Ray McGovern/W. Patrick Lang: Holding Intelligence Liars Accountable

[seafan]

Holding Intelligence Liars Accountable

By Ray McGovern and W. Patrick Lang
January 6, 2007

All those who helped President George W. Bush launch a war of aggression—termed by Nuremberg “the supreme international crime”—have blood on their hands and must be held accountable. This includes corrupt intelligence officials. Otherwise, look for them to perform the same service in facilitating war on Iran.
“They should have been shot,” said former State Department intelligence director, Carl Ford, referring to ex-CIA director George Tenet and his deputy John McLaughlin, for their “fundamentally dishonest” cooking of intelligence to please the White House. Ford was alluding to “intelligence” on the menacing but non-existent mobile biological weapons laboratories in Iraq.
Ford was angry that Tenet and McLaughlin persisted in portraying the labs as real several months after they had been duly warned that they existed only in the imagination of intelligence analysts who, in their own eagerness to please, had glommed onto second-hand tales told by a con-man appropriately dubbed “Curveball.”
In fact, Tenet and McLaughlin had been warned about Curveball long before they let then-Secretary of State Colin Powell shame himself, and the rest of us, by peddling Curveball’s wares at the U.N. Security Council on Feb. 5, 2003.


.....

“U.S. Toll in Iraq Reaches 3,000” screamed The Washington Post ’s lead story on New Year’s Day, which included the Pentagon’s count of more than 22,000 troops injured. As is known, the Pentagon does not count dead Iraqis, but reputable estimates put that number at about 650,000.
As we pass this sad milestone, it behooves us to pause and consider the enormity of what has been allowed to happen—and how to prevent it from happening again. The House and Senate Intelligence committees in the new Congress need to reinstitute genuine oversight, including a close look at why so many intelligence officers cooperated in the dishonesty leading to war. We owe that to the 25,000, not to mention the 650,000.
Start with Tenet and McLaughlin and include Alan Foley, the retired chief of CIA’s Center for Weapons Intelligence, Nonproliferation and Arms Control (WINPAC) and devotee of imaginative intelligence on bio-labs, uranium from Niger, aluminum tubes and other artifices to justify an unnecessary war.



Most of the suspects owe their meteoric careers in large measure to Defense Secretary Robert Gates who, as head of CIA analysis and later as CIA director, institutionalized the politicization of CIA analysis more than 20 years ago, mostly by moving malleable managers up the pay scale.
Another beneficiary of Gates is George Tenet who, as staff director of the Senate Intelligence committee in 1991, helped Gates overcome strong opposition to his confirmation as director. It is a safe bet that Gates returned the favor by recommending that Tenet be kept on as director when George W. Bush became President in 2001.
Gates learned well at the knee of his original mentor, William Casey, President Ronald Reagan’s CIA director. They and those that followed had remarkable success in perpetrating the dual crime of which, long ago, Socrates was accused: making the worse case appear the better and corrupting the youth.



Thus, in September 2002 when Senate Intelligence committee Democrats Dick Durban and Bob Graham insisted on a National Intelligence Estimate on “weapons of mass destruction” before Congress voted for war, George Tenet found himself the ultimate beneficiary of Robert Gates’ finely tuned Geiger counter for corruptibility.
The pliant managers promoted originally by Gates were happy to conjure up a formal estimate written to the specifications of their frequent visitor, Vice President Dick Cheney. .....
Rep. Lloyd Doggett, D-Texas, put the effects of all this most succinctly in a floor speech last year:

This war was launched without an immediate threat to our families... Radical "know-it-all" ideologues here in Washington bent facts, distorted intelligence and perpetrated lies designed to mislead the American people into believing a third-rate thug had a hand in the 9/11 tragedy and was soon to unleash a mushroom cloud.

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[EVDebs]

1. None dare call it treason but Curveball and his enablers did more damage to US

"accidentally" than any Democrat could possibly have done "on purpose", to use KKKarl Rove's sick logic against him.

[Tom Joad]

2. Go Ray McGovern! And Rep. Jim McGovern! And George, we haven't forgotten you.

unrelated, they just share smarts and guts and a common last name.

[rman]

3. "must be" held accountable, but how are we going to

hold them accountable when their superiors cover for them?