[Congressional Record Volume 150, Number 43 (Wednesday, March 31, 2004)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E491-E492]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                    USES AND MISUSES OF INTELLIGENCE

                                 ______
                                 

                           HON. RUSH D. HOLT

                             of new jersey

                    in the house of representatives

                       Wednesday, March 31, 2004

  Mr. HOLT. Mr. Speaker, in just over 3 years the United States has 
faced two acute intelligence failures. The first was the tragic events 
of September 11, 2001. The second can be found in the arguments made to 
go to war in Iraq. Weapons of mass destruction have not been found. 
Anti-American sentiment has been strengthened and spread across the 
Islamic world. In the aftermath the United States has been saddled with 
a long-term commitment to pay the rising costs of war and endure the 
continuing loss of life in Iraq. It is in this context America's hard-
won lessons from its past covert activities should be turned to, to 
guide us in our current endeavors.
  Mr. Speaker, I would like to include in the Record a copy of the 
following speech by Professor Raymond H. Close delivered to the 
Princeton Middle East Society at Princeton University last month on the 
uses and misuses of intelligence in the conflict with Iraq.

                    Uses and Misuses of Intelligence

                         (By Raymond H. Close)

       Today I want to describe to you the details of a few 
     specific situations that took place a number of years ago 
     where intelligence estimates and covert actions were 
     employed, and in some cases deliberately distorted, in a 
     manner calculated to support policy objectives of the U.S. 
     Government that might otherwise not have received the support 
     of the American people and the approval of the world 
     community. From an assessment of those experiences in the 
     past, perhaps we can draw some useful lessons to guide our 
     intelligence officials today in fulfilling their professional 
     obligations more honestly and appropriately.
       My own experiences in the twenty years that I spent 
     actually engaged in clandestine operations in the Middle East 
     were entirely in the areas of old-fashioned espionage and so-
     called covert action--which I define as the effort to achieve 
     specific strategic objectives for the United States through 
     secret intervention in the political processes of another 
     country. As you all know, the term ``covert action'' can also 
     include the employment of lethal violence in some situations 
     to accomplish objectives that could not otherwise be 
     justified by our own legal system or by humanitarian 
     principles, carried out by methods designed to hide our 
     government's role behind a shield of ``plausible denial''.
       Let me start by telling you about some of my experiences in 
     Lebanon during the years 1952-1958, from which some lessons 
     can still be drawn, I think.
       In 1957, I participated in a covert action operation in 
     Lebanon, explicitly ordered by President Eisenhower, in which 
     it was our objective to keep a government in power that was 
     committed to the open and enthusiastic support of American 
     policy objectives in the region, but was under assault by 
     internal elements determined that their country should adopt 
     a more independent stance. We were initially successful, but 
     our crude manipulation of the democratic process during 
     Lebanon's 1957 parliamentary elections contributed directly 
     to a civil war that was ended only on the landing of a large 
     U.S. Marine and Army military force one year later. To 
     justify that armed intervention, we deliberately and 
     knowingly provided false intelligence to the United Nations 
     purporting to prove that our forces had responded to indirect 
     aggression against the freely elected government by forces 
     inspired and supported by international communism. This was 
     pure fabrication. By the autumn of 1958, following our 
     military intervention, the government that we had supported 
     by our covert action had been replaced by a regime composed 
     primarily of individuals who had been leaders of the 
     political opposition, but who were not by any objective 
     standard enemies of the United States. The supreme irony, I 
     always thought, was that shortly thereafter Barry Goldwater 
     wrote a book in which he extolled the glorious success of our 
     ill-advised and ultimately counterproductive covert action 
     operation in Lebanon. Goldwater recorded that, in a 
     triumphant demonstration of how to employ U.S. power in the 
     cause of freedom, a communist regime had been overthrown in 
     Lebanon and replaced by a pro-western government. This 
     breathtaking contradiction of historical fact was an example 
     to me of how effective the big lie can be, and has, 
     particularly in recent months, reminded me to keep an open 
     mind when it comes to assertions of fact by senior American 
     policymakers. A case in point: On February 5th, 2003, just 
     one year ago, Secretary of State Colin Powell, in his now-
     famous report to the United Nations Security Council, said 
     this: ``My colleagues, every statement I make today is 
     backed up by sources, solid sources. These are not 
     assertions. What we're giving you are facts and 
     conclusions based on solid intelligence.'' Secretary 
     Powell's use of the pronoun ``we'' in this statement was 
     clearly intended to include CIA Director George Tenet, 
     whose face appeared right over Powell's shoulder 
     throughout the presentation. Tenet's presence could only 
     have been intended to put the CIA's official stamp of 
     approval on everything Powell was reporting--even 
     information that Tenet must have known was highly 
     questionable.
       The Bush Administration apparently felt under pressure to 
     strengthen its case for war in Iraq by persistent enhancement 
     of whatever intelligence happened to be available that seemed 
     to support their policy objectives. The details of how that 
     corruption was implemented are much less important, however, 
     than the violation of principles that allowed a preemptive 
     war to be initiated on the basis of evidence that was known 
     by the senior levels of our government to be inconclusive, 
     and even demonstrably false in some cases. This misuse of 
     intelligence will have long-term costs, first among which is 
     that American and world public opinion will, in future crisis 
     situations, be so dubious about the credibility of American 
     intelligence that approval and support of other U.S. military 
     actions overseas may be withheld by the international 
     community even in situations where intervention is urgently 
     called for. Secondly, the personal image of George W. Bush 
     relying on questionable information to make life and death 
     decisions has drastically compromised his credibility and 
     effectiveness as a national and world leader. Finally, the 
     present crisis has revealed flaws in the way various 
     intelligence agencies in Washington evaluate their product, 
     and how honestly and objectively it is packaged and marketed 
     to their customers in a competitive

[[Page E492]]

     political arena in which the possession of allegedly 
     ``solid'' secret information can provide such a formidable 
     advantage.
       Another appropriate example, from which valuable lessons 
     can still be derived today, concerns events in Africa in the 
     late summer of 1998, when the Clinton Administration 
     retaliated against terrorist bombings of the American 
     embassies in Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaam by launching long-
     range Tomahawk missiles at targets in Afghanistan and the 
     Sudan. The missile attack on Khartoum, in particular, because 
     it was based on embarrassingly inaccurate intelligence, made 
     subsequent American counter-terrorism strategy much more 
     difficult to implement. At that time, in September 1998, 1 
     wrote the following in an op-ed piece published in the Sunday 
     Outlook Section of the Washington Post under the headline: 
     ``We Can't Defeat Terrorism with Bombs and Bombast''. This is 
     an extract from that article, written exactly three years 
     before 9/11:
       ``To launch missiles into countries with which we are 
     technically at peace--and to kill their citizens--is to 
     declare that the United States is free to make its own rules 
     for dealing with the international problem of terrorism. What 
     standing will we have in the future to complain about any 
     other country that attacks the territory of its neighbor, 
     citing as justification the need to protect itself from 
     terrorism? Did those who authorized these attacks think 
     through the long-term implications of this short-sighted and 
     dangerous precedent?
       ``Let's get down to practical realities. The new threat we 
     face is often stateless, without sovereign territory or 
     official sponsorship. Friendly governments around the world--
     especially those with large Muslim populations such as India, 
     Pakistan, Egypt, Turkey, Jordan, Indonesia, Malaysia, the 
     Gulf states and the new republics of Central Asia--share a 
     common need for internal and regional stability. Terrorism 
     is a weapon that threatens all civil authority. This set 
     of circumstances provides an unprecedented incentive, 
     which is to say a God-given opportunity, to establish new 
     systems and procedures for intergovernmental cooperation, 
     even among states that may differ on other basic issues. 
     But the fight against a silent and hidden common enemy 
     requires infinite patience and tact on the part of law 
     enforcement agencies and intelligence services. It demands 
     absolute secrecy, mutual trust and professional respect. 
     If the United States loses its cool without warning, if it 
     is seen by others as a loose cannon that resorts to sudden 
     violent action on a massive scale, the critically needed 
     cooperation will not be there.'' Later in the same article 
     I added: ``President Clinton and others have labeled all 
     Islamic terrorists as members or `affiliates' of the 
     `Osama bin Laden Network of Terrorism.' This is, of 
     course, the common mistake of demonizing one individual as 
     the root of all evil. In fact, elevating bin Laden to that 
     status only gives him a mantle of heroism now and, more 
     ominously, will guarantee him martyrdom if he should die. 
     Informed students of the subject have known for years that 
     although the various militant Islamist movements around 
     the world share a common ideology and many of the same 
     grievances, they are not a monolithic international 
     organization. Our recent attacks. unfortunately, may have 
     inflamed their common zeal and hastened their unification 
     and centralization--while probably adding hosts of new 
     volunteers to their ranks. We are rolling up a big 
     snowball.''
       I received many complimentary messages after that article 
     appeared in the Washington Post, including one from Robert 
     Bryant, Deputy Director of the FBI, who invited me to lunch 
     and told me that he had instructed all his officers who were 
     working on the terrorism target to read it. He particularly 
     appreciated the emphasis that I had put on dealing with 
     terrorism by patient criminal investigation and cooperation 
     with other international law enforcement agencies rather than 
     by what I had dubbed ``bombs and bombast''. The intelligence 
     indicating that the pharmaceutical factory in Khartoum was 
     producing a precursor of biological weapons was completely 
     incorrect--another case of bad intelligence having been 
     seized upon to justify a violent military initiative that 
     proved to be unjustified and seriously counter-productive. 
     Thomas Pickering was Deputy Secretary of State for Political 
     Affairs at the time. I clearly remember when this 
     distinguished and highly respected statesman, a former U.S. 
     ambassador to Jordan, Israel, India, the Philippines and the 
     United Nations, appeared on national television to explain 
     and defend the Clinton Administration's Tomahawk missile 
     attack on the Sudan, offering confident and positive 
     assurances of the accuracy of U.S. intelligence reports that 
     the Daral-Shifa plant was a critically dangerous 
     installation--putting himself in exactly the same humiliating 
     position that Colin Powell is in today as a result of his 
     similarly inaccurate testimony before the United Nations one 
     year ago.
       Finally, I would like to take a look at some important 
     features of the present situation in Iraq, looking again for 
     lessons that should have been drawn from earlier experience, 
     but were ignored. Here I am prepared to go out on a limb with 
     some current intelligence estimates of my own. In other 
     words, I'm ready to make some predictions about the future, 
     based on my own past experiences. I offer these predictions 
     with confidence, but with sincere hopes that they will prove 
     to be wrong.
       The United States began its invasion of Iraq operating 
     under a number of seriously flawed expectations that were 
     based on nothing other than bad intelligence, construed by 
     dedicated ideologues to suit their own preconceived 
     misjudgments.
       One expectation was that gratitude toward the United States 
     for liberating their country from Saddam's terrible 
     dictatorship would be the determining factor in shaping 
     Iraq's political future, in defiance of overwhelming evidence 
     that their own social and cultural heritage would inevitably 
     take precedence over American dictates. Secondly, the U.S. 
     has maintained a confident expectation that a new government 
     of Iraq would grant the U.S. long-term leases on military 
     bases from which the U.S. could project its power throughout 
     the entire Middle East and Central Asian region for a long 
     time into the future. Another expectation has been that the 
     new Iraqi government will continue in the future to cooperate 
     closely with the United States in the management of its oil 
     and gas resources, even when Iraq's own economic and 
     political needs might be in conflict with American 
     objectives. And fourthly, the Bush Administration leadership 
     (and especially the neo-cons and their allies in Congress) 
     have all confidently expected that Iraq would become a fully 
     cooperative partner in dealing with the Israeli-Palestinian 
     problem, even when U.S. policies are in conflict with Iraqi 
     conceptions justice. It is as if our intelligence experts 
     have suffered total amnesia when it comes to the historic 
     realities of nationalism in the Arab world.
       My prediction is this: Any new political group aspiring to 
     leadership of Iraq must recognize that its popularity and its 
     credibility will depend on the degree to which it can 
     demonstrate its independence (read that as ``defiance'') of 
     American influence. When this finally becomes apparent, the 
     United States Government will decide to interfere with the 
     political process to whatever extent, and by whatever means, 
     are necessary to ensure that control of the country remains 
     with acceptably cooperative and compliant Iraqis. I think 
     that such an operation would of necessity be anything but 
     covert, and I'm ready to predict that it will be a messy 
     failure. My conviction that the CIA will be directed to 
     ensure the installation of a compliant new regime in Iraq is 
     based on my experiences in Lebanon and elsewhere, which 
     demonstrated that men who occupy the Oval Office seem 
     inevitably to develop an irrational confidence that by 
     pushing a button they can have their dirty tricks department 
     across the Potomac River in Langley perform a covert action 
     operation to fix the problem--justifying the action as 
     necessary to protect the freedom of the American people and 
     the welfare of all humanity.
       In my opinion, the hard reality is that when push comes to 
     shove, the Bush Administration, for all its exalted 
     protestations of virtue and Godliness, is not going to allow 
     a government that defies U.S. policy objectives to take power 
     in Baghdad. High principles will, as I have seen so many 
     times in my own experience, be compromised as necessary to 
     produce results that can be presented as justification for a 
     preemptive war costing thousands of human lives and uncounted 
     billions of dollars. The end result will be that the entire 
     Middle East will be destabilized, while the forces supporting 
     and sustaining terrorism will be injected with new vigor.

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