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Jury out on Bush's
intelligence panel
By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON - President George W Bush's choice to
co-chair his commission to investigate intelligence
failures prior to the war in Iraq is a long-time,
right-wing political activist closely tied to the
neo-conservative network that led the pro-war propaganda
campaign.
Federal appeals court Judge Laurence
Silberman, who will share the chairmanship with former
Virginia Democratic Senator Charles Robb, also has some
history in covert operations. In 1980, when he served as
part of former Republican president Ronald Reagan's
senior campaign staff, he played a key role in setting
up secret contacts between the Reagan-Bush campaign and
the Islamic government in Tehran, in what became known
as the "October Surprise" controversy.
(Former
president George H W Bush, the current president's
father, was Reagan's vice president for two terms,
1981-89).
Rewarded with his appeals court
judgeship several years later, Silberman helped advise
right-wing activists during the 1990s on strategies for
pursuing allegations of sexual misconduct by
then-Democratic president Bill Clinton, according to
various accounts.
Besides Silberman and Robb, a
conservative Democrat who also has strong ties to
neo-conservatives through the Democratic Leadership
Council, Bush chose five other commission members, and
indicated that two more have yet to be named. The five
include Arizona Republican Senator John McCain; former
White House counsel for Clinton and former president
Jimmy Carter, Lloyd Cutler; Yale University president
Richard Levin; former deputy Central Intelligence Agency
(CIA) director, Admiral William Studeman, and retired
appeals court judge Pat Wald.
In announcing the
panel, Bush rejected appeals by the opposition Democrats
in Congress that they be given a role in deciding its
membership in order to enhance its credibility. He also
appeared to limit the commission's mandate to study only
the mistakes made by the intelligence community in
assessing Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction
programs.
Bush said that the commission will
submit its report by March 31, 2005, well after the
presidential elections in November. "Last week, our
former chief weapons inspector, David Kay ... stated
that some pre-war intelligence assessments by America
and other nations about Iraq's weapons stockpiles have
not been confirmed," Bush said. "We are determined to
find out why."
Democrats said that the mandate
was too limited. "The president is not allowing [the
commission] to look into the growing number of questions
millions of Americans are asking about the
administration's statements and actions before the Iraq
war," said Democratic Minority Leader Tom Daschle. "That
investigation still needs to be done."
Democrats
have charged that political pressure from leading
administration figures, notably Vice President Dick
Cheney, contributed to the intelligence failures, as did
officials' public exaggerations of the intelligence
community's assessments in order to persuade the public
to support the war.
Democrats and other analysts
had also wanted the commission to take up the
administration's pre-war charges that former Iraqi
president Saddam Hussein worked closely with the
al-Qaeda terrorist group.
"The independent
commission ... should seize upon its mandate to
investigate 'related 21st century threats' and the
biggest failure in the justification for the Iraq war:
unproven allegations of links between al-Qaeda and
Saddam Hussein," said Charles Pena, a foreign policy
analyst at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank
that has strongly opposed the Iraq war, despite its
generally Republican orientation.
Yet Bush's
appointments surprised several observers by their
ideological diversity and reputations for independence.
"Overall, this is a much more professional, much more
balanced group than I expected," said Mel Goodman, a
former top CIA analyst who has frequently charged the
administration with distorting and exaggerating the
intelligence on Iraq.
"It looks like the
pragmatists in the White House must have said, 'it's
important that we get good names, so we're not
attacked'," added Goodman, who teaches at the National
War College. He said that much will now depend on who is
appointed as the panel's staff director.
While a
Republican who has often taken neo-conservative
positions, McCain, who opposed Bush in the 2000
Republican primary elections and has frequently clashed
with him on key issues, is considered fiercely
independent.
During his tenure at the CIA,
Studeman was well respected among analysts. In contrast
to a number of other senior officials, "Studeman was an
honest man," said Goodman, whose public charges that
former CIA chief Robert Gates had slanted assessments of
Soviet power and intentions in the late 1980s created a
sensation in Washington.
Cutler, a top adviser
to both Carter and Clinton, has enjoyed a strong
reputation for independence and thoughtfulness over
several decades, while Wald, who was appointed to the
bench by Carter, is considered a strong-willed liberal
Democrat, who after retirement served as a judge on the
International Criminal Tribunal for the former
Yugoslavia.
The appointment of both Silberman
and Wald to the commission is seen as particularly
curious, because they are known not to get along. In his
controversial book, Blinded by the Right, former
right-wing journalist David Brock said Silberman gave
"false information" to him about Wald whom, according to
Brock, "[Silberman] hated with a passion".
Brock
depicts Silberman as a major, if discreet, figure in the
right-wing network that harassed Bill and Hillary
Clinton for various alleged scandals during the 1990s.
Brock, who describes Silberman as his "mentor", has
since admitted that many of his attacks on Democrats
were based on little or no evidence.
"A
consummate Washington insider for more than two
decades," Brock wrote, "Larry would often preface his
advice to me with the wry demurrer that judges shouldn't
get involved in politics - 'that would be improper',
he'd say - and then go ahead anyway."
"He was a
behind-the-scenes adviser to the conservative editors of
the Wall Street Journal editorial page, and he delighted
his conservative audiences with his acid critiques of
the liberal press," added Brock.
Silberman has
also reportedly been known as aggressive and sometimes
abusive, even in his written opinions. He once accused
Clinton of "declaring war on the United States" by
permitting his aides to attack independent counsel
Kenneth Starr in the Whitewater case, while, during an
argument with another appeals court judge, he is
reported to have said, "If you were 10 years younger,
I'd be tempted to punch you in the nose."
But it
is his role in the 1980 election that is perhaps most
intriguing about Silberman's appointment. He is alleged
to have set up and participated in a mysterious meeting
in Washington on October 2, 1980 - one month before the
election - with Reagan's top foreign policy adviser,
then-Marine Lieutenant-Colonel Robert McFarlane
(Reagan's national security adviser during the
Iran-Contra scandal), and at least one Iranian arms
dealer.
It was the culmination of a series of
secret meetings - never reported to the US government -
between Reagan campaign officials and Iranians who
purported to represent the government of the Ayatollah
Khomeini. The precise purpose of those meetings has
never been resolved, but one school of thought,
propounded most effectively in the early 1980s by
Carter's top National Security Council adviser on Iran,
was that the Republican campaign was trying to ensure
that Tehran would not make a deal with Carter to release
US embassy hostages who were being held in Iran until
after the November elections. In return, Iran would be
covertly supplied with US-made weapons via Israeli
middlemen, according to the theory.
Reagan
officials, including Silberman, have vehemently denied
this version of events. Nonetheless, it appears that
Silberman was a key conduit to Iran during the early
1980s. According to one source, after he received his
judicial appointment, Silberman passed along his Iranian
contacts to Michael Ledeen, a close associate of Richard
Perle at the American Enterprise Institute, who played a
key role with McFarlane in the transfer of US weapons to
Tehran in the deal that gave rise to the Iran-Contra
scandal.
Several years later, Silberman cast the
deciding vote on a three-judge panel in a decision that
resulted in dismissing the criminal convictions of
Admiral John Poindexter and Lieutenant-Colonel Oliver
North for lying to Congress in connection with the
scandal.
(Inter Press Service)
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