security Council. However, being a farsighted man, Cheney had included in it, in June 2001, his friend Elliot Abrams to be in charge of Middle East affairs. Abrams began his career as a collaborator of Democrat Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson, together with Richard Perle. Later, he worked for Democrat Senator Daniel P. Moynihan along with Agram N. Shulsky and gary Schmitt.

During the Nixon and Reagan administrations, he supervised the death squadrons in Central America and actively participated in the Irangate case. Being a Jewish fundamentalist, he created the Public Policy and Ethics Center where he studied and denounced the influence of US materialism on the Israeli society. He is also one of the main adversaries of the Oslo Accords.

Finally, in order to guarantee the success of his operation, Dick Cheney also had to neutralize the eventual peace initiatives of Saddan Hussein. The Special Plans Bureau organized a complex operation to have the Iraqi president wait and make him believe, for as long as possible, that a peaceful solution to the crisis could be found. It was absolutely necessary to avoid that Saddam Hussein fully accepted the demands by the UN experts.

The Lebanese member of the Bureau, Michael Maloof, made contact with the Iraqis and Richard Perle headed secret negotiations in London. The procedure followed was exactly similar to that used in 1991 during the first Gulf War, when Bush Sr. resorted to French president François Mitterrand to have Saddam Hussein wait by sending him two emissaries: Marc Bourreau d’Argonne and Edgard Pisani [19].

All in all, the operation was directed by Dick Cheney thanks to a small team of loyal collaborators. Cheney did not hesitate to involve his wife Lyne - who monitored the activities of the American Enterprise Institute - and his own daughter Elizabeth - who avoided the interference of Colin Powell in the State Department.

Almost all of the officials involved in the operation were recruited among the most extremist Zionist organizations with the promise of destroying Iraq and sending Palestinians there some day. Most of them are members of the Center for Security Policy [20] and had signed an open letter to President Clinton in 1998 asking for an attack against Iraq.