1 Boring Old Man

Jason Leopold and emptywheel both have posts up that relate to Abu Zubaydah and the Plame leak. It was a long time ago – eight years. Joseph Wilson had been sent to Niger to nose around about the report that Iraq had either tried to buy, or bought, Uranium Ore on the QT in Niger. He returned convinced that there was nothing to the report. At the end of March, John Kiriakou, a CIA Agent led the raid that captured Abu Zubaydah. In Washington, John Yoo at the DoJ began formulating his Torture plans for Zubaydah. President Bush and Tony Blair met at the Crawford Ranch in April, the meeting the Chilcot Inquiry focused on as the time when plans for Iraq were sealed. By August, the White House Iraq Group had been set up to market a war in Iraq. The campaign began in early September. This is from Leopold’s article about Kiriakou:

Kiriakou said he was instead given a "field promotion" and by August 1, 2002 – the month in which the CIA maintains Zubaydah was waterboarded 83 times – he was working on top-secret issues related to the administration’s Iraq invasion plans. So secret was his new job, Kiriakou wrote in his book, that he had to sign six separate "secrecy agreements." After he and his boss, Robert Grenier, the CIA’s associate deputy director of operations for policy support who was later promoted to Iraq mission manager, signed the secrecy agreements they were briefed on their new assignment.

"Okay, here’s the deal," the CIA’s unnamed director of Iraq operations told Kiriakou and Grenier. "We’re going to invade Iraq next spring. We’re going to overthrow Saddam Hussein. We’re going to establish the largest Air Force base in the world and we’re going to transfer everybody from Saudi Arabia to Iraq. That way, al-Qaeda won’t have that hanging over us, that we’re polluting the land of the two holy cities." Kiriakou wrote that he and Grenier were stunned.

"We’re going to invade Iraq?" Grenier asked the unnamed director of Iraq operations, Kiriakou wrote. Kiriakou added that Grenier had later told him that one of his bosses had briefed him "on the executive branch’s thinking a couple of months earlier," meaning the war had been in the planning stages for some time, which supports similar claims made by other former Bush administration officials. "It’s a done deal, Bob," the director said. "The decision’s already been made … . the planning’s completed, everything’s in place."

Kiriakou wrote that the Iraq director explained to him and Grenier that the ruse the Bush administration cooked up was "ratchet up the pressure on weapons of mass destruction … go to the United Nations toward the end of the year to make it look as if we wanted to ask the UN Secretary Council to authorize force. We expected Russian, Chinese and French opposition … and we were prepared to go it alone."

Kiriakou said he was told the public and Congressional debates surrounding the invasion of Iraq had no bearing on the administration’s plans. "We were going to war regardless of what the legislative branch or what the federal government chose to do," he wrote. The CIA’s role would be one of "support … not a rerun of Afghanistan where [the agency] was running the show."

It has now essentially become common knowledge that the Iraq War was full of sound and fury, signifying absolutely nothing – at least nothing good. Here we read first hand that by the summer of 2002, it was planned, signed, sealed, and delivered. It didn’t matter what Congress did, or whether the UN or the UK joined the effort, or whether or not they could even muster a credible reason for doing it. And so, for seven and a half years, people have fought to find the truth – to reconstruct what actually happened in that year between the September 11, 2001 attack and the September 8, 2002 unveiling of the campaign for war in Iraq. And the effort goes on, though only pieces surface in the media with a fairly short half life.