This, to my mind, is a must read for understanding the failure of our intelligence on the issue of WMD. Someone who knows the workings of the intelligence community, in an interview with our oft-posted listmember, the great William Rivers Pitt, gives the best picture I've seen of all that led up to these times, from the Soviet war against Afghanistan to now. It's a riveting read. I've pulled some highlights out, but do link to the piece on Truthout.org (a site to support with your funds) to read it all.
Interview: 27-Year CIA Veteran, by William Rivers Pitt, 6/26/03
Ray McGovern was a CIA analyst for 27 years, working at senior levels, serving seven Presidents.
Excerpts:
PITT: With all of your background, and with all the time that you spent in the CIA, can you tell me why you are speaking out now about the foreign policy issues that are facing this country?
McG: It’s actually very simple. There’s an inscription at the entrance to the CIA, chiseled into the marble there, which reads, “You Shall Know The Truth, And The Truth Shall Set You Free.” Not many folks realize that the primary function of the Central Intelligence Agency is to seek the truth regarding what is going on abroad and be able to report that truth without fear or favor. In other words, the CIA at its best is the one place in Washington that a President can turn to for an unvarnished truthful answer to a delicate policy problem. We didn’t have to defend State Department policies, we didn’t have to make the Soviets seem ten feet tall, as the Defense Department was inclined to do. We could tell it like it was, and it was very, very heady. We could tell it like it was and have career protection for doing that. In other words, that’s what our job was. When you come out of that ethic, when you come out of a situation where you realize the political pressures to do it otherwise – you’ve seen it, you’ve been there, you’ve done that – and your senior colleagues face up to those pressures as have you yourself, and then you watch what is going on today, it is disturbing in the extreme. You ask yourself, “Do I not have some kind of duty, by virtue of my experience and my knowledge of these things, do I not have some kind of duty to speak out here and tell the rest of the American people what’s going on?”…to see George Tenet – who has all the terrific credentials to be a staffer in Congress, credentials which are antithetical to being a good CIA Director – to see him sit behind Colin Powell at the UN, to see him give up and shade the intelligence and cave in when his analysts have been slogging through the muck for a year and a half trying to tell it like it is, that is very demoralizing, and actually very infuriating…That’s the kind of thing that will be a very noxious influence on their morale and their ability to continue the good fight…In the coming weeks, we’re going to be seeing folks coming out and coming forth with what they know, and it is going to be very embarrassing for the Bush administration.
PITT: How much of a dent does this unease, and this inability to stand up to those who have put this atmosphere in place, how much of a dent does this put in our ability to defend this country against the very real threats we face?
McG: A big dent, and that of course is the bottom line. What you need to have is rewards for competence and not for being able to sniff which way the wind is blowing…
PITT: You stated that the decision to make war in Iraq was made in the summer of 2002. General Wesley Clark appeared on a Sunday talk show with Tim Russert on June 15, and Clark surprisingly mentioned that he was called at his home by the White House on September 11 and told to make the connection between those terrorist attacks and Saddam Hussein. He was told to do this on the day of the attacks, told to say that this was state-sponsored terrorism and there must be a connection. What do you make of that?
McG: That is really fascinating. If you look at what he said, he said, “Sure, I’ll say that. Where’s the evidence?” In other words, he’s a good soldier. He’s going to do this. But he wanted the evidence, and there was no evidence. Clark was not only a good soldier, but a professional soldier. A professional soldier, at his level at least, asks questions. When he found out there was no evidence, he didn’t say what they wanted him to say. Contrast that with Colin Powell, who first and foremost is a good soldier. But when he sees the evidence, and knows it smells, he will salute the President and brief him anyway, as he did on the 5th of February…
PITT: Why was the decision made in 1989 to leave Afghanistan in such a sorry state? The chaos left in the aftermath of that war led to the rise of the Taliban. Why didn’t we help clean up the terrible mess we had helped to cause?
McG: I hate to be cynical about these things, but once we got the Soviets out, our reason to be there basically evaporated. You may ask about the poor people and the poor country. Well, we have a history of doing this kind of thing, of using people…We had a brilliant victory, we got the Soviets out of there, we started pounding our chests, and nobody gave much thought to helping the poor Afghanis that were left behind…
My primary attention is on the forgery of the Niger documents that supposedly proved Iraq was developing a nuclear program. It seems to me that you can have endless arguments about the correct interpretation of this or that piece of intelligence, or intelligence analysis, but a forgery is a forgery. It’s demonstrable that senior officials of this government, including the Vice President, knew that it was a forgery in March of last year. It was used anyway to deceive our Congressmen and Senators into voting for an unprovoked war…Cheney knew, and Cheney was way out in front of everybody, starting on the 26th of August, talking about Iraq seeking nuclear weapons. As recently as the 16th of March, three days before the war, he was again at it. This time he said Iraq has reconstituted its nuclear weapons program. It hadn’t. It demonstrably hadn’t. There has been nothing like that uncovered in Iraq…
There is no conceivable reason why the United States of America should not be imploring Hans Blix and the rest of his folks to come right in. They have the expertise, they’ve been there, they’ve done that. They have millions of dollars available through the UN. They have people who know the weaponry, how they are procured and produced. They know personally the scientists, they’ve interviewed them before. What possible reason could the United States of America have to say no thanks, we’ll use our own GI’s to do this?…The more sinister interpretation is that the US wants to be able to plant weapons of mass destruction in Iraq…It can be the kind of little vile vial that Colin Powell held up on the 5th of February. You put a couple of those in a GI’s pocket, and you swear him to secrecy, and you have him go bury them out in the desert. You discover it ten days later…I think that’s a possibility, a real possibility…Four months ago, I would have said, “McGovern, you’re paranoid to say stuff like that.” But in light of all that has happened, and light of the terrific stakes involved for the President here – each time he says we’re going to find these things, he digs himself in a little deeper – I think it’s quite possible that they will resort to this type of thing.