Who Had the Real Intel on the War

The protesters on the streets knew the war would be a disaster and that, in any case, it was wrong.

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


[Second of two articles dedicated to shame and honor in the Bush era. Read the first here.]

On November 2, 2005, I found myself in a familiar situation — at a protest. This time, it was the New York version of the World Can’t Wait nationwide protest on the first anniversary of George W. Bush’s reelection. In some ways the scene was typical. Heavy police presence for the rally. Lots of police vans. The ubiquitous metal barricades. And that vestigial gift of the August 2004 Republican National Convention in the Big Apple: the NYPD scooter brigade — complete with flexi-cuffs informally used to weaponize the scooters by lashing billy clubs to them.

The police had been called out in force because the kids were out in force. While I saw many of the usual suspects (including my rapidly aging self), the day belonged to throngs of high-school and college kids — some of whom walked out of class, braving suspensions. Many were too young to vote or buy alcohol, though not to enlist in the military. (Go figure.) It was a fired up, diverse crowd that grooved to the excellent musicianship and furious lyrics of the genre-bending Brooklyn quintet, Outernational, and gave it up for speakers ranging from fiery City Councilwoman Margarita Lopez to former diplomat Ann Wright, who called on the crowd to spend Thanksgiving with her and other hearty activist souls at Camp Casey in Crawford, Texas.

Then they took to the streets. Carrying a creative mélange of signs, clad in “Resist Or Die!” t-shirts, and wearing green stickers bearing the words of their signature chant — “Drive out the Bush Regime, The World Can’t Wait!” — they commenced a two-mile march through Manhattan to Times Square. They yelled or sang familiar call-and-response chants. “Whose streets? Our streets!” “What do we want? Peace! When do we want it? Now!” They implored passersby to join the march — and I even saw an elderly man do so. Many drivers in cars smiled or honked horns in support, while office workers in windows above flashed peace signs, cheered, or gave thumbs-up. Then there was the fellow, high above in dress shirt and tie, who held his own home-made sign to a window: “Get a job.” He was met by the expected opprobrium and a chant just for him: “Get a clue! Get a clue!”

Finally, he mouthed back — at least it looked that way to me — “You, get a clue!” And I was reminded of something that is almost never mentioned anymore. I remember well the huge rallies and marches in New York, Washington, and elsewhere as the Bush administration rushed headlong into war, claiming the need to find weapons of mass destruction that were never there and strangle a threat that never existed. It should make you think about who had a clue, and who needed to get one.

In a recent column in the New York Times, Maureen Dowd called attention to a striking Los Angeles Times op-ed by retired Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell’s former chief of staff. He wrote that American “foreign policy had been hijacked by ?a secretive, little-known cabal’ [headed by Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld] that hated dissent.” At the end of her piece, Dowd suggested that President Bush ought to take back the Medal of Freedom he gave to former CIA chief George Tenet and instead award one to Wilkerson.

As striking as Wilkerson’s revelations were, the more striking thing may be that those of us out protesting in the streets before the first shock-and-awe missiles landed on Baghdad didn’t need such information (much as we would then have wished for a voice like his to speak out). We didn’t need the latest intel from generals or politicians or spymasters with top-secret access to reports from the intelligence community. We did better without it. On February 15, 2003, at least 10 million people in 400 cities in 60 countries, across 5 continents saw what was about to happen plenty clearly. They saw that the coming war would be illegitimate, deadly, and destructive. They sensed that invading Iraq would, in the long run, be no cake-walk. They already understood that what the Bush administration so clearly planned to do was based on lies. And they knew it was all wrong — not from the start or months or years later — but before it ever began.

If medals are being given out, perhaps this is what should never be forgotten. It was the “crazies” in the streets. It was kids in weird clothes with strange hair. It was a man holding a puppet and a woman with a homemade sign. They knew then what it took the majority of Americans years to figure out. That the war would be a disaster and that, in any case, it was wrong. Those people, braving a bitterly cold day in New York City in February 2003, had better intel, more foresight, and better judgment than the military, the intelligence agencies, and especially the President and Vice President of the United States and all their advisors.

I can’t get that man with his little sign high in the window out of my head or the thought that facts like these are so easily forgotten. What I might tell him, were he to decide to come down and ask what I thought, is this: Remember well that if you want the real story. If you want the unvarnished truth. If you want the intel that trillions can’t buy. You just might find it in the streets. It might be the only place left where you can actually get a clue.

Nick Turse works in the Department of Epidemiology at Columbia University and is the Associate Editor and Research Director of TomDispatch.com. He has written for the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Village Voice, and regularly for Tomdispatch on the military-corporate complex, the homeland security state, and various other topics.

Copyright 2005 Nick Turse

This piece first appeared at Tomdispatch.com.

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate