The Road to the Iraq War | 3. Mushroom Clouds

Summary

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Slow Burn – The Road to the Iraq War

Episode 3: Mushroom Clouds

Date: May 5, 2021 | Host: Noreen Malone (Slate Podcasts)

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Episode Overview

This episode of Slow Burn investigates how the specter of "weapons of mass destruction" (WMD) became the Bush administration’s centerpiece rationale for the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Through the voices of intelligence officers, White House insiders, and journalists, this episode dissects the evolution of faulty intelligence, the manipulation of public messaging, and the mounting pressure inside Washington that pushed the U.S. to war on the premise of dangers that ultimately did not exist.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Emergence and History of WMD in Iraq (01:02–10:21)

• The Phrase Takes Hold: "Weapons of mass destruction" (WMD) becomes the political catchphrase in 2002, saturating media and politics.

  • [01:26] Dick Cheney: “Iraq is in possession of weapons of mass destruction.”
  • [01:29 & 01:31] Robert Draper, George W. Bush: Variations of the WMD mantra.

• Inspections in the 1990s:
  Former Australian intelligence officer Rod Barton recounts grueling UN weapons inspections in early 1990s Iraq. Despite Iraq’s obligations after the Gulf War to destroy such weapons, inspectors find signs of ongoing concealment and partial cooperation.

  • [02:48] Rod Barton: “It was hell on earth... the chemical weapons plant had been heavily bombed... chemical alarms went off. So there was poisonous gas in the air.”

• Dr. Germ and Al Hakam:
  Iraq’s biological program, led by Dr. Rihab Taha (a.k.a. “Dr. Germ”), comes to light. Inspections are stymied until her emotional breakdown leads to reluctant admissions.

  • [06:16] Rod Barton recounts Dr. Taha sobbing when confronted: “...if she’d given anything away, she would be jailed, perhaps tortured, perhaps shot, who knows?”
  • [07:06] Secret confession: “They really had to confess to having a biological weapons program.”

• Aftermath of Defections and Sanctions:
  Saddam’s son-in-law, Hussein Kamel, defects and provides documentation. Barton and the UN team conclude most WMDs were likely destroyed, but uncertainty remains.

  • [09:57] Rod Barton (post-inspection): “We’ve destroyed at least 95% of everything... Iraq is not a threat.”

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2. The Return of the WMD Threat and the Bush Doctrine (10:21–13:53)

• Bush’s 2002 Rhetoric:
  Despite prior conclusions, President Bush resurrects WMD fears in his State of the Union address.

  • [10:33] George W. Bush: “The Iraqi regime has plotted to develop anthrax and nerve gas and nuclear weapons for over a decade... This is a regime that has something to hide from the civilized world.”

• Strategic Shift:
  The Bush administration shapes the “Bush Doctrine” — prioritizing preemptive, unilateral action to prevent potential threats post-9/11.

  • [12:48] George W. Bush: “You’re either with us or you’re against us in the fight against terror.”

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3. Manufacturing the Case: Intelligence, Pressure, and Misrepresentation (13:53–26:22)

• White House Pressure on the CIA:
  Jane Green, then-chief of the CIA’s Iraq Group, details White House hostility toward agency analysis that debunked Iraq–Al Qaeda connections. Facing disparagement from Cheney, some CIA analysts become “more forward-leaning” under mounting political pressure.

  • [15:09] Jane Green: “Cheney hated the briefing... we didn’t think that Iraq had anything to do with 9/11 and he believed the opposite.”

• Intelligence Filtering and Raw Intel Dumps:
  Vice President Cheney demands raw, unvetted intelligence—contrary to agency norms—seeking any thread to reinforce the case for war.

  • [17:54] Robert Draper: “The office of the Vice Presidency kept these many vaults of raw intelligence… actual vaults. I think they had like a half a dozen of them.”

• Information Entrepreneurs: Ahmed Chalabi’s Role:
  Iraqi exile Ahmed Chalabi and his group feed stories to eager officials, including fabricated links between Saddam, Al Qaeda, and the 9/11 hijackers.

  • [18:56] Jane Green: Tells an anecdote about a woman claiming she saw Osama bin Laden in Saddam’s palace—“It was totally made up... she was saying what certain people wanted to hear.”
  • [19:57] Dick Cheney (Meet The Press): “It’s been pretty well confirmed that he [Mohammad Atta] did go to Prague and did meet with a senior official of the Iraqi Intelligence Service...”

• Pushback Ignored:
  The intelligence community, especially the CIA, repeatedly reports no credible link between Iraq and Al Qaeda. But the administration keeps asking the same questions—hoping for a different answer.

  • [21:44] Jane Green: “We gave Wolfowitz generally the same answer each time... But still he would come back with a slightly different wording of the same question in order to... get an answer that was more useful to him.”

• Alternative Intelligence Efforts:
  When unsatisfied, the White House turns to the Defense Department’s Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group—tasked mainly with connecting Saddam Hussein to terrorism at any cost.

  • [23:00] Robert Draper: “What it really was, was ‘let’s figure out every single way we can to tie Saddam Hussein to these terror groups.’”

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4. Mainstreaming the WMD Argument (26:22–35:33)

• From Theory to Public Relations:
  The White House Iraq Group orchestrates a campaign featuring high-profile faces (Cheney, Rice, Powell) and carefully crafted language. The media (notably the New York Times) amplifies stories about Saddam’s supposed nuclear ambitions, often fed by administration leaks.

• “Mushroom Cloud” and the Framing of Fear:
  A memorable phrase used repeatedly in media appearances and speeches conjures the existential threat of nuclear catastrophe.

  • [34:29] Condoleezza Rice (quoting White House Iraq Group speechwriting): “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.”

• Bush’s UN and Cincinnati Speeches:
  President Bush personally conflates Saddam with Al Qaeda and magnifies the nuclear threat, often sidestepping the CIA’s skepticism.

  • [36:26] George W. Bush: “We know that Iraq and Al Qaeda have had high level contacts that go back a decade...”
  • [37:49] George W. Bush: “We cannot wait for the final proof—the smoking gun that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.”

• Critique of Presidential Rhetoric:
  Even years later, Bush maintains his case was sound, but journalists and historians denounce the Cincinnati speech as historically reckless.

  • [38:09] Robert Draper: “That speech deserved to be condemned as really the most irresponsible and fact-free presidential address up to that point since, say, President Johnson falsely claimed that submarines had been attacked in the Gulf of Tonkin... It was irresponsible, it was based on intuition... not on any intelligence that connected those various dots.”

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5. The War Clock, Groundwork, and What’s Next (39:06–end)

• Logistical Reality and Timelines:
  The military’s deadline (March 2003) looms. Troops already wait near Iraq’s border as officials focus on securing public, congressional, UN, and allied support—within five months.

• Preview of Next Episode:
  The coming debate among liberal hawks and neoconservatives about the intellectual justifications for war:

  • [40:23] Rod Barton: “Even if there was a less than 5% chance of success, I would be morally bound to fight for it and to argue for it.”

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the subjective reach for evidence:
  [23:53] Robert Draper: “There would be all of these squiggly lines that would connect the two. This or that occasion, this or that meeting, this or that rumor. It goes to show you the kind of effort that was made to establish these links conclusively and was truly an obsession.”

• On the administration's message discipline:
  [33:25] Ken Adelman: “This is the brilliance of the propagandists at the Bush White House. Dick Cheney, Condi Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, all fanned out onto the Sunday morning shows and pointed to what would turn out to be an erroneous New York Times piece as evidence of what was brewing in Iraq...”

• On the intelligence community’s dilemma:
  [28:56] Ken Adelman: “What does the intelligence community really want to avoid doing? Like any institution, they want to avoid their mistakes from before. So what did they do? They highballed things... They vastly overestimated what Saddam Hussein had.”

• On public fear-mongering:
  [37:49] George W. Bush: “We cannot wait for the final proof—the smoking gun that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.”

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Important Timestamps by Segment

• 01:02–10:21 — UN inspections, Barton’s testimony, background on WMD in Iraq
• 10:21–13:53 — Bush Doctrine emerges, shift in post-9/11 strategy
• 13:53–26:22 — White House pressure on intelligence, Chalabi’s fabrications, futile search for Iraq–Al Qaeda link
• 26:22–35:33 — White House Iraq Group, PR strategies, mushroom cloud narrative
• 35:33–39:06 — Bush’s Cincinnati speech, historical context, preparation for war
• 39:06–End — Military timelines, preview of political/intellectual justifications ahead

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Tone & Language Notes

• The episode is factual, pointed, and critical, using first-person recollections and contemporary soundbites to capture the intensity of the political environment and the pressures felt within intelligence agencies. The Bush administration’s rhetorical tactics and intelligence failures are scrutinized without hyperbole, letting participants’ words and admissions reveal the urgency, fear, and ultimately, the false premises that propelled the nation into war.

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Recommended for anyone seeking an in-depth, insider recounting of how the U.S. government’s faulty case for the 2003 Iraq invasion came to dominate not just politics, but the collective American imagination.

Transcript

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[Narrator (possibly a Slate Plus host)]

If there's one thing Americans know about the 2003 invasion of Iraq, it's that the Bush administration said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. And it turned out that he didn't. Weapons of mass destruction. Wmd. The phrase had been around for a while, but it wasn't in common usage until 2002. That's when it took off. The American Dialect Society named it Word of the Year.

[Dick Cheney]

Iraq is in possession of weapons of mass destruction.

[Robert Draper]

We know they have weapons of mass destruct.

[George W. Bush]

Weapons of mass destruction.

[Narrator (possibly a Slate Plus host)]

Weapons of mass destruction.

[George W. Bush]

Weapons of mass destruction.

[Narrator (possibly a Slate Plus host)]

In the context of Iraq, WMD mainly referred to a few chemical weapons like mustard gas, biological weapons like anthrax, or, most frightening, nuclear weapons. To understand why the Bush administration thought Iraq had WMD, you have to go back to the early 90s.

[Rod Barton]

The United nations wanted weapons inspectors, and I went to this meeting to suggest some weapons inspectors. And the chairman of the committee said, well, actually, we're thinking of you.

[Narrator (possibly a Slate Plus host)]

Rod Barton was a former Australian intelligence officer. He first went to investigate Saddam's weapons programs in 1991. Saddam was supposed to be declaring and destroying any weapons of mass destruction. It was part of an agreement he'd made with the United nations at the end of the Gulf War so he could stay in power. Chemical and biological weapons were explicitly banned under international law. Anyone who didn't already have nuclear weapons wasn't supposed to be able to make them. People like Barton were there to make sure Saddam followed through on the agreement. They began by visiting Iraq's known weapons production facilities. It was 110 degrees in the desert and the inspectors had to wear hazmat suits.

[Rod Barton]

It was hell on earth. That's what it looked like. Because the chemical weapons plant had been heavily bombed in the first Gulf War. So there was sort of broken concrete and, you know, broken walls. Equipment was smashed. As soon as you got there, we had chemical detectors and our chemical alarms went off. So there was poisonous gas in the air.

[Narrator (possibly a Slate Plus host)]

The more time Barton spent on the ground, the clearer it became that the Iraqis hadn't declared all their weapons. This became the central drama of the inspector's time in Iraq.

[Rod Barton]

I mean, they were very gracious, they gave us lunch. Everything was very nice. But when you started looking at things and when you started asking them some questions, you knew that this is not quite right. They're not cooperating in the way they're required to cooperate.

[Narrator (possibly a Slate Plus host)]

The inspectors knew going in that Saddam had chemical weapons at one point because he'd used them during the Iran Iraq war. As Barden and the other inspectors traveled the country, they found that Saddam had actually been hiding nuclear and bioweapons programs too. The nuclear program was hard to spot because the regime was using old technology, building a nuke the way the Manhattan Project scientists did back in the 1940s. According to some experts, the Iraqis could have been just a few years away from getting a bomb. The bioweapons program was far along too. It was run by a British educated scientist with a nickname out of a.

[Rod Barton]

James Bond movie the press referred to as Dr. Germ. We knew her as Dr. Rehab. Taha. Dr. Taha.

[Narrator (possibly a Slate Plus host)]

She was quite glamorous. Right?

[Rod Barton]

Well, okay. We often amongst ourselves, and perhaps I shouldn't say this, but we referred to her as the desert rose. So that perhaps answers part of your question.

[Narrator (possibly a Slate Plus host)]

Dr. Taha was one half of an Iraqi weapons power couple. Her husband was a former general who ran the country's missile program.

[Rod Barton]

He seemed to be genuinely fond of her. If I can interpret that way, I'm not sure it was completely reciprocated.

[Narrator (possibly a Slate Plus host)]

What would her motivation have been? Protection in some way or.

[Rod Barton]

Yeah, well, I sometimes wondered this, but I don't really know. Could be a genuine love match and I just really don't know that.

[Narrator (possibly a Slate Plus host)]

According to Barton, Dr. Taha initially refused to participate in weapons making, but when Saddam's regime threatened her, she did what she was told. She didn't have any prior experience making biological weapons, but she learned quickly.

[Rod Barton]

They built this new plant for her out in the desert. This place, we didn't know anything about it. Never been bombed and sure enough, it was still intact, which was quite fortunate for us because we can go around and have a look.

[Narrator (possibly a Slate Plus host)]

The plant was called Al Hakam. It's where the Iraqis manufactured anthrax, among other deadly diseases. Dr. Taha claimed that Iraq had destroyed all of its anthrax following the Gulf War. But Barton was suspicious. Throughout his time in Iraq, he'd come across burned documents and buried equipment. At one point, the Iraqis had opened fire on inspectors at a facility. And in Dr. Taha's case, the inspectors discovered a tell. When they got close to the truth, she would start to cry. It happened once when Barton explained some of their discoveries to Dr. Taha's team.

[Rod Barton]

And during this presentation she started to try to interrupt. I just ignored her. I finished the presentation and I heard these noises coming from her. I looked around and she was sobbing. And of course we didn't quite know why she started to cry. In fact, it often came as a surprise to us. Partway through she'd just break down and tears would. And at first we thought this was a ploy to stop the interview going any further, but I think it was quite genuine. She was quite distressed and you have to remember if she'd given anything away, she would be jailed, perhaps tortured, perhaps shot, who knows?

[Narrator (possibly a Slate Plus host)]

Not long after this crying episode, the inspectors met with Dr. Taha's team again.

[Rod Barton]

And that's when they really confessed that they really had to confess to having a biological weapons program.

[Narrator (possibly a Slate Plus host)]

How did it feel when you got that confession?

[Rod Barton]

We felt a bit elated afterwards, but we knew it wasn't the whole truth.

[Narrator (possibly a Slate Plus host)]

The inspectors uncovered even more about Iraq's weapons program in 1995. That's when Saddam's son in law, Hussein Kamal, defected to Jordan. He was deeply involved in the weapons program and told the UN what he knew. How big the programs had been before the war, how much had been destroyed, and what was still being made.

[Rod Barton]

So after the defection, we had a lot of documentation on the programs. That documentation helped fill in the missing gaps, you could say.

[Narrator (possibly a Slate Plus host)]

But more important than Kamal's confession was the Saddam regime's reaction to it. They panicked. The Iraqi government released a trove of documentation about their weapons, information they claimed the son in law had been hiding from them. But even then, the information didn't match up with what the inspectors were finding on the ground. The regime was still covering stuff up, all while pretending to come clean. Seven months later, Hussein Kamal returned to Iraq. He thought being married to Saddam's daughter would protect him. It didn't. He was killed the son in law's revelations confirmed what the inspectors believed. The Iraqis had been running an active weapons program. But Barton still wasn't sure how much of a threat it amounted to. After all, Iraq's infrastructure had been badly damaged during the Gulf War and the country was struggling under UN sanctions imposed in 1990. The condition for lifting the sanctions that Iraq show it had destroyed all of its wmd. The UN sanctions were devastating. Iraqis couldn't get the most basic of resources and instead of weakening Saddam's grip on power, the embargo ended up strengthening it. The only people in Iraq who could reliably get food and other necessities were members of his Ba'ath party. Barton believed that the sanctions had crippled Saddam's weapons program too, but he couldn't be absolutely sure. That's because his work was cut short. In 1997, Saddam accused the inspectors of spying for the Americans and he began to make life difficult for them. The US and Britain retaliated the following year.

[George W. Bush]

Explosions lit the sky around Baghdad tonight.

[Narrator (possibly a Slate Plus host)]

As President Clinton announced that he has ordered a, quote, strong, sustained series of airstrikes against Iraq.

[George W. Bush]

The goal is to eliminate Saddam Hussein's.

[Narrator (possibly a Slate Plus host)]

Capacity for weapons of mass destruction.

[George W. Bush]

The President said it was.

[Narrator (possibly a Slate Plus host)]

Barton and his colleagues had to leave with almost no notice. But he believed their work dismantling Saddam's weapons arsenal was mostly done.

[Rod Barton]

In fact, I remember giving testimony to an Australian inquiry where I said, well, we've destroyed at least 95% of everything and if they've got anything left, a lot of it won't be of much use because it's aged. Maybe the anthrax, if they've still got some of that, might be of use, but we believe most of it's gone. Iraq is not a threat.

[Narrator (possibly a Slate Plus host)]

Barton thought the questions around Iraq's WMDs had been resolved. He was wrong. Just a few years later, Barton watched George W. Bush's 2002 State of the Union address.

[George W. Bush]

The Iraqi regime has plotted to develop anthrax and nerve gas and nuclear weapons for over a decade. This is a regime that agreed to international inspections, then kicked out the inspectors. This is a regime that has something to hide from the civilized world.

[Rod Barton]

And I was quite shocked that Bush had identified Iraq as a grave and growing danger because of wmd. I thought, hey, hang on, this is news to me.

[Narrator (possibly a Slate Plus host)]

This is Slow Burn. I'm your host, Noreen Malone. There were lots of reasons why people in the Bush administration felt it made sense to invade Iraq. Strategic ones, humanitarian ones too. But the case the administration chose to make was based on something else. The idea that Saddam presented an imminent threat to the United States. In the Bush administration's view, the Iraqis had shown they couldn't be trusted. Which meant it didn't matter if there was no proof that Saddam had a huge arsenal of weapons. As Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld liked to say, the absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence. The Iraqis history of lying was the key to the administration's casus belli, its case for war. So how did the Bush administration justify a war of choice? Why did the intelligence community end up going along? And how did the invasion come to hang on weapons of mass destruction that didn't exist? This is episode three Mushroom clouds. After 9 11, something we now call the Bush Doctrine began to show up in the President's speeches. Its principles went more or less like don't wait to be attacked. Take preemptive action. Don't be afraid to act unilaterally. There should only be one superpower in the world and there are sides. The Iraq war would be the first test of those principles.

[George W. Bush]

Everybody ought to be given the benefit of the doubt. But over time it's going to be important for nations to know they will be held accountable for inactivity. You're either with us or you're against us in the fight against terror.

[Narrator (possibly a Slate Plus host)]

The last time the US went into Iraq in the Gulf War, it was to defend a country under attack. America was part of a coalition of nearly 40 allies. Some American officials at the time, like Paul Wolfowitz of the Defense Department, wanted regime change in Iraq. But that wasn't the UN's mission, so it didn't happen A decade later. Influential people inside the Bush administration thought Saddam Hussein being against the United States was reason enough to overthrow him. But the public and Congress and the UN and potential allies, they all needed more. And the administration wasn't yet rejecting the need for international support, even if it was headed that way. So it needed that casus belli one serious enough to bring all those groups on board. They'd eventually settle on wmd. But first the administration tried a different approach.

[Jane Green]

Mostly our reaction was and I don't know that you can broadcast this term, but oh shit.

[Narrator (possibly a Slate Plus host)]

Jane Green was the chief of the CIA's Iraq Group. Greene says the people at the CIA, including Director George Tenet, had gathered that Iraq would be a priority for the administration even before 9 11.

[Jane Green]

There was a wide feeling among us that President Bush, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld and Vice President Cheney all had reason to want to redress what they felt was the failure during the Gulf War of leaving Saddam in power.

[Narrator (possibly a Slate Plus host)]

The 911 attacks only increased the administration's desire to do something about Iraq. If Iraq had been involved in the attacks, launching a war on Saddam would count as self defense. That would be as clear cut a casus belli as you could ask for. Some members of the administration, most prominently Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz and their deputies started trying to connect 911 and Iraq almost immediately. Jane Green remembers Cheney coming to Langley to hear the CIA's assessment.

[Jane Green]

Cheney hated the briefing and he hated the briefing because bottom line was we didn't think that Iraq had anything to do with 911 and he believed the opposite.

[Narrator (possibly a Slate Plus host)]

Cheney's displeasure was a bigger deal than it should have been because of an unhealthy dynamic between the administration and the CIA.

[Jane Green]

At that point in time, the agency was very focused on what was called the first customer, which meant the President to be able to have the ear of the first customer to tell him the truth about what's going on in the world and what we felt about it in terms of analytic conclusions, that was the gold standard. And to have the Vice President disparage what our work said was very threatening.

[Narrator (possibly a Slate Plus host)]

To maintain its relevance, the CIA began to adjust. Those changes started out small, but they quickly added up to something bigger.

[Jane Green]

A new branch chief came in and what had been a very careful analytic element turned into something that was much more aggressive in terms of showing a connection between Saddam and Al Qaeda, Iraq and Al Qaeda.

[Narrator (possibly a Slate Plus host)]

Here's how the human intelligence process usually works. CIA field officers collect information from primary sources. Those sources could be anyone from a trustworthy longtime asset to a guy more or less off the street. Every source has his own agendas and biases. Analysts like the group Jane Green led then decide if the source's intelligence is credible and and if it's relevant. Based on that determination, they deliver a rundown for decision makers. Cheney didn't trust the CIA's track record on Iraq. He wanted to get as close to the raw intelligence as he possibly could. And he asked for it to be sent his way unfiltered. After 9 11, he treated that raw intelligence like his own personal Twitter feed. Here's Robert Draper, a New York Times Magazine reporter and the author of To Start a War.

[Robert Draper]

The thing about intelligence is you can find almost anything you want on a spectrum. There is raw intelligence and raw intelligence is somebody saying something, often for motives of their own. And it is unverified and it is unanalyzed. This raw intel exists, just stacks and stacks of it. And indeed, the office of the Vice Presidency kept these many vaults of raw intelligence.

[Narrator (possibly a Slate Plus host)]

Like actual vaults?

[Robert Draper]

Actual vaults. I think they had like a half a dozen of them.

[Narrator (possibly a Slate Plus host)]

The unfiltered intelligence Dick Cheney was mainlining was not always reliable. The CIA didn't have good sources inside Iraq at the time. Field officers were under pressure to pass along more and more information. So Cheney was getting some unverified intelligence stuff that wouldn't normally make it to the Vice President's desk. Information could also flow the other way. High level officials, especially at the Department of Defense, sometimes brought their own leads to the intelligence agencies. Gary Greco, a former Defense Intelligence Agency officer, has a name for these sources.

[Ken Adelman]

Entrepreneurs. Information entrepreneurs. And you get all kinds of people whispering in the ears of senior decision makers on their views on things.

[Narrator (possibly a Slate Plus host)]

One notorious information entrepreneur, Ahmed Chalabi. Jane Green still can't get over a piece of information. She says Chalabi was pushing a woman.

[Jane Green]

Who came over to the US Claiming that she had been Saddam's second wife. She'd been standing in the Republican palace and saw a really tall guy walk by. She was standing with one of Saddam's sons. And she asked, who is that tall man? And he said, well, that's Osama bin Laden was totally made up. And it was very hard for us to convince people who wanted to believe that reporting that it was just flat out untrue. You know, none of that mattered because she was saying what certain people wanted to hear.

[Narrator (possibly a Slate Plus host)]

Another piece of information that Gary Greco traces back to Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress is the idea that One of the 911 hijackers, a man named Mohammad Atta, had met with an Iraqi intelligence official. Here's Dick Cheney on Meet The Press in December 2001.

[Dick Cheney]

It's been pretty well confirmed that he did go to Prague, and he did meet with a senior official of the Iraqi Intelligence Service in Czechoslovakia last April.

[Narrator (possibly a Slate Plus host)]

This was the kind of evidence Cheney needed to make the case he wanted to make. The trouble is, it didn't seem to be true. Facial comparisons showed that the person photographed meeting with the Iraqi official wasn't Atta. Flight records indicated that Atta wasn't in Prague at the time of the meeting. The CIA and the Czech intelligence service agreed the meeting never happened. Cheney was undeterred. He kept talking about Atta and Prague publicly. Regardless of what Dick Cheney believed, the mainstream view at the CIA was that there just wasn't much of a link between Iraq and Osama bin Laden. Saddam had given some aid to anti Israel groups, but none to Al Qaeda. There was no evidence that high level operators from Iraq and Al Qaeda had any real relationship with each other. More to the point, the idea that Saddam was in league with Osama Bin Laden just didn't make any sense. Saddam saw Al Qaeda as a potential threat.

[Jane Green]

Jane Green Saddam was consistently a secular guy that was in it for himself. And he knew that the rise of Al Qaeda and the extremist elements of Sunni Islam was designed to undercut people like him.

[Narrator (possibly a Slate Plus host)]

But again, the administration wouldn't let it go. The Saddam Al Qaeda link was like Groundhog Day. The CIA would debunk the idea and the next day senior officials would start asking all over again. Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defense did this constantly.

[Jane Green]

We gave Wolfowitz generally the same answer each time with virtually no daylight between. But still he would come back with a slightly different wording of the same question in order to, in hopes that we would come back with an answer that was more useful to him.

[Narrator (possibly a Slate Plus host)]

Within the CIA there were analysts who were willing to be more forward leaning on the Saddam Al Qaeda links.

[Jane Green]

I was told, come on Jane, it's a rock. Meaning, you know, if this, if he didn't do this, then he did something else. So you know, why not we just say this?

[Narrator (possibly a Slate Plus host)]

Cheney and Wolfowitz liked these analysts findings better than the ones coming from Jane Green's group. There were internal battles over whose analysis would win the day. George Tenet, the CIA director seemed like he was doing his best to give the White House what it wanted. But even the more aggressive CIA analysts wouldn't go far enough for the Bush administration's Iraq hawks. When the CIA wouldn't tell them what they wanted to hear, Wolfowitz and Cheney did their information shopping elsewhere. The Department of Defense set up its own intelligence project staffed by people who were willing to get creative. It was called the Policy Counter Terrorism Evaluation Group.

[Robert Draper]

Robert Draper Basically its job was to look at all of the intelligence that was out there and try to decide what terror groups were up to and how they might confederate what the worst case scenarios were. But in practical terms, what it really was was let's figure out every single way we can to tie Saddam Hussein to these terror groups.

[Narrator (possibly a Slate Plus host)]

The Defense Department group became infamous for making something that was nicknamed the Beautiful Mind scroll, a reference to the Russell Crowe movie about a schizophrenic mathematician. The main character spends a lot of time writing complex equations on chalkboards and windows. The Pentagon group's version of this was a literal piece of parchment Paper with Saddam Hussein's name at one end and Osama bin Laden's on the other. In between was where the Beautiful Mind happened.

[Robert Draper]

And there would be all of these squiggly lines that would connect the two. This or that occasion, this or that meeting, this or that rumor. It goes to show you the kind of effort that was made to establish these links conclusively and was truly an obsession.

[Narrator (possibly a Slate Plus host)]

It's a little ironic. Conspiracy theorists love to talk about the Bush administration and what really happened on 9 11. But the Bush administration had its own conspiracy theorists with their own crazy charts, and they too wanted to talk about what really happened on 9 11. All this Iraq Al Qaeda talk, even if it was baseless, made an impact, especially on one very important decision maker.

[Robert Draper]

President Bush himself somehow became convinced that there was some kind of association, some kind of ties between Saddam and terror groups. It's hard to know how and why he came to this conclusion, because none of the specific intelligence appeared to have swung the President towards this opinion. It seems instead that just the daily accretion of discussion about Saddam and terrorism, combined with Bush's gut instincts that Saddam is an evil doer, somehow swayed him.

[Narrator (possibly a Slate Plus host)]

All the dog whistling in the media from the administration had an effect. By the first anniversary of 9 11, a majority of Americans thought that Saddam Hussein was responsible for the attacks. Even CIA Director George Tenet eventually wrote to the Senate Intelligence Committee that there were links between Al Qaeda and Iraq when he wrote that he was going against the consensus within his own organization. But in the end, without the CIA's full backing, the administration wasn't willing to put 911 at the center of its case for war with Iraq, which meant it needed to rest on something else.

[Robert Draper]

They had worn the entire intelligence community down with their relentless army arguing. And so finally, when the question was asked, well, what about Saddam's weapons program? There was almost this collective sigh of relief. Yes. Yes. Yeah, okay, he's got wmd. We can agree on this.

[Narrator (possibly a Slate Plus host)]

Why was the intelligence community willing to agree that Saddam had wmd? There were some small pieces of evidence that had surfaced. A defector who had a story about mobile bioweapons labs, the attempted purchase of aluminum tubes that seemed like they could be used to make nuclear bombs. You'll hear more about all that in a later episode. But the thing to know now is that there was almost no hard evidence for wmd. Still, when the administration was pushing the connection between Iraq and 9 11, they were asking the intelligence community to sign onto something highly implausible. When they moved on to wmd. They were now asking the intelligence community to sign on to something that seemed.

[Robert Draper]

At least kind of plausible once the inspectors left. Between that point and 9, 11, we had really no visibility at all. Our intelligence sources on the ground in Iraq consisted of two individuals who had very, very spotty intel at best. And what we largely based our assessments on were the past and then the regime's behavior, which seemed to us to suggest that they were hiding something. Though precisely what they were hiding was unclear to us.

[Narrator (possibly a Slate Plus host)]

So based on a little information and a lot of inference, the intelligence community believed that Saddam likely had weapons of mass destruction. Jane Green was focused on another question. Was he going to use them?

[Jane Green]

Our analysis was that he would not use it against the United States, that he realized that that was a ticket to obliteration and that he had it mostly as a deterrent against especially Iran, but to some degree, Israel. But we didn't see him as being a proactive user of wmd. We thought that he would just. It was basically a security blanket for him.

[Narrator (possibly a Slate Plus host)]

But for some people in the Bush administration, that analysis didn't carry weight.

[Jane Green]

It was like, if he's got it, then he's got to go. It was just the fact that he had WMD at all was a reason to go to war.

[Narrator (possibly a Slate Plus host)]

Ken Adelman was a close, longtime friend of Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. He was on the Defense Policy Board. It's a group that advises the Secretary of Defense. At their meetings, they were briefed by generals who gave them the same kind of intel that Donald Rumsfeld and George W. Bush got.

[Ken Adelman]

They were telling us on the intelligence side it was pretty clear that Saddam Hussein was making big progress on weapons of mass destruction. And this was convincing because you had to go back to the Gulf War. And what did we find out? We found out that the intelligence estimates before the Gulf War were underplaying the threat of Saddam Hussein with nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons. They were underestimating things. Okay, then you come to the Iraq War. What does the intelligence community really want to avoid doing? Like any institution, they want to avoid their mistakes from before. So what did they do? They highballed things. To use a new phrase. They vastly overestimated what Saddam Hussein had in terms of programs and capabilities on the weapons of mass destruction.

[Narrator (possibly a Slate Plus host)]

So there was consensus on what the case for war would be. Now it was time for the rollout. Enter something called the White House Iraq Group. They met weekly in the Situation Room in the summer of 2002. The group included National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice and Cheney's chief of staff, Scooter Libby. There were also a lot of communications people, strategists like Karen Hughes and Karl Rove, and a White House speechwriter who crafted the language administration officials would use. By September, it was time to take the case to the public. Why? Then White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card explained the thinking to the New York Times. From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August. Dick Cheney had jumped the gun, though the vice President did introduce the new product in August in a speech at a Veterans of Foreign wars convention in Nashville.

[Dick Cheney]

Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt that he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us. And there is no doubt that his aggressive regional ambitions will lead him into future confrontations with his neighbors. Confrontations that will involve both the weapons he has today and the ones he will will continue to develop with his oil wealth.

[Narrator (possibly a Slate Plus host)]

Cheney wasn't supposed to be the guy leading the charge. He was a polarizing figure, and the administration wanted to get the whole country behind the war effort. But Cheney ended up being one of the most visible advocates for the war. There were two reasons for that. First, he was one of the loudest voices pushing for it within the administration. And second, Cheney was strangely compelling on television.

[Michelle Giaccone]

Dick Cheney was somebody who is in Sunday show history, one of the best Sunday show guests, one of the most interesting guests because he had the confidence and freedom to talk without that discipline, which sometimes makes for more interesting television.

[Narrator (possibly a Slate Plus host)]

Michelle Giaccone was a producer on NBC's Meet the Press. During the Tim Russert era. The show was a favorite spot for the Bush administration to make its case.

[Michelle Giaccone]

I remember one interview we did with him. I looked up at the clock and we had gone 45 minutes without taking a commercial. And that is absolutely unheard of in television.

[Dick Cheney]

He does not have a nuclear weapon. Now, I can't say that. I can say that I know for sure that he's trying to acquire the capability. But the point to be made here is we have to assume there's more there than we know. What we know is the White House.

[Narrator (possibly a Slate Plus host)]

Was also talking to print reporters. On September 8, Judith Miller and Michael Gordon, reporters at the New York Times with high level sources, wrote a splashy story. It suggested that Saddam Hussein was close to getting nuclear weapons if he didn't have them already. US Says Hussein Intensifies Quests for a Bomb Parts, read the headline. Frank Rich was writing an Opinion column for the New York Times in the lead up to the war.

[Ken Adelman]

This is the brilliance of the propagandists at the Bush White House. Dick Cheney, Condi Rice, Donald Rumsell, Colin Powell, all fanned out onto the Sunday morning shows and pointed to what would turn out to be an erroneous New York Times piece as evidence of what was brewing in Iraq and how afraid we should all be. And they could very disingenuously say, look, don't believe us, believe the New York Times.

[Dick Cheney]

There's a story in the New York Times this morning. This is, and I want to attribute to the Times, I don't want to talk about obviously specific intelligence sources, but it's now public that in fact he has been seeking to acquire and we have been able to intercept and prevent him from acquiring the kinds of tubes that are necessary to, to build a centrifuge. And the centrifuge is required in those.

[Ken Adelman]

Appearances on the Sunday morning talk shows. Condi Rice speaking on CNN actually used a quote that was in the Times piece.

[Jane Green]

There will always be some uncertainty about how quickly he can acquire a nuclear weapon, but we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.

[Narrator (possibly a Slate Plus host)]

The mushroom cloud line was cooked up by a Bush speechwriter in the White House Iraq Group. It was originally meant to be deployed in a speech by the President, but the group liked it so much that they started using it earlier. You can see why they found it useful. It was a throwback to Cold War fears of nuclear destruction and the more recent image of the Twin Towers falling in a plume of smoke. It was a vivid response to those who wanted to hold off on declaring war until there was hard evidence. By then we might all be dead. The mushroom cloud line wasn't falsifiable because it didn't make a factual claim. What it did was suggest that Saddam's wmd, if they existed, might be the most terrifying weapons imaginable. President Bush also made a public push on Iraq on WMD. The day after the first anniversary of 9 11, Bush gave a speech at the UN.

[George W. Bush]

Should Iraq acquire fissile material, it would be able to build a nuclear weapon within a year. And Iraq's state controlled media has reported numerous meetings between Saddam Hussein and his nuclear scientists, leaving little doubt about his continued appetite for these weapons.

[Narrator (possibly a Slate Plus host)]

By mid fall, the WMD rollout was in full swing. But support for an Iraq invasion had still declined nearly 20% since the year before. The economy wasn't doing great. People wanted the Bush administration to focus on problems closer to home. President Bush decided it was time for him personally to make the strongest possible case. He made it in a speech in Cincinnati in October. In that speech he hinted at a connection between Iraq and 9 11. In spite of the CIA's findings, we.

[George W. Bush]

Know that Iraq and Al Qaeda have had high level contacts that go back a decade. Some Al Qaeda leaders who fled Afghanistan went to Iraq. These include one very senior Al Qaeda leader who received medical treatment in Baghdad this year and who has been associated with planning for chemical and biological attacks.

[Narrator (possibly a Slate Plus host)]

He threw out some bits of disputed intelligence, one after another.

[George W. Bush]

We've learned that Iraq has trained Al Qaeda members in bomb making and poisons and deadly gases.

[Narrator (possibly a Slate Plus host)]

Bush talked a lot about things that could happen.

[George W. Bush]

Iraq could decide on any given day to provide a biological or chemical weapon to a terrorist group or individual terrorists. Alliance with terrorists could allow the Iraqi regime to attack America without leaving any fingerprints.

[Narrator (possibly a Slate Plus host)]

And he made the threat of a nuclear attack sound imminent in the context of a very big if.

[George W. Bush]

If the Iraqi regime is able to produce, buy or steal an amount of highly enriched uranium a little larger than a single softball, it could have a nuclear weapon in less than a year.

[Narrator (possibly a Slate Plus host)]

And he brought out the administration's favorite sound bite.

[George W. Bush]

Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof, the smoking gun that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.

[Narrator (possibly a Slate Plus host)]

When Robert Draper interviewed President Bush for a book, the President told him that he believed the Cincinnati speech had been unfairly overlooked.

[Robert Draper]

My conclusion actually is that Bush was right. The speech had not gotten the attention that it deserved because both at the time and you know, in history, that speech deserved to be condemned as really the most irresponsible and fact free presidential address up to that point since, say, President Johnson falsely claimed that submarines had been attacked in the Gulf of Tonkin. This was a scenario that I think Bush truly believed. I do not think that he was inventing it just for the audiences sake. But it was irresponsible, it was based on intuition, it was based on his gut, and it was based on his determination that no other attack on American soil take place during his presidency. But it was not based on any intelligence that connected those various dots.

[Narrator (possibly a Slate Plus host)]

So why did Bush feel so much pressure to ratchet up his own rhetoric? Because the administration was on a schedule. You don't launch a new product in the summer and you don't launch a war in the desert then either. March 2003 was set as the target date, the last point at which the military could come in and execute a ground operation before the weather got too hot. Meanwhile, there had actually been troops lined up in Kuwait since September. Officially, they were conducting more military exercises, but that kind of movement signaled to close watchers that war was definitely already in motion. The administration had laid the groundwork. They had even begun the logistics. But they still needed to get a lot of stakeholders on board, like, yes, the American public and Congress and the United nations and a set of potential allies. And they needed to get them on board in less than five months. Next time on Slow Burn. Liberal hawks, neoconservatives, and all the intellectual justifications for going to war.

[Rod Barton]

Even if there was a less than 5% chance of success, I would be morally bound to fight for it and to argue for it.

[Narrator (possibly a Slate Plus host)]

Christopher saying, I've been signaling you, you know, Wolf Witz, tongue in cheek back. I thought so. Or I wondered.

[Dick Cheney]

I wondered.

[Michelle Giaccone]

I did not want to fly the flag. Once they start flying the flag, they're going to go to war.

[Narrator (possibly a Slate Plus host)]

Slow Burn is a production of Slate Plus, Slate's membership program. Slate plus members get bonus episodes of Slow Burn every week, where we'll go behind the scenes into making the show and air clips in interviews that we couldn't fit in here. On this week's bonus episode, you'll be hearing from Michelle Giacconi, who is a producer over at Meet the Press during the run up to the war. Head over to slate.com slowburn to sign up and listen. Now, it's only a dollar for your first month. We couldn't make Slow Burn without the support of Slate plus, so please sign up if you can. Head over to slate.com slowburn and one more note of business. Gary Greco, who you heard from earlier in this episode, wants it to be clear that he was speaking to us in his personal capacity, not on behalf of the dia. Slow Burn is produced by me, Jason De Leon and Sophie Summergrad, with editorial direction by Josh Levine and Gabriel Roth. Our mix engineer is Merritt Jacob. Brendan Angelides composed our theme song. The artwork for Slow Burn is by Jim Cook. Some of the audio you heard in this episode comes from C span. Special thanks to Jared Holt, Lowen Liu, June Thomas, Megan Kallstrom, Rachel Strom, Seth Brown, Chow Tu, Asha Soluja, Katie Rayford, and Avi Zenleman. Thanks for listening.