ElBaradei Auditions for Egpytian President

by John M. Curtis
(310) 204-8700

Copyright April 23, 2011
All Rights Reserved.                                         

        After spearheading the Egyptian revolution, 61-year-old former International Atomic Energy Agency [IAEA] Director-General Mohamed ElBaradei put former U.S. President George W. Bush in the crosshairs, threatening to bring criminal charges in the International Criminal Court over the Iraq War.  While the missing weapons of mass destruction continue to plague the Iraq War, it’s curious that ElBaradei—a possible presidential candidate in the new Egypt—would urge prosecution of former Bush officials.  Promoting his new book, “The Age of Deception” [Henry Holt & Co., 2011], ElBaradei accused the Bush administration of “grotesque deception,” a deliberate attempt to deceive the U.S. and world community.  Contending that, “deliberate deception was not limited to small countries ruled by ruthless dictators,” Elbaradei raises disturbing questions about the United States.

            Elbaradei ran the IAEA from 1997 to 2009, during the years that chief U.N. Weapons Inspector, Sweden’s Dr. Hans Blix, pleaded in 2002 with the Bush administration to reconsider going to war without proof of WMD.  ElBaradei and Blix were emphatic with former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, and others that U.N. weapons inspectors found no evidence whatever of Powell’s Feb 6, 2003 multimedia presentation to the U.N. Security Council “proving” the existence of Saddam Hussein’s nuclear and biological weapons programs.  ElBaradei’s 321-page book raises no justification for the eventual slaughter of thousands of Iraqi civilians since the start of the Iraq War, March 10, 2003.  ElBaradei believes that holding the U.S. accountable should help prevent future preemptive wars that put civilians into harm’s way.

            Criticizing the Bush administration’s logic and talking points serves notice to future administrations that before the U.S. goes to war, it better have a compelling justification.  For over a year before Cruise missiles hit Baghdad March 20, 2003, Powell and Rice chatted up the WMD on national radio and TV.  Condi’s “mushroom cloud” talking points made Saddam a clear and present danger to U.S. national security. ElBaradei’s book accuses the U.S. of bypassing the U.N. weapons’ inspection process, providing a “cover for what would be, in essence, a United States-directed inspection process.”  In fairness to the Bush folks, the administration was in a lockdown mode after Sept. 11, still reeling from the colossal intelligence failures that allowed Bin Laden’s suicidal assassins to level the World Trade Center and damage the Pentagon.  White House officials trusted no one.

             Bush and his Vice President Dick Cheney found little credibility in the CIA and FBI after Sept. 11.  They began to trust only certain handpicked bureaucrats at the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans, led by 57-year-old Harvard and Georgetown Law Center graduate Douglas J. Feith Jr. and created by Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld.  Feith denied to Congress supplying Cheney intelligence about Iraq’s presumed WMD, relying heavily on discredited German Intelligence reports from a contact codenamed “Curveball,” supplying fabricated reports about Saddam’s alleged arsenal on biologic and nuclear weapons.  Feith conceded only that he supplied Cheney with “criticism” of the CIA’s intelligence assessments that found no evidence of Saddam’s alleged arsenal of WMD or connection to Osama bin Laden.

            ElBaradei was emphatic in “The Age of Deception,” that the U.S. ignored and bypassed credible sources of intelligence of Saddam’s WMD but instead cherry-picked intelligence from Feith’s OSP.  Bush recently admitted “a sickening feeling” in his memoir “Decision Points” when he realized after the Iraq invasion that no WMD were found.  Yet the ex-president still insists that it was the right decision to topple “a homicidal dictator pursuing WMD,” chalking the problems up to “intelligence failures,” despite knowing that Cheney relied on bogus intelligence from Feith’s OSP, knowingly fabricated by “Curveball,” a mentally ill relative of former Iraqi exile and Iraqi National Congress leader Ahmed Chalibi.  Intelligence failures with the CIA and FBI occurred before Sept 11, not when the Bush White House gleaned its intelligence from the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans.

            Presenting his best evidence of Bush’s fraudulent intel on Iraq, ElBaradei pointed out that Bush’s Jan. 28, 2003 State of the Union Speech cited evidence of “aluminum tubes” and Saddam’s attempts to buy “yellowcake” from Niger.  On both counts, ElBaradei shows that the “aluminum tubes” were artillery rocket parts, not tubes to enrich uranium, and the “yellowcake” story was completely fabricated.  “I was aghast at what I was witnessing,” Elbaradei said before the U.S. invaded Iraq.  “Aggression where there was no imminent threat,” urging the U.N. to bring charges against former Bush officials at the International Criminal Court.  “Do we as a community of nations, have the wisdom and courage to take the corrective measures to ensure that such a tragedy will never happen again?” asked ElBaradei, letting Egypt’s new government know that he’s no pushover and U.S. puppet.

 John M. Curtis writes politically neutral commentary analyzing spin in national and global news.  He's editor of OnlineColumnist.com.and author of Dodging the Bullet and Operation Charisma.

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