The Bush cabal's coercion and corruption of US
intelligence, and its consequences (almost 900 US
soldiers killed in Iraq, and counting...)is a scandal
that far eclipses Watergate or Iran-Contra...The
scapegoating of the CIA, both for the Bush
abomination's pre-9/11 incompetence and its post-9/11
blundering into war and occupation in Iraq, is a
national disgrace for which much of the US Senate and
almost all of the "US mainstream news media" are also
complicit...and indeed their complicity and
capitulation, which continues even now, is of far
greater danger than the Bush abomination's own
egregious wrongs...
Ray McGovern, www.tompaine.com: "I too am appalled—and angry. You give 27 years of your professional life to an institution whose main mission—to get at the truth—is essential for orderly policy making, and then you find it has been prostituted. You realize that
your former colleagues lacked the moral courage to
rebuff efforts to enlist them as accomplices in
deception. Deception that involved hoodwinking our
elected representatives into giving their blessing to
an ill-conceived, unnecessary war. Even Republican
stalwart Sen. Pat Roberts, chairman of the Senate
Intelligence Committee, has conceded that, had
Congress known before the vote for war what his
committee has now discovered, “I doubt if the votes
would have been there.”
Repudiate the 9/11 Cover-Up and the Iraq War Lies,
Show Up for Democracy in 2004: Defeat Bush (again!)
http://www.tompaine.com/articles/corrupted_intelligence.php
Corrupted Intelligence
Ray McGovern
July 12, 2004
McGovern and other veteran intelligence officers spent
the weekend digesting the Senate Intelligence
Committee report and ended up sick to their stomachs.
Not only did the report confirm what they already
knew—that the CIA skewed intelligence—but corruption
ran much deeper, with analysts cooking up outright
lies. In the wake of the report, McGovern worries
media across the political spectrum aren't doing their
job. They are buying without question the
administration spin about the Senate report: that the
White House lead the nation to war because of bad
intelligence, rather than ill-conceived policy.
Ray McGovern, a CIA analyst for 27 years, is
co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for
Sanity.
In our various oral and written presentations on Iraq,
my veteran intelligence officer colleagues and I took
no delight in sharply criticizing what we perceived to
be the corruption of intelligence analysis at CIA.
Nothing would have pleased us more than to have been
proven wrong. It turns out we did not know the half
of it.
Several of us have just spent a painful weekend
digesting the report of the Senate Intelligence
Committee on prewar intelligence assessments on Iraq.
The corruption is far deeper than we suspected. The
only silver lining is that corrupter-in-chief George
Tenet is now gone.
When the former CIA director departed, he left behind
an agency on life support—an institution staffed by
sycophant managers and thoroughly demoralized
analysts, who are embarrassed at their own naiveté in
believing that the passage carved into the marble at
the entrance to CIA Headquarters—“You will know the
truth, and the truth will set you free”—held real
meaning for their work.
The Senate Committee report is meticulous. Its
findings are a sharp blow to those of us who took
pride in working in an agency where we could speak
truth to power—with career protection from retribution
from the powerful, and with leaders who would face
down those policymakers who tried to exert undue
influence over our analysis.
Enter “Joe Centrifuge”
Although it was clear to us that much of the
intelligence on Iraq had been cooked to the recipe of
policy, not until the Senate report did we know that
the skewing included outright lies. We had heard of
“Joe,” the nuclear weapons analyst in CIA’s Center for
Weapons Intelligence and Arms Control, and it was
abundantly clear that his agenda was to “prove” that
the infamous aluminum tubes sought by Iraq were to be
used for developing a nuclear weapon. We did not know
that he and his CIA associates deliberately falsified
the data—including rotor testing ironically called
“spin tests.”
The Senate committee determined that “Joe”
deliberately skewed data to fit preconceptions
regarding an Iraqi nuclear threat. “Who could have
believed that about our intelligence community, that
the system could be so dishonest?” wondered the
normally soft-spoken David Albright, a widely
respected veteran expert on Iraq’s work toward
developing a nuclear weapon.
I share his wonderment. I too am appalled—and angry.
You give 27 years of your professional life to an
institution whose main mission—to get at the truth—is
essential for orderly policy making, and then you find
it has been prostituted. You realize that your former
colleagues lacked the moral courage to rebuff efforts
to enlist them as accomplices in deception. Deception
that involved hoodwinking our elected representatives
into giving their blessing to an ill-conceived,
unnecessary war. Even Republican stalwart Sen. Pat
Roberts, chairman of the Senate Intelligence
Committee, has conceded that, had Congress known
before the vote for war what his committee has now
discovered, “I doubt if the votes would have been
there.”
Catering To The Powers That Be
It turns out that only one U.S. analyst had met with
the Iraqi defector appropriately codenamed
“Curveball”—the source of the scary tale about mobile
biological weapons factories—and that this analyst, in
an e-mail to the deputy director of CIA’s task force
on weapons of mass destruction, raised strong doubt
regarding Curveball’s reliability before Colin Powell
highlighted his claims at the United Nations on Feb.
5, 2003. I almost became physically ill reading the
cynical response from the deputy director of the task
force:
"As I said last night, let’s keep in mind the fact
that this war’s going to happen regardless of what
Curveball said or didn’t say, and the powers that be
probably aren’t terribly interested in whether
Curveball knows what he’s talking about.”
(Reading this brought to consciousness a painful
flashback to early August 1964. We CIA analysts knew
that reports of a second attack on U.S. destroyers in
the Tonkin Gulf were spurious but were prevented from
reporting that. The director of current intelligence
explained to us condescendingly that President Johnson
had decided to use the non-incident as a pretext to
escalate the war and that “we do not want to wear out
our welcome at the White House.” So this kind of
politicization, though rare in the past, is not
without precedent—and not without similarly woeful
consequences.)
With respect to Iraq, George Tenet’s rhetoric about
“truth” and “honesty” in his valedictory last week has
a distinctly Orwellian ring. Worse still, apparently
“Joe Centrifuge,” the abovementioned deputy director,
and other co-conspirators will get off scot-free.
Sen. Roberts says he thinks, “It is very important
that we quit looking in the rearview mirror and
affixing blame and, you know, pointing fingers.” And
Acting Director John McLaughlin has told the press
that he sees no need to dismiss anyone as a result of
what he portrayed as honest, limited mistakes.
Tell It To The Families
I would like to hear Roberts and McLaughlin explain
all this to the families of the almost 900 U.S.
servicemen and women already killed and the many
thousand seriously wounded in Iraq.
Roberts seemed at pains to lay the blame on a “flawed
system,” but a close reading of the committee report
yields the unavoidable conclusion that CIA analysis
can no longer be assumed to be honest—to be aimed at
getting as close to the truth as one can humanly get.
For those of you cynics about to smirk, I can only
tell you—believe it or not—that truth was in fact the
currency of analysis in the CIA in which I was proud
to serve.
Aberrations like the Tonkin Gulf cave-in
notwithstanding, the analysis directorate was widely
known as the unique place in Washington where one
could normally go and expect a straight answer
unencumbered by any political agenda. And we were
hard into some very controversial—often
critical—national security issues. It boggles my mind
how any president, and particularly one whose father
headed the CIA, could expect to be able, without that
capability, to make intelligent judgments based on
unbiased fact.
It is said that truth is the first casualty of war.
Sadly, in the case of Iraq, even before the war, truth
took a back seat to a felt need to snuggle up to
power—to stay in good standing with a president and
his advisers, all well known to be hell-bent on war on
Iraq.
Caution: Don’t Be Fooled
The Washington Times lead story on July 10 began:
“Flawed intelligence led the United States to invade
Iraq was the fault of the US intelligence community…a
report by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence
concluded yesterday.” From the other end of the
political spectrum, David Corn of The Nation led his
own report with, “The United States went to war on
the basis of false claims.”
Not so. This is precisely the spin that the Bush
administration wants to give to the Senate report; i.
e., that the president was misled; that his decision
for war was based on spurious intelligence about
non-existent weapons of mass destruction.
But the president’s decision for war had little to do
with intelligence on Iraqi weapons of mass
destruction. It had everything to do with the
administration’s determination to gain control of
strategic, oil-rich Iraq, implant an enduring military
presence there, and—not incidentally—eliminate any
possible threat from Iraq to Israel’s security.
These, of course, are not the reasons given to justify
placing U.S. troops in harm's way, but even the most
circumspect senior officials have had unguarded
moments of candor. For example, when asked in May
2003 why North Korea was being treated differently
from Iraq, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz
responded, “Let’s look at it simply…The country (Iraq)
swims on a sea of oil.”
And basking in the glory of “Mission Accomplished”
shortly after Baghdad had been taken, Wolfowitz
admitted that the focus on weapons of mass destruction
to justify the attack on Iraq was “for bureaucratic
reasons.” It was, he added, “the one reason everyone
could agree on”—meaning, of course, the one that could
successfully sell the war to Congress and the American
people.
The Israel factor? In another moment of unusual
candor—this one before the war—Philip Zelikow, a
member of the President’s Foreign Intelligence
Advisory Board from 2001 to 2003 (and now executive
director of the 9/11 commission), pointed to the
danger that Iraq posed to Israel as “the unstated
threat—a threat that dare not speak its name…because
it is not a popular sell.
Last, but hardly least, it was not until several
months after the Bush White House decided to make war
on Iraq that the weapons-of-mass-destruction-laden
National Intelligence Estimate was commissioned, and
then only because Congress needed to be persuaded that
the threat was so immediate that war was necessary.
Vice President Dick Cheney set the main parameters in
a major speech on Aug. 26, 2002, in which he declared,
"We know that Saddam has resumed his efforts to
acquire nuclear weapons." The estimate Tenet signed
dutifully endorsed that spurious judgment—with "high
confidence," no less.
Is There Hope?
If hope is what was found at the bottom of Pandora’s
box, it can be found here too. That there are still
honest, perceptive analysts at CIA is clear from the
analysis that Anonymous sets forth in his excellent
book, Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War
on Terror . (Note to Condoleezza Rice: Anonymous’
name is Michael Scheuer; he is an overt employee; you
can get his extension from the CIA operator.)
As long as analysts of that caliber hang in there,
there can be hope that, once the CIA is given the
adult supervision it has lacked for the last 25 years,
it can fulfill its critical mission for our country.