Posted on 07/25/2005 10:03:04 PM PDT by Sam Hill
Ex-CIA Accuse Bush of Manipulating Iraq Evidence
Monday, March 17, 2003
WASHINGTON — Invoking
the name of a Pentagon whistle-blower, a small group of retired, anti-war CIA officers are accusing the Bush administration of manipulating evidence against Iraq in order to push war while burying evidence that could show Iraq's compliance with U.N demands for disarmament.
The 25-member group, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, composed mostly of former CIA analysts along with a few operational agents, is urging employees inside the intelligence agency to break the law and leak any information they have that could show the Bush administration is engineering the release of evidence to match its penchant for war.
VIPS member Ray McGovern, a 27-year CIA veteran who gave intelligence briefings to top Reagan officials before retiring in 1990, said the administration has not made the case that Iraq has ties to Al Qaeda and is providing information that does not meet an intelligence professional's standard of proof.
"It's been cooked to a recipe, and the recipe is high policy," McGovern said. "That's why a lot of my former colleagues are holding their noses these days."
But the CIA said McGovern doesn't have any authority to speak of the quality of intelligence policy-makers are reviewing.
"He left the agency over a decade ago," spokesman Mark Mansfield said. "He's hardly in a position to comment knowledgeably on that subject."
VIPS say their appeals to CIA staff are an attempt to evoke another Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers, a top-secret study on U.S. involvement in Vietnam.
Leaking classified national defense information is illegal, and CIA officers, who take a secrecy oath when they join could lose their security clearances or jobs, and may even face prosecution...
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
You're right. I was being too kind. They are just slightly less crazy.
Well, then, why isn't anybody talking about the things we're talking about?
They will be :-)
Thanks. I like calling a spade a spade and those two are. :-)
From your keyboard, to GOD's ear.
Note the names that show up in this documentary which was RELEASED in December 2003--which means it was made in the fall of 2003:
The New York Times UNCOVERED: THE WAR ON IRAQ Movie Review
http://movies2.nytimes.com/mem/movies/review.html?title1=Uncovered%3A+The+War+on+Iraq+(Movie)
FILM REVIEW; Revisiting The Road To Iraq War, Step by Step
By DAVE KEHR
Published: August 20, 2004, Friday
With Michael Moore's ''Fahrenheit 9/11'' approaching $150 million in worldwide grosses, it's hardly surprising that more political documentaries are turning up in theaters. Robert Greenwald's ''Uncovered: The War on Iraq'' began as a 58-minute DVD release in December 2003, and has now been expanded, with financial support from MoveOn.org and the Center for American Progress, into a 90-minute theatrical film that opens today in New York, Boston and Washington.
UNCOVERED
The War on Iraq
Produced and directed by Robert Greenwald; edited by Chris Gordan, Kimberly Ray and Deborah Zeitman; released by Cinema Libre. Running time: 83 minutes. This film is not rated.
WITH: David Albright, Robert Baer, Milt Bearden, Rand Beers, Bill Christison, David Corn, Philip Coyle, John Dean, Patrick Eddington, Chas Freeman, Graham Fuller, Mel Goodman, Larry C. Johnson, David A. Kay, John Brady Kiesling, Karen Kwiatkowski, Patrick Lang, David C. MacMichael, Ray McGovern, Scott Ritter, Clare Short, Stansfield Turner, Henry Waxman, Thomas E. White, Joseph C. Wilson, Col. Mary Ann Wright and Peter Zimmerman.
Because WE always find things out first! :-)
That's some list! YUCK!
"composed mostly of former CIA analysts along with a few operational agents"
That's a pretty funny distinction, isn't it? Since Larry Johnson was only ever an analyst. And yet he began his radio response for the Democrats by saying that he and Plame were both under cover the minute they started at CIA.
There might be the odd loyal democrat but I doubt it.. What the entire party stands for is against a free republic.. The mostly democrat State Department is another security risk.. national security is joke.. because of that..
I read that yesterday (now I can't find the damned link to macmind.blogspot.com--that's not the url), and actually it had the opposite effect on me. This stuff is coming out. I hope the right-leaning media get on top of it.
* Ray McGovern
Ray McGovern is the frequent William Rivers Pitt (DU SuperStar) source who "knew Joe Wilson well enough to know" that his wife was an undercover agent. Ray McGovern is the guy who participated in a 9/11 conspiracy theory panel [http://www.911truth.org/newyork.html] along with Cynthia McKinney, Michael Ruppert (From the Wilderness), Wayne Madsen, Pitt and Medea Benjamin. Ray McGovern is affiliated with Lyndon LaRouche. 7 posted on 01/21/2004 8:44:57 PM PST by seamole
SEPTEMBER 30, 2004 : (DRAFT MYTH : RAY MCGOVERN WRITES ARTICLE THAT APPEARS ON THE WEB PAGES OF THE MUSLIM AMERICAN SOCIETY : IN IT HE CLAIMS THERE IS GOING TO BE A DRAFT AFTER THE ELECTION) It’s not an “if.” It’s a “when.” Pentagon officials have indicated that they plan to send as many as 15,000 additional troops during the first four months of 2005, and the President George W. Bush continues to insist “we will stay the course” until Iraq is stabilized. (I do wish his advisers would provide a different vocabulary so that those of us steeped in the mistakes regarding Vietnam could be spared painful flashbacks.) Where will the additional troops come from? The Bush administration insists there will be no draft, but its credibility has been badly tarnished. The “backdoor draft” that... -----------------Lots More Troops To Iraq... After the Election Muslim American Society ^ | 30 Sep 2004 | Ray McGovern
Ping
Has he ever gone after any Democrats before? I picked up bits and pieces of the Sunday talk shows, and nobody seemed to suggest anything other than trouble for the White House, if indeed indictments do come down. I wonder are these media guys whistling past the graveyard or do they know something we don't. Gosh how I do hope this ends up biting the bad guys in the backside for once.
I voted for it! |
ARMOR FOR IRAQ?  |
Before I voted against it! |
 |
"I know Joseph Wilson well enough to know,” said McGovern in a telephone conversation we had today, “that his wife was in fact a deep cover operative running a network of informants on what is supposedly this administration’s first-priority issue: Weapons of mass destruction."
McGovern retired in 1990. Plame was not in deep cover at that time. She never left the country until after the Gulf War, and that was to attend the London School Of Economics.
So if what McGovern said is true, he wouldn't have been in a position to hear of it without somebody breaking the law.
Former CIA official looks to leak the truth
CHELSEA CONABOY, Concord Monitor. Concord, N.H.: Oct 5, 2004. pg. B.01
Copyright Concord Monitor/Sunday Monitor Oct 5, 2004
Retired CIA intelligence analyst Ray McGovern knows more than he can say. He won't talk, for instance, about what was discussed behind closed doors on the mornings when he would issue President George H.W. Bush his daily intelligence briefings.
McGovern spent 27 years in a position where secrecy was part of his job description. But for the last few months, he and a group of other former tight-lipped agents have been speaking out. Now he is asking others who are still within the system to break through layers of classification to leak what McGovern said is the truth about the war in Iraq and the junior Bush administration.
McGovern spent the latter half of last week touring the state. He gave presentations at Dartmouth College and in Rochester during the week and at the South Congregational Church in Concord Friday night.
He and his fellow whistleblowers call themselves Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity. The group has about 45 members and has expanded since it first began in January 2003 to include not just CIA analysts but also former State Department employees and members of the FBI.
The former analysts sought each other out just before the start of the declared war on Iraq because, like their name implies, they needed a sanity check, McGovern said. They needed to compare notes on what they saw going on in the Bush administration and in the media.
"What we hoped, of course, was that the movement would become more than the sum of its parts," he said during a conversation with the Monitor before his presentation Friday.
The group has written letters to President Bush and General Secretary of the United Nations Kofi Annan and opinion pieces for online publications like Common Dreams and Salon.com.
The first analysis the CIA veterans took on together was of Colin Powell's speech before the United Nations on Feb. 5. McGovern said it was a challenge to see if the retirees still knew how to analyze like they once did.
"It was heady stuff, but it was really rigorous," he said.
Powell supplied charts and graphs detailing the location of chemical bunkers and ballistic missile-toting trucks and explaining Iraq's terrorist activity. The group finished their analysis the same day.
Their findings: Powell presented a lawyer's brief, a technical argument that was not forthcoming with fact. It was not a convincing case for war, McGovern said.
McGovern said a prostitution of the intelligence system has taken place. Some of its leaders have sold out and backed down under the pressure of the administration. Former CIA director George Tenet did not step up and explain that there was no concrete evidence to support the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, he said. Real analysis would have presented inappropriate answers in the eyes of an administration that McGovern said had long before decided to go to war with Iraq.
Now, more than a year and half since the war was declared, McGovern asks his audiences, "Are we safer?"
"Unequivocally, no," he said. "We're not."
The Arab people all watch TV at night and have seen stories coming out of Abu Ghraib and Fallujah, he said. They have seen U.S.-built bulldozers wreaking havoc on the West Bank and the Gaza strip.
"We've created the longest recruiting lines Al Qaeda ever had," he said.
McGovern said the administration has been untruthful about the condition in Iraq. He said he thinks the CIA is being asked to withhold the truth from the American public.
In an essay called "High Time for Bush to Tell the Truth," published on Antiwar.com last Thursday, McGovern writes about how in 1968 Gen. William Westmoreland put an artificial ceiling on the reported number of armed Vietnamese Communists. It was an election year.
When the Tet offensive occurred and the National Liberation Front attacked nearly every city in South Vietnam, the actual strength and number of the enemy was revealed.
During the Vietnam War, McGovern said his colleague received a memo that directed CIA analysts not to release the numbers of armed enemies in Vietnam because the press would have a field day.
"This is what we call the smoking gun," McGovern said.
The memo was labeled classified. His friend did not leak it. McGovern could have. But instead, he told himself, "I can live through this dishonesty, keep my head down," he said. He had just been picked to go to Munich for a tour of duty. He had a great job, one in which he thought he was doing real work that was helping the country. So he stayed quiet. Now he regrets it.
Part of the message McGovern is pressing through his writing is to encourage current CIA analysts not to make his mistake. He said analysts may have many reasons not to leak - job security, a family, a mortgage.
"Do it anyway," he said. "That's the patriotic thing to do."
McGovern said such leaks could potentially affect the election. If the election is not postponed, that is. He said he thinks the groundwork already has been laid for doing so if a terrorist threat arises. The American people need to pay attention, he said, and push for it to go on.
Maria Comella, New Hampshire spokeswoman for the Bush campaign, disputed McGovern's claim that we are not safer. She said Bush has been pursuing a strategy focused on defeating terrorists and has been implementing policies consistent with the Sept. 11 Commission finding.
"He's realized that in our post-9/11 world we've reached a point where we are safer, but there's still more to do," she said.
She said the Sept. 11 committee found no evidence that the exaggeration of Iraq's weapons capabilities came as a result of politics or pressure on the intelligence community.
McGovern's visit to New Hampshire was sponsored by New Hampshire Peace Action. McGovern has made about 35 presentations and met with dozens more in towns across the country this year. He is taking time off from his job as co-director of the Servant Leadership School, a school in Washington, D.C., that helps people involved in social organizations working for the poor to get organized and find a community in which to stay grounded.
McGovern said the people he works with look at the expenses of an unnecessary war and can already see how it has cost the poorer neighborhoods in the nation's capital.
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