Must-read. This was written by Melvin A. Goodman.
Melvin A. Goodman, a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and adjunct professor of government at Johns Hopkins University, spent 42 years with the CIA, the National War College, and the U.S. Army. His latest book is Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA.I found this on Consortium News, but it was published first at Truthout.
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2010/011110a.htmlThe Obama administration quietly announced Friday the appointment of John McLaughlin, former deputy CIA director, to head the internal investigation of the intelligence failures that led to the Christmas Day attempted bombing of a Delta airliner headed for Detroit as well as the events leading to the shootings at Fort Hood in November.
With this appointment, President Barack Obama has assured that the culture of intelligence cover-up will continue. McLaughlin has participated in and sought to cover-up many of the CIA's most egregious failures and misdeeds of the past decade. When he left the CIA, he then served as the agency's chief apologist.
So, who is John McLaughlin? Most of official Washington and the mainstream media view McLaughlin as the mild-mannered, professorial CIA bureaucrat, who former CIA Director George Tenet called the "smartest man he had ever met."
Few people understand, however, that McLaughlin played the most important role in making sure that the Bush administration received the intelligence that would be used and misused to justify the use of force against Iraq in 2003.
Washington insiders remember that it was CIA Director Tenet who told President George W. Bush, "Don't worry, it's a slam dunk," in response to the President's demand for stronger intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction (WMD) to provide to the American people.
Few people remember that it was McLaughlin who actually delivered the "slam-dunk" briefing to the President in January 2003.
McLaughlin was the "villain" behind the politicized intelligence on Iraq in the run-up to the war. He perverted the intelligence process, ignored high-level briefings on the weakness of the intelligence on WMD and tried to silence David Kay, the chief of the Iraq Survey Group, when the weapons inspectors found no evidence of strategic weapons in Iraq.
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McLaughlin was also the villain behind the CIA's preparation of Secretary of State Colin Powell's speech to the United Nations in February 2003 that used phony intelligence to convince an international audience of the need for war.
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In addition to being one of the ideological drivers for the CIA's policies of torture and abuse, secret prisons and extraordinary renditions, McLaughlin demonstrated early in his career that he was a company man willing to do what was necessary to advance his career.
In the 1980s, when CIA Director William Casey and his deputy Robert Gates were "cooking the books" on intelligence dealing with the Soviet Union, Central America and Southwest Asia, McLaughlin offered no dissent.
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President Obama has made many mistakes in his handling of the CIA and the intelligence community that could be attributed to his inexperience and his reliance on intelligence officials, who are themselves part of the culture of cover-up.
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The President's early mistakes demonstrated that he simply didn't get it; the appointment of McLaughlin indicates that the President doesn't want to get it.
It is essential for President Obama to understand what went wrong in order to reform the CIA and take corrective actions.
In relying on those individuals who have circled the wagons to protect themselves and the agency, the President has deprived himself of an opportunity to understand the intelligence failures of 9/11 and the shoot-down of the missionary plane over Peru as well as the illegality of renditions, detentions and interrogations.
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