Turns out, according to Politico’s John Walcott, there were some known unknowns and some unknown unknowns that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld knew about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction in September 2002. And he didn’t share those with others in the run-up to war.
In August 2002, Rumsfeld had asked Air Force Maj. Gen. Glen Shaffer, head of the Joint Staff’s intelligence directorate, for a report on Iraq’s WMDs. Although the report was declassified in 2011 and posted on Rumsfeld’s website then, it has not previously garnered any attention.
The eight-page September 2, 2002, document, titled “Status of Iraq’s WMD Programs,” was passed along to Rumsfeld by Gen. Richard Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the time. The general noted in his two-sentence cover memo to Rumsfeld, “It is big.”
The report appeared on Rumsfeld’s desk right in the middle of the administration’s effort to “educate” the public about what it claimed was a serious threat from Iraq. The report noted that “We’ve struggled to estimate the unknowns [...] Our knowledge of the Iraqi (nuclear) weapons program is based largely—perhaps 90%—on analysis of imprecise intelligence.”
Myers already knew about the report. The Joint Staff’s director for intelligence had prepared it, but Rumsfeld’s urgent tone said a great deal about how seriously the head of the Defense Department viewed the report’s potential to undermine the Bush administration’s case for war. But he never shared the eight-page report with key members of the administration such as then-Secretary of State Colin Powell or top officials at the CIA, according to multiple sources at the State Department, White House and CIA who agreed to speak on condition of anonymity. Instead, the report disappeared, and with it a potentially powerful counter-narrative to the administration’s argument that Saddam Hussein’s nuclear, chemical and biological weapons posed a grave threat to the U.S. and its allies, which was beginning to gain traction in major news outlets, led by the New York Times.
It’s also not known whether the report was sent along to President Bush. But a staff member for the Joint Chiefs who was copied in on the document at the time it was sent to Rumsfeld told Politico: “That’s the last place they would have sent it.”
Actually, the last place it would have been sent was to anybody in the House or Senate, which voted to approve an authorization to use military force against Iraq just one month later. Whether the report would have changed from a yes to a no the vote of any senator or representative—including John Kerry and Hillary Clinton—is one of those unknowns that can never be known.
What we do know is that Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney didn’t like what they were hearing from the existing intelligence operations. Included in their gripes was the CIA’s unwillingness to support neoconservative claims that Saddam Hussein had been involved in the 9/11 attacks.
Soon after the attacks, Rumsfeld had charged Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith to set up the Office of Special Plans at the Pentagon to provide the administration with unvetted raw intelligence reports. Critics noted the OSP was fond of cherry-picking intelligence that supported their determination to invade Iraq, and ignoring reports that undermined their drive to war.
In a May, 2003 article in The New Yorker, shortly before the OSP was disbanded, Seymour M. Hersh quoted an unnamed former intelligence official on the subject:
"'One of the reasons I left was my sense that they were using the intelligence from the C.I.A. and other agencies only when it fit their agenda. They didn't like the intelligence they were getting, and so they brought in people to write the stuff. They were so crazed and so far out and so difficult to reason with -- to the point of being bizarre. Dogmatic, as if they were on a mission from God.' He added, 'If it doesn't fit their theory, they don't want to accept it.'"
As a consequence, hundreds of thousands of people—including 4,500 American military personnel—met violent deaths in Iraq and more hundreds of thousands were maimed in an invasion and occupation that will ultimately cost U.S. taxpayers at least a couple of trillion dollars. But Rumsfeld, Cheney, Wolfowitz, and others of that crew continue to roam free, doing book tours, pulling in the bucks from speaking engagements, working their sinecures at rightist think tanks, and offering their bloodstained advice about how American foreign policy should be conducted.
Anything they have to say ought to be coming from their prison cells.