Nicholas F. Benton:

CIA Analyst Roasts Bush

By Nicholas F. Benton

Ray McGovern, a 27-year analyst for the CIA speaking in Falls Church, Virginia, to a gathering of the Virginia Votes group Sunday, unleashed a scathing indictment of the Bush’s administration’s handling of an array of intelligence, military and human rights matters in the context of the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq. He said the people that are currently running U.S. foreign and military policy were affectionately known as “The Crazies” during the Reagan and Bush Sr. administrations, and were “kept at arm’s length,” never permitted to rise above middle management levels of influence because of their radical proclivities. However, with the election of the current Bush, they took over all the top positions.

McGovern and his colleagues in the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity held a press conference in D.C. last Friday to brief the media on the implications for the lives and safety of U.S. anti-terror intelligence assets worldwide of Bush advisor Karl Rove’s blowing the cover of an undercover CIA agent, Valerie Plame. Rove’s action was done in order to “get even” with Plame’s husband, Ambassador Joe Wilson, for exposing the administration’s lie about Iraq’s nuclear capabilities prior to the invasion. “We wanted to tell the media how many people might get killed,” he said. It was in the context of that briefing that former CIA analyst Larry Johnson was invited to give the Democratic response to the president’s weekly radio address Saturday.

In Falls Church Sunday, McGovern said his group is nearing the conclusion of an independent investigation of the source of what is widely held to be a forged document attributed to the government of Niger in 2001. The document indicated there was a deal to deliver yellow cake uranium to Iraq. He said indications already point to the fact that the forgery was produced in the U.S., perhaps from among circles of former U.S. government officials that were involved in the Iran-Contra scandals of the 1980s. He said some damning evidence and conclusions could be made public within a few months. “It was an inside job,” he charged, arising in the aftermath of the sudden assertion on August 26, 2002 by Vice President Cheney that Iraq was developing nuclear weapons along with its other phantom so-called “weapons of mass destruction.” That speech was the first “call to arms” that led to the invasion of Iraq the following March.

Then CIA Director George Tenet told his analysts, McGovern said, that the White House did not want any intelligence estimate of Iraq, but when Congressional pressure arose, he told them to do an estimate that agreed with Cheney’s claims. “Thus, we got the worst intelligence estimate in U.S. history. It was demonstrably false, matched only by the CIA assessment in 1962 that there were no Soviet missiles in Cuba. But that was an honest mistake,” McGovern said. “This one was dishonest from the get-go.”

He said there was “enough ambiguity” in the sanitized version of the estimate that the Congress saw to prevent more doubts from being raised at the time, he said.

“We have a war criminal as president,” McGovern exclaimed, noting that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales had advised him it was OK to violate the Geneva Convention and the War Crimes Act by permitting the systematic torture of detainees.

But McGovern did not limit his criticism to the Bush administration. In the course of his 1 1/2 hour presentation, including Q&A’s, he said the “biggest sea change in the last 42 years” has been the decline in the independent role of the press. “We no longer have a free press,” he exclaimed, citing as an example a panel assembled in 2001 for the 30th anniversary of the publication of the Pentagon Papers, which is attributed with turning the vast majority of Americans against the U.S. involvement in Vietnam.

“At this panel, with representatives of the New York Times and Washington Post congratulating themselves, they were asked if a similar set of classified documents were leaked to their news organizations today, they would be published,” he recounted. “After a dead silence, they one after another began to answer, ‘It’s not likely today.’ And they said this without any trace of embarrassment or regret.”

He said that bloggers and the Internet are providing ways around the “captive press” and were, among other things, responsible for the eventual public exposure of the Downing Street memos that exposed the U.S. administration’s treachery in misleading the public on its motives for invading Iraq.

If there is any solace, that type of exposure and the tireless work by the likes of McGovern, with his impeccable credentials, has led to the latest national polls showing that over half the American people now feel they were misled by the Bush administration into supporting the Iraq invasion.

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