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 ...
Q & A / RAY McGOVERN, former CIA analyst: 'We're trying to spread a little truth';
DAN CHAPMAN. The Atlanta Journal - Constitution. Dec 7, 2003. pg. F.2
(Copyright, The Atlanta Journal and Constitution - 2003)
Ray McGovern was a CIA analyst for 27 years, serving seven U.S. presidents and routinely presenting the morning intelligence briefings at the White House. Angered by what he deems the politicization of intelligence information, McGovern helped found Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity earlier this year.
McGovern, 64, is also co-director of the Servant Leadership School, an outreach ministry in inner-city Washington. He spoke with students and faculty at Georgia State, Emory and Georgia Tech earlier this week. He also talked with reporter Dan Chapman. Excerpts, edited for brevity, are below.
Q: What's your latest mission?
A: We're trying to spread a little truth around. I've just been watching very, very closely how intelligence has been abused in the lead up to the Iraq war and, now, after the war. I fear for what this will mean for a very crucial part of our government. If the president can't turn to the CIA for straight answers, whether he knows it or not, he's in bad shape. He has nowhere to turn for a straight answer. He can't expect [Deputy Defense Secretary Paul] Wolfowitz or [Defense Secretary Donald] Rumsfeld to tell him, "Sorry boss, we didn't think of A or B or C. We thought it would be a cakewalk." He's getting slanted advice from the people running the policy toward Iraq.
Q: Who's to blame?
A: Rumsfeld and [Vice President Dick] Cheney primarily. And then George Tenet, the head of the CIA. He's not making any waves. This is an abnegation of responsibility because the CIA is supposed to make waves. The CIA [should be] completely objective. It should not promote or defend any particular policy. So, once the CIA loses its reputation for complete objectivity, it has nothing special to offer and you might as well just close it down.
[McGovern says Tenet and Cheney should resign.]
Q: What are the most egregious examples of "sexed-up" intelligence?
A: The report that Iraq was seeking uranium from the African country of Niger was false on its face and has to be at the top of the list. That was the most obvious and crass lie and the only report they had in September and October of last year to raise the specter that Saddam Hussein might get nuclear weapons.
The other main thing, of course, was the alleged tie between Iraq and al-Qaida. CIA analysts spent a year and a half poring through each and every report and found none to be persuasive or reliable. Then [Secretary of State] Colin Powell made his speech to the United Nations on Feb. 5, where he produced some cockamamie evidence suggesting that al-Qaida types were roaming around Iraq with Saddam Hussein. In the period leading up to the war, the president would say that we have to go after Iraq because of 9/11. That is the way that the president played on the trauma of 9/11 to persuade the American people that we couldn't take a chance on Saddam Hussein.
Q: Do the American people care that they were misled on Iraq? Does Congress? The press?
A: There's still a lot of torpor, but there are two new elements now. No. 1: The men and women who are being killed every day in Iraq. No. 2: The fact that no one --- not even the press --- likes to be lied to. I'm an American, and I never thought the president would lie so often and so demonstrably.
The Bush administration's reasoning went like this: "We'll deceive Congress. We'll have our war. We'll win handily. The folks in Iraq will meet us with cut flowers and open arms, and who will care at that point whether the [war's premise] was based largely on a forgery?" But there's zero chance that Congress will establish an independent judicial commission to investigate how we got into Iraq. Both houses of Congress are controlled by the president's party. There are no statesmen to rise above party affiliation and say, "We were lied to." No one will do that.
Q: Do you honestly believe the Bush administration is the first to politicize intelligence information for its own geopolitical endeavors?
A: No. I've seen some pretty terrible stuff. We did a very careful job of analyzing how many enemy [soldiers] there were in Vietnam in 1967, and we found out that there were twice as many as the military in Saigon would admit.
We put that into the National Intelligence Estimate for the president, and CIA Director Richard Helms caved in to the military and went with their numbers. Two months later, with the Tet Offensive, our numbers proved to be correct. That was bad. The Gulf of Tonkin [misinformation] was equally bad.
But what makes this different is that it was knowingly calculated over a period of a year and a half. The public relations was masterful --- just think back to Colin Powell's speech. Not one charge has been borne out and yet it persuaded the country that the war in Iraq was a good idea.
Q: What's the danger?
A: I see us in a particularly critical period now, a period very much akin to the early stages of Vietnam. Key decisions need to be made. Do we commit more troops? The president is under great pressure to do that. But if he does, the situation will just get worse and worse and the troops will be the lightning rods.
We need to go to the United Nations and say, "Look, we really need your help and in return we'll be willing to surrender power to you."
Q: What role should U.S. citizens play?
A: It's really essential that Americans take an interest in learning about how this war began. That's really their citizenship duty; otherwise they may see their sons and daughters coming home in pine boxes. At the end of the day, though, it's the November elections that will determine the course of the war.
Does Fitzgerald have the courage to follow this line if this is indeed where the facts lead him? This raises very interesting speculations about the true nature of the secrets Judith Miller is protecting by going to jail.
One could almost taste the delicious irony if the RICO statutes could be turned against their leftist authors.
Cold comfort that our reaction is a normal and human reaction to a despicable plot, or at least a movement, to cripple our commander in chief in time of war.
Our job is to win the war not to convict Alger Hiss.
Here's some of Larry Johnson's INTELLIGENCE:
Fake Terror
"The Declining State of Terror"
July 10, 2001
The greatest risk is clear: if you are drilling for oil in Colombia -- or in nations like Ecuador, Nigeria or Indonesia -- you should take appropriate precautions; otherwise Americans have little to fear.
Well said but even Lincoln rounded up the traitors until after the war was won. Lincoln didn't have a fourth branch of government to deal with, either, the Intelligence communities. Bush has to do something -- it is a balance of power issue when this fourth branch turns revolutionary.
Perhaps they are more frightened at what a cleaned up CIA might discover, should they start looking in the closets.
I have a lot of suspicions that lackadaisical oversight during the Clinton years may have led to quite a few abuses of the CIA's resources, most specifically - unprecedented access by private persons on behalf of some shady non-patriotic industrialists. A similar lack of oversight for abuses in the stock market led to a self-correction in the collapse of the tech bubble. 9/11 was a symptom of a problem, that has resulted in processes that hopefully are self-correcting in their nature, but the process is far from complete and the roaches are fighting against the changes.
Then again, it is about this late that I'm given over to conspiratorial delusions that lay many problems at the door of Bill Clinton's incompetent administration - and his desire to be liked by everybody.
bookmark
bump
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ping
Servant Leadership Schools Nationwide
2. 8 THEOLOGY, WORSHIP, BIBLE 8A BIBLE STUDY, COMMENTARY VT 8A 052 10 ...
book, 117 pg Publisher: Servant Leadership School Date: 1992 ... Fifteen years of intensive study sponsored by the NCC, produced this readable, ...
carlislepby.org/THEOLOGYWORSHIP-8.pdf [Found on Google]
Larry Johnson, ex-CIA who wrote a letter to the NYT in July 2001 that Americans were too concerned with terrorism and we should worry instead about nukes.
There is definitely a rogue element within the CIA, intent with bringing down the administration.
These people are traitors.
Looks like you're right!
"I didn't read the link"
El Cid, it really is worth reading to see how far off base this Johnson clown was/is. For instance, there was absolutely no reference in his analysis to the 1993 WTC bombing.
VIPS Steering Group
Other Alleged VIPS Members
So two years later, no one has come forward and responded to this request.
A normal rational person would then conclude that there are no secrets that will hurt Bush.
But the looney, irrational people would conclude that there's a cover up.
Sam did you ping cyncooper???
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