2 Intelligence Experts Assert Bush, Not CIA, to Blame

At a National Press Club briefing Tuesday, two former Central Intelligence Agency and State Department experts lashed out at the Bush administration for trying to pin the blame on the intelligence community for misinformation on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Melvin Goodman was division chief and senior analyst at the Office of Soviet Affairs for the CIA and a senior analyst at the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research.

Larry Johnson is a former Deputy Director of the State Department's Office of Counter Terrorism and received Exceptional Performance awards for his work at the CIA. He is a registered Republican who contributed financially to Bush in 2000 and voted for him.

Both blasted Bush and his administration for their relentless campaign to sell the invasion of Iraq to the American people and the world through distortions and lies that were at odds with official intelligence estimates.

Goodman focused on how Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld "falsified intelligence" by creating the position of Undersecretary for Intelligence and the Office of Special Plans to falsify intelligence and leak it to the press.

He said that Secretary of State Colin Powell's infamous Feb. 5, 2003 speech to the United Nations "documenting" the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was "wrong in all its particulars," and that the Kaye report, one by one, demonstrated that by finding all 29 charges in the Powell speech false.

He attacked Bush's assertion in his State of the Union message that "Iraq is the center of the war on terrorism" as contrary to all U.S. intelligence assessments. Terrorism is the product of Islamic fundamentalism, which could never get a hold in Iraq. "Saddam might have been bad, but he was no fundamentalist," Goodman said, "and the entire U.S. intelligence community knows it."

But now, the U.S. invasion of Iraq has, ironically, created "a self-fulfilling prophecy" for Bush. Since the U.S. invasion and occupation, terrorist forces have now moved into Iraq and are in proximity of U.S. military targets, objectives and 130,000 U.S. troops in ways that were never possible for them before.

"They are now capable of launching a full-scale civil war with the U.S. military caught in the middle," he said.

Goodman decried the unwillingness of the U.S. Congress to call the Bush administration to account on this, and joined his voice to that of such groups as the web-based MoveOn.Org and Win Without War to call for a Congressional censure of the president.

"Congress was willing not only to censure, but to impeach President Clinton for covering up an extramarital affair," he said. "There is no comparison, in terms of its consequences for vital U.S. interests, including the lives of hundreds of U.S. soldiers and thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians, between what it impeached Clinton for and what Bush must be held accountable for now."

Johnson's assertions were equally compelling against the president, especially since they came from a former loyal Bush supporter with an intelligence background that qualifies him to know what he's talking about. He also attacked Bush's assertions of ties between Hussein and Osama bin Laden.

"By April of last year," he said, "I was beginning to pick up grumblings from friends inside the intelligence community that there had been pressure applied to analysts to come up with certain conclusions. Specifically, I was told that analysts were pressured to find an operational link between Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. One analyst, in particular, told me they were repeatedly pressured by the most senior officials in the Department of Defense."

Johnson added, "In an e-mail exchange with another friend, I raised the possibility that `the Bush administration had bought into a lie.' My friend, who works within the intelligence community, challenged me on the use of the word, `bought,' and suggested instead that the Bush administration had created the lie."

"I have spoken to more than two analysts who have expressed fear of retaliation if they come forward and tell what they know," he added. "We know that most of the reasons we were given for going to war were wrong. My goal in appearing today is to call for accountability...I am still enough of a dreamer to believe that there are Republicans committed to finding the truth and holding leaders accountable."