Interview with John Prados, National Security Archive, Senior Analyst

July 16th, 2004
Transcription by Scott Anderson

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: Alright. So why don't you go ahead and introduce yourself and your background.
PRADOS: Okay. My name is John Prados. I'm an author and analyst of international security and intelligence issues. I'm a senior analyst with the National Security Archive in Washington, that specializes in declassified government documents. I'm the author of more than twelve books, many of which deal with intelligence and/or national security issues. Most recent one of those books is titled "Hoodwinked." And it covers the run-up to the Iraq war and shows how the Bush administration essentially constructed a theory -- or a story of how Saddam Hussein was an international threat and needed to be destroyed by United States and coalition invasion.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: I think now we see a lot of blame that the administration is putting on the CIA. Can you kind of put that into context from a lot of the documents that you've seen over the years? And the shifts that you've seen?
PRADOS: Yes, I think that the CIA certainly does bear some blame in the sense that it talked about weapons that did not exist. It assessed that weapons existed where they did not. It relied on assumptions instead of data for a lot of what it reported on Iraq. But the Bush administration has a larger aim in looking at what happened in Iraq as an intelligence failure. And its aim is to escape the political responsibility for its own actions in the pre-war period, during which it was constructing a certain image of an alleged Iraqi threat that needed to be countered by United States action.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: When you look at the television news media, how they covered this build-up, how would you evaluate both the print and television news media leading up to the war in Iraq?
PRADOS: I would say that there were individual instances of very forthright reporting where certain reporters went out and attempted to get to the bottom of allegations that were made. But to a much greater degree corporate reporting, if you want to call it that, the large array of media, the broad swath, took the administration line and reported it as fact. And I think that had to do partly with their concerns about their image with the American people, in which it's often reported and polls frequently say that the media has little credibility. So they could gain credibility this way. And also because of their concerns on access. The administration officials are the source for much news that gets reported. Their access was threatened by taking a line that differed from what they were being told by administration officials. So over the broad swath, I think that the media went along with the administration to a considerable degree. I would say, probably, that the print media was less guilty of this than the broadcast media. But, in general, I think that problem applied across the board.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: And when you look at -- Can you speak to a lot of journalism is event-based, like news of the day, as opposed to looking at the public record? And what type of insights have you gained from looking at a long-term public record?
PRADOS: I think that's exactly right.
ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: And I'm not going to include my questions.
PRADOS: I understand. I think it's exactly right that -- Because journalism reports day-to-day events, there's a very small premium attached to looking at historical records, and keeping track of broad sets of events over a period of time. And this, I think, contributed to a great degree to the media's inability to realize that it was being taken for a ride by the administration. Because not having looked at historical record, they were unable to tell when they were being fed a line of goods. For example, there were CIA reports, all through the 1990s, already in the public domain, because they were declassified and had been declassified as a result of the controversy over Gulf War Syndrome, a medical consequence of the 1990-1991 war, which detailed a good range of the government's data on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction programs. And in fact, now in the follow-up to the Iraq war, where the Senate Intelligence Committee has just released a report detailing what intelligence was used by the CIA itself, by the Bush administration. In explaining the Iraqi threat, that report shows that some of these same -- this same material furnished a good fraction of the material that they were, in fact, using in compiling their data. When the administration officials then came forward with claims that were more extreme than the data substantiated, media didn't look at these historical records or this material that was available in the public record, but simply took the claims that were being advanced by administration officials.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: And, when you -- Can you make a distinction between European governments, the European media and their perspective on this whole diplomatic battle leading up to the war in Iraq? Were they -- Did they look at this historical record a little bit more? Or can you talk about that -- the international perspective?
PRADOS: I think the international perspective is an interesting one. There was -- there were a number of countries that went along with the United States in the so-called "coalition" in the Iraqi war. And if you look at those countries, the principal ones are the United Kingdom and Australia, were the two largest allies in the war. Both the United Kingdom and Australia have intelligence liaison relationships with the United States. And both the United Kingdom and Australia derived a large amount of their information from the CIA and the US intelligence community. Now you look at those countries, their medias were not so receptive to their governments' claims about what was going on in Iraq. I'm not sure how this bears on the "credibility of media" question that we discussed a little while ago, because I don't know enough about how media are held in regard by the people of Australia and the United Kingdom. But nevertheless, there was a much more active questioning and doubting of government claims in both those countries. And if you go further afield, to countries that were less reliant on CIA intelligence reporting, places like France and Germany, in those countries, both the intelligence services and the media did not go so far as the American media and the American intelligence service in portraying an Iraqi threat.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: So, in other words -- Did you see that the US media was asserting as fact claims that they did have weapons of mass destruction when they did, in fact, not? I mean, when they should have said "allegations" and such?
PRADOS: I think there were instances in which the United States -- media in the United States asserted as fact allegations that were being made about Iraq. But that's a certain fraction of the whole. I think a larger element in the explication is that they repeated and repeated again, in press stories day after day, allegations that were not substantiated by the administration. And that active repetition had an impact in making people think of these allegations as facts.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: And can you speak to this whole body of information that the UN had had over the ten years? And how did that play into a lot of these -- And for how did the CIA and the administration incorporate -- or fail to incorporate a lot of that information?
PRADOS: There was a second stream of information, in addition to the CIA's own reporting from the 1990s, and that was the reporting from the United Nations disarmament commissions that were in Iraq from 1991 to 1998 -- and that returned to Iraq in the end of 2002, and up to the period just prior to the war -- when the war began. This was a large body of material to which the United States had complete access. As a matter of fact, American intelligence services helped the United Nations weapons inspectors with information -- Helping them to find and target, if you will, if that's the right word, Iraqi sites to go inspect and destroy anything that they found at those places. That material from 1991 to 1998 provides a record of large amounts of Iraqi materials and weapons and weapons precursors that were destroyed, as well as a set of indications that some Iraqi resources could not be documented -- their destruction could not be documented, they were so-called "unaccounted for." We took, in the run-up to the Gulf War, all the indications of things that could not be accounted for, and assumed that those were weapons in an Iraqi arsenal. And we discounted the evidence of the United Nations inspectors, where they had reports that Iraq had issued this or that order to dismantle weapons programs, to dismantle their arsenal, to take away arms caches. In the second period, the period just before the Gulf War, when inspectors were sent back in again, we furnished -- reluctant -- we gave reluctant cooperation to the inspectors in terms of helping them with data that would help them find things. I would argue, because the Bush administration needed to avoid a United Nations judgment that Iraq had, in fact, disarmed its arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. And -- At the same time, when the United Nations weapons inspectors went in there and then, produced a series of reports on their progress in disarming the Iraqi arsenal, the US intelligence treated those reports as objects to be refuted, rather than new data that could be incorporated into an objective analysis of the Iraqi suite of weapons of mass destruction.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: And, during the build-up -- I think on August 26th, Dick Cheney made a big speech. And then from there, they seemed to unroll a lot of this public relations campaign, really. At what point did you realize that something was not right, that something didn't -- from what you've seen from the historical record -- didn't seem to add up. And at what point did you become suspicious? It may have been even before that time.
PRADOS: You talking about me, personally? In terms of --
ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: Right.
PRADOS: Or what I discovered afterwards? I think that, personally, it was in the summer of 2002, looking at the sequence of claims about Iraq, that I began to be aware, really, that something was going on here. And it was at that point, when I started to pay real attention to the sequence of charges and allegations that were coming out of the Bush administration, that I began to realize that this different from what I remembered of the 1990s. Because during the process of the United Nations weapons inspections, I had followed this story. And I had seen at that time that there were various controversies about this or that Iraqi program that had not been dismantled or had been dismantled, and so on. About Iraqi efforts to hide weapons from inspectors, and so on. But there was also solid record of United Nations achievement in terms of disarming the Iraqi weapons. Their entire chemical infrastructure had been taken down. Their biological weapons program infrastructure had been taken down. Iraq lacked, by 1998, any facility with a negative atmosphere -- or I should say, a positive atmosphere, isolation and containment that would enable it to work with germs without killing people, for example. And, there was the whole business about the chief of the Iraqi weapons program, who had defected and then told the United Nations inspectors that, in fact, orders had been given by Saddam to dismantle their programs. Now you will find, if you look into the Bush administration's reporting before the Iraq war, that that individual, Hussein Kamal, is referred to on a number of occasions. But every single time, he's referred to in context where he said, "There was something," and never is he referred to in contexts where he was telling the United Nations and through them the CIA that "Iraq had dismantled this or that thing."

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: And so, do you -- I think you had made a point in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, that Hussein Kamal, that he was making these claims. But when you look at the public record, you'd actually seen that the reporting had actually -- You know, there is a question of what real evidence did Hussein Kamal give? The administration was trying to say, "We only can find stuff through these defectors. These people who defect." But is that, in fact, true? Do they actually know that already?
PRADOS: Give me that question again.
ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: So if you look at the Bush administration's claim that Hussein Kamal -- that you can only find information from defectors. And you look at some of the declassified documents from the Gulf War Syndrome release -- Do you see evidence that they actually knew a lot of this information already?
PRADOS: Yes. There are two points here, actually. First, let me say this about the question of defectors. One of the interesting aspects about this question of defectors is that, even there, there is a bifurcation. That is to say, if the Bush administration was getting information from defectors, "Why is it that the information from Hussein Kamal is only admissible in its threatening aspects?" Whereas the information from the Iraqi National Congress people and those other defectors that were brought forward by Ahmed Chalabi is totally admissible? In other words, the Bush administration -- even itself -- was playing games with what material they were going to use. They were picking and choosing among the reporting that they were getting, and presenting those things that were threatening and not presenting the things that were not. Now, on your second question, it is the case that the CIA reporting from the 1990s contains human intelligence reports from people who were Iraqi officials and officers during the Gulf War -- and right after the Gulf War. Presumably, some of these things from prisoner interrogation, and some of them from contacts between United Nations weapons inspectors and Iraqi officials that they were talking about, that furnished information which contradicts some of the reports that were given to the US by defectors who were brought forward by Ahmed Chalabi and Allawi and the various Iraqi émigré groups. So, yes. Those contradictions are in the record.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: And -- Did you see a pattern of the Bush administration trying to discredit weapons inspection process? And what -- And how does that claim that weapons inspections are totally worthless, how does that claim stack up?
PRADOS: I think that the assertions that the weapons inspections were totally worthless was contrived by the Bush administration as a means of advancing its interpretation of the Iraqi threat, and therefore the necessity for invading Iraq. The United Nations weapons inspectors did a great deal of work. They visited the relevant sites. They were denied information by US intelligence. I would submit, for the purpose of the United States then being able to claim that the weapons inspections were not comprehensive and were not working. And then, when the United Nations weapons inspectors filed their reports before the United Nations Security Council, the CIA and US intelligence treated those reports as charges that needed to be refuted. And in fact, we made use of those reports in exactly the sort of manipulative way that we used the data from defectors and agents. For example, Hans Blix gave -- No, I take that back. For example, Mohamed ElBaradei, the chief of the International Atomic Energy Agency, gave a major presentation before the Security Council on January 27, 2003, in which he presented a conclusion, which he called "his conclusion," that they had found no evidence of an Iraqi nuclear program -- or that could substantiate an Iraqi nuclear program. And then, only about ten days later, the American Secretary of State Colin Powell gave a briefing before the same body, in which he asserted that Mohamed ElBaradei'sconclusions, in his report, supported the United States' position that there was an Iraqi nuclear program that was far advanced.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: Okay. And when you look at the situation now, it seems like everything's being framed, that this decision, after the Congressional vote in October, that that was it. And in a way, it seemed to disregard any sort of contradictory evidence that was pouring in over that time period up until before the war. Can you comment on that? Do you see that as well?
PRADOS: I think what we have going on now is an effort to change the ground. You know, we'll talk about Iraq as an "intelligence failure." George Bush is not responsible because he was given the wrong information. Whereas, prior to the war George Bush was pushing the intelligence agencies to give him the information he needed so he could push the war. "Now, we'll talk about this as some kind of technical intelligence failure, and we'll shift the ground to talk about how much better Iraqis are today -- are off today than they were under Saddam Hussein." Now, it's debatable whether, in fact, Iraqis are better off today than during the time of Saddam Hussein, for various reasons that have to do with their electricity supply, and the level of unemployment in Iraq, and the infrastructure -- the destroyed infrastructure of the Iraqi economy. But again, the administration isn't talking about those factors. It's trying to focus solely on the question of the government of Iraq, and this notion that it got into the war because of some misguided intelligence failure.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: And did you see that they were not really, as you said before, listening to the weapons inspectors' results? They were trying to just, in a way, use it as a pretext? Did you see that the United States was merely using this multilateral agency to get approval to go to war?
PRADOS: I think the United States was attempting to use the multilateral agency -- the United Nations agencies as well as the United Nations itself as legitimizing mechanisms for its enterprise of conducting a war against Saddam Hussein. This was going to be the preventive war. This was going to be the action that established the so-called Bush doctrine and was going to become the basis for an American policy, so-called of counter-proliferation, which offered the same kinds of threats of American actions to other countries that refused to hew an American line on what we said in foreign policy.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: Okay. During the build-up to the war in Iraq, is there any point when the mainstream corporate or alternative media came to you to speak as an expert on this issue?
PRADOS: I gave a certain number of interviews before the war. I wouldn't say that any of them were with mainstream media. They were with public media or individual radio stations mostly, but not with mainstream media.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: Did you try to reach out to them, to say --
PRADOS: I was not making a special effort to reach out to them.
ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: Okay.
PRADOS: But I was out there. I had pieces that you saw, certainly. And anyone could have seen. And I had a good deal of interest, actually, from European media. Several times, BBC, for example. But never once ABC or CBS or, you know, that kind of thing.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: Okay. From your sense of looking at everything, why did the United States go to war in Iraq?
PRADOS: That's the sixty-four dollar question -- why did the United States go to war with Iraq? Right now, I favor the interpretation that the so-called neoconservatives in the Bush administration had a vision of transforming the Middle East, and a vision really that flowed out of the Gulf War of 1991. After that war, you saw some progress in the Arab-Israeli situation as a result of agreements on negotiations that were made in Oslo and Madrid. And a lot of the analysis at that time -- I'm talking now about 1991 to '93 period -- was that the reason this was happening was because of what had happened in the Persian Gulf, and this huge coalition that had come together, and the fact that Arab and western countries had all united around a set of goals. And there was some idea, I think, in the Bush administration, that that could be replicated, and that in the act of replicating that, they could also change some of the other political problems that they had. Such as the discomfort of having American forces in Saudi Arabia -- they could be shifted out and put somewhere else. And the issue of oil exports from the Middle East. So they had, sort of, this idea that by doing this one thing, they could solve many problems. In addition to entrenching this new Bush doctrine of preemption and preventive war.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: Okay. You talk a little bit about, in this article here, February 5th as being a point of departure. Can you speak to that -- the Powell presentation?
PRADOS: I think the key political problem that the Bush administration faced at the end of 2002 and going into 2003 was that it was not getting the kind of international support, it wasn't getting the kind of coalescence of a coalition that had happened before the Gulf War in 1991. It had, in hand, a congressional resolution, which said that 'The United States is authorized to use force based on an international commitment by the United Nations to enforce UN resolutions on disarming Iraq.' And it had, in hand, a United Nations resolution that said that 'We may make a decision in a further resolution about going to war with Iraq.' For those reasons, the real political situation was that the United States wasn't in a position to go to war with Iraq absent further international action. And that required building some kind of international consensus for war with Iraq. The consequences of that were palpable. They were that, the United States had to avoid any judgment by United Nations weapons inspectors that Iraq had disarmed, because that would void the United Nations resolutions -- the Security Council resolutions that the United States was supposed to be enforcing in taking this military action. And, the United States had to do something to bring about this international consensus that would permit the Security Council to pass a further resolution that would complete the authorization for war that Bush needed. For those reasons, the Powell speech, on February 5th, 2003, was crucial -- the crucial diplomatic play in laying the groundwork for attempting this second United Nations Security Council resolution -- which, however, the United States failed to obtain.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: And what was the reaction -- Did you see a difference in the reaction from the American public and press versus the international public and press -- of that speech?
PRADOS: I think there was a very definite difference in terms of reactions to the Powell speech. The American media, in large part, reported the Powell speech as a kind of breakthrough -- a breakthrough in terms of the diplomacy of preparing for war, and a breakthrough in terms of intelligence transparency. They were going to move forward and reveal so much in this that no one could have any question anymore about Saddam Hussein's alleged weapons of mass destruction. Powell gave his speech. The same day, if you looked at interviews with the Chinese foreign minister, the French foreign minister, the Syrian foreign minister, the German representatives, at the United Nations who had listened to that speech, all of them raised questions about it. The British press was not especially receptive to the Powell speech. The French and German presses also reported it negatively. The Spanish foreign minister was positive, as was the British, but both the Spanish and the British were our diplomatic allies in this process of trying to obtain an additional United Nations Security Council resolution.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: I think another key point that I see is on March 7th, you have these doubts that were coming out from ElBaradei, but at the same time, the Bush administration had given this arbitrary 10-day deadline. And so, virtually none of that information was transmitted. Can you speak to what type of revelations came forth on March 7th from ElBaradei?
PRADOS: I think on March the seventh, reporting to the Security Council, Mohamed ElBaradei of the IAEA identified a process that his group had gone through which had, in fact, established that Iraq lacked the nuclear program that the United States was saying. The United States proceeded to say that ElBaradei 's materials were incomplete, but that it couldn't wait any longer for a resolution. And established an arbitrary limit. And after 10 days, the United States issued an ultimatum and actually started the war 48 hours after that.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: When you say "arbitrary" deadline, I think there's some confusion -- even within the mainstream press -- as to how long these resolutions would go on, and -- I don't know if you can speak to like Resolution 1384 and 1441 as to what the exact timeline was according to the UN versus what the administration was saying.
PRADOS: That's a good question. I'm not sure I can speak to that. If I remember correctly, 1441 had a 120-day deadline, did it not? And 120 days would make it -- middle of February. But then there was an extension that was approved in the middle of February, was there not? It was a 90-day extension?
ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: Well, I read Han Blix's book, and I think what happened -- And this is something that wasn't really covered in the mainstream media, so it is very difficult even for us to really know what happened -- But I think in January, they said, "Well, let's just fall back to what created UNSCOM" You know, this resolution that created UNSCOM, as to be -- Or UNMOVIC, as different from being UNSCOM. So they kind of fell back on those reporting deadlines. But, from my reading of it, I didn't see that there was any set date that was going to stop the inspections. It was going to go on. And so --
PRADOS: Well, that's certainly true in the UNMOVIC resolution. But I'm afraid I can't speak to that in detail.
ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: Okay. That's fine. I haven't talked to anyone who has looked at this as much as you, so. Alright. Let's see. You speak to the nuclear, chemical, and biological claims that the administration was making. And let's start with some of the stuff that the administration was saying versus what was coming out in the public record. There seemed to be shifts in the CIA reporting of the threats, I think you had pointed out.
PRADOS: I think that there was a certain amount of a struggle within the US intelligence community about its reporting on Iraq. The people who specialized in different areas of the dinosaur -- different parts of the dinosaur had different things to say. And there were definite disputes between the CIA and other United States intelligence agencies on certain issues. One of them was the Iraqi nuclear program. The Iraqi nuclear program, according to some analysts within the CIA, was far advanced enough to make use of these aluminum tubes that Iraq was attempting to procure as parts of centrifuge machines that would distill and enrich uranium so that it could be used in nuclear weapons. There were major differences between the CIA and the Department of Energy and the State Department about whether, in fact, this was the case. The main CIA analyst, who was working on this -- who was working this issue, didn't, in fact, have the expertise to make the claims that he was making. Yet he was backed by agency superiors in the arguments that ranged back and forth about these matters within the intelligence community. If you look now at the report recently issued by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on the pre-war intelligence about Iraq, you will see that this debate about the aluminum tubes actually went back to at least the end of the Clinton administration. In a series of reports that went back and forth between the Central Intelligence Agency and the Department of Energy, primarily, with the State Department sort of being on the sidelines. But the Department of Energy provided quite explicit, and very concrete reports explaining why this claim that the aluminum tubes were nuclear program items could not be true. And why, in fact, another alternative explanation of these tubes -- i.e. that they were pieces of artillery rockets -- was, in fact, the probable role for those items. On chemical weapons now, there was a different set of concerns among the agencies. And people in the CIA had little evidence, in fact, for a number of the assertions that they made -- including that Saddam had a stockpile of active chemical weapons, that there was production of chemical weapons going on in Iraq, that the Iraqis had upgraded and expanded their chemical program for the specific purpose of conducting a chemical weapons program, and that they were ready to deliver chemical weapons. There was almost no concrete evidence for any of those assertions. And that was verified by the report of the Senate Intelligence Committee after the war. The CIA, in running up to the war, did a section on chemical weapons programs in its National Intelligence Estimate, and relied on reporting from a different US agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, to sort of get around some of these objections. Because DIA had had previously a more restrained view of the chemical weapons situation. And a similar kind of problem occurred with the biological weapons claims that were roiling back and forth within the intelligence community. In fact, we had very little evidence for Iraqi biological efforts. We did have evidence from the United Nations weapons inspections of the 1990s, that the Iraqi laboratories and infrastructure had, in fact, been dismantled. And we had a certain amount of evidence that some Iraqi plants were being upgraded and put back on line -- including with the fermentation units, and so on. But at the same time, there had been outbreaks of foot and mouth disease in Iraq in the year 2000 and afterwards. And Iraq had started an active vaccination program. Now, the Iraqis needed vaccine to implement a vaccination program in their country. The United States government made the claim that Iraq -- that this action with the Iraqi chemical -- or sorry -- biological plants was unnecessary. It could only be explained by a biological weapons program, because they could buy all the vaccine they needed through the United Nations Food for Peace program. The Bush administration did not say that the United States had routinely vetoed every effort by Iraq to buy vaccine through the United Nations Food for Oil program. So, there were games going on with how to portray the development of Iraqi biological industries. And when it came time to present this to the American public in the form of that CIA White Paper, in fact, this Iraqi biological plant was held up as an example of Iraq's push for a so-called biological weapons program. Similarly, with the question of these mobile -- the alleged, I should say -- mobile biological weapons laboratories. The evidence for those was exceedingly skimpy. A lot of it was open to question, the purveyors of the evidence themselves, some of them were labeled as fabricators. And that essentially did not make any difference to the drafters of the National Intelligence Estimate, who went ahead to put this in as an "active piece," quote unquote, of an Iraqi weapons program.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: I want to, kind of, ask some -- More detailed of the timing of the National Intelligence Estimate. It seems that a lot of these claims were being made, and then it took a call from Congress -- I think it was Dick Durbin, on September 12th -- and it was three weeks after that, and all those claims that were being made in the meantime, had already seemed to be starting. So can you speak to the National Intelligence Estimate and who usually requests it?
PRADOS: National Intelligence Estimates are usually the product of one of three avenues. One of them is, the President requests a National Intelligence Estimate -- or his National Security Council in his name requests a National Intelligence Estimate. The second is, the CIA has a program of NIE's that it produces sort of semi-automatically. For example, every year, there used to be a Russian estimate, an estimate about what the Soviet Union was up to. So there's a regular schedule of estimates that are, more or less, automatically produced. And then, an estimate can be requested by another cabinet-level official of the United States government. The Secretary of Defense, for example, might request an estimate on whether the political stability in the various successor states to Russia is going to impinge on his programs for emplacing American forces -- you know, just as a hypothetical, right? So those are the usual avenues. It's almost unheard of for a National Intelligence Estimate to come from a request by the Congress.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: Can you speak to -- it seems, like, very suspicious that none of the administration -- any of those three avenues were requesting a National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq. And it wasn't until the Democrats in Congress really pushed for it, so can you speak to that?
PRADOS: I think this is actually symptomatic of the question of what was the purpose here? What was the purpose of the whole issue of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction in American politics? I think that the purpose of raising this to the level of a political issue was to make Americans afraid, and make them unite behind a project to attack Iraq. For that reason, the Bush administration wanted essentially to have a clear field to make whatever allegations about Iraq it wished to do. Consequently, the Bush administration did not want a National Intelligence Estimate about Iraq because that estimate might come out with conclusions that undercut charges that it was making about the threat from Saddam Hussein. So, unlike the usual role of National Intelligence Estimates -- [Interruption]
ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: Sorry about that.
PRADOS: That's okay. Unlike. In sort of an ideal vision of American governmental process -- You know, if you were considering going to war with a country, you would ask for a National Intelligence Estimate because you wanted to know about that country's forces, you wanted to know about its ability to stop you, you wanted to be able to plan against those forces in creating your military plans for a war. I think in the case of Iraq, the Bush administration had a clear sense that it could defeat whatever Iraqi military forces were in the field, so it did not feel it needed a National Intelligence Estimate for that purpose. And it did feel that a National Intelligence Estimate might undercut some of the claims that administration officials were making about the Iraqi threat.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: Okay. Let me just hook this up real quick. And I have about five more minutes of questions. Is that okay?
PRADOS: Alright.
ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: Now it seems, just from a lot of the claims that were being made, that simple flaws of critical thinking, in a way, of making assertions -- Can you speak to what sort of claims that the administration was making that just didn't hold up to pure critical thinking?
PRADOS: (pause) I'm speechless. [laughs]
ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: Too many? Well, some that I think of -- correlation/causation -- You know, just because two things are linked doesn't mean they're collaboratively linked, with al Qaeda and Iraq. Another one could be --
PRADOS: That's true. Okay. Yes, there was a -- There were cases in the administration's arguments in which one thing didn't even lead to another thing. For example, the situation with allegations that there was an alliance between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda. In fact, what you had was a set of fairly limited intelligence reporting through the 1990s, some of it from other governments that were -- that had an interest in influencing the United States, some of it from defector sources -- some of whom have been, in fact, labeled as fabricators -- and some of it from foreign services, all of which added up to very little. But permitted them to assert that there had been a series of meetings, and a set of other events, and, indeed, those meetings and events may have taken place. But, there's a leap between saying that "Such-and-such a meeting" or "Such-and-such an event took place," and saying "There was an alliance between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda." And we never had evidence to bridge that gap. We were making a logical leap when we asserted, based on this limited evidence, that there was that kind of a relationship. I think that same kind of error occurred in other places. Also, the aluminum tubes in the Iraqi nuclear program is an example of that. Even if these aluminum tube -- which we're now pretty sure had nothing to do with Iraqi nuclear weapons -- but even if they had, that didn't add up to an advanced Iraqi nuclear program that was going to yield a nuclear weapon in the near-term that was going to be a threat to the Middle East and the United States -- which is the way that George Bush put it. So there were a number of instances of that kind of thinking in the Iraq estimates.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: Another thing I see is assumptions -- Starting with assumptions and piling on and not checking assumptions and having alternative competing hypotheses, in a way.
PRADOS: Well, that's absolutely right. One of the major conclusions of the Senate Intelligence Committee report is that there was, what they called, an "assumptions train." That the CIA and other intelligence agencies had taken assumptions about what was going on with Iraq, and then as they did further reports down the line, they went back to the old reports -- based on assumptions. They made new assumptions, and in each -- each iteration made the reporting another step removed from reality. And I would say that's true in general. But it's also true specifically, that we used -- we replaced data with assumptions in any number of situations. For example, the idea that there was a secret, hidden, Iraqi force of long-range missiles that was about to be launched against Tel Aviv or Riyad, or other targets in the Middle East -- that notion that there was this secret force was based on just a few people saying that they'd seen a rocket this place or that place or they'd seen some parts for rockets. And the fact that the United Nations weapons inspectors in the 1990s had not been able to account for a couple of missiles that the Iraqis had bought from the Soviet Union, and some missiles that the Iraqis had built in Iran -- some knock-off model copies. And all of a sudden, there was a covert missile force. There was no evidence that there was units running such a force, that there were facilities for such a force, that this force was operating. No concrete evidence of this force whatsoever. But the assumption was, based on this accounting difference, that there was this force. So there are a number of examples of that.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: I think one of the things that drove those assumptions is the behavior of Saddam Hussein. So when you look in hindsight -- Can you kind of put that into context as to these assumptions being driven by this behavior? And why was he behaving like that?
PRADOS: I'm not sure that we will ever have an explanation for what Saddam Hussein was thinking as the year 2002 wended into 2003 and then the war began. I think it is clearly the case that Saddam's reluctance to confront this rising American anger, and his inability to bring himself to really open Iraq to the weapons inspections that might have defused the American claims. His refusal to do that really set him up for what happened to him subsequently. I think that Saddam's behavior is a major question mark in the whole Iraqi business. I don't really have an explanation for it that's a good one. One hypothesis is that Saddam was posturing himself within a regional political and international context. That by maintaining this ambiguity of whether there were Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, he was obliging leaders of neighboring states to deal with him as if he had weapons of mass destruction. So that consequently, he would be reluctant to give up this deception. If that's what it was. But if that's what it was, it was, in fact, an Iraqi deception. Because Iraq did not have a substantial weapons of mass destruction force.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: Back in 1998, some report from Scott Ritter is that a lot of UNSCOM was infiltrated by intelligence agents. And I think, I see in some ways, smoking guns even saying, the CIA saying, 'Our human intelligence sources within Iraq dried up after '98.' So can you speak to was that a factor -- of the American espionage?
PRADOS: It was certainly a factor that human intelligence sources for the CIA dried up in Iraq after 1998. The information we have is that there were only a handful of sources -- human sources, that is -- reporting from Iraq for the CIA after 1998. I think the number four has been used. And it's been said that not a single one of those sources was reporting on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. None of them were associated with Iraqi weapons of mass destruction programs. The Brits -- the British intelligence had only a handful of Iraqi sources. And both American and British streams of reporting, it's not clear to this day to what degree they were, in fact, getting reporting from the same people. So, the human intelligence sources for both countries were very, very, very, extremely limited.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: And do you see that there was -- [Cinematography signal]
PRADOS: That's it. We're out of time.