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To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Monday, December 10, 2001 8:58 AM
Subject: [Iraqsolidarity] Woolsey: Leading the hawks against Baghdad
http://www.sunspot.net/news/nationworld/bal-te.journal09dec09.column
Leading the cry to oust Hussein
Iraq: The former director of the CIA, R. James Woolsey, is among the
loudest voices publicly urging President Bush to overthrow the Baghdad
regime.
By Mark Matthews
Originally published Dec 9, 2001
WASHINGTON - For weeks, the capital has heard a chorus of voices urging
President Bush to move from victory in Afghanistan to Iraq.
Of all the pundits and politicians calling for the forced removal of
Saddam Hussein's regime, none makes the case as publicly or persistently
as R. James Woolsey, a former CIA director who is one of TV's most
active talking heads.
Bush's father missed a golden opportunity after the 1991 Persian Gulf
war, Woolsey says, when Shiites and Kurds rose up against Hussein, only
to be brutally crushed while the United States stood by.
But he reserves particular scorn for his former boss, President Bill
Clinton, and his strategy of containing Iraq's aggressive tendencies
while trying, covertly and unsuccessfully, to topple the regime.
From: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Monday, December 10, 2001 8:58 AM
Subject: [Iraqsolidarity] Woolsey: Leading the hawks against Baghdad
http://www.sunspot.net/news/nationworld/bal-te.journal09dec09.column
Leading the cry to oust Hussein
Iraq: The former director of the CIA, R. James Woolsey, is among the
loudest voices publicly urging President Bush to overthrow the Baghdad
regime.
By Mark Matthews
Originally published Dec 9, 2001
WASHINGTON - For weeks, the capital has heard a chorus of voices urging
President Bush to move from victory in Afghanistan to Iraq.
Of all the pundits and politicians calling for the forced removal of
Saddam Hussein's regime, none makes the case as publicly or persistently
as R. James Woolsey, a former CIA director who is one of TV's most
active talking heads.
Bush's father missed a golden opportunity after the 1991 Persian Gulf
war, Woolsey says, when Shiites and Kurds rose up against Hussein, only
to be brutally crushed while the United States stood by.
But he reserves particular scorn for his former boss, President Bill
Clinton, and his strategy of containing Iraq's aggressive tendencies
while trying, covertly and unsuccessfully, to topple the regime.
Woolsey says Clinton compounded the elder Bush's error with "eight years
of mistakes" and a "flaccid and feckless" policy, giving the impression
that America is "essentially afraid of Saddam."
With his close connections to Washington's
national security
establishment, Woolsey, 60, can't easily be dismissed as a
neoconservative ideologue, though that is exactly how he is viewed by
some of his former Clinton colleagues, who refuse to speak on the
record.
Reared in Tulsa, Okla., a graduate of Stanford and Yale Law School and a
Rhodes scholar, Woolsey participated in four major arms control
negotiations, including the 1969-1970 Strategic Arms Limitation Talks
between the United States and Soviet Union, and the 1989-1991
Conventional Forces in Europe talks.
He also served as Navy undersecretary and counsel to the Senate Armed
Services Committee during three decades of shuttling between government
and a corporate law practice.
His unhappy tenure as director of central intelligence from 1993 to 1995
was marked by sour relations with the Democratic chairman of the Senate
Intelligence Committee at the time, Dennis DeConcini, and no
relationship at all with Clinton, who had hired Woolsey to disarm
critics who saw the Democratic president as dangerously weak on national
security matters.
Woolsey says he suppressed his own hard-line views about Iraq and other
subjects so as not to be accused of skewing intelligence.
Even so, Clinton preferred to get his intelligence briefings on paper
and not to meet with Woolsey, who resigned soon after Vice President Al
Gore told him: "You and [Clinton] don't have the kind of relationship
that a president and a [CIA director] should have."
Out of office, Woolsey has remained in the strategic policy mix, serving
on panels such as the 1998 Rumsfeld Commission, which assessed the
strategic missile threat to the United States.
He now is a member of four government advisory panels and has a chance
to influence Pentagon leaders through his position on the Defense Policy
Board, chaired by his longtime friend Richard Perle, a fellow hard-liner
on Iraq.
The pressure campaign to make Saddam Hussein a military target of the
U.S. counter-terrorism effort has gained steam as U.S. and opposition
forces have succeeded in destroying the Taliban regime that provided a
haven for Osama bin Laden and the al-Qaida network in Afghanistan.
Last week, 10 members of Congress, including Sens. John McCain, an
Arizona Republican, and Joseph I. Lieberman, a Connecticut Democrat,
sent a letter to the president, pressing him to plan for the
"elimination of the threat from Iraq."
Bush has signaled that he is focused on finding bin Laden and destroying
al-Qaida's worldwide network, a daunting military, diplomatic and
investigative challenge in itself.
The United States is also expected to play a growing role in stifling
Hamas and Islamic Jihad, two terrorist groups based in the West Bank and
Gaza Strip that have killed scores of Israelis and are bent on derailing
the Middle East peace process.
But Bush recently left little doubt that Iraq figures in his long-range
plans. He accused Hussein of wanting to "terrorize the world" with
weapons of mass destruction and warned that "he'll find out" what's in
store if Hussein does not allow United Nations weapons inspectors back
into his country.
The question now, many analysts believe, is not whether Bush will go
after Iraq, but when and how.
Arab and European leaders want to delay the showdown indefinitely.
Moderate Arabs fear that a third regional crisis, on top of war in
Afghanistan and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, could imperil their
governments. Even Britain, a close ally, has warned against attacking
Iraq without evidence that it was involved in the terror attacks on the
United States.
Woolsey says proof of Hussein's guilt is "an irrelevant standard." But
he has been aggressively pointing an accusing finger at Iraq ever since
Sept. 11.
According to Woosley, there are "strong indications and probabilities"
of Iraqi involvement in both the Sept. 11 and anthrax attacks. In an
effort to pursue evidence of an Iraqi connection, he has worked with
Justice and Defense Department officials. He met with a senior official
of Britain's Scotland Yard in London in late September.
With a litigator's zeal, he offers a list of suspicious connections:
"extensive contacts" between Iraqi intelligence and al-Qaida; the lead
hijacker Mohammed Atta's meeting with an Iraqi intelligence officer in
Prague; and a secret camp in Iraq where, witnesses say, hijackers
trained on an old Boeing 707 using knives and physical force to
overpower the crew.
"Now, I suppose that someone might suggest that, well, maybe Saddam has
a grudge against Icelandic Air and he just hasn't struck yet," Woolsey
says. He also dismisses the notion that the anthrax attack was the work
of a domestic crackpot with no link to Iraq.
"I think there is a reasonable chance that there is more information
available in secure [intelligence] channels than there is in public," he
says. Administration officials "may well be collecting it, [and] don't
want to tip their hand."
Woolsey's dark view of Iraq was reinforced by legal work he undertook,
without fee, in 1998, after an Iraqi resistance leader asked him to
represent six members of a CIA-backed rebel group.
The men, who had fled Iraq after Hussein's forces moved to crush their
rebellion in 1996, were facing deportation from the United States as
alleged threats to national security. But the Immigration and
Naturalization Service wouldn't say what threat they posed.
Woolsey fought to get the evidence disclosed and denounced what he
called a Kafkaesque INS detention process.
When evidence was produced, he persuaded the courts that it had little
merit and eventually won the men's freedom.
One client, he says, had been the object of an Iraqi assassination
attempt, using a particularly harsh ingredient of rat poison.
"When you know someone face to face, and it's someone who is in your
care, in a sense, and he tells you about several assassination attempts
against him, it brings it home," Woolsey said in an interview.
Woolsey doesn't advocate a large-scale ground war against Iraq, which
many believe would be required to oust Hussein's regime. He says the
Iraqi dictator can be brought down by making his entire country a no-fly
zone, recognizing a government-in-exile, and providing air support to
Kurds in the north and Shiites in the south if they launch a rebellion.
The United States, he says, is now paying the price for displaying
weakness in the Middle East over the past three decades, which has
prompted terrorists to conclude that America is a paper tiger.
By the end of the war on terrorism, the United States will either be
feared or still held in contempt, he says. There is no middle ground.
Copyright © 2001, The Baltimore Sun
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establishment, Woolsey, 60, can't easily be dismissed as a
neoconservative ideologue, though that is exactly how he is viewed by
some of his former Clinton colleagues, who refuse to speak on the
record.
Reared in Tulsa, Okla., a graduate of Stanford and Yale Law School and a
Rhodes scholar, Woolsey participated in four major arms control
negotiations, including the 1969-1970 Strategic Arms Limitation Talks
between the United States and Soviet Union, and the 1989-1991
Conventional Forces in Europe talks.
He also served as Navy undersecretary and counsel to the Senate Armed
Services Committee during three decades of shuttling between government
and a corporate law practice.
His unhappy tenure as director of central intelligence from 1993 to 1995
was marked by sour relations with the Democratic chairman of the Senate
Intelligence Committee at the time, Dennis DeConcini, and no
relationship at all with Clinton, who had hired Woolsey to disarm
critics who saw the Democratic president as dangerously weak on national
security matters.
Woolsey says he suppressed his own hard-line views about Iraq and other
subjects so as not to be accused of skewing intelligence.
Even so, Clinton preferred to get his intelligence briefings on paper
and not to meet with Woolsey, who resigned soon after Vice President Al
Gore told him: "You and [Clinton] don't have the kind of relationship
that a president and a [CIA director] should have."
Out of office, Woolsey has remained in the strategic policy mix, serving
on panels such as the 1998 Rumsfeld Commission, which assessed the
strategic missile threat to the United States.
He now is a member of four government advisory panels and has a chance
to influence Pentagon leaders through his position on the Defense Policy
Board, chaired by his longtime friend Richard Perle, a fellow hard-liner
on Iraq.
The pressure campaign to make Saddam Hussein a military target of the
U.S. counter-terrorism effort has gained steam as U.S. and opposition
forces have succeeded in destroying the Taliban regime that provided a
haven for Osama bin Laden and the al-Qaida network in Afghanistan.
Last week, 10 members of Congress, including Sens. John McCain, an
Arizona Republican, and Joseph I. Lieberman, a Connecticut Democrat,
sent a letter to the president, pressing him to plan for the
"elimination of the threat from Iraq."
Bush has signaled that he is focused on finding bin Laden and destroying
al-Qaida's worldwide network, a daunting military, diplomatic and
investigative challenge in itself.
The United States is also expected to play a growing role in stifling
Hamas and Islamic Jihad, two terrorist groups based in the West Bank and
Gaza Strip that have killed scores of Israelis and are bent on derailing
the Middle East peace process.
But Bush recently left little doubt that Iraq figures in his long-range
plans. He accused Hussein of wanting to "terrorize the world" with
weapons of mass destruction and warned that "he'll find out" what's in
store if Hussein does not allow United Nations weapons inspectors back
into his country.
The question now, many analysts believe, is not whether Bush will go
after Iraq, but when and how.
Arab and European leaders want to delay the showdown indefinitely.
Moderate Arabs fear that a third regional crisis, on top of war in
Afghanistan and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, could imperil their
governments. Even Britain, a close ally, has warned against attacking
Iraq without evidence that it was involved in the terror attacks on the
United States.
Woolsey says proof of Hussein's guilt is "an irrelevant standard." But
he has been aggressively pointing an accusing finger at Iraq ever since
Sept. 11.
According to Woosley, there are "strong indications and probabilities"
of Iraqi involvement in both the Sept. 11 and anthrax attacks. In an
effort to pursue evidence of an Iraqi connection, he has worked with
Justice and Defense Department officials. He met with a senior official
of Britain's Scotland Yard in London in late September.
With a litigator's zeal, he offers a list of suspicious connections:
"extensive contacts" between Iraqi intelligence and al-Qaida; the lead
hijacker Mohammed Atta's meeting with an Iraqi intelligence officer in
Prague; and a secret camp in Iraq where, witnesses say, hijackers
trained on an old Boeing 707 using knives and physical force to
overpower the crew.
"Now, I suppose that someone might suggest that, well, maybe Saddam has
a grudge against Icelandic Air and he just hasn't struck yet," Woolsey
says. He also dismisses the notion that the anthrax attack was the work
of a domestic crackpot with no link to Iraq.
"I think there is a reasonable chance that there is more information
available in secure [intelligence] channels than there is in public," he
says. Administration officials "may well be collecting it, [and] don't
want to tip their hand."
Woolsey's dark view of Iraq was reinforced by legal work he undertook,
without fee, in 1998, after an Iraqi resistance leader asked him to
represent six members of a CIA-backed rebel group.
The men, who had fled Iraq after Hussein's forces moved to crush their
rebellion in 1996, were facing deportation from the United States as
alleged threats to national security. But the Immigration and
Naturalization Service wouldn't say what threat they posed.
Woolsey fought to get the evidence disclosed and denounced what he
called a Kafkaesque INS detention process.
When evidence was produced, he persuaded the courts that it had little
merit and eventually won the men's freedom.
One client, he says, had been the object of an Iraqi assassination
attempt, using a particularly harsh ingredient of rat poison.
"When you know someone face to face, and it's someone who is in your
care, in a sense, and he tells you about several assassination attempts
against him, it brings it home," Woolsey said in an interview.
Woolsey doesn't advocate a large-scale ground war against Iraq, which
many believe would be required to oust Hussein's regime. He says the
Iraqi dictator can be brought down by making his entire country a no-fly
zone, recognizing a government-in-exile, and providing air support to
Kurds in the north and Shiites in the south if they launch a rebellion.
The United States, he says, is now paying the price for displaying
weakness in the Middle East over the past three decades, which has
prompted terrorists to conclude that America is a paper tiger.
By the end of the war on terrorism, the United States will either be
feared or still held in contempt, he says. There is no middle ground.
Copyright © 2001, The Baltimore Sun
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