William D. Hartung: on the high cost of the bad advice from Richard Perle Ehsan Ahrari: on mixing reform and regime change in Saudi Arabia Ronald Bruce St John: on the victory for diplomacy in Libya's voluntary opening to inspections

New York University

U.S. State Department's
Report on Patterns of Global Terrorism for 2002

The US State Department's Report on Patterns of Global Terrorism for 2001

Who really misinformed the President about Iraq?

BLAMING IT ON INTELLIGENCE

EVASIVE MANEUVERS?
By appointing a committee to take a long-term look at alleged intelligence failures, the administration neatly sidesteps a debate over the decision to go to war with Iraq until after the election. What happened to the intelligence reporting in Washington is hardly a secret, and in fact, everything that the committee is likely to discover has already been lucidly explained by Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker.
It is hard to imagine finding anyone in Washington who does not know about the neo-conservative "cabal" that ran its own intelligence operation--the Office for Special Plans--from the Pentagon or that it "stovepiped" information--bypassing the orthodox procedures for review and evaluation by professionals--in order to bolster the case for pushing ahead with a war that former treasury Secretary Paul O'Neil noted in his recent book had already been decided on in the first days of the administration. The real question is not whether Saddam was a bad person or presented a long term danger to the U.S. and world peace, but whether the threat was deadly enough to rush into a costly war without taking time to evaluate the real risks to national security.
•The BBC reports on Washington and London
•Did Cheney's office change the CIA's version?
The Washington Post reports on an alleged rewrite of Powell's speech to the U.N.(Glenn Kessler, Walter Pincus, Washington Post, February 1, 2004)
•Seymour Hersh's New Yorker article on intelligence "stovepiping"
•The Washington Post on setting up the committee to look into what happened.
•Colin Powell wavers on the war (Washington Post, Feb 3, 2004)
•Carnegie assesses where the process went wrong
(Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, January 2004)
•Press skepticism in the Middle East (BBC monitoring service)
•David Kay: No weapons found;the process needs fixing. David Kay's entire testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee can be watched in streaming video via C-Span. Check "Most Watched Videos." The hearing runs 2 hours and 42 minutes.

INTELLIGENCE ISN'T THE ONLY PROBLEM
A U.S. Army study of operations in Iraq reports that logistical breakdowns were much worse than Army officers initially reported. At one point, U.S. artillerymen were forced to cannibalize Iraqi parts to keep going, while tank engines remained in Kuwait because no truck drivers could be found to deliver them. The logics operations were part of LOGCAP, a program run by Halliburton's subsidiary, Kellog Brown and Root. Halliburton has also been investigated for allegedly overcharging on fuel sold to the U.S. Army in Iraq, and more recently for billing three times the cost of delivering food to troops. (Eric Schmidt, New York Times, February 3, 2004) Also, The GAO reports on logistics foul-ups in Iraq,(GAO, Dec. 18, 2004)

HOW MUCH WILL IT COST?
The Center for Defense Information's Winslow T. Wheeler notes that the new Department of Defense budget calls for $380 billion, or $400 billion or $462 billion, depending on your perspective. What is most disturbing about the half- trillion dollar deficit the administration has run up so far is that it doesn't include the runaway costs of the war in Iraq. That will be added in later. (Winslow T. Wheeler, Defense Week, February 2, 2004)

FAILURE IN IRAQ COULD HAVE AN IMPACT ON FUTURE U.S. ENERGY DEMANDS
The Center for Strategic and International Studies' Anthony Cordesman updates the role the Persian Gulf is likely to play in the near future. Latest estimates are that the Persian Gulf will account for 66% of petroleum exports by 2025 and the U.S. will find itself competing in an increasingly cut-throat world energy market. (Anthony Cordesman et al. CSIS, January 30, 2004)

Abdul Qadeer Khan at Pakistan's nuclear test site in happier days

SELLING AN ISLAMIC BOMB
The father of Pakistan's atomic bomb is a hero at home, or he was until his ouster from official functions and the publication of his alleged confession this weekend. Khan is accused of selling nuclear secrets to Iran, Libya and other potential rogue states--a charge that is not likely to carry much credibility in the third world since it is common knowledge that Pakistan was getting support for its nuclear efforts from countries like Libya from the beginning. Khan's downfall is more likely to be seen as another sign that Pakistan's President Musharraf is kowtowing to the U.S., and that may further weaken Musharraf's already shaky hold on power.(Peter Grier, Faye Bowers, and Owais Tohid in the Christian Science Monitor, February 2, 2004)
•Comment by Lt. General (Ret.) Talat Massood in Pakistan's Dawn Newspaper
•Fast Track to Humiliation?
Abid Ullah Jan notes in Paknews.com that Khan's downfall may mean that Pakistan is ready to succumb to U.S. pressure to cede control over its nuclear deterrence.

Andrew Gilligan

BLOODY WEEKEND FOR THE BBC
Resignations by the Chairman and Director General of the BBC over the weekend were followed by the resignation of BBC reporter Andrew Gilligan, who had accused the government of Tony Blair of "sexing up" intelligence on Iraq. An inquiry by Lord Hutton looking into the death of British weapons expert David Kelly focused mostly on errors that Gilligan had made in an unscripted television interview. To a certain extent the report uses hindsight and access to previously secret information to criticize a reporter's efforts to get at the facts in a hostile environment. It does provide interesting insights. Hutton notes that the government confirmed David Kelly's name to reporters as a source for critical comments about handling Iraq intelligence because it felt obliged to avoid casting suspicion on other possible sources. Hutton admits that not informing Kelly may have been a mistake. Hutton also noted that the term "sexed up" might have several meanings. If it meant that the government had actually falsified intelligence, then Hutton felt that there was no evidence. If Gilligan meant that the government had emphasized certain aspects of the intelligence, then a case could be argued. Hutton also reported that a claim that Saddam might launch weapons of mass destruction on only 45 minutes notice actually came from Britain's Secret Intelligence Service(BBC comments with links to analysis).

•London Spectator comments on the controversy over the BBC and the Hutton Report
•Report summary
•Andrew Gilligan's incautious remarks on the Today Show
•Former BBC Director General Greg Dyke's letter to Tony Blair last March concerning independent reporting on BBC.
•HUTTON INQUIRY website
•Civil War at the BBC (The Independent, February 1, 2004)
•The Independent on documents which hold the answer to Iraq's weapons under guard in a Qatar warehouse.

GOOD TERRORISTS VS BAD: RICHARD PERLE SPEAKS TO A CONTROVERSIAL GATHERING
Richard Perle claimed that his paid-speaking engagement for a charity benefit for earthquake victims in Iran was at the behest of the Red Cross. Unfortunately the Red Cross had already backed out, and the Justice Department was considering closing in. The problem: some of the charity organizers allegedly had connections to the Mujaheddin e-Khalq, a guerrilla organization classified as a terrorist group by the U.S. State Department. The Mujaheddin e-Khalq is not only devoted to the overthrow of the Iranian government but it also enjoyed full support of Saddam Hussein. It participated in the kidnapping of American hostages in Teheran after the Iranian Revolution, and it killed a number of Americans in passing. (Glenn Kessler,The Washington Post, January 29, 2004)
•Report in The Hill magazine

WHAT HAPPENS WHEN THE CIA AND SPECIAL FORCES BLEND TOGETHER FOR COMBINED OPS?
Expect ethical confusion. Kathryn Stone analyzes the implications for the U.S. Army War College. (Spring 2003)

A TRIP TO NORTH KOREA
Los Alamos National Laboratory's Siegfried Hecker testifies to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on his unexpected visit to a North Korean nuclear facility. (FAS, January 2004)

FEDERALISM IN IRAQ
None of the groups in Iraq has a firm understanding of the concept, yet federalism may offer the only possibility for a democratic government that still offers autonomy to competing ethnic minorities. (Kamal Ali, Institute for War, Peace Reporting, 27 January 2004)

REMEMBER AFGHANISTAN?
Ahmed Rashid reports in the New York Review of Books that the U.S. has been playing one game in Kabul and quite another in the hinterlands where human rights violations at the hands of war lords is disturbingly commonplace. (New York Review of Books, February 2004)

DAVID KAY'S CONCERNS ABOUT THE LACK OF RELIABLE INTELLIGENCE ON IRAQ
Although there may be obvious political advantages to blaming the rush to invade Iraq on faulty intelligence, former arms inspector David Kay sees a genuine systemic problem in Washington's costly exaggerated estimation of the threat from Saddam. Here is an excerpt of Kay's report to the Senate Armed Services Committee:
"... I had innumerable analysts who came to me in apology that the world that we were finding was not the world that they had thought existed and that they had estimated. Reality on the ground differed in advance.
And never -- not in a single case -- was the explanation, "I was pressured to do this." The explanation was very often, "The limited data we had led one to reasonably conclude this. I now see that there's another explanation for it."
And each case was different, but the conversations were sufficiently in depth and our relationship was sufficiently frank that I'm convinced that, at least to the analysts I dealt with, I did not come across a single one that felt it had been, in the military term, "inappropriate command influence" that led them to take that position.
It was not that. It was the honest difficulty based on the intelligence that had -- the information that had been collected that led the analysts to that conclusion.
And you know, almost in a perverse way, I wish it had been undue influence because we know how to correct that.
We get rid of the people who, in fact, were exercising that.
The fact that it wasn't tells me that we've got a much more fundamental problem of understanding what went wrong, and we've got to figure out what was there. And that's what I call fundamental fault analysis.
And like I say, I think we've got other cases other than Iraq. I do not think the problem of global proliferation of weapons technology of mass destruction is going to go away, and that's why I think it is an urgent issue." (DAVID KAY, CNN transcript, January 28, 2004)

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