In another time and age and place
perhaps such wisdom would be cherished and rewarded.
In our time and age, absolute power
cannot face nor listen to truth; it's too painful to accept that
even absolute power has an Achilles heel5.
History
Repeating - If We Fail to Learn From Past Mistakes
Now that the war in Afghanistan is
winding down and the war in Iraq is at an end, I would like to
revisit an article where Ray McGovern shared his thoughts about why
the war in Iraq was a mistake.
You need to appreciate that when he
gave this interview he was almost a lone voice, shunned by CNN,
Fox, and all the other major news networks or where invited by the
media harangued as a 'crank' and 'troublemaker' as they all meekly
allowed themselves to be herded on a path towards war by not
questioning motives nor the evidence presented.
This article is important in the
sense that other wars, involvements and commitments are just over the horizon where again other
patriots will be asked for the ultimate sacrifice and for this
reason there need to be more (albeit) lone voices like McGovern to
question the wisdom and purpose of how to achieve America's long-term economic objectives without the first strike option of
'gunboat diplomacy' always prevailing.
It is highly unlikely that the
children of corporate America magnates will be making this ultimate
sacrifice. If they were forced to, by law ( the Draft), I can assure
you their parents would not be so 'gungho' and keen to promote
wars abroad, to the ends of the earth, as first options.
Timeless
This interview below is, for myself,
timeless, in that McGovern asks most of the relevant questions of
the politicians and shows us the flaws in their arguments through
rational thinking rather than partisan political demagoguery. Ray
McGovern was criticized for being 'unpatriotic'. But is it
unpatriotic to want to save the lives of U.S. armed forces
personnel from being needlessly wasted when you honestly and
genuinely believe their (mainly young) lives are being expended not
to fulfill U.S. ethical, spiritual, and political objectives and
the policy objectives of global governance, but solely to satisfy those
short-term objectives of corporate America, acting independently
and selfishly against the real interests and policy objectives
(independent of corporate lobbyists) of the United States? On many
of the issues I have just mentioned I too would be at variance and
in disagreement with Ray McGovern but the essence of my point here
is that military conflicts are being prioritized over economic and social-societal
pre-eminence and while there is interchangeability, any superpower
whose economy is home-based on military technology rather than, for
example, the export of civilian goods and services, full
employment, urban renewal and government supported infrastructural,
housing, medical, educational, recreational and a national job
creation plan, as a right for every American in America, is on the
wrong path.
Finally, do not assume that I am in
accord with Ray McGovern's views on a wide range of very specific
issues. I am not. The purpose of remembering his interview of
2003 is so that it can act as a lighthouse or beacon on the
headland for journalists and politicians (at least those who can see) to perhaps reflect on as
our ships set sail yet again for new and ever dangerous waters and
perils, with very old and very familiar contours.
Now you read on...and judge the
merits and deficits of the article for yourself.........
(It's a bit more than I usually blog
in an article, so you might wanna get a cup of coffee before
reading if you need to stay awake.)
Part II
[The article below is reproduced in
full by kind permission of 'Truthout']
''Interview:
27-Year CIA Veteran by Will Pitt
t r u t h o u t |
Interview
Thursday 26 June
2003
Ray McGovern was a
CIA analyst for 27 years, serving seven Presidents. He
is on the Steering
Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.
He is co-director of
the Servant Leadership School, an outreach ministry in
the inner city of
Washington.
-------
PITT: Could you give me some
background regarding who you are and what
work you did with the CIA?
McG: I was a graduate student in
Russian studies when I got interested in
the Central Intelligence Agency. I
was very intrigued that there was one
central place to prevent what
happened at Pearl Harbor from happening again.
I had been commissioned in the US
Army, so I needed to do my two years
service there, but wound up down in
Washington DC. I took a job with the CIA
in 1963, and it was what it was made
out to be.
In other words, I was told that if
I were to come on as an analyst of
Soviet foreign policy, when I sat
down in the morning, in my In-Box would be
a bunch of material from open
sources, from closed sources, from
photography, from intercepts, from
agent reports, from embassy reports, you
name it. It would be right there, and
all I had to do was sift through it
and make some sense out of it. If I
had an important enough story, I would
write it up for the President the
next morning. That seemed too good to be
true, but you know what? It was true,
and it was really heady work.
PITT: Which Presidents did you
serve?
McG: I started with President
Kennedy and finished with President Bush,
the first President Bush. That would
make seven Presidents.
PITT: What was your area of
expertise with the CIA?
McG: I was a Soviet Foreign Policy
analyst. I also worked on Soviet
Internal Affairs when I first came
on, but then my responsibilities grew and
I became responsible for a lot of
different parts of the world. During the
1980s I was briefing the Vice
President and Secretaries of State and
Defense, the Assistant to the
President for National Security Affairs, and
the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. I
did this every other morning. We worked
in teams of two, and on any given
morning depending on schedules, I would be
hitting two or perhaps three of those
senior officials.
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?"
PITT: Do you feel as though the
'truth-telling' abilities of the CIA, the
ability to come in with data without
fear of reprisal or career
displacement, has been abrogated by
this administration?
McG: It has been corroded, or
eroded, very much. A lot of it has to do
with who is Director. In the best
days, under Colby for example, or John
McCone, we had very clear
instructions. I myself, junior as I was in those
days, would go up against Henry
Kissinger and tell it like we thought it
was. I was not winning any friends
there, by any stretch, but I came back
proud for having done my job. That
was because Colby told me to do that, and
I worked directly for him. I also
worked directly for George Bush I, and he,
I have to say to his great credit,
acted the same way. He was very careful
to keep himself out of policy
advocacy, and he told it like it was.
So to watch what is going on now,
and 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.
PITT: On September 26 2001, George
Bush II went down to the CIA, put an
arm around Tenet, and said that he
had a "report" for the American people,
that we have the best possible
intelligence thanks to the good people at the
CIA. We've come a fair piece down the
road since then, and if you read
through the news these days, you get
the definite sense that the Bush
administration is attempting to lay
blame for the fact that no weapons of
mass destruction have been found in
Iraq, to lay blame for that at the feet
of the CIA. Furthermore, by all
appearances, the months of reports the
administration put out about Iraq's
weapons capabilities are not turning out
to be accurate. To no small extent,
it appears that there is a scapegoating
process taking place here. What is
your take on this?
McG: It is interesting that you
would go back to September 26, because tha
t was a very key performance on the
part of our President. Here was an
agency that was created expressly to
prevent another Pearl Harbor. That was
why the CIA was created originally in
1947. Harry Truman was hell-bent on
making sure that, if there were
little pieces of information spread around
the government, that they all came to
one central intelligence agency, one
place where they could be collated
and analyzed, and the analysis be given
to policy people.
So here is September 11, the first
time since Pearl Harbor that this
system failed. It was worse than
Pearl Harbor. More people were killed on
September 11 than were killed at
Pearl Harbor, and where were the pieces?
They were scattered all around the
government, just like they were before
Pearl Harbor. For George Bush to go
out to CIA headquarters and put his arm
around George Tenet and tell the
world that we have the best intelligence
services in the world, this really
called for some analysis, if you will.
My analysis is that George Bush had
no option but to keep George Tenet on
as Director, because George Tenet had
warned Bush repeatedly, for months and
months before September 11, that
something very bad was about to happen.
PITT: There was the August 6 2001
briefing.
McG: On August 6, the title of the
briefing was, "Bin Laden Determined to
Strike in the US," and that
briefing had the word "Hijacking" in it. That's
all I know about it, but that's quite
enough. In September, Bush had to make
a decision. Is it feasible to let go
of Tenet, whose agency flubbed the dub
on this one? And the answer was no,
because Tenet knows too much about what
Bush knew, and Bush didn't know what
to do about it. That's the bottom line
for me.
Bush was well-briefed. Before he
went off to Texas to chop wood for a
month like Reagan did in California,
he was told all these things. He didn't
even have the presence of mind to
convene his National Security Council, and
say, "OK guys, we have all these
reports, what are we going to do about it?"
He just went off to chop wood.
PITT: Now why is that? There are
people in America who believe this kind
of behavior was deliberate - the
administration was repeatedly warned and
nothing was done about those
warnings. It smacks of deliberate policy for a
lot of people. This is the current
World Heavyweight Champion of conspiracy
theories.
McG: In this, I am an adherent of
the charitable interpretation, and that
comes down to gross incompetence.
They just didn't know what to do. Look at
who was in charge there. You have
Condoleezza Rice. She knows a lot about
Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union,
but she has no idea about terrorism.
She had this terrorism dossier that
Clinton NSC director Sandy Berger left
behind, and by her own admission she
didn't get to it. "It was still on my
desk when September 11 happened,"
she said. They didn't take this thing
seriously.
Now, you can probably fault George
Tenet for not being careful about
crying wolf. In other words, you cry
wolf often enough and in an
undifferentiated way, then that is
not a real service to the President. You
really have to say, "Mr.
President, you know I warned you about this two
months ago, but now this is really
serious." You have to grab him by the
collar and say, "We've got to do
something about this." Tenet didn't do
that. So I attribute it not to
conspiracy theories, but to lack of
experience, a kind of arrogance that
says, "Who cares what Sandy Berger
thinks," and just gross
incompetence.
Now 'gross incompetence' is not a
nice thing to say about a President, but
he had no experience in this at all,
and the people he surrounded himself
with also had no experience.
PITT: Given all of this - the
August 6 briefing, the other terrorism
warnings, the big hug given to Tenet
by Bush on September 26, and the fact
that Tenet was kept on because he
knew too much about what the Bush
administration was aware of before
September 11 - one gets the sense that
Tenet has been relegated to the
position of lapdog. This is a frightful
position for the Director of CIA to
occupy.
McG: It wouldn't be the first time,
and I think regarding Tenet the term
'lapdog,' unfortunately, is apt. For
example, here were rather courageous
CIA analysts under terrific pressure
from the likes of Deputy Defense
Secretary Wolfowitz to establish a
contact or connection between al Qaeda
and Iraq. They resisted this ever
since 9/11, not out of any unwillingness
to believe it, but simply because
there was no evidence to establish it. To
their credit, they held the line, and
were supported by Brent Scowcroft of
all people, who very courageously
spoke out and said that evidence is
"scant."
Now here's George Tenet, when push
comes to shove on February 5 at the UN,
sitting right behind Colin Powell
like a potted plant, as if to say the CIA
and all his analysts agreed with what
Colin Powell was about to say about
contacts between al Qaeda and Iraq.
That was incredibly demoralizing for all
my colleagues. That's the kind of
thing that will be a very noxious
influence on their morale and their
ability to continue the good fight.
PITT: Is there a great deal of
unrest and unease within the CIA at this
point?
McG: Not a great deal, but an
incredible amount of unease and disarray.
There are a lot of people who feel as
strongly as I do about integrity. It
was not some sort of an extra thing
with us. We took it seriously, and we
had a big advantage, of course. We
could tell it like it was. To the degree
that esprit de corps exists, and I
know it does among the folks we talk to,
there is great, great turmoil there.
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. You need to have
people rewarded for good performance and
not for political correctness. You
have to have people who are serious about
collecting and analyzing this
material. The way the analysis was played fast
and loose with, going back to last
spring, is just incredible. It requires a
whole re-do of how the whole national
security setup is arranged, to have
intelligence come up and have it
treated with the kind of respect and the
kind of consideration it is due.
PITT: Let's bottom-line it here. In
the situation regarding the question
of chemical, biological and nuclear
weapons in Iraq, where does the fault
lie for the manner in which this has
all broken down? Was it an intelligence
failure on the part of the CIA, or
are we talking about the Bush
administration misusing both that
institution and the information it
provided?
McG: It's both, really. Let's take
the chemical and biological stuff
first. At the root of this, as I
reconstruct it, is what I call 'Analysis by
Subtraction.' Let's take a
theoretical example: Iraq had listed 50,000
liters of sarin nerve gas in 1995.
The UN is known to have destroyed 35,000
liters of this. Subsequently, US
bombing destroyed another 5,000 liters of
this. Therefore, QED, they have
10,000 liters of sarin.
There's no consideration given here
to shelf life of sarin, what would be
necessary to keep sarin active, where
it would be stored, how it would be
stored, the correct temperature and
all that. Instead, it is, "We think they
had this and here is the inventory.
We think we destroyed this" or "We know
we destroyed that, and so the
difference, we assume, is there"
You don't start a war on an
assumption, and with the sophisticated
collection devices the US
intelligence apparatus has, it is unconscionable
not to have verified that so they
could say, "Yes sir, we know that it's
there, we can confirm it this and
that way." Instead, as I said, it was
analysis by subtraction. We had the
inventory here, and we know we destroyed
that, so they must have this.
Analysis like that, I wouldn't rehire the
analyst who did it if he were working
for me. That's the biological and
chemical part.
To be quite complete on this, it
encourages me that the analysts at the
Defense Intelligence Agency - who
share this ethic of trying to tell the
truth, even though they are under
much greater pressure and have much less
career protection because they work
for Rumsfeld - to their great credit, in
September of last year they put out a
memo saying there is no reliable
evidence to suggest that the Iraqis
have biological or chemical weapons, or
that they are producing them.
PITT: Was this before or after Vice
President Cheney started making
personal visits to the CIA?
McG: It was all at the same time.
This stuff doesn't all get written in
one week. It was all throughout the
spring and summer that this stuff was
being collected. When the decision
was made last summer that we will have a
war against Iraq, they were casting
about. You'll recall White House Chief
of Staff Andy Card saying you don't
market a new product in August. The big
blast-off was Cheney's speech in
Nashville, I think it was Nashville anyway,
on August 26. He said Iraq was
seeking materials for its nuclear program.
That set the tone right there.
They looked around after Labor Day
and said, "OK, if we're going to have
this war, we really need to persuade
Congress to vote for it. How are we
going to do that? Well, let's do the
al Qaeda-Iraq connection. That's the
traumatic one. 9/11 is still a
traumatic thing for most Americans. Let's do
that."
But then they said, "Oh damn,
those folks at CIA don't buy that, they say
there's no evidence, and we can't
bring them around. We've tried every which
way and they won't relent. That won't
work, because if we try that, Congress
is going to have these CIA wimps come
down, and the next day they'll
undercut us. How about these chemical
and biological weapons? We know they
don't have any nuclear weapons, so
how about the chemical and biological
stuff? Well, damn. We have these
other wimps at the Defense Intelligence
Agency, and dammit, they won't come
around either. They say there's no
reliable evidence of that, so if we
go up to Congress with that, the next
day they'll call the DIA folks in,
and the DIA folks will undercut us."
So they said, "What have we
got? We've got those aluminum tubes!" The
aluminum tubes, you will remember,
were something that came out in late
September, the 24th of September. The
British and we front-paged it. These
were aluminum tubes that were said by
Condoleezza Rice as soon as the report
came out to be only suitable for use
in a nuclear application. This is
hardware that they had the dimensions
of. So they got that report, and the
British played it up, and we played
it up. It was front page in the New York
Times. Condoleezza Rice said, "Ah
ha! These aluminum tubes are suitable only
for uranium-enrichment centrifuges."
Then they gave the tubes to the
Department of Energy labs, and to a
person, each one of those nuclear
scientists and engineers said, "Well, if
Iraq thinks it can use these
dimensions and these specifications of aluminum
tubes to build a nuclear program, let
'em do it! Let 'em do it. It'll never
work, and we can't believe they are
so stupid. These must be for
conventional rockets."
And, of course, that's what they
were for, and that's what the UN
determined they were for. So, after
Condoleezza Rice's initial foray into
this scientific area, they knew that
they couldn't make that stick, either.
So what else did they have?
Well, somebody said, "How
about those reports earlier this year that Iraq
was trying to get Uranuim from Niger?
Yeah.that was pretty good." But of
course if George Tenet were there, he
would have said, "But we looked at the
evidence, and they're forgeries, they
stink to high heaven." So the question
became, "How long would it take
for someone to find out they were
forgeries?" The answer was
about a day or two. The next question was, "When
do we have to show people this
stuff?" The answer was that the IAEA had been
after us for a couple of months now
to give it to them, but we can probably
put them off for three or four
months.
So there it was. "What's the
problem? We'll take these reports, we'll use
them to brief Congress and to raise
the specter of a mushroom cloud. You'll
recall that the President on the 7th
of October said, "Our smoking gun could
come in the form of a mushroom
cloud." Condoleezza Rice said exactly the
same thing the next day. Victoria
Clarke said exactly the same thing on the
9th of October, and of course the
vote came on the 11th of October.
Don't take my word for it. Take
Henry Waxman's word for it. Waxman has
written the President a very, very
bitter letter dated the 17th of March in
which he says, "Mr. President, I
was lied to. I was lied to. I was briefed
on a forgery, and on the strength of
that I voted for war. Tell me how this
kind of thing could happen?"
That was March 17. He hasn't received a
response from the White House yet.
That's the way it worked, and you
have to give them credit. These guys are
really clever. It worked.
PITT: We were talking a little
while ago about Andy Card and marketing
wars in August, and 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: There was a recent Reuters
report which described Powell being given
a draft of his February 5 UN
statements by Scooter Libby and the Rumsfeld
boys. Powell threw it across the
room, according to Reuters, and said, "I'm
not reading this. This is bullshit."
McG: I can see it happening. Powell
was Weinberger's military assistant
for a couple of years, and I was
seeing Weinberger every other morning in
those years. I would see Powell
whenever I went in to see Weinberger, and so
I used to spend 15 minutes with him
every other morning, just kind of
reassuring him that I wasn't going to
tell his boss anything he didn't need
to know. Not only that, but we come
out of the same part of the Bronx. He
was a year ahead of me. He was ROTC
and so was I. He was in ROTC at City
College and became Colonel of Cadets
and head of the Pershing Rifles, a kind
of elite corps there.
I understand Colin Powell. I know
where he is coming from, I know where he
got his identity and his persona, and
it was in this great institution we
call the United States Army, which,
by the way, I am very proud to have
served in. But that be exaggerated,
and it has been in his case. People were
expecting him to take a stand on
principle and resign. That was never a
possibility I attributed to Colin
Powell, because unlike General Clark,
Powell is really a creature of how he
was given his identity in this whole
system. He is just not
constitutionally able to buck it.
PITT: Do you think Powell was aware
that the British intelligence dossier
he used on February 5 before the UN,
the one he held up and praised
lavishly, was plagiarized from a
graduate student who was writing about Iraq
circa 1991?
McG: No, I think he was unaware of
that. I'll tell you a little story.
Back in January, Colin Powell invited
all the NATO countries for a confab so
he could brief them on Iraq and tell
them what they should be telling their
host governments. After one of the
sessions he was in the hall, and one of
the ambassadors asked him what the
evidence was like on Iraq. Powell said he
didn't know, he hadn't seen it yet.
That was January.
Small wonder that Powell now brags
of having had to spend four days in
early February - right before his UN
speech on the 5th - up at CIA
headquarters pouring over the
evidence, analyzing and selecting what he
should say on the 5th. I can only
believe he had a lot on his plate - the
Middle East and other stuff - and
that the daily briefings were so sparse
that he really didn't have a good
handle on what the evidence was that
support this case for weapons of mass
destruction and all that stuff. It
becomes more believable to me that he
really was starting almost with tabula
rasa on the 1st of February, and then
went up to CIA headquarters and said,
"OK, what have we got?" And
the first thing he was given was Scooter Libby's
first draft, and you already
recounted his reaction.
PITT: So what we have, essentially,
is in the run-up to the war the
Secretary of State of the United
States of America was cramming for a major
exam like a freshman in high school.
McG: Yes. And most of the evidence
was being supplied by the Vice
President's office, in the person of
Scooter Libby, and Secretary of Defense
Rumsfeld along with Wolfowitz. That's
curious enough, but an equally
important point I would make is this:
I worked at senior levels up there for
27 years. Never, never once, not one
time did the Vice President of the
United States, the Secretary of State
or the National Security Advisor come
up to the CIA for a working visit.
Vice President Bush came up a couple of
times to give awards out - after all,
he was once the Director - but never
for a working visit.
We went down there. I was part of
that briefing team. I would be down
there every other morning, and if
they wanted more depth I would bring folks
down there with me, folks who I knew
were the experts. We came to them. We
had our homework done alone, thank
you very much. We got real good insights
into what the concerns were during
these morning briefings, and sometimes we
got concrete requirements or papers
to be done by the next day. We had a
really good window into what was
uppermost in policy-maker's minds, but we
would take that back to CIA
headquarters and say, "OK, now we know what they
're interested in. What to we have?"
And we'd do it alone. We'd analyze the
heck out of it. We'd polish it off,
pass it by our supervisors and bring it
down the next morning.
The prospect of the Secretary of
State and Condoleezza Rice and Cheney
convening in CIA headquarters to sit
around a table and help with the
analysis.give me a break! You don't
have policy-makers at the table when you
're doing analysis. That's
antithetical to the whole ethic of analysis. You'
re divorced from policy as soon as
you do your analysis, and when you're
finished, you serve it up to them,
and they can do what they want with it.
To be sure, that's the other part of
the game. But when they get it, they
get it in unexpurgated virgin form,
and that was heady and important work.
It was the only place in town, in the
Foreign Affairs realm, that could and
did do that work.
PITT: Where do you see this whole
issue of the manner in which the war was
sold to the American people going?
McG: The most important and
clear-cut scandal, of course, has to do with
the forgery of those Niger nuclear
documents that were used as proof. The
very cold calculation was that
Congress could be deceived, we could have our
war, we could win it, and then no one
would care that part of the evidence
for war was forged. That may still
prove to be the case, but the most
encouraging thing I've seen over the
last four weeks now is that the US
press has sort of woken from its
slumber and is interested. I've asked
people in the press how they account
for their lack of interest before the
war, and now they seem to be
interested. I guess the simple answer is that
they don't like to be lied to.
I think the real difference is that
no one knew, or very few people knew,
before the war that there weren't any
weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
Now they know. It's an unavoidable
fact. No one likes to be conned, no one
likes to be lied to, and no one
particularly likes that 190 US servicemen
and women have been killed in this
effort, not to mentioned the five or six
thousand Iraqi civilians.
There's a difference in tone. If
the press does not succumb to the
argument put out by folks like Tom
Friedman, who says it doesn't really
matter that there are no weapons in
Iraq, if it does become a quagmire which
I believe it will be, and we have a
few servicemen killed every week, then
there is a prospect that the American
people will wake up and say, "Tell me
again why my son was killed? Why did
we have to make this war on Iraq?"
So I do think that there is some
hope now that the truth will come out. It
won't come out through the
Congressional committees. That's really a joke, a
sick joke.
PITT: During the Clinton
administration, if there was going to be an
investigation into something, it was
going to come out of the House of
Representatives. What would your
assessment of the situation be at this
point?
McG: It doesn't take a crackerjack
analyst. Take Pat Roberts, the
Republican Senator from Kansas, who
is chairman of the Senate Intelligence
Committee. When the Niger forgery was
unearthed and when Colin Powell
admitted, well shucks, it was a
forgery, Senator Jay Rockefellar, the
ranking Democrat on that committee,
went to Pat Roberts and said they really
needed the FBI to take a look at
this. After all, this was known to be a
forgery and was still used on
Congressmen and Senators. We'd better get the
Bureau in on this. Pat Roberts said
no, that would be inappropriate. So
Rockefellar drafted his own letter,
and went back to Roberts and said he was
going to send the letter to FBI
Director Mueller, and asked if Roberts would
sign on to it. Roberts said no, that
would be inappropriate.
What the FBI Director eventually
got was a letter from one Minority member
saying pretty please, would you maybe
take a look at what happened here,
because we think there may have been
some skullduggery. The answer he got
from the Bureau was a brush-off. Why
do I mention all that? This is the same
Pat Roberts who is going to lead the
investigation into what happened with
this issue.
There is a lot that could be said
about Pat Roberts. I remember way back
last fall when people were being
briefed, CIA and others were briefing
Congressmen and Senators about the
weapons of mass destruction. These press
folks were hanging around outside the
briefing room, and when the Senators
came out, one of the press asked
Senator Roberts how the evidence on weapons
of mass destruction was. Roberts
said, oh, it was very persuasive, very
persuasive.
The press guy asked Roberts to tell
him more about that. Roberts said,
"Truck A was observed to be
going under Shed B, where Process C is believed
to be taking place." The press
guy asked him if he found that persuasive,
and Pat Roberts said, "Oh, these
intelligence folks, they have these
techniques down so well, so yeah,
this is very persuasive." And the
correspondent said thank you very
much, Senator.
So, if you've got a Senator who is
that inclined to believe that kind of
intelligence, you've got someone who
will do the administration's bidding.
On the House side, of course, you've
got Porter Goss, who is a CIA alumnus.
Porter Goss' main contribution last
year to the joint committee
investigating 9/11 was to sic the FBI
on members of that committee, at the
direction of who? Dick Cheney. Goss
admits this. He got a call from Dick
Cheney, and he was "chagrined"
in Goss' word that he was upbraided by Dick
Cheney for leaks coming out of the
committee. He then persuaded the innocent
Bob Graham to go with him to the FBI
and ask the Bureau to investigate the
members of that committee. Polygraphs
and everything were involved. That's
the first time something like that
has ever happened.
Be aware, of course, that Congress
has its own investigative agencies, its
own ways of investigating things like
that. So without any regard for the
separation of powers, here Goss says
Cheney is bearing down on me, so let's
get the FBI in here. In this case,
ironically enough, the FBI jumped right
in with Ashcroft whipping it along.
They didn't come up with much, but the
precedent was just terrible.
All I'm saying is that you've got
Porter Goss on the House side, you've
got Pat Roberts on the Senate side,
you've got John Warner who's a piece
with Pat Roberts. I'm very reluctant
to be so unequivocal, but in this case
I can say nothing is going to come
out of those hearings but a lot of smoke.
PITT: So what is the alternative?
McG: The alternative would be an
independent judicial commission, such as
the one that a lot of the British are
appealing for in London. You get a
person who is not beholden to George
Bush or to the Democrats, a universally
respected figure, and let him pick
the members of the commission, and you
give them access to this material.
Not restricted access, like what the 9/11
committee in Congress got. You give
them everything, and you let them tell
their story. It would take a while,
but they would come up with a much
better prospect of a fair judgment on
what happened.
PITT: That's not going to come
unless there is some pretty significant
pressure put on the administration
from outside Congress.
McG: I wouldn't see that coming at
all, and surely not before 2004.
PITT: In your time at CIA as a
Soviet Foreign Policy analyst, you were
directly involved with analyzing
Soviet policy issues in the run-up to and
duration of the Soviet war in
Afghanistan?
McG: Yes.
PITT: How deep into the details of
that did you get?
McG: Oh, quite deep. By that time
my responsibilities had grown, and I
stayed very interested and abreast of
what was going on there.
PITT: Could you talk about how
America's involvement in the Soviet war in
Afghanistan led to the events of
September 11? There are some very clear,
straight-line connections - starting
with Brzyznski's 'Afghan Trap' in
1978 - between the two events, yes?
From your perspective, how did that
develop?
McG: The big momentum was put on by
a fellow named William Casey, who was
head of CIA under Reagan. He saw this
as a little war that he could wage and
win, and he had a lot of support from
folks on the Hill. What they did was
arm and recruit folks like Osama bin
Laden and others. One of the big
decisions they had to make was
whether or not to give them Stinger missiles.
I remember when that was under
discussion. The dangers of giving these
uncontrollable folks Stinger missiles
was emphasized, but the decision was
to go ahead and give them those
missiles anyway. In many respects, the folks
that were used as our proxies in this
war against the Soviets have come back
to bite us, and to bite us very hard
as we know from 9/11.
PITT: The invasion came in 1979
because the Soviets were worried about
their puppet regime in Afghanistan.
It became a great Muslim cause to defend
Afghanistan against the godless
invaders. Osama bin Laden became a hero by
funding this fight, and by fighting
along with the others. When the war
ended in 1989, when the Soviets
withdrew with their tail between their legs,
Afghanistan was left in an utterly
shattered and destroyed state. Given the
fact that we basically precipitated
the start of that war by arming and
training those mujeheddin fighters to
go after the Afghan government in 1978
and 1979, 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. The Kurds are
one example. We use them and betray
them, and we don't care much once our
little geopolitical objective has been
achieved. That's what was in play
here. Nobody gave a damn. 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.
In addition, these bad guys were
our good guys. Osama bin Laden and all
those folks were people we armed and
trained, and when you get that close -
and this is a systemic problem within
the Agency - when you get that close
so that you're in bed with these
guys, you can't step back and say, "Whoa,
wait a second. These guys could be a
real danger in the future." You can't
make a calculated, dispassionate
analysis of what might be in store for
these guys. It was a poor situation
politically, strategically, and as it
turned out, analytically as well.
PITT: What we're talking about is
actions and consequences. At the time,
there was not a lot of concern for
Afghanistan after we had achieved our
goals there, and the place was left
to fester, and 9/11 became the
inevitable consequence of that.
McG: Right.
PITT: Are you aware of the
situation surrounding John O'Neill? He was a
Deputy Director of the FBI, and was
the chief bin Laden hunter. He
investigated the first Twin Towers
bombing, he investigated the Khobar
Towers bombing, he investigated the
bombing of our embassies in Africa, and
he investigated the bombing of the
USS Cole. He was the guy in government
who knew everything about bin Laden,
and he quit the FBI in protest three
weeks before 9/11. He quit because he
said he was not being allowed to
investigate terror connections to
Saudi Arabia, because such investigations
threatened the petroleum business we
do with that nation. O'Neill quit, took
a job as chief of security at the
World Trade Center, and died doing his job
on September 11. The fact that he was
thwarted in his terrorism
investigations clearly left a hole in
our intelligence capabilities
regarding these threats - the guy who
knew the most about it was not allowed
to pursue those connections to the
greatest possible degree.
McG: I am aware of that. There are
other FBI folks who have spoken out
about this same problem. There is an
agent from Chicago named Robert Wright
who has spoken out about his being
hamstrung in his attempts to investigate
these matters. Just read the book
about the FBI labs that was written by
Warren and Kelley. The corruption and
deceit that goes on there, and the
headquarters mentality where you can
be completely incompetent and still get
a Presidential award - which is what
happened with the fellow who squashed
the Minneapolis Bureau's requests for
action against Moussaoui - there's
something really insidiously wrong
there. The problem is that if you ask Pat
Roberts or the Judiciary Committee
and the Congress to do something about
it, well, lots of luck.
PITT: Is there anything else you
would like to touch upon before we are
finished?
McG: 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. That seems to
me to be something that needs to be
borne in mind, that needs to be held
up for everyone to see. If an informed
public, and by extension an informed
Congress, is the necessary bedrock for
democracy, then we've got a split
bedrock that is in bad need of repair.
I have done a good bit of research
here, and one of the conclusions I have
come to is that Vice President Cheney
was not only interested in "helping
out" with the analysis, let us
say, that CIA was producing on Iraq. He was
interested also in fashioning
evidence that he could use as proof that, as
he said, "The Iraqis had
reconstituted their nuclear program," which
demonstrably they had not.
What I'm saying is that this needs
to be investigated. We know that it was
Dick Cheney who sent the former US
ambassador to Niger to investigate. We
know he was told in early March of
last year that the documents were
forgeries. And yet these same
documents were used in that application. That
is something that needs to be
uncovered. We need to pursue why the Vice
President allowed that to happen. To
have global reporters like Walter
Pincus quoting senior administration
officials that Vice President Cheney
was not told by CIA about the
findings of this former US ambassador strains
credulity well beyond the breaking
point. Cheney commissioned this trip, and
when the fellow came back, he said,
"Don't tell me, I don't want to know
what happened." That's just
ridiculous.
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. As
the first President Bush said about
the invasion of Kuwait, this cannot
stand.
One other thing I'd like to note is
the anomaly that President Bush has
succeeded Saddam Hussein in the role
of preventing UN inspectors from coming
into Iraq. He has not even been asked
why.
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.
Don't come in here. That needs to be
brought out. For the UN to be waiting
with those inspectors at the ready,
there has got to be some reason why the
United States won't let them back in.
The more sinister interpretation is
that the US wants to be able to plant
weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
Now, most people will say, "Come on,
McGovern. How are you going to get a
SCUD in there without everyone seeing
it?" It doesn't have to be a
SCUD. 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, and President Bush,
with more credibility than he could
with those trailers will say, "Ha! We've
found the weapons of mass
destruction."
I think that's a possibility, a
real possibility. I think that, since it
is a real possibility, the Democrats'
sheepishness on this, their reluctance
to get out on a limb and say there
are no weapons of mass destruction in
Iraq, may be more explainable. But
they should come around anyway.
PITT: I have heard that it is
difficult to manufacture Iraqi-style weapons
of this type, because the Iraqi
chemical and biological weapons have a
particular signature created in their
inception that is hard to duplicate.
McG: It was very difficult to do
the forgery, too. A slipshod job was
done. When Colin Powell was asked
about it , he said, "We have this
information. If it is inaccurate,
fine." Like I said before, he and I come
out of the same part of the Bronx. He
went to Army charm school and I did
not. That kind of tone, that kind of
attitude, was always accompanied by an
obscene gesture and a four-letter
word where I came from. But that's the
attitude.
If they can take that kind of
attitude on a forgery, they can take the
same attitude on this. "You can
believe who you want," they'll say. "You can
believe Hans Blix and Saddam Hussein,
or you can believe us. We say we found
it there."
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.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
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William Rivers Pitt
william.pitt@mail.truthout.org is a New York Times
best-selling author of two books -
"War On Iraq" available now from Context
Books, and "The Greatest
Sedition is Silence," now available from Pluto
Press at www.SilenceIsSedition.com.
© Copyright 2003 by TruthOut.org.
Copyright,
Truthout.org. Reprinted with permission
Part I
References