Ray McGovern/www.tompaine.com: There was no NIE because Tenet realized that an honest one would show how little the intelligence community knew about the threat from Iraq and would hardly support a case for war. And so, consummate bureaucrat that he is, he kept his head down for as long as he could.
Repudiate the 9/11 Cover-Up and the Iraq War Lies,
Show Up for Democracy in 2004: Defeat Bush (again!)
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/020804B.shtml
Still Smoke and Mirrors
By Ray McGovern
TomPaine.com
Friday 06 February 2004
Ray McGovern, a 27-year career analyst with the CIA,
is co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals
for Sanity and co-director of the Servant Leadership
School, an outreach ministry in the inner city of
Washington, DC.
For some reason February 5 has been chosen two
years running for rhetoric aimed at what Socrates
termed "making the worse cause appear the better"—last
year by Secretary of State Colin Powell at the UN and
Thursday by CIA Director George Tenet at Georgetown
University.
As with Powell's spurious depiction of the threat
from Iraq, Tenet's disingenuous tour de force becomes
more embarrassing the closer you look.
Tenet chose to defend the indefensible—the bogus
National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) hurriedly
conjured up in September 2002 to support spurious
charges made by Vice President Dick Cheney on August
26, 2002, in beating the drum for war on Iraq. The
conclusions of that estimate have now been proven—pure
and simple—wrong.
Even so, that is not the most important point.
What all should know is that the Bush administration's
decision for war against Iraq came well before any
intelligence estimate. There is ample evidence that
that decision was made, at the latest, by spring 2002.
That there was no NIE before that speaks volumes.
During my 27 years of service as a CIA analyst, never
was a foreign policy decision of that magnitude made
without first commissioning a National Intelligence
Estimate. Why did Tenet not take the initiative and
see that one was done? Surely, if he did not know that
decisions on war and peace were being made at the
White House and Pentagon in early 2002, he was the
only one in Washington so unaware.
There was no NIE because Tenet realized that an
honest one would show how little the intelligence
community knew about the threat from Iraq and would
hardly support a case for war. And so, consummate
bureaucrat that he is, he kept his head down for as
long as he could.
It was only when the somnolent senator from
Florida, Bob Graham—then Chair of the Senate
Intelligence Committee—was nudged awake by committee
colleague Dick Durbin that Graham agreed, yes, it did
seem odd that no NIE had been prepared. And especially
odd at a time when Congress was being asked to cede to
the president its constitutional prerogative to
declare war.
So Graham called Tenet, and Tenet got the
go-ahead from his masters in the White House—with the
proviso that the estimate's conclusions dovetail with
the case for war just made by Cheney. Tenet saluted,
and then picked his most malleable manager, Robert
Walpole, to ensure that a politically correct NIE was
produced.
In other words, the purpose of the estimate was
not to inform an (already reached) decision on whether
war was necessary. Rather, it was to enlist
intelligence in the campaign to deceive Congress into
thinking that Iraq posed such a threat that the
legislative branch's prerogative must be surrendered
to the president, and—not incidentally—to make so
persuasive a case to the nation that those who dared
vote against the president would be highly vulnerable
in the mid-term election of 2002. That worked, too.
Thanks to inspector David Kay's refreshing
honesty, we now know that Cheney's charges, and the
cognate conclusions of the estimate, were bogus.
The NIE: Lynchpin Or Window-Dressing?
Am I saying that the fall 2002 Estimate on Iraq's
"weapons of mass destruction" was irrelevant? In the
narrow sense that it was ex post facto the decision
for war, yes.It was decidedly NOT the "lynchpin of the
Bush administration's case for invasion," that former
CIA analyst and Iraq specialist Kenneth Pollack
recently claimed it was.
But enlisting the intelligence community in a
deliberate campaign to mislead our elected
representatives into surrendering their power under
the Constitution—that is highly relevant, and
unconscionable. In 40 years of following such issues
quite closely, I have never seen politicization of
intelligence so cynical, so sustained, so
consequential. And I was there for Vietnam.
Bob Graham voted against the war. But he was
never able to stay awake long enough to tell his
colleagues they were being conned. His behavior, and
that of House Intelligence Committee Porter Goss, give
an entirely new meaning to the word "oversight"
customarily used to describe their committees'
function.
The Tenet Speech On Thursday
"Now I am sure you are asking: Why haven't we
found the weapons? I have told you the search must
continue and it will be difficult."
But, Mr. Tenet, it has been over 10 months since
we invaded Iraq. Your former chief inspector David Kay
concluded "probably 85 percent of the significant
things" have now been found—but no WMD. And his
successor, Charles Duelfer told the press four weeks
ago "the prospect of finding chemical weapons,
biological weapons is close to nil at this point." On
what basis do you now say "we are nowhere near 85
percent finished"?
Tenet is obediently arguing the administration's
brief that the search for WMD is far from over and
that it will, in Cheney's words, "take some additional
considerable period of time in order to look in all
the cubbyholes and ammo dumps." A safe guess is that
the administration's current plan is to drag out the
quest until after the election in November.
Taking his cue from Cheney, Defense Secretary
Rumsfeld, in testimony before Congress on Wednesday,
also stressed the need for additional time. And
yesterday, in an unguarded moment, Rumsfeld gave the
game away, when he disparaged David Kay's judgment on
the status of the search for WMD:
"Kay said we're about 85 percent complete. Tenet
said what I said: there's work yet to be done."
Indeed, Tenet says what Rumsfeld. . . and Cheney
say. Tenet is the quintessential "team player," an
attribute antithetical to his statutory duty to tell
the emperor when he had no clothes on. Former House
speaker Newt Gingrich, like Cheney a frequent visitor
to CIA Headquarters, recently told the press, "George
Tenet is so grateful to the president [presumably for
not firing him on Sept. 12, 2001] that he will do
anything for him."
Are you surprised that intelligence has been
politicized?
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Posted by richard at February 8, 2004 01:13 PM