2+2=4
Ray McGovern, www.tompaine.com: That there was no NIE before that decision speaks volumes. Clearly, those around the president who were bent on war with Iraq did not want an honest assessment of the dubious "threat" it posed. Indeed, honest intelligence had already infected both Powell and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice to the point that they had declared publicly in 2001 that Iraq had been contained and that it posed no threat to its neighbors, much less to the United States.
Repudiate the 9/11 Cover-Up and the Iraq War Lies,
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http://www.tompaine.com/feature2.cfm/ID/9991
Case Closed
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.
Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice
to deceive. But when we’ve practiced for a while, we
markedly improve our style.
A time-honored aphorism. And the second-sentence
Karl-Rove-corollary has been applied with consummate
skill—until now. The web is unraveling.
Chief U.S. weapons inspector David Kay cut the main
strand last month, making it clear that the president
and his advisors were wrong to claim that war was
necessary to "disarm" Saddam Hussein of "weapons of
mass destruction." There were none.
Kay’s refreshing honesty threw a wrench in the works
of the White House PR machine, which remains in a
state of disrepair. The commission that President Bush
handpicked this month to investigate the performance
of his own administration and to report after the
November election was widely seen as disingenuous.
Perhaps the most telling sign of disarray in the White
House was the president’s decision, in effect, to do
it to himself. Against the better judgment of his
advisors, he insisted on submitting to an unscripted
interview Sunday on Meet The Press. His nervous,
defensive performance proved them right and hastened
the unraveling.
The most eerie coincidence was the decision to have
CIA Director George Tenet go to Georgetown University
on Feb. 5 to give an apologia-without-apology for the
intelligence underpinning for the war on Iraq. It was
the first anniversary of Secretary of State Colin
Powell’s masterful but—we now know—spurious U.N.
performance six weeks before the war. Tenet’s rhetoric
rivaled Powell’s in what Socrates called "making the
worse cause appear the better."
Like Vice President Dick Cheney last July, Tenet set
out to defend the indefensible—the National
Intelligence Estimate (NIE) that got it so wrong about
"weapons of mass destruction" in Iraq. I remember
thinking last summer, Why would Cheney choose to cite
conclusions that had already been thrown into great
doubt? Listening to Tenet do the same thing six months
later—and after Kay’s findings—added to my puzzlement.
Their focus on last fall’s NIE, "Iraq’s Continuing
Programs for Weapons of Mass Destruction" (the very
title got it wrong) seemed at first self-defeating.
Then I realized that this focus serves to obscure the
fact that the decision for war predated the estimate
by several months. That decision was made, at the
latest, by spring 2002.
That there was no NIE before that decision speaks
volumes. Clearly, those around the president who were
bent on war with Iraq did not want an honest
assessment of the dubious "threat" it posed. Indeed,
honest intelligence had already infected both Powell
and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice to the
point that they had declared publicly in 2001 that
Iraq had been contained and that it posed no threat to
its neighbors, much less to the United States.
Sadly, given the well-known proclivities of Cheney and
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Tenet shied away
from serving up an estimate that conveyed how little
the intelligence community knew about any residual
threat from Iraq.
Tenet managed to keep his head down until September
2002, when the White House asked Congress to give its
blessing to war on Iraq. The Senate Intelligence
Committee woke up to the bizarre fact that no NIE had
been prepared and formally asked Tenet to produce one.
By then, however, Cheney, in a major speech on Aug.
26, had set the terms of reference. Clearly, Tenet was
instructed to provide an estimate with retroactive
support for Cheney’s alarming claims regarding Iraq’s
"weapons of mass destruction."
Tenet picked his most trusted—and malleable—aide,
Robert Walpole, to chair an NIE that left honest
intelligence analysts holding their noses. That NIE
became the centerpiece of an incredibly cynical
campaign playing on the trauma of 9/11 to deceive our
elected representatives into forfeiting to the
president their constitutional prerogative to declare
war.
One is left wondering: How did they think they could
get away with it?
The answer is embarrassingly simple. Don’t you
remember? It was to be a cakewalk. The vice president
and others assured us that U.S. troops would be
welcomed as liberators. They would be met with cut
flowers, not roadside bombs. The "evil dictator" would
be gone. And then who would care if it were eventually
discovered that the case for war was manufactured out
of whole cloth?
Yes, I think this is what they really believed. And
they were not about to listen to cautions that
undercut their "faith-based intelligence."
Now, bogged down in the sands of Iraq with over 500
troops already killed, the White House is without a
clue as to what to do next.
Perhaps worst of all, since the president has condoned
big-time politicization of the intelligence community,
he now has nowhere to turn for an objective assessment
of the challenges ahead.
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Published: Feb 19 2004