Learning the lessons of the neocon wetdream all over again

Learning the lessons of the neocon wetdream all over again

by digby

So Kurt Eichenwald has a new book coming out called 500 Days: Secrets and Lies in the Terror Wars.He wrote a piece for the NY Times in which he revealed some new information about the months before the attacks:

The direct warnings to Mr. Bush about the possibility of a Qaeda attack began in the spring of 2001. By May 1, the Central Intelligence Agency told the White House of a report that “a group presently in the United States” was planning a terrorist operation. Weeks later, on June 22, the daily brief reported that Qaeda strikes could be “imminent,” although intelligence suggested the time frame was flexible.

But some in the administration considered the warning to be just bluster. An intelligence official and a member of the Bush administration both told me in interviews that the neoconservative leaders who had recently assumed power at the Pentagon were warning the White House that the C.I.A. had been fooled; according to this theory, Bin Laden was merely pretending to be planning an attack to distract the administration from Saddam Hussein, whom the neoconservatives saw as a greater threat. Intelligence officials, these sources said, protested that the idea of Bin Laden, an Islamic fundamentalist, conspiring with Mr. Hussein, an Iraqi secularist, was ridiculous, but the neoconservatives’ suspicions were nevertheless carrying the day.

In response, the C.I.A. prepared an analysis that all but pleaded with the White House to accept that the danger from Bin Laden was real.

“The U.S. is not the target of a disinformation campaign by Usama Bin Laden,” the daily brief of June 29 read, using the government’s transliteration of Bin Laden’s first name. Going on for more than a page, the document recited much of the evidence, including an interview that month with a Middle Eastern journalist in which Bin Laden aides warned of a coming attack, as well as competitive pressures that the terrorist leader was feeling, given the number of Islamists being recruited for the separatist Russian region of Chechnya.

And the C.I.A. repeated the warnings in the briefs that followed. Operatives connected to Bin Laden, one reported on June 29, expected the planned near-term attacks to have “dramatic consequences,” including major casualties. On July 1, the brief stated that the operation had been delayed, but “will occur soon.” Some of the briefs again reminded Mr. Bush that the attack timing was flexible, and that, despite any perceived delay, the planned assault was on track.

Yet, the White House failed to take significant action.

This seems to be a shocking revelation to many people this morning. I’m not sure why. It was obvious after Richard Clarke’s testimony about people running around with their “hair on fire” that summer that the administration had been negligent. I suppose that Eichenwald turning up documents and interviews that back up that testimony is important for the historical record, but even before Clarke’s testimony, the confluence of events alone showed what happened quite clearly.

I wrote this before the invasion in early 2003 (and been writing similar elsewhere since early 2002):

Invading Iraq on a thin pretext (which is what is going to happen because this war is already timed for American convenience and nothing else) is possibly going to set off a chain of events that could have been avoided if we handled the situation with a little more sophistication and finesse instead of fulfilling some long held neocon wet dream. And that is the real problem.

The Wolfowitz/Perle school never took terrorism seriously when it was becoming a threat on the world stage and they don’t take it seriously now. The influential CSP issued only 2 reports since the 1998 embassy bombing about the threat of terrorism until 9/11. The PNAC has been wringing their hands about Iraq and pushing for missile defense for years, but terrorism was hardly even on the radar screen. They are about China, Iraq, North Korea, Russia, Israel, US “benevolent” hegemony and missile defense. Period. Anything else will be subsumed under what they believe is the real agenda…

This is very dangerous. Bush, with his stupid bellicose posturing has created a needless crisis in Asia by challenging a cornered and neurotically proud despot in North Korea into a nuclear standoff. He has escalated the problem with Iraq to one of immediate danger, when it was a medium term threat at worst, and by conflating it with Al Qaeda and Muslim fundamentalism, for no good reason other than political expediency, he has made it a cause for a whole lot of disaffected people in the Mideast and Indian subcontinent to rally around.

The PNAC documents were clear about their priorities. Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and the rest of that PNAC cabal had an agenda. Terrorism wasn’t part of it.

On the other hand, when the threat they didn’t take seriously materialized, they were prepared to take advantage of it. As their seminal document “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” said:

[T]he process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event––like a new Pearl Harbor”

And indeed, they started talking about invading Iraq immediately. Recall this:

On the day of the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center, Wolfowitz told senior officials at the Pentagon that he believed Iraq might have been responsible. “I was scratching my head because everyone else thought of al Qaeda,” said a former senior defense official who was in one such meeting. Over the following year, “we got taskers to review the link between al Qaeda and Iraq. There was a very aggressive search.”

In the winter of 2001-02, officials who worked with Wolfowitz sent the Defense Intelligence Agency a message: Get hold of Laurie Mylroie’s book, which claimed Hussein was behind the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, and see if you can prove it, one former defense official said.

The DIA’s Middle East analysts were familiar with the book, “Study of Revenge: The First World Trade Center Attack and Saddam Hussein’s War Against America.” But they and others in the U.S. intelligence community were convinced that radical Islamic fundamentalists, not Iraq, were involved. “The message was, why can’t we prove this is right?” said the official.

Richard Clarke quoted Wolfowitz in his book making all this crystal clear:

“You give Bin Laden too much credit. He could not do all these things like the 1993 attack on New York, not without a state sponsor. Just because FBI and CIA have failed to find the linkages does not mean they don’t exist.”

They were very, very wedded to their larger agenda — so much so that they ignored the threat assessments in the summer of 2001. So wedded, in fact, that they took advantage of the terrorist attacks on September 11th to pursue it.

I thought we already knew this. But judging by what I’m reading this morning on twitter and elsewhere, we didn’t. As Elizabeth Warren would say, “holy moley.”

Update: To be clear, I’m not saying that Bush and his people planned 9/11 or even wished for it. I’m saying they didn’t believe it could happen. But when it did, they used it to advance the agenda they already had on tap.