Monday, 19 May 2014

Speaking truth To Power
(Ray McGovern)


Part I

Rogue or Visionary?
Ray McGovern has often been called a 'renegade' former CIA Officer, a 'nutcase' a CO
(conscientious objector), an 'extremist', a 'radical', maybe even a 'Commie'.
Whatever opinion you take, on the big issues, he has proved over time to be remarkably accurate in his perception of the direction of U.S. Foreign policy. For that, he has earned the enduring enmity of most of the Republican political class – and even many Democratic politicians.
As a retired CIA Officer it is expected that he should go quietly into the silent night and disappear into the background.  If, as a member of the general public (and with a potential media high profile) he is no longer actively or passively 'supportive' of U.S. Foreign policy it is expected he should remain silent.   Indeed after retirement most of his former colleagues do – which is why he is unique.
Epiphany
Reviled and shunned (and occasionally 'roughed up' at political speaking events1) he really is the quintessential 'Thomas Becket'6 of America in our time.
(As there are few spiritual leaders of any worth, but many of great wealth, in the U.S. today, I am at a loss but to find a historical similarity, hence my choice of Becket.)
The conscience of America everyone would prefer to ignore.  The elephant in the room, invisible to all but those who can see.
A Saint by no means but one who more likely than not has had an epiphany 'on the Road to Damascus', seeing what he has seen and experiencing what he has experienced, retiring from the CIA has freed him to speak openly about the political (and spiritual) direction of the United States in today's world in a way he could never have done as an insider.
The CIA that he joined as an enthusiastic young man was a very different animal from what it is today.  The most important difference between then and now is it's autonomy.
Today it is a tool of partisan politicians rather than something respected for it's impartial political autonomy.   Under the guise of accountability it is not just subject to political scrutiny but is captive to the whims of every objective and agenda corporate America wishes to implement - regardless of whether such are in the best long-term political, economic, social and cultural interests of the United States in a world more dynamic, more fluid and more complex since the breakup of the Soviet Union.
9/11 and it's Aftermath
The over reliance of Elint, Comint, Sigint and Telint has left America highly vulnerable. 9/11, in my opinion, is the apex of such paucity and over-reliance.
What followed on from 9/11 has, in my opinion, been one disaster after another - failed objectives in Afghanistan, in Iraq, in Libya.  For goodness sake, Al Qaeda are now on the Southern flank of Europe - all across North Africa - sorry that your mainstream media has not informed you about this.
After 9/11 such were the monumental shifts in U.S. foreign policy when world economic objectives, long in abeyance, could now be realized as opportunistic challenges to fulfill  what were paper pipe dreams and sketches of hypothetical scenarios of an ideal world the U.S. would like to arrange became possible. One of the problems was, in my opinion, an ignorance of local conditions - something the British Empire never suffered from as it always assiduously studied the culture, customs and history of peoples it was managing throughout the world so that it could be a effective and efficient custodian and administrator from afar.   Such concepts are alien to corporate America as such are too time consuming and shareholders demand profits and growth every year not every 10 or 20 years.
In an era of instant gratification, and for these reasons, American hubris has little patience.

'What If.........?'
I recall many years ago (probably three decades, certainly long before 9/11) a colleague (who had access at a senior level of authority) provided me with a think-tank paper where what evolved after 9/11 was remarkably similar to what that paper had suggested.  (I must for accuracy say that the paper did not in any way foresee 9/11 but was a scenario of a 'wish list' for re-arranging the world according as to how America, would, under ideal conditions, like it to exist.) Yes, I know that many people spent a lot of time working on 'wish lists' in the years following the collapse of the Soviet Empire but this one caught my eye again after 9/11for it's remarkable portrayal of events which are still unfolding to this very day. (The region of the Caspian Sea was also mentioned in that paper.)
Cassandra
''Before her death, in Aeschylus' play Agamemnon, she tells of how Apollo had seduced her - by offering her his special gift: prophecy.  But she changed her mind and denied him satisfaction.  His revenge was to change the gift subtly - she'd still see the future, but no one would believe her.  The real cruelty was that she would always see the truth: but be unable to communicate it.  So in the play she foresees her own brutal death - as well as Agamemnon's - but cannot prevent it.
Greek society did not recognize the woman's right to say no: so her fate is, in a sense, to have to accept the answer "no" for the rest of her life.  No to marriage, and no to her accurate prognostications.  And so she becomes a serial victim who deserves sympathy for her tragic life but gets none...''3
Whether I agree or disagree with Ray McGovern on many issues is not the point of this article.
What is important to me is that more times than not he has got it right - and far from being rewarded he has been reviled - for the embarrassment he has caused, as an insider and as an outsider, by getting it right4.
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.



----------------------------------------------------------------------------
----
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
at