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Transcriber's introduction:The following outline and transcript, created by the poster, are based on an audio recording of Joseph Wilson's evening keynote lecture to the Education for Peace in Iraq Center (EPIC) on June 14, 2003, delivered several weeks prior to Wilson's New York Times op-ed of 7/6/2003 which preceded the controversial Robert Novak article mentioning Valerie Plame's CIA background. Wilson's speech was immediately preceded by that of the other keynote speaker, Ray McGovern of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity. After their individual speeches Wilson and McGovern held a joint question-and-answer session. Other participants in the forum and their respective topics...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- A small group composed mostly of retired CIA officers is appealing to colleagues still inside to go public with any evidence the Bush administration is slanting intelligence to support its case for war with Iraq. Members of the group contend the Bush administration has released information on Iraq that meets only its ends -- while ignoring or withholding contrary reporting. They also say the administration's public evidence about the immediacy of Iraq's threat to the United States and its alleged ties to al-Qaida is unconvincing, and accuse policy-makers of pushing out some information that does not meet...

Since learning in April that their son, Army Spc. Casey Sheehan, had been killed in Iraq, life has been everything but normal for the Sheehan family of Vacaville. Casey's parents, Cindy and Patrick, as well as their three children, have attended event after event honoring the soldier both locally and abroad, received countless letters of support and fielded questions from reporters across the country. "That's the way our whole lives have been since April 4," Patrick said. "It's been surreal." But none of that prepared the family for the message left on their answering machine last week, inviting them to...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A fired CIA agent, who a newspaper says told superiors in 2001 that Iraq had abandoned part of its nuclear program, is asking the FBI to investigate allegations that the spy agency dismissed him for refusing to falsify intelligence. A July 11 letter to FBI Director Robert Mueller from the former agent's attorney suggests CIA officials may be guilty of criminal violations involving intelligence he produced on weapons of mass destruction in 2000 that contradicted an official agency position. The former agent's attorney, Roy Krieger, said his client initially asked the CIA's inspector general to investigate charges...

Providing security for distinguished U.S. visitors in Baghdad is necessary, Army Cpl. Fred Senethavilay pointed out, because the Iraqi capital city "is not a safe place." Senethavilay, 22, said he and his partner, Staff Sgt. Barry D. Gumaer, are infantrymen deployed to Iraq with the Texas Army National Guard's 111th Engineer Battalion, which has its headquarters in Abilene. Both soldiers work personal security details at the Joint Visitors Bureau here. The two machine-gun-toting, Kevlar-clad soldiers participated in an American Forces Press Service interview in Baghdad July 27 during Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's recent trip to Iraq. Senethavilay said he...

(CNSNews.com) - The leak of CIA agent Valerie Plame's identity is the result of "partisan madness" that is undermining U.S. security during a time of war, a panel of former CIA operatives told a group of congressional Democrats on Friday. "For the first time in the history of the United States, by any administration, a political operative [Bush adviser Karl Rove] went after an active intelligence officer and leaked her name for petty, trivial political reasons, and at the end of the day, has caused terrific damage to the United States," former CIA analyst Larry Johnson said at the forum...

It was a dark and stormy night. I was sitting back in the Mad Mammoth study, reviewing the latest threads on Free Republic, when my MSN Messenger icon barked that I had an email waiting. I went to my InBox. What did I find? I had a very angry email from some schnook called 'lcjohnso' taking me to task for some long forgotten post I made on FR. Called me out. Wanted my address. Wanted to visit me with a bunch of his pals "anytime, anyplace", I'm wondering to myself "WTF is this nonsense?" So I responded in a fairly...

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...

Uncovered: The War on Iraq Directed by Robert Greenwald Cinema Libre, opens August 20 Anybody who tries to deconstruct the new American empire erected by the Bush regime's schnooks and crooks winds up babbling to himself and others, "You can't make this shit up." But then you have to get your hands dirty and mold it into something that's interesting to look at. That's something Michael Moore did in Fahrenheit 9/11, but which Robert Greenwald doesn't do in Uncovered: The War on Iraq. Moore created a movie; Greenwald gives us a cinematized blog. His vast made-for-TV experience (The Burning Bed,...

Since midsummer, the Senate Intelligence Committee has been attempting to solve the biggest mystery of the Iraq war: the disparity between the Bush Administration’s prewar assessment of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and what has actually been discovered. The committee is concentrating on the last ten years’ worth of reports by the C.I.A. Preliminary findings, one intelligence official told me, are disquieting. “The intelligence community made all kinds of errors and handled things sloppily,” he said. The problems range from a lack of quality control to different agencies’ reporting contradictory assessments at the same time. One finding, the official went...

It's not an if, it's a when. Pentagon officials have indicated that they plan to send as many as 15,000 more troops to Iraq during the first four months of 2005, and President Bush continues to insist that ''we will stay the course'' until Iraq is stabilized. Where will the additional troops come from? The Bush administration insists that there will be no draft, but the ''backdoor draft'' that has kept so many from the Reserve and National Guard on active duty has backfired, as quotas for new enlistments have not been met. So plans are already advanced for fully...

A group of former intelligence officers is pressing Congressional leaders to open an immediate inquiry into the disclosure last summer of the name of an undercover C.I.A. officer, Valerie Plame. Their request, outlined in a letter on Tuesday to Speaker J. Dennis Hastert and others, reflects discontent and unrest within the intelligence services about the affair, along with concern that a four-month-old Justice Department investigation into the matter may never identify who was behind the disclosure. The syndicated columnist Robert Novak, who first identified Ms. Plame as a C.I.A. officer in a column last July, has identified his sources only...

<p>Media organizations prepared Tuesday to oppose any efforts by the Justice Department to subpoena journalists and their notes to learn who leaked the identity of an undercover CIA agent to columnist Robert Novak.</p> <p>Subpoenas could be challenged on the basis of First Amendment guarantees of freedom of the press, said Bill Felber, editor of The Manhattan (Kan.) Mercury and freedom of information chairman for the Associated Press Managing Editors. But they could also be challenged, he said, if they were too broad or if the information could be obtained in other ways.</p>

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...

Bush targeted by leftist 'intelligence professionals' Gerard Jackson BrookesNews.Com Monday 21 July 2003 A group calling itself the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity sent President Bush a letter demanding that Cheney resign over the issue of Saddam's WMDs. Now who or what is VIPS? This is a question that many have been asking. The answer is simple. It is a front for the notorious Marxist-Leninist Washington-based IPS (Institute for Policy Studies). This is what Brian Crozier (a highly respected commentator on intelligence matters and a fellow of the prestigious Institute for the Study of Conflict) had to say about the...

WASHINGTON, April 17 (AFP) - The US government should be "embarrassed" over the apparent failure to uncover weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, retired intelligence officials who opposed the war said Thursday. "It's going to be very embarrassing when it turns out they have nothing to declare," said Eugene Betit, a former defense intelligence analyst who belongs to Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), formed in January to speak out on the use of intelligence to justify the war. Another, former CIA station chief Ray Close, said: "I'm hoping they will be embarrassed into acknowledging a role for some independent...