Blowback - S1 Episode 3 - "Curveball"

Episode Date: June 29, 2020

September 11th gives America the perfect excuse to finish our hit job on Iraq. We put together the Bush administration's case for war — WMD and al-Qaeda — and take it apart piece by piece.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Tonight, America under attack. How could it happen? Who did it? How did they do it? And why? Clitzer reporting tonight from Washington, and there is a widespread belief that yesterday's attack succeeded because of major security and intelligence failures.

Joining us now, the former CIA director Jim Woolsey. Director Woolsey, a lot of people say that the signature of Osama bin Laden is all over these attacks. Are you ready to draw that conclusion? It may be all over these attacks, and I think that might make us a bit suspicious that something else may be up. Certainly, bin Laden may well have been deeply involved

and may have been the operational figure and his people in this, but that doesn't mean that he acted alone. I begin to think that maybe we're supposed to focus solely on bin Laden, and there might be something else in train. My suspicion, it's no more than that at this point, is that there could be some government action involved together with bin Laden or a major terrorist group, and one strong suspect there, I think, would be the government of Iraq. Freedom of Disclosure.

Welcome to Blowback, a podcast about the Iraq War. I'm Noah Colwin. I'm Brendan James, and this is episode 3, curveball. And if you like the show, if you're enjoying the show, we'll remind you you can always get access to all 10 episodes and bonus episodes if you sign up to Stitcher Premium. Go to Stitcher Premium.com, enter the code Blowback for one month, totally. free. You can binge it. You can bop it. You can twist it. You can pull it. All right. So the last couple episodes, we've taken you through the long, sordid history of American meddling in Iraq

up until the late 1990s. After a decade in which we went to war with Iraq, periodically bombed Iraq under both H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton. And most devastatingly, starved the country, brought it to the brink of famine and disease and poverty with the UN-approved sanctions. regime. But now we're getting into the real heart of the show. We want to look at how after 9-11 and the national psychosis that enveloped America, how we got from thinking about Osama bin Laden and Afghanistan and al-Qaeda to Iraq and Saddam Hussein and WMD. In this episode is really going to be about the quote-unquote intelligence that was used to create this case for war and what shape that case for war would take. In fact, we call this episode Curveball, not just because it was the name of one of the sources

that was pimped out to help make the case for war, but also because I think it speaks quite nicely to the very sharp change of direction that the Bush administration took immediately after 9-11 to get us into war with Saddam Hussein in Iraq. Yeah, we're going to put the case for war together and then take it all apart. Peace by peace. All right, you want to get started? Let's do it. Hey! Ho-ho! The Taliban has got to go, hey! Oh-ho! The Taliban has got to go, hey! Oh-ho! The Taliban has got to go, hey! Oh-ho! During the 1990s, while we were thrashing Iraq with sanctions in the occasional bombing campaign by President Clinton, America actually had pretty decent relations with the Taliban in Afghanistan. And that makes sense since it was America that had helped create and nurture the smattering of warlords and Islamic militants that were fighting the Soviets in the 1980s in that country. And after the Taliban took power in the 90s, we were still open to working with them, saw a lot of opportunities for some oil pipelines to get some of that black gold in the Caspian basin.

And the Taliban, Islamic fundamentalists or not, were aware of how much money they could make dealing with the West. As late as 1998, they were making a lot of the noises that America wanted to hear. Here was a guy from their foreign ministry, quote, We are hoping to encourage private sector investment and privatization and to utilize overseas investment to rebuild our economic infrastructure. In other words, ready to play ball, let in foreign capital, and abide by the American-led rules of the global market. But there was one small fly in the soup,

a young entrepreneur from Saudi Arabia who was working out of their space. Yeah, he was the weird guy in the we work for them. Yeah. Of course we're talking about one, Osama bin Laden. When U.S. troops were placed in Saudi Arabia as a result of Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait, that really was a kind of turning point for Osama. The son of a Saudi billionaire family and a very wealthy man, therefore, himself. And Osama at this point was really just one among many terrorist financiers. His home country of Saudi Arabia wanted him back badly.

But what I don't think a lot of people know is that in early 1998, the Taliban were in negotiations with Saudi Arabia and America. to hand over bin Laden. Ben Laden existed in Afghanistan exactly 17 years before our government existed. We inherited him. They met a complication in 1998 when militants connected with Osama bombed the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Rather than intensifying the efforts to get bin Laden handed over to the Saudis, instead America did a little thing called Operation Infinite Reach,

which was a bombing of both a medicinal plant in Sudan, which America erroneously claimed was manufacturing nerve gas for bin Laden. Sudan crowds have gathered outside the U.S. embassy demonstrating their anger. The government has denounced the attacks on what it has said was a civilian pharmaceuticals factory. And cruise missile strikes into Afghanistan. This effectively ended any cooperation from the Taliban in handing over bin Laden. You have declared a jihad against the United States. Can you tell us, Why?

The U.S. The U.S.S. government has committed acts that are extremely unjust, hideous, and criminal. By 2001, the Taliban were so isolated, they were closer to bin Laden than they'd ever been before. And this was fine by him, and he basically just bought the country. We believe the U.S. is directly responsible for those killed in Palestine, Lebanon, and Iraq. By the way, that medical plant that we hit in Sudan, we'll never know how many people that ended up killing because we blocked any investigation into the knock-on effects. But if the idea sounds familiar to you,

America being attacked in some way by Osama bin Laden and then obliterating a country that had nothing to do with said attack, then you could think of that medicine factory in Sudan as one big dress rehearsal. But the world's largest mobile phone maker is warning that third quarter sales will be about 5% below the year ago level. This just in, you were looking at an audience. obviously a very disturbing live shot there.

That is the World Trade Center, and we have unconfirmed reports this morning that a plane has crashed into one of the towers. What's the other jet doing? What's the other jet doing? Holy fuck! Oh my God! Oh my goodness! Oh my goodness.

We're looking at a live picture from Washington, and there is smoke pouring out of the Pentagon. It would appear that there has been another major explosion, explosion, this one in the nation's capital. I think to most normal people, 9-11 was a snuff film broadcast live and rerun on TV for months and months on end. But to some other people, it represented a lot of opportunities. This is a day when all Americans from every walk of life unite in our resolve for justice and peace. America has stood down enemies before, and we will do so this time. For the Bush administration and the war cabinet, sometimes

dubbed the Vulcans, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Condi Rice. It was a chance to correct America's Vietnam syndrome. You know, we talked in episode two about the idea of the end of history after the Cold War and how America was then just going to be unopposed and first among equals in a new neoliberal utopia. But you could tell for a lot of these people up top, particularly the Bush administration, that whole idea was actually pretty boring. And 9-11, you know, it got their blood flowing again. It gave them an adversary. It gave them a challenge. It gave them moral clarity. Good and evil is about as effective as shorthand as I can imagine. It isn't a war on terror. It's a war on terrorists who

wanted to impose an intolerant tyranny on all mankind, an Islamic universe in which we are all compelled to accept their beliefs and live by their lights. And in that sense, this is a battle between good and evil. And it gave them a foreign policy. It gave them an agenda. Our war is against networks and groups, people who coddle them, people who try to hide them, people who fund them. This is our calling.

It's easy to forget that in 2000, when Bush was actually running for president, he didn't really talk about terrorism. He actually said he was against America becoming world cop. Yeah, I'm not so sure the role of the United States is going around the world and say this is the way it's got to be. I think one way for us to end up being viewed as the ugly American is for us to go around the world saying, we do it this way, so should you. The neocons didn't like him. They wanted John McCain to win. But after 9-11, he was reborn, you know, with a purpose. It is both our responsibility and our privilege to fight freedoms fight. That was the ideological side of it. Beneath that, for the same people and, of course, many, many others, it represented a new chance.

to plunder, a new chance to expand, a new chance for new markets. What followed was a national psychosis. It's war. Come on. All right. It's a Japanese. This is Pearl Harbor. We got to go bomb everything over there now. We got to bomb the hell out of them. You know who it is. I can't say, but I know who it is. Bush's approval rating was north of 90%.

The people who knocked these buildings down will hear all. civil rights go out the window the FBI starts hunting quote al-Qaeda sleeper cells inside of America we thwarted terrorists in buffalo and Seattle Portland Detroit North Carolina and Tampa Florida you had Congress passed the authorization for the use of military force the bill that justified the forever war there's no such thing as a Democrat or Republican war in October 2001 we launched the war in Afghanistan the US with the assistance of Britain in at least one instance has begun a major attack against the Taliban and the al-Qaeda network in Afghanistan.

Good shot, get shot. Okay, five, my three, clear! Oh, yeah! You had the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, which would give birth to ICE. Department of Homeland Security will have nearly 170,000 employees who will wake up each morning with the overriding duty of protecting their fellow citizens.

It broke the goofy meter. This is from Newsweek by Jonathan Alter. Read that. Time to think about torture, published on November 4th, 2001. We can't legalize physical torture. It's contrary to American values. But even as we continue to speak out against human rights abuses around the world, we need to keep an open mind about certain measures to fight terrorism,

like court-sanctioned psychological interrogation. What the fuck does that mean? I don't know. The next sentence is the money shot, though. And we'll have to think about transferring some suspects to our less squeamish allies. Even if that's hypocritical, nobody said this is going to be pretty. So this process is not new. I mean, America's been doing that forever. You put a bag over someone's head and you walk them into some room with a little Egyptian or Ukrainian flag on the table and let the guys in different uniforms torture them. But what was new was the... idea of writing this without shame in Newsweek magazine is something that we should do more of.

Yeah. Oops. I said the quiet part loud and the loud part quiet. Yeah, so I just use that altar piece to communicate a general widening of the possibilities for what you could say out loud. Another thing that was really wild was Operation Tips, T-I-P-S. This was a plan to recruit one in 24 Americans as citizen spies who would inform on their neighbors and their friends. This did not end up happening and probably didn't really need to happen given that the magnification of the NSA and its power and its scope did a better job than any kind of old Stasi program possibly could have. I mean, I will say that I am 100% confident that all of the people who love that fucking movie

the lives of others also 100% would have loved to do this program. Fuck that movie. Fuck that movie. The last example that I wanted to mention is the Millennium Challenge, challenge 2002. And this was a war game run by the military in that year. War games are, you know, simulations, like complex versions of battleship that the military uses to run tests and experiments in case that type of war happens someday. God forbid. And there's always a blue team, which represents the U.S., the good guys. And in this case, the red team was widely understood to stand

in for Iran or Iraq. This was actually inspired by the Halo model. It was right around when Halo is in development, and they clearly shared info. Yeah, this is, we talk a lot about the militarization of video games. Bungee, the blood is on your hands. What was different about this war game was that it was administered so that the blue team, America, basically could not lose. Anytime there was like a difficulty or a problem, they basically got to go mods, and then it was just waved away.

That rules. Maybe just a little bit of a foreshadowing to a hubristic empire that didn't want. to even consider the idea that they would lose the war and just did whatever they wanted. Here's a couple, a little just tidbits that I thought were funny. The people running the war games even ordered the enemy, Red Team, to pull its forces back in order to allow American units to land safely. This is by a general who was on the Red Team, quote, then I asked to use chemical weapons.

That was refused. And then finally, the people running the war games even ordered the enemy to disclose some of its troop locations so that the Americans could find them. Like, yeah, that'd be great if we could do that in fucking the Sunni triangle, I guess. I mean, it wouldn't be great, in my opinion, but the U.S. Central Command probably thought it would be great. It doesn't actually work that way. So, again, that was the intoxication level. Well, let's talk now about the investigation into finding out exactly who is responsible for this.

Officials are saying that early investigation into this, these deadly attacks point to Islamic extremist and alleged terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden. And this new reality, there was a new big bad, and that was Al-Qaeda. People had heard about Osama bin Laden by now. And obviously, despite the denial, attention will quickly turn to the bin Laden group. They had not heard of Al-Qaeda. This one network, Al-Qaeda, that's receiving so much discussion and publicity. It looks as though the responsible organization was a group called Al-Qaeda. It's Arabic for the base.

That's Osama bin Laden. He headed it up. That's because, long story very short, al-Qaeda did not really exist up until 2001. What do you mean? If we want to get right how the Bush administration started to connect Iraq to 9-11 and al-Qaeda, I think we got to get it right on what al-Qaeda really was. The idea, which is critical to the FBI's prosecution, that Bin Laden ran a coherent organization with operatives and cells all around the world,

of which you could be a member, is a myth. There is no Al-Qaeda organisation. There is no international network with a leader, with carders who will unquestioningly obey orders with tentacles that stretch out to sleeper cells in America, in Africa, in Europe. That idea of a coherent, structured, terrorist network

with an organized capability simply does not exist. That is a scholar and journalist named Jason Burke, who, in his book Al-Qaeda, explains that by this point, Osama definitely had a terrorist group. He had pulled off some big ones, like the bombing of the U.S. embassies, for example,

and the USS Cole in 2000. He wasn't calling his group Al-Qaeda. That was a name that we basically slapped on it once we were trying some of his associates in 2001. But as we mentioned before, he was really just one among many international financiers of terrorism. He had the money and he would give it out the way a venture capitalist would. Seed capital for different things. He wasn't really masterminding a whole lot. He wasn't

really planning a whole lot. But he definitely wanted to be viewed as an international badass who was fighting the crusaders and the Jews, etc. And he would puff himself up whenever cameras are around. CNN interviewed him in the late 90s. He knew he would be in front of American audiences. So he hired a bunch of guys from other jihadist groups in Afghanistan to walk around with him with guns. So it looked like he had this huge entourage. In other words, bin Laden and the Americans cooperated to make him look like the president of terrorism. So what is all the say about the actual scope and power and an organization of the group we would eventually call Al Qaeda? This idea that Al Qaeda was a top-down organization that had cells in all these different countries that

answered directly to bin Laden, kind of like a mafia for terrorism. That is exactly how Bush put it in his address to Congress right after 9-11. Al-Qaeda is to terror, but the mafia is to crime. Even after we had Osama on the run, we still built him up as like this bond villain with, you know, a layer miles beneath the earth's crust. The search for Osama bin Laden, there was constant discussion about him hiding out in caves,

and I think many times the American people have a perception that it's a little hole dug out of a side of a mountain. Oh, no. This is it. This is a fortress, a complex, multi-tiered, bedrooms and offices on the top. as you can see secret exits on the side and the end and on the bottom cut deep to avoid thermal detection a ventilation system to allow people to breathe and to carry on the entrance is large

enough to drive trucks and even tanks even computer systems and telephone systems it's a very sophisticated operation oh you bet this is serious business and there's not one of those there are many of those countries all over the world would now find a big fat package of aid or support or guns if they could tell the Americans they had their own al-Qaeda problem and wanted to become a customer or a client. Of course, half the time, the groups that they were complaining about not only weren't al-Qaeda, they weren't even Islamic fundamentalist militants. They were just left-wingers or opponents of whatever regime was in power. Didn't matter. But no one would benefit more from this new shadowy concept of al-Qaeda than the American enemies of Saddam Hussein.

When I see bin Laden issuing fatwas, religious edicts, putting out vizabeth, videotapes, issuing poems, having his subordinates talk about how they're taking part in terrorism against the United States. I begin to think that maybe we're supposed to focus solely on bin Laden, and there might be something else in train. So we started the episode playing that clip from former CIA chief James Woolsey, the day after 9-11, where he said, yeah, bin Laden was definitely involved, but the real mastermind was likely Saddam Hussein. And by the way, that was just one of many shows he went on that day. I think he made the round. all the major networks, morning, noon, and night.

What it's interesting to know that we'll come to find this episode, James Walsy, is a huge supporter of one man named Ahmed Chalabi. Woolsey was definitely not alone in trying to immediately connect what had happened to Iraq. I mean, there was like a whole network of journalists, right-wing think tank figures, you know, pretend national security analysts, especially people from the American Enterprise Institute, home of notorious race scientist Charles Murray. But what about inside the Bush administration? If I'm not wrong, the first recorded discussion of Iraq after 9-11 came from Rumsfeld, who during a national security meeting right after the attacks, suggested striking Iraq first because it, quote, had the best targets.

But by most accounts, the administration really was in the month or so after September 11th focused on Afghanistan. stuff. Even Dick Cheney, who famously unraveled a bunch of maps of Iraq's oil fields before 9-11, even Cheney was telling some of Rumsfeld's goons like Paul Wolfowitz to shut the fuck up about Iraq while the administration was getting the war in Afghanistan off the ground. This did not stop Rumsfeld's guys from getting started on a incredibly pretentiously named group called Bletchley Park 2. Do you know what Bletchley Park? Remember what Bletchley Park is? No, what's that? Bletchley Park was in World War II, the code-breaking team dramatized in the imitation game that broke the Nazi codes.

It was, you know, like the brain trust of the British military effort. And so Bletchley Park 2, staffed by Fareed Zakaria and Paul Wolfowitz's friends, would be the brain trust of this war. And I just have to note here that Bob Woodward in describing this group, not helping the fight against neocon tropes because he writes quote Wolfowitz and his group of neocons were rubbing their hands over the idea for war which you know I mean show me the lie of course but it's just writing it that way I was like I mean look we're going to return to the theme of Bob

Woodward being an incredibly valuable resource for understanding the way that these people thought about themselves and thought about Iraq and thought about like you know administering U.S. power except Bob Woodward is also the worst fucking writer. At any rate, Bletchley, too, would move things away from the obvious countries relating to 9-11, like Egypt or Saudi Arabia, and toward, for whatever reason, a very different group of nations.

Here's a choice quote. Egypt and the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, where most of the hijackers came from, were the key, but the problems there are intractable. Iran is more important, where they were confident and successful when setting up up a radical government. But Saddam Hussein was different, weaker, more vulnerable. We agreed Saddam would have to leave the scene before the problem would be addressed. Right, but they would also never say that the problem were the countries or even these specific leaders. It was about eradicating this like Nazi-like ideology. I mean, this is around, this is when the time, you know,

like Islamofascism is a meme or becomes one. And it sort of reflects that what they view Iraq as is, and it's wild because Iraq is not ruled by a fundamentalist. No, there's a lot of stuff like, let's quote, start with Iraq, i.e., this is going to span multiple countries. And there's also outright mention of, quote, Iranian overthrow. So honestly, that's about as clear as you could probably get articulating the unannounced agenda after 9-11. In November 2001, Bush pulls Rumsfeld aside and says, draw up the plan. on Iraq, quote, I want to know what the options are. Rumsfeld, in turn, goes to General Tommy Franks, who is the head of U.S. Central Command.

Franks is a tall, intimidating, a Texan guy who's known to be a bit of a hothead. He pulls out the existing plans for any kind of war with Iraq, which were left over from the Clinton years. And the plan looked a lot like just a Gulf War Part 2. Tanks, big bombs, lots of troops, a huge military buildup in the region, something like the half million that we did in the Gulf War. Gulf War. Rumsfeld pinches his nose because, as you've said before, he views himself as a modernizer of the U.S. military and of the DoD. So he wants to shave a lot of this down and

try a nimbler, cleaner, light footprint approach. The Defense Department, over the past months since I arrived, has fashioned a new strategy not to deal only with specific threats, like the threat of North Korea or a threat of Iraq invading Kuwait, but rather to reorient ourselves towards a capability-based strategy. So over the next year, General Tommy Franks and his Keebler elves of military officers would put together this sleek modern war plan that would meet Rumsfeld's specifications. So by November, the war machine had revved up. The question now was, how to sell the switch?

how did we get from 9-11 to Iraq? Until around the beginning of 2002, if you're a regular American, you are still mostly hearing about Afghanistan and Osama bin Laden. Iraq was this teaser for next season, but until the war in Afghanistan wound down, it wasn't center stage.

As James Mann points out in his book, Rise of the Vulcans, once Afghanistan started to wind down, there was a slow and subtle shift in rhetoric from the Bush administration. that got us from al-Qaeda and Osama and Afghanistan to Saddam and Iraq and WMD. And it went like this. In mid-September 2001, Cheney was on Meet the Press.

Saddam Hussein, your old friend, his government had this to say, the American cowboy is rearing the fruits of crime against humanity. If we determine that Saddam Hussein is also harboring terrorists, and there's a track record there, Would we have any reluctance of going after Saddam Hussein? No. He was still saying things like, at this stage and at this time, the U.S. was only focused on Afghanistan and Al-Qaeda. At this stage, the focus is over here on al-Qaeda and the most recent events in New York, Saddam Hussein's bottled up at this point. Do we have any evidence linking Saddam Hussein or Iraqis to this operation?

No. But in November, Bush and Rumsfeld both start to. talk about the danger of terrorist groups like al-Qaeda, acquiring WMD, and that preventing that was a very important part of the war on terror. These same terrorists are searching for weapons of mass destruction. They can be expected to use chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons the moment they are capable of doing so. Any government that rejects this principle, trying to pick and choose its terrorist friends,

will know the consequences. Then in the new year, January 2002, Bush gives his State of the Union and introduces everybody to our new Council of Doom, the Axis of Evil. Iran aggressively pursues these weapons and exports terror. North Korea is a regime arming with missiles and weapons of mass destruction. Iraq continues to flaunt its hostility toward America and to support terror. The Iraqi regime has plotted to develop anthrax and nerve gas and nuclear weapons. states like these and their terrorist allies constitute an axis of evil.

I mean, but like, what is North Korea doing there? Yeah. Was there some link between, like, at that point, like Kim Jong-il? Well, right. I mean, the association makes no sense. Obviously, the term axis is meant to evoke World War II, in which three powers actually did cooperate and work together. You at home now know that Iran and Iraq were arch enemies.

North Korea, I think, by most accounts, was on there so that it wouldn't be all Middle Eastern countries. But the pitch was supposed to be that they have just sort of a vibe in common. It's the idea that there's, oh, well, there's some ideological or intellectual overlap among them, which is, like, between Juche and, like, the, like, Shia clerics that rule Iran and just, like, the Sunni, like, like, Saddam Botism. Like, it's not even an ideology. Yes. So, all right, my head hurts. Can we just get to the part now about, like, what they actually, like, start, like,

to do. So with things in motion, we start to whisper to our allies about a possible military buildup that could be happening on the borders of Iraq in the near future. These are the same allies that we're already working with to, say, extract intelligence from certain detainees they're picking up in the war on terror. The fine people at the Jordanian intelligence agency, which is sometimes referred to as the fingernail factory, who knows why. And the president of Yemen at the time, the genocide guy from Yemen.

The CIA is posting up in Kurdistan, again, just flashback to 1995, except this time they're not looking to sponsor some hairbrain coup like last time. They're looking for Intel on WMD, desperately. They were poison hunting, essentially, and being approached exclusively, really, by, like, alcoholics and people fucking with them. there was one guy who came into the CIA camp and said he had a little jar of a really dangerous poison and as he was showing it to them he spilled it on himself and everyone started laughing who was with him like yeah anyway sorry it's not really poison that wasn't accompanying the CIA was this band of Turkish fixers who were ostensibly there to help out but apparently stuck to mostly watching porn smoking cigarettes and spying on their American counterparts so they were actually cool I hear there's rumors on the

internets that we're going to have a draft. We're not going to have a draft, period. So things are getting heady. You know, we're actually pulling the ripcourt here. And I just want to say a little bit about where Bush was here. Wordward has a lot of passages where, you know, it's a meeting. And he says, you know, Bush seemed neutral and studying everyone's faces. And it's like, yeah, maybe he was thinking that.

Or maybe he was just like a huge dullard and didn't know what everyone was talking about and had no idea what was going on. That's another way to read his face. I can't imagine somebody like Solomon Lund, understanding the joy of Hanukkah. I don't want to embarrass him, but at one point, H.W. Bush, Bush's dad, actually called Prince Bandar of Saudi Arabia, who was an old consigliary from Saudi that had been a friend of the Bush family for a while, to come to America and essentially babysit. And apparently, W. said, quote, he's having a bad time. Just help

him out. Bandar would, like, follow him around and say, like, yes, very good, sir. Oh, you sound very prepared for worse. Incredible. Have you considered the cruise missiles we discussed? Yeah. I mean, this is, by the way, whenever any like, grown person tells you that they're talking about state craft and the seriousness of the task of civil service or whatever,

this is what they are actually describing, though they may not know it. There will always be some uncertainty about how quickly he can acquire a nuclear weapon. But we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud. All right. Let's get nutty with it. Let's talk about the case for war that was assembled by the Bush administration in 2002. We've seen that the actual planning for war had started all the way back in November 2001. We've seen the internal justifications offered by things like the Bletchley Park 2 group run by Wolfowitz.

And I'd hope that listeners to the show by now see the context of the entire history of our involvement with Iraq, which after 1991, we viewed him as a loose end that needed to be taken care of. But you had to make up some better reasons if you really wanted to sell this shit to the Congress and the media and the public. So there were a lot of people in the administration responsible for selling this war. You had people in Dick Cheney's office. You had the actual press secretaries who went and faced off with the press every day. We'll get to them. But in the spirit of this show, I think we want to focus on the most grotesque of the bunch. And for us, that is the Office of Special Plans headed up by Rumsfeld's Undersecretary for Policy, Douglas Fife.

If you've listened to our episode zero, our prologue episode where we go through a lot of the characters, you've already heard his talk about Fythe. He was a very embarrassing man, both intellectually, even people in the Bush administration would openly talk and write about how stupid he was. And physically, he was embarrassing. He sported a Mo Howard. type haircut and gave off a constant leer. But this was the guy in charge of marshalling the intelligence to prove Saddam not only had WMD, but was also in league with al-Qaeda. And the special plans office was called special plans because at the time, calling it Iraq planning office might have undercut our diplomatic efforts with regard to Iraq and the U.N. and

elsewhere. Oh, did I say that or just think it? I've got to think of a lie fast. One of Fyth's henchmen, the henchman of a henchman, was a guy named David Wormser, a perfect name, one of those perfect names that comes up in this show. Bin Laden, I think may well be working for Iraq. This guy was writing books about how we needed to go to war with Iraq all throughout the 90s, obsessed with Saddam, and was appropriately tasked with putting together the terror connection. and he would sift through raw intelligence. I can't believe this. This is like intelligent shit.

I'm not comfortable with this. This is like, like, I can't believe this shit I'm seeing. And piece it together on a big blackboard like Charlie and it's always sunny. I mean, I think of it more as like the guy from Libra, the Dondolillo book, who's just like trapped in a room for eternity, like looking at like JFK files. So he was drawing out these connections through some. Rusted algorithm in his own head that would supposedly fill in the gaps that the raw intelligence left out in Saddam's relationships to all these different al-Qaeda guys. We're talking about Sigint and signals and shit and which signals means code, you know. It was just lying there. Talking here about department heads and their names and shit.

And then there's these other files that are just like numbers, array, numbers and numbers and dates and numbers and numbers and dates. And numbers, and I think that's the shit, man. The raw intelligence. He would put a bunch of stuff in a black box, this sort of Schroederger's Saddam, shake it around, and then see what came out of it. And intellectually, like, that's a kind of sickness that you see all the way down and how we think about terrorism, you know, and, like, the way the FBI prosecutes cases today. I mean, when you think about gang prosecution is actually probably a great example,

that, like, the NYPD will use very, like, when they did, that huge bust in the Bronx a few years ago and sent over 100 people to jail, the way that they were able to do it was a series of tenuous such connections based on who knows what and which proximity that just adds up to a deliberate misreading of what those actual relationships were. Just as a footnote here, James Risen, one of the reporters who would chronicle a lot of this stuff, wrote that Israeli intelligence played a hidden role in convincing Wolfowitz that he couldn't trust the CIA. And this dissatisfaction helped cause him to rely on Ahmed Chalaby for intelligence. The door in this case swung both ways in a big way because one of the policy

analysts working for Fyth and Wolfowitz was named Larry Franklin. And he would go on to be convicted of spying for Israel and passing classified intel through APEC. Apic would then go on to pass it to the Israelis. And eventually Fyth, Wolfowitz, and Wormser were We're investigated as well. So we just heard Ahmed Chalabi's name there. Let's check in on him because he's now going to serve a very useful purpose in selling the war throughout 2002.

Last episode, we saw how he bounced back in the 90s after a pretty dismal decade of trying to overthrow Saddam with the CIA and being on the run from his massive bank fraud in Jordan. He successfully lobbied for the Iraq Liberation Act, which made it the policy of the U.S. to give a bunch of money, to anti-Saddam dissidents like Ahmed Chalabi. The State Department also paid for his PR services at the once-Paul Manafort and Roger Stone-run firm, B-K-S-H.

And ever the visionary, Chalaby had started planting Saddam WMD stories before 9-11 in February 2001 in the Sunday Telegraph. By this time, Chalaby was the darling, particularly of Republicans. And in fact, he, in the months after 9-11, attended a big meeting with Dick Cheney while his organization, the INC, was being audited for fraud at the behest of the State Department.

Chalaby and his associates were basically writing fake invoices and sending them to the State Department and getting a shitload of money for doing nothing. But of course, Chalabee's biggest scam ever was the one he was about to pull in priming the pump for America to invade Iraq. So this process of guys like Wolfowitz and Wormser and Fythe and at the top, Dick Cheney,

dragging the intelligence, you know, across the finish line. You pile up all of the existing intel that you can polish into something solid, and you get guys like Chalabee to supply you a bunch of fresh new tabloid-style intel. We'll take a look at how Chalabee did that later. You finally end up with a big, fat dossier on Saddam Hussein, and you're ready to show it to the world.

Let's look at that case for war. Roll the music. Stockpiles. This was our intel that showed. that Saddam was stockpiling hundreds and hundreds of chemical and biological weapons. Aluminum tube. This was our intel that Saddam was buying aluminum tubes to construct a nuclear centrifuge. The mobile lab. This was intel showing Saddam was developing portable WMD labs to avoid inspections. Anthrax. This was intel that suggested Saddam was behind the rash of

anthrax being mailed around the United States in the months after 9-11. Drones. This was our intel that showed Saddam was developing drones to deliver WMD. With extra spooky bonus intel that Saddam had recently purchased electronic maps of the eastern United States, maybe to use the drones there. Saddam's trip to Africa. This was our intel that showed Saddam had tried to buy yellow cake uranium in Niger. Muhammad Atta's trip to Prague. This was intelligence that showed 9-11 hijacker Muhammad Atta had met with Iraqi intelligence agents in the capital of the Czech Republic. Al-Qaeda training camps.

This was intel that showed that Saddam was responsible for training al-Qaeda members inside and outside of Iraq. Zarqawi. This was intelligence suggesting Saddam was what? working with al-Qaeda member, Abu Musab al-Zarkawi. The new bin Laden. Okay. Let's look at this intelligence. A lot of the stuff on that list came from Chalabi directly.

And interestingly, all of Chalabi's intel would be slipped to American intelligence by former CIA chief James Walsy, the guy who went on TV and pointed the finger at Saddam the day after 9-11. Chalabee knew he had to pull out all the stops to get the really spicy stuff, either to the American government directly, the intelligence agencies, and so forth, or the press, which was just as good. In late 2001, Chalaby and his associates connected U.S. Intel with three sources, with a story that Saddam hosted basically a sleepaway camp for hijacking airplanes at a place called Selman Pak. That perked people's ears up. This is first reported in the Washington Post in October 2001 by, of course, one of Chalabee's American journalist pals. It gets repeated in the New York

Times in William Sapphire's column and at the Wall Street Journal. It's then fleshed out into a reported piece in the New York Times in November 2001. And the story went from tell of a training camp that might be associated with terrorists that we would know of to very specific allegations by, quote, Iraqi intelligence defectors that Saddam was, to their knowledge, behind 9-11. Next up, also in November 2001, Chalabi and the INC connect with a guy who claims to be an Iraqi subcontractor who claimed that Saddam was trying to repair a series of underground tunnels. This guy said contained WMD. By the time this guy is interviewed by the New York Times, he is now claiming that he had personally visited dozens of biological and chemical

weapons sites. These two stories, the training camp and the guy who had seen the WMD sites and the underground tunnels, the Bush administration wouldn't cite them publicly in speeches and so forth, but they would disseminate them to journalists in little press packets that they would hand out during news conferences about the threat. They would also make it into the National Intelligence Estimate of 2002, which came out late that year, and as we'll see, was the intelligence document used to justify the Iraq War. Another piece of intelligence that Chalabi was shopping around was that two of the 9-11 hijackers met with Iraqi intelligence in the United Arab Emirates, presumably before 9-11.

And another was that he had made contact with the guy who claimed to have invented the concept of mobile weapons labs and that this person was now willing to come forward through Chalaby, of course, and tell everybody everything that he knew. All right, this one might be my favorite. A headline in Reuters. This is Reuters. Not the National Enquirer or the Daily Mail.

Headline. Saddam met Osama bin Laden, says Mistress. The INC found a Greek woman who had claimed to be Saddam's mistress for the past 30 years. She painted a portrait of a sadist who would pop Viagra and look in the mirror and scream Heil Hitler. Let's fuck! Don't know the veracity of that, but I'm not here to impugn anyone's character. She then went on... Certainly not Saddam's.

No, I'm talking about Saddam. Once she got put in front of cameras by 60 minutes, She threw in a new claim that not only was Saddam a raging sadist, but that he invited and welcomed Osama bin Laden to Iraq and met with him on two different occasions. Even the INC guys were telling her to tone it down after that one, and she started to recant more and more until her story went away completely. Somehow, even sleazier than that, if that's possible, was another story that Chalabi shopped, which was about a Navy pilot who was shot down. on the first day of the Gulf War in 1991. He was classified, killed in action. But Chalaby took it upon himself to resurrect him.

According to an article in Raw story in 2005, sources say in order to convince the administration to invade Iraq, Ahmed Chalabi claimed the pilot was alive and being held as a prisoner of war. So those were some of the Chalabi files. And Chalabee didn't make up the entirety of the Bush administration's case for war, but the freshest intelligence,

the most eye-catching intelligence, like the stuff we've been mentioning came from him. And if you haven't guessed already, it was all bullshit. They were tall tales told by sources who were either flimflammers or dupes themselves or just lonely, desperate alcoholics. And Chalaby's biographer, Aram Rostin, makes it clear in his book that the man himself and his associates, most of them, believed none of this shit. But he knew it would get the job done.

And that it was going to serve his monomaniacal desire to be the ruler of Iraq. That is how he saw this playing out. And there's an interview that he gave to the journal of Spartan Gelman that actually just lays this out in a disturbingly transparent way. So in the months after the invasion, Chalaby sits down with Gelman. And Gelman has the opportunity to ask Chalaby straight up what happens if we don't find any WMD.

Because at this point, a few months after the invasion, we are. looking for WMD and we are not finding WMD. Chalaby says, turn off the tape. So as Goon comes over and, you know, he picks up the tape and inspects it, make sure it's not going. And Chalabee then turns to Gelman and he says, it doesn't matter. I am not concerned. We liberated Iraq and it does not matter why. It is a good thing. So let's put to bed some of the other, uh, pieces of intelligence that we listed off earlier. Why don't you talk about the namesake of this episode, Curveball, who was one of the key sources for the claim about mobile WMD laboratories inside

of Iraq? Curveball is the story of an Iraqi defector who arrived in Germany in 1999 looking for a visa. He was, at least according to the CIA, an alleged sex offender and a low-level engineer. and he became a key source for the claim that Saddam had WMD Mobile Labs. Now, German intelligence officers who were the first to actually debrief him, and the only ones, as far as we know, they describe his information as highly suspect. American agents never debriefed him, but in 2002, three years after he shows up in Munich with these like bullshit tales about mobile weapons labs and whatever, the defense intelligence agency and the CIA will pass on the raw intel of what he says to high-ranking U.S.

government officials and members of Congress. By this point, the case had become so, like, it had become so oxygenated. And the media element of it, we will get into later, we promise. But the degree to which it had sort of become, like, osmotically absorbed by all of these people, like, it just goes to show you how a sex purve from Iraq can show up in Germany in 1999. and suddenly become an instrumental part of the case for how Saddam has nuclear weapons.

I constantly say to people there are no decisions that have been made in relation to Iraq at all, but there is no doubt that Iraq poses a threat in respect to weapons of mass destruction, and there is no doubt that this issue is an issue that should be dealt with. He is, without any question, still trying to develop that chemical, biological, potentially nuclear capability.

I am quite sure. I think most people are that he has these weapons and that the people in the documentation exist to show that. Let's take a little tour across the pond for a second because the British government

under Tony Blair was enthusiastically supporting Bush in prepping for war against Saddam and Blair's government was cooking its own intelligence. They assembled a pair of dodgy dossiers as they were referred to in the British press. This is where we got some of the claims like Saddam shopping for uranium in Niger

which was based on forged documents that Saddam could launch WDazis. WMD within 45 minutes of giving an order. That number actually referred to launching conventional weapons on a battlefield. Bush would soon use this one in a speech against the wishes of his own CIA director, George Tenant, who referred privately to this as the they can attack in 45 minutes shit.

One piece of intel that went straight to Tony Blair was a report that Saddam had a chamber full of little green vials of VX gas that was clearly derived from a scene in the Michael Bay movie The Rock starring Nicholas Cage. Epidermal exposure or inhalation, and you'll know twinge at the small of your back as the poison seizes your nervous system. Do not move that. Finally, the British dossier contained a piece of intel that was just wholesale plagiarism of a paper about Iraq by a student from California

State University. If anyone knows the Iraq War spoof movie in the loop, that is what they are parodying, the British dossiers. That really happened. They really did take a student's paper stripped it of its attributions and sourcing, and passed it off as Intel. Surely some of it must have been true. What about the aluminum tubes Saddam was buying to build centrifuges? They turned out to be a way he was building rockets on the cheap, conventional weapons, nothing illegal. What about the 9-11 hijacker that met with Iraqi agents in Prague? Didn't happen.

Czech intelligence told us it was bullshit, we didn't care. What about the anthrax? Completely made up, we just blamed it on Saddam with no evidence. What about the drones? They were for surveillance, for spying on his neighbors, not for WMD. The electronic map of the Eastern Union. United States, Saddam never bought it. It was offered to him by an Australian venda, but he didn't want it. It's false. No way. Not this time. We created it. Not this time. It's a made-up tale.

It's a total fabrication. It never happened. It never happened. This one was invented by a writer. Not this time. It never happened. It's false. It never happened. It's a fake. It's fiction. It's an urban legend that never happened. So all of this bullshit leaks out steadily, drips out from the dual sphincter of American government and American media throughout 2002. But at the same time, the anti-war movement broke out in full. I'm here because you have to do something. When enough crimes get committed and if you do the reading and you look at what's going on, it's powerful when you try something. You do something.

Initially protests in America where, you know, a couple thousand people, maybe less, that would assemble outside of, say, the UN when Bush went there or outside of Congress, things like that. A lot of the mobilization was from, you know, activist groups like answer. Some figures of American politics like Jesse Jackson, you know, would join in. But a lot of it was genuine grassroots opposition. As the fall of 2002 went on, the numbers started to get bigger and bigger. By the end of October, there were over 100,000 people protesting in Washington, 50,000 people demonstrating in San Francisco. In Europe, the popular opposition was even greater. George Bush, we know you! George Bush, we know you! It's all about oil. It's all about persecuting the Islamic faith,

and we don't need any of that. We're a peaceful nation, and we don't really want to be associated with the American view that Islam should be stamped out for some trivial, you know, petty oil dispute. Who does Mr. Tony Blair represent? Does he represent George Bush, or does he represent people of Britain?

If people want to change a regime, then there ought to be helped to change a regime. themselves, not interference from outside, and certainly not in the aggressive way that America is suggesting. In September, you already had 150,000 people showing up in Britain, and in November in Italy, one million people turned out on the streets. We'll check in on the anti-war movement next episode, because in early 2003, that was when it hit its peak, and there were millions protesting both in America and Europe. Simply stated, there is no doubt that there is no doubt Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction.

There is no doubt that he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us. Unfortunately, for most people in a depoliticized dying empire, war on Iraq, after all of the little rhetorical shifts and tricks and flim-flamming and scamming, now felt to everybody inevitable. All that was left was to really put the rubber stamp on it, and the Bush administration was going to do that in two ways. One, go to the UN, which we'll get to next episode. But two, more importantly, go to Capitol Hill and whip the clowns in Congress into a tizzy so that they would vote for an authorization of the war. Looks like those clowns in Congress did it again. What a bunch of clouds. The Iraq War Resolution was introduced into Congress on October 2nd, and Bush had a couple

weeks before the vote to turn in the rest of his homework, meet with congressional leaders, and continue to turn up the pressure for them by making the WMD in terror case publicly like a speech in Cincinnati on October 7th. We know that the regime has produced thousands of tons of chemical agents, including mustard gas, sarin nerve gas, VX nerve gas. Iraq has a growing fleet of manned and unmanned aerial vehicles. The evidence indicates that Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program.

We cannot wait for the final proof, the smoking gun, that could come in the form of a mushroom class. Bush had been meeting with members of the House for a couple weeks, even before they introduced the Iraq War resolution. And in one meeting in the cabinet room, he told a dozen or so, I'll do my not very good Bush impersonation. The biggest threat, however, is Saddam Hussein and his weapons, mass destruction. He can blow up Israel, and that would trigger an international conflict. Wait, that's what he said. He could blow up Israel and it could trigger an international conflict.

Yeah. I love the way this man thinks. Delving into some of the details of the war plan, Bush told them, we will take over the oil fields to mitigate the shock. And then he interrupted himself and said, Nobody needs to be telling anybody this. Colin Powell playing the good cop as ever, strong-armed, skeptical Democrats and Republicans, getting them on board with the case for war.

Powell also testified before the House Foreign Affairs Committee pitching the case for war there as well. We now see that a proven menace like Saddam Hussein, and possession of weapons of mass destruction could empower a few terrorists to threaten millions of innocent people. A key document in pitching the war to the Congress was the national intelligence estimate of 2002. We mentioned it a little while ago. It was, you know, basically the Bible, a compendium of all the evidence that Saddam possessed WMD

and links to terror. Yeah, and it was like a lot of declarations, like, based on, like, the size of the tubes and how many, like, It contained much of the junk information that we've discussed this entire... Right, but discussed in like short matter-of-fact ways. Yeah, and lest we sound like we're blaming the administration for, you know, hoodwinking these poor members of Congress with this sketchy document, a lot of them have admitted, including senators who went underrun for president, that they didn't even bother to read it, which means that they didn't care enough,

or they had already made up their mind that Saddam had WMD, or they were too cowardly to vote against the war in general. Ultimately, the national intelligence estimate would treat all of this bullshit intel as fact. But still, one would think that the Democrats might apply some greater scrutiny of all this information, given that the stakes were, well, the question of whether to invade another country, or even that George W. Bush was a Republican president and that they could play the role of the loyal opposition. Thank you all for coming. When Bush first announced the Iraq resolution weeks before the vote,

he went into the Rose Garden to give a little speech with a bunch of members. of Congress. And speaking up in support of him and the resolution were John McCain, who, when he ran against Bush in 2000, was accused by the Bush campaign of having fathered a black child out of wedlock during the South Carolina primary. I'd like to thank the president for his leadership in addressing a challenge that many of us believe should have been addressed at least four years ago. And Democrat Joe Lieberman, who had in fact been Al Gore's running mate against Bush in that same election. And that is why I am grateful for the opportunity to stand with my colleagues from both parties and both houses and with you, Mr. President.

You know, just putting aside their party membership or their petty political differences to come together as the keymaster and the gatekeeper in order to open the portal to Gozer the destructor. Consider everything that we've gone over in this episode. There's no way that you could look at all of this intelligence and conclude that it was sufficient proof of anything, that it was proof of Saddam's capacity for WMD, his interest in developing WMD, or that it was proof of his connections to al-Qaeda. This intelligence did not mean anything unless you already wanted to go to war. In the end, the best you could say is that the Democrats were split on the issue and that there

were still at least some who saw what was happening for what it was. Yeah, there were some people like Jim McDermott. He was a Democrat from Washington. He actually traveled to Baghdad and gave a bunch of interviews about how destructive our policies had been throughout the 90s and how another war would be a huge crime and a devastation for Iraq. And as we mentioned, the anti-war movement had been turning up the heat, not only in America, but all over the world with thousands and thousands of people, eventually millions of people marching and demonstrating. But the U.S. Congress doesn't run on protests. By mid-October, it goes to a vote. Madam Speaker, I yield five minutes to the gentlelady from California, a leader in peace and humanitarian issues, Ms. Lee.

So this blank check to authorize a first strike will not restore peace and security. I'm convinced that it will inspire hatred and fear and increase instability and insecurity. I urge you to oppose this rush to war. Government reform, financial services. Mr. Sand is a truth leader in this government. Gentleman from Vermont is recognized for five minutes. Thank you, Mr. Speaker, and I thank my friend from New Jersey for yielding. I'm opposed to giving the president a blank check to launch a unilateral invasion and occupation of Iraq.

I have not heard any estimates of how many young American men and women might die in such a war or how many tens of thousands of women and children in Iraq might also be killed. as a caring nation, we should do everything we can to prevent the horrible suffering that a war will cause. I am concerned about the problems of so-called unintended consequences. Who will govern Iraq when Saddam Hussein is removed? And what role will the U.S. play in an ensuing civil war that could develop in that country? And these are just a few of the questions that remain unanswered. I am the keymaster.

I am the gatekeeper. Is that future two-time Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton? If left unchecked, Saddam Hussein will continue to increase his capacity to wage biological and chemical warfare and will keep trying to develop nuclear weapons. Is that 2020 Democratic frontrunner Joe Biden? And I do not believe this is a rush to war. I believe it's a march to peace and security. Is that future Trump vice president, Mike Pence? This is a time of conscience and judgment.

Time will judge us. History will judge us. Is that John Kerry? Is that a dead man who looks like the guy from reanimator shambling around the halls of Congress who will run against push in 2004? Who among us can say with any certainty to anybody that the weapons might not be used against our troops? Is that American hero and maverick? May he rest in peace, John McCain?

We vote on this resolution in the same way brave young men and women in uniform will fight and die as a result of our vote, as Americans. See you next time. Fight. Please. Please. Please. Let's make some.

It's magic. We're doing everything we can to avoid war in Iraq. If Saddam Hussein does not disarm peacefully, he won't make a song by force. It's a lot. Ah! Ah! A!