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OK. Here's the entire interview, carefully translated. Sorry, (mostly) English English, to give my head a break. Please forgive any remaining typos!. Sure, I guess Ekaiser and Pillar were conversing in English in the first place.
...Pillar did not hesitate after hearing of the 11th of March (2004) attack in Spain. "It was a classic Islamic Jihad attack. You can find whatever circumstantial links you like between terrorist groups, but I do not know of any serious proof of cooperation between ETA and Al Qaeda, just as there were none between Saddam and Bin Laden ". Pillar, professor of security studies at Georgetown University, granted an ample interview to EL PAÍS in our office. Here is our dialogue.
Question: The 11 of March of 2004, you were responsible in the C.I.A. for the Near East and the South of Asia. What did you think when you heard the news of the attacks in Madrid?
Answer: First of all, not ETA. I especially followed ETA's terrorism while I was a member of the Counterterrorism Center. I would have been very surprised to find that these attacks had been ETA's work, and much less so, of course, were it to have turned out to be a consequence of Islamic Jihadism. See, I worked in the field of counterterrorism throughout most of the 'nineties, with the Counterterrorism Center, where I was for several years in charge of analysis and assistant director of the entire Center. And the Madrid attack did not surprise me because it was exactly the type of Islamic Jihad attack (expected) against a Western target. It was not necessarily an attack ordered by Osama Bin Laden or Ayman Al Zawahiri, from a cave in Southern Asia, but rather a manifestation of what has always been a decentralised movement. The reasons for specifically making Spain a target did not suprise me either. José María Aznar's government's desire to be well-in with the Bush Administration in the USA, the war in Iraq, were the reasons, that is clear, although there could also have been historical motivations, such as the loss of Al Andalus (Andalusia)...
Q: Did you at any moment think that the attacks could have been the result of a collaboration between fundamentalist Islamic terrorism and ETA?
A: I have never seen any evidence of that. For me, the attacks had a very clear Jihadist afiliation. You can never (entirely) exclude (possible) contacts between terrorist organisations, but I have never had any evidence of that. In the shadowy world of international terrorism you can come to the conclusion that more or less any terrorist group could be connected with another if you put enough necessary effort into finding the evidence of casual (random) contacts, (shared) experiences. Even the most elemental data and circumstances could be presented as proof of a supposed relationship between terrorist groups, ignoring the relevant question as to whether a State supports a particular terrorist group and the fact that such relationships could be competitive, more of mutual suspicion than collaborative. The Bush Adminstration displayed tremendous voracity when it came to presenting connections between Saddam Husein and Al Qaeda and Bin Laden. But there weren't any.
Iraq War
Q: Why is there so much resistance to drawing the conclusion that the Bush Administration lied to the Northamerican public about the reasons for the war on Iraq?
A: In relation to the weapons of mass destruction which Iraq could have posessed, there was a generalised erroneous perception in the US and UK intelligence services, amongst others, that Iraq had some of them. We were mistaken. And what President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair said was part of that (mistake). Now, something else is when you get on to the issue of terrorist connections between Saddam Husein and Bin Laden, which was, definitely, flagrant. I am still uncomfortable using the word 'lies'. I would be comfortable with that only with reference to a specific affirmation spoken by someone who at the moment he said it knew that it was false. And this also goes for the arguments in favour of war. It's not so much that this reason or that other were mistaken. It's the wider message, the attempt to transmit the impression that there was a terrorist alliance between Iraq and Al Qaeda, which was not the case. Nor (is it the case) that the intelligence community affirmed the existence of such links. I have asked myself hundreds of times: Is this deceitful? Yes, it is. Is this sending a message making partial use of the information your experts have provided? Yes. I suppose that, according to certain definitions, you can call this lying. I would prefer to use that term in relation to a precise and concrete affirmation.
Q: What you are describing is an organised campaign of manipulation of the the Northamerican public. Do you agree?
A: Yes, certainly. It was an organised campaign of manipulation.
Q: Vice-President Dick Cheney, for example, many times visited the head office of the C.I.A. in Langley, Virginia, looking for data with which to justify what had already been decided beforehand, right?
A: Yes. I was not personally involved in those meetings. But I have no problem with emphasising that those meetings were relevant. High officials in the Administration would come time and time again to the intelligence community and say: "Look at this again, search, there must be more data on the relationship between Iraq and Al Qaeda". This was Vice-President Dick Cheney's business. It wasn't that Cheney and other high officials would twist your arm and say: "change your point of view". When someone at that level returns to your office over and over again and suggests that you should work harder, look at this again, the message is very clear.
Q: In the so-called Downing Street Memorandum, seat of the British Government, in which is recorded a meeting on the 23rd of July 2002 of advisers and ministers with Tony Blair, it is said that, having already taken the decision to go to war, "the intelligence and the facts must be arranged in accordance with this decision". This was almost a year before the invasion of Iraq. Do you agree?
A: Yes, of course, the decision was taken at the beginning of 2002. A recently-leaked document has particularly caught my attention, in which is transcribed a meeting between Bush and Blair on the 31st of January 2003. Bush says there that he was thinking of sending to Iraq Northamerican airplanes painted in the colours of the United Nations, to see if Saddam would give the order to attack them and thus draw the conclusion that he was in material violation of the Resolutions, so that the Security Council could back the war. This reminded me of how, almost forty-two years ago, in August 1964, a manipulation of intelligence surrounding a supposed attack in the Gulf of Tonkin was used by President Lyndon B. Johnson to justify the escalation of hostilities in Vietnam. But, well, essentially, these British documents confirm that the decision to go to war was first adopted, and that later the justification was sought. The decision did not depend on weapons of mass destruction or on the results of the United Nations inspections. The decision had been taken long before for other reasons. Once President Bush had decided that this was his chosen course, it was his course, everything must be made to fit in with his chosen objective. The intelligence data about weapons of mass destruction programs in Iraq did not lead Bush to take the decision to go to war in Iraq. As much in the USA as in other countries, it was considered that the policy of disuasion had worked in Iraq and that Saddam was contained (boxed-in), and that the best way to solve the problem of prohibited arms was to reinforce the inspections. The fact that the Bush Administration came to different conclusions and unleashed the war is proof that his decision to take out Saddam was due to other reasons, let's be clear, to strategically shake the foundations of the structure of the Middle East, for Israel's requirements, for oil, for many reasons. The Bush Administration politicised the intelligence services, but I would like to tell you that the most surprising factor for me is the very little relevance of the role played by intelligence in one of the most important decisions, the war in Iraq, taken by the USA during the last (several) decades. Intelligence was used to justify a previously-taken decision. I believe that the United Kingdom has engaged in much more open debate than we have here. You have Robin Cook {Parliamentary Leader of the Labour Party (R.I.P.)}, who resigned his post over Iraq. He was the most eloquent spokesman for this accusation and he employed exactly the (right) terms, that is to say, that first there was a decision to go to war and later the intelligence was made to follow the policy, rather than the other way round. We never had here a personality of the stature of Robin Cook saying such things in the USA.
Q: But, in real-time, what did you see in the run-up to the war?
A: For me it was obvious that the Bush Administration decided to go to war at the start of 2002. And this is the reason why we tried to get across our point of view, before the war started, about the possible problems (challenges, resistance) we would likely have to face in Iraq after the invasion. And not because they had asked us about this, but because we reckoned that we would find ourselves in a real mess (deep shit) if we were to invade. Unfortunately, one has to recognise that what we had to say was very valid, taking into account the disaster that everyone has been able to see since then. We tried to do our work in the best and most useful way possible given that our Government had already made its decision.
Q: In October 2002, the C.I.A. supplied a National Intelligence Assessment, which contained all of the inaccuracies we now take into account in relation to Iraq. Did that report influence the Bush Administration?
A: No. That report was requested by Congress, not by Bush. In October 2002, before voting on the authorisation to go to war, very few Members of Congress had the opportunity to read the whole document before casting their votes. Very few. Ony six Senators and a small group of Representatives went further than the six-page summary. Anyone who had read the whole report, although damaged (screwed-up) as it was, would have come out of it with very ambivalent ideas. The questions would have been obvious. Is this all the evidence we have against Iraq? was the most legitimate question. The mere fact that the summary which was taken to be the most fundamental argument was called "Key Judgements" and not "Key Facts" was ignored. And on the basis of repeating in a selective and biased manner, over and over again, on the Administration's part that there were links between Saddam and Al Qaeda, the public ended up believing that Iraq was behind 9/11.
Q: The presentation given by then Secretary of State Colin Powell to the United Nations Security Council, was it an essential part of the manipulaion campaign? Is that why George Tenet, Director of the C.I.A., was there next to Powell?
A: Colin Powell's presentation was the result of the prolonged presence of the Secretary of State and his staff in the C.I.A.'s offices in Langley. Many people have felt disturbed by that image of Tenet next to Powell at the UN. This is not the role that it is supposed that the Director of Intelligence should play. Tenet was under strong pressure and he felt himself to be very implicated with the Bush Administration. Although that image from the UN Security Council was seen all over the world, the goal of Powell's presentation was also to convince the Northamerican people and Congress. The issue, therefore, is whether it was just (right, correct) for the Director of Intelligence, while this was still a matter for debate in the USA, to align himself in such a visible manner with one of the sides in the political discussion. There is a difference, for an intelligence official, between participating in an internal debate about war and supporting our diplomats in the task of persuading other govenments to support it. As far as Powell is concerned, there are things which, had it been up to him, he would not have been involved with for anything in the world.
Q: Such as?
A: I am thinking of the issues (surrounding) the war on terror... This was without doubt the issue with which there was the most discrepancy between what the Bush Administration declared and the evidence and analysis of the intelligence services. At no time did we provide evidence of the presumed alliance between Iraq and Al Qaeda. The Administration was interested in this because it was what most influenced the Northamerican public, and it brought back images of 9/11 and the need to provide a response to Iraq. Believe me, feeding the Administration's appetite for material about this nonexistant alliance cost a lot of time and work for top intelligence officials and the most veteran C.I.A. analysts, which required us to abandon other anti-terrorist activities. And since we didn't tell them what they wanted to hear, the Bush Administration decided to form a special department in the Pentagon, the Counterterrorism Policy Evaluation Group, under subsecretary Douglas Feith. This unit dedicated itself to finding possible links between Saddam and Al Qaeda, and in some presentations went to the length of accusing the C.I.A. of having failed to see the pretended alliance. And now let's turn to Colin Powell. At no time did he want to mention the name Al Zarqaui (Al Zarqawi), for example, but he was forcibly pressured by Vice-President Cheney's office, which urged him to speak of connections between Saddam Husein and Al Qaeda. And he did so in the final minutes... And if you look closely you'll see that he said nothing of relevance. There is no trace of evidence of an alliance other than a purely circumstantial coincidence. That Zarqaui should be in Iraq meant nothing compromising for the Iraqi regime. In reality, the available information also recounted that the Iraqis were asking themselves about the whereabouts of Zarqaui, which clearly implied the absence of any relationship betwen them and Zarqaui. Everything became part of this organised manipulation campaign: you mention this small detail, you emphasise that other, and you present a situation which seeks to create the general impression that a relationship exists. But, if you look at exactly what Powell had t say, it's worthless... Some of my colleagues, involved in weapons of mass destruction issues, worked very hard with Powell during he preceeding weekend. I didn't have to do it. But I knew what was going on, because that same weekend I was at work and they came to my office and told me about the resistance Powell and his team were putting up.
Q: How important is Al Zarqaui in the Iraqi resistance?
A: The general portrayal of Zarqaui's protagonism could be exaggerated. The Bush Administration tries to explain much of what is going on in Iraq in terms of the presence of a terrorist whose name is fairly well known, instead of recognising that the people do not like foreign military occupation, that there is insecurity and the electricity doesn't work and even the water supply is not guaranteed. All of the motives that fuel the insurgency are subsumed under Al Zarqaui's violence and brutal terrorism that cuts off heads and which preaches against democracy. He is the great enemy we need to have. And in this sense his figure is the object of exaggeration. Having said that, thereis no doubt that Zarqaui is an important player with organisational skills such that Iraqis, more than the foreigners, support him.
The Plame Case
Q: This intelligence officer's name was leaked by the Bush Administration after her husband, Joe Wilson, special envoy sent to Niger to investigate whether Iraq had purchased enriched uranium, debunked the story that Saddam had the capacity to manufacture nuclear bombs. You were also discredited. Are such as these the shameless methods of the Bush Administration?
A: Yes, it's a behaviour pattern. The story, basically, that the Special Prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, is investigating is as follows: we have here someone, Ambassador Joe Wilson, who says certain things that go against the case the Bush Administration is making to support the war. So they go and discredit him by leaking his wife's name because, they claim, it was she who sent him to Niger. They did the same to me. I recall that in 2004, during the Bush reelection campaign, things appeared to begin to go well in Iraq. But in August of that year, we in the C.I.A. put together a new National Intelligence Assessment, the most extensive and profound document resulting from our work.
Q: Requested by whom?
A: Well, we have here another example of the irrelevant role of intelligence in the case of Iraq. In my post as national intelligence officer in charge of the Near East and as such responsible for information on Iraq, the first request for information from the Bush Administration, to prepare a report, did not occur until one year after the war began, in 2004. We prepared it and some of its conclusions were leaked to the press. I have no idea who was the author of the leak. It wasn't me. Some scenarios were mentioned (in the report). Amongst others, the worst was this: Iraq could be on the brink of civil war within the following 18 months, that is to say, up to the end of 2005. If one looks at what has (since) happened, we weren't far off the mark. My name was associated with that report. And the Bush Administration, which was into the last two months of its election campaign, attempted to discredit me. And what was the means they used? The journalist Robert Novak, the same who had revealed the name of C.I.A. agent Valerie Plame in July of 2003. It was the 27th of September 2004 when Novak named me in one of his articles as responsible for the report and as the probable leaker. The C.I.A., according to Novak, was developing an insurgency against the White House. In the Plame Case, one was not supposed to pay attention to what her husband Joe Wilson had to say about the use of false information on Iraqi enriched uranium purchases for nuclear weapons manufacture because she was (supposedly) responsible for sending him to Niger. In other words, it was a case of nepotism. The same story, the same instrument. I have spoken a couple of times with Wilson. I've told him that we share this story of havng been targets of Robert Novak. The majority of intelligence officials know that they face the (potential) problem of being used. But the Valerie Plame case goes further than that. Because it's a case of deliberately destroying a secret agent's cover as part of an effort to discredit her husband. It's beyond anything known. I don't know the exacts steps taken by the C.I.A. to send Wilson to Niger. But knowing how it works I can easily imagine how things happened. Vice-President Cheney asked the C.I.A. to research the data to see if there was any sign that Saddam wanted to purchase uranium in Niger. People in the Nuclear Arms Counterproliferation department considered what to do. Maybe they could send someone there to investigate. Who would be in a position to do it? Then someone said, well, there's Joe Wilson, Valerie Plame's husband. He knows the Prime Minister of Niger and the Minister for Mines. Why don't we send him? It must have happened like that. But, come on, how can anyone claim it this is an example of nepotism to send someone to Niger, as if it were a pleasure trip! To Niger, hah!
Q: But it was the C.I.A. that in October 2002 asked Bush not to mention the subject of Niger and Iraq's presumed nuclear capability in a speech. Why did he later do so in his State of the Union address, at the end of January 2003?
A: In early October, the Administration told us that they wanted to use this theme. But we insistently told tham that there was no serious evidence and that it would be better to leave the issue alone. At the end of January, as the date set for the invasion was approaching, the hite House returned to the Niger story. We told them again that they shouldn't do it because we knew that it was a lie. So then they said, well, we're going to use it, naming the source as the intelligence services of the United Kingdom. And that's how it was.
Q: Following the first report on the errors of the intelligence services in Iraq, there is still pending a Senate document on the manipulation of intelligence by the Administration. Will this ever see the light of day?
A: I don't know if that document will finally get written. They have interrogated me several times. And, nothing. The Commission which investigated the errors of the intelligence services in relation to Iraq indicated that there was no evidence that the C.I.A. analysts had modified their reports under political pressure. As I've told you, I was called to declare to the panel. They asked you if there had been arm-twisting,that is to say, if the Administration had persuaded you to report what was wanted. This method of investigation would only have discovered the most gross attempts at politicisation. And they are very rare. Although it's true that they have existed. The ex-subsecretary of State and actual US ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton, tried unsuccessfully to make the C.I.A. subscribe to his view that Cuba and Syria posessed weapons of mass destruction. But it's veryu difficult to get an analyst to admit before a panel that his reports have been politicised. That would be worse than admitting to errors in his evaluation of the data.
ETA's ceasefire
Q: How do you now view the permanent ceasefire decision on the part of ETA in Spain?
A: I have seen ETA's permanent ceasefire declaration, yes. It is a declaration similar to that of the Irish IRA. Beyond possible legitimate contacts which may have preceeded this declaration, there are two factors which explain the new situation with ETA's terrorism. The first is the firmness of the political and judicial struggle against the terrorist group during the last several years, which has brought about their virtual defeat. But the other factor is the appearance (on the scene) of fundamentalist Islamic terrorism, with which it is impossible to compete. In other words, in these new circumstances it is no longer possible to sustain violent action as a justification of supposedly political goals.
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