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bismi-lLahi-rRahmani-rRahiem
In the Name of Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful
=== News Update ===
Can We Let Intelligence Officials Lie With Impunity?”
By Ray McGovern and W. Patrick Lang
01/05/06 "Information Clearing House" -- -- Lies have consequences . All
those who helped President George W. Bush launch a war of aggression—
termed by Nuremberg “the supreme international crime”—have blood on
their hands and must be held accountable. This includes corrupt
intelligence officials. Otherwise, look for them to perform the same
service in facilitating war on Iran.
“They should have been shot,” said former State Department intelligence
director, Carl Ford, referring to ex-CIA director George Tenet and his
deputy John McLaughlin, for their “fundamentally dishonest” cooking of
intelligence to please the White House. Ford was alluding to
“intelligence” on the menacing but non-existent mobile biological
weapons laboratories in Iraq.
Ford was angry that Tenet and McLaughlin persisted in portraying the
labs as real several months after they had been duly warned that they
existed only in the imagination of intelligence analysts who, in their
own eagerness to please, had glommed onto second-hand tales told by a
con-man appropriately dubbed “Curveball.” In fact, Tenet and McLaughlin
had been warned about Curveball long before they let then-Secretary of
State Colin Powell shame himself, and the rest of us, by peddling
Curveball’s wares at the U.N. Security Council on February 5, 2003.
After the war began, those same analysts, still “leaning forward,”
misrepresented a tractor-trailer found in Iraq outfitted with industrial
equipment as one of the mobile bio-labs. Former U.N. weapons inspector
David Kay, then working for NBC News, obliged by pointing out the
equipment “where the biological process took place... Literally, there
is nothing else for which it could be used.”
George Tenet knows a good man when he sees him. A few weeks later he
hired Kay to lead the Pentagon-created Iraq Survey Group in the famous
search to find other (equally non-existent, it turned out) “weapons of
mass destruction.” (Eventually Kay, a scientist given to empirical
evidence more than faith-based intelligence, became the skunk at the
picnic when, in January 2004, he insisted on telling senators the truth:
“We were almost all wrong—and I certainly include myself here.” But
that came later.)
On May 28, 2003, CIA’s intrepid analysts cooked up a fraudulent six-page
report claiming that the trailer discovered earlier in May was proof
they had been right about Iraq’s “bio-weapons labs.” They then
performed what could be called a “night-time requisition,” getting the
only Defense Intelligence Agency analyst sympathetic to their position
to provide DIA “coordination,” (which was subsequently withdrawn by
DIA). On May 29, President George W. Bush, visiting Poland, proudly
announced on Polish TV, “We have found the weapons of mass destruction.”
When the State Department's Intelligence and Research (INR) analysts
realized that this was not some kind of Polish joke, they “went
ballistic,” according to Ford, who immediately warned Colin Powell that
there was a problem. Tenet must have learned of this quickly, for he
called Ford on the carpet, literally, the following day. No shrinking
violet, Ford held his ground. He told Tenet and McLaughlin, “That report
is one of the worst intelligence assessments I’ve ever read.”
This vignette—and several like it—are found in Hubris: The Inside Story
of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War by Michael Isikoff and
David Corn, who say Ford is still angry over the fraudulent paper. Ford
told the authors:
It was clear that they [Tenet and McLaughlin] had been
personally involved in the preparation of the report... It
wasn’t just that it was wrong. They lied.
This, of course, was just one episode in the long drama of deliberate
perversion of intelligence to grease the skids for justifying the
invasion of Iraq—the most serious foreign policy blunder in our nation’s
230-year history.
“Hubris,” the overweening arrogance that brought down many a protagonist
of the Greek tragedies, is an aptly-chosen title for the revealing
Isikoff/Corn study. Some of the ground they cover is familiar to us
Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), who well before
the war started chronicling the Bush administration’s lies. What makes
the book different is its cumulative impact—the detailed, first-hand
accounts of lie and cover-up, lie and cover-up, ad nauseam .
Protagonists need a supporting cast. And many of the dramatis personae
were intelligence analysts—former colleagues of mine. The question
lingers: How could they allow themselves to be seduced into enlisting in
the meretricious march to mayhem in Iraq? Much of the answer (and much
of the reason this misguided war is allowed to continue) lies in the
fact that those planning and facilitating the war in Iraq are not
fighting it. Unlike Vietnam, no one “important” is being asked to put
life and limb at risk; nor, generally speaking, are their children.
Interestingly, most of our troops come from towns with populations of
less than 10,000.
Theirs Not To Reason Why
Into the valley of death rode the 3,000. “U.S. Toll in Iraq Reaches
3,000” screamed The Washington Post ’s lead story on New Year’s Day,
which included the Pentagon’s count of more than 22,000 troops
injured. As is known, the Pentagon does not count dead Iraqis, but
reputable estimates put that number at about 650,000. As we pass this
sad milestone, it behooves us to pause and consider the enormity of what
has been allowed to happen—and how to prevent it from happening
again. The House and Senate Intelligence committees in the new Congress
need to reinstitute genuine oversight, including a close look at why so
many intelligence officers cooperated in the dishonesty leading to
war. We owe that to the 25,000, not to mention the 650,000.
Start with Tenet and McLaughlin and include Alan Foley, the retired
chief of CIA’s Center for Weapons Intelligence, Nonproliferation and
Arms Control (WINPAC) and devotee of imaginative intelligence on bio-
labs, uranium from Niger, aluminum tubes and other artifices to justify
an unnecessary war. Most of the suspects owe their meteoric careers in
large measure to Defense Secretary Robert Gates who, as head of CIA
analysis and later as CIA director, institutionalized the politicization
of CIA analysis more than 20 years ago, mostly by moving malleable
managers up the pay scale.
Another beneficiary of Gates is George Tenet who, as staff director of
the Senate Intelligence committee in 1991, helped Gates overcome strong
opposition to his confirmation as director. It is a safe bet that Gates
returned the favor by recommending that Tenet be kept on as director
when George W. Bush became president in 2001.
Gates learned well at the knee of his original mentor, William Casey,
President Ronald Reagan’s CIA director. They and those that followed had
remarkable success in perpetrating the dual crime of which, long ago,
Socrates was accused: making the worse case appear the better and
corrupting the youth. Thus, in September 2002 when Senate Intelligence
committee Democrats Dick Durban and Bob Graham insisted on a National
Intelligence Estimate on “weapons of mass destruction” before Congress
voted for war, George Tenet found himself the ultimate beneficiary of
Robert Gates’ finely tuned Geiger counter for corruptibility. The pliant
managers promoted originally by Gates were happy to conjure up a formal
estimate written to the specifications of their frequent visitor, Vice
President Dick Cheney.
Those who tell consequential lies need to be held accountable. That
includes, of course, Colin Powell. Congress needs to ask the former
Secretary of State why he decided to disregard the objections of his own
intelligence analysts and turned instead to faith-based intelligence for
war. He has expressed regret for his scandalous performance at the U.N.,
but only because it put “a blot on my record.” I would like to see him
try that out on Cindy Sheehan and 3,000 other bereaved mothers.
Powell and I grew up a mile from each other in the Bronx. There we had a
word for his forte, which remains a ubiquitous scourge in Washington.
It was both noun and verb: “brownnose.” And it has nothing to do with
skin color. It was a familiar word before I learned
“sycophant.” Webster’s provides this meaning: “To ingratiate oneself
with, to curry favor with; from the implication that servility is
equivalent to kissing the hinder parts of the person from whom
advancement is sought.”
Rep. Lloyd Doggett, D, Texas, put the effects of all this most
succinctly in a floor speech last year:
This war was launched without an immediate threat to our
families... Radical "know-it-all" ideologues here in Washington
bent facts, distorted intelligence and perpetrated lies designed
to mislead the American people into believing a third-rate thug
had a hand in the 9/11 tragedy and was soon to unleash a
mushroom cloud.
Much is being said today about honoring the sacrifices of our fallen
soldiers. Perhaps the best way to do that is to find out who did the
misleading and hold them to account before they do it again
Ray McGovern was an Army infantry/intelligence officer before his 27-
year career as a CIA analyst. W. Patrick Lang, a retired Army colonel,
served with Special Forces in Vietnam, as a professor at West Point and
as Defense Intelligence Officer for the Middle East (DIA). Both are with
Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.
source:
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article16069.htm
===
-muslim voice-
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BECAUSE YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO KNOW
