Ray McGovern is a nutjob, but he really, really seems to hate Rumsfeld and anyone associated with him. One reason is probably this:
"In an attempt to unearth incriminating intelligence on Saddam Hussein, Mr Rumsfeld created last year the Office of Special Plans, an intelligence unit inside the Pentagon. This became a direct rival not only of the CIA, but of the Pentagon’s own Defence Intelligence Agency.
Another reason is likely even greater- he has an affinity for the Iraqi regime, or simply despises the US enough to cleave even to enemies.
As the Freeper Shermy has noted, Ray's group "Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity" seems to be little more than a front of the familair leftist site counterpunch.org, or at the least counterpunch gave VIPS a mailing addy for its fans.
This might be why he seems so familiar, aside from him being mentioned in association with Wilson and the EPIC group; note that it is published in MAY, well before Novak's article - and best of all, look at these unnamed sources! :
Public was misled, claim ex-CIA men The Times (U.K.) ^ | 05/31/03 | Tim ReidHow hard would it be for a group like this to convince journalists they are real current administration employees? Who's to say some of them aren't, since our security clearances don't seem too good of late?(snip)
A GROUP of former US intelligence officials has written to President Bush claiming that the US Congress and the American public were misled about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction before the war. The group’s members, most of them former CIA analysts, say that they have close contacts with senior officials working inside the US intelligence agencies, who have told them that intelligence was “cooked” to persuade Congress to authorise the war.
The manipulation of intelligence has, they say, produced “a policy and intelligence fiasco of monumental proportions”. They write in the letter to Mr Bush: “While there have been occasions in the past when intelligence has been deliberately warped for political purposes, never before has such warping been used in such a systematic way to mislead our elected representatives into voting to authorise launching a war.
“You may not realise the extent of the current ferment within the intelligence community and particularly the CIA. In intelligence, there is one unpardonable sin — cooking intelligence to the recipe of high policy. There is ample indication that this has been done in Iraq.”
The Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity group is headed by Ray McGovern, a CIA analyst for 27 years. He said that people in the agency were totally demoralised, particularly over what they claim is the reliance by Donald Rumsfeld, the US Defence Secretary, and his Pentagon-based intelligence staff on the testimony of Ahmed Chalabi, an Iraqi emigré.
“The contribution of reporting from emigrés has been highly touted for months by Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz (Paul Wolfowitz, Mr Rumsfeld’s deputy), who seem unaware of Machiavelli’s warning that of all intelligence sources, exiles are the least reliable,” the letter says. Mr Chalabi heads the Iraqi National Congress and was the favourite among Washington’s hawks to lead a postwar Iraqi authority. The failure of coalition troops to uncover Iraq’s banned weapons is causing increased tensions between Capitol Hill and the White House. The House and Senate Select Intelligence Committees are to investigate in hearings this summer the claims of weapons stockpiles and the intelligence that led to them.
The former CIA officials were supported by a current official in the Pentagon’s Defence Intelligence Agency, who told The New York Times yesterday: “The American people were manipulated.” Pentagon officials said that the claims of intelligence manipulation were nothing more than a campaign of sour grapes led by present and former CIA officials over their perceived marginalisation in the run-up to the war.
(* My note: given what we know of Ray McGovern and Wilson, I can see that there is a need for "marginalization." )
In an attempt to unearth incriminating intelligence on Saddam Hussein, Mr Rumsfeld created last year the Office of Special Plans, an intelligence unit inside the Pentagon. This became a direct rival not only of the CIA, but of the Pentagon’s own Defence Intelligence Agency.
(/snip)
Now to make things more interesting, on the night Ray McGovern and Former Ambassador Wilson spoke, another individual also participated in the lecture series.
Guess who?
From EPIC's web site:
Glen Rangwala, PhD is a lecturer in politics at Cambridge University, UK. He has been a coordinator of the Campaign against Sanctions on Iraq for the past five years. His work on the allegations made about Iraq's prohibited weapons have been covered by every major news outlet, most notably when he discovered that the "intelligence" dossier released by the British government had been plagiarized from a PhD student's thesis. He acts as an advisor to British parliamentarians on policy towards Iraq. He is beginning an in-depth academic study on Iraq's changing society from 1990 to the present day, and will be assessing the outcomes of the US-led reconstruction attempts.
Hmmmm. Note that he didn't prove the thesis wrong, and for all we know its author works in UK intel now anyway. I'm sure he's a very nice guy who didn't have a thing to do with driving Kelly to suicide, and I'm sure Iraq didn't pay him like they did Galloway and Ritter... and I'm sure its just a coincidence that he and McGovern and Wilson and others just happen to be kissing fools.
This investigation could be very fun. Isn't it interesting how inbred these folks are?