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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
Korb also suggests that this affair could seriously affect the ability of the U.S. government to function efficiently. "What this administration has done to military and intelligence professionals in government is disgraceful," he says, citing Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric Shinseki, who was publicly rebuffed by Wolfowitz and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld after predicting -- correctly, it now seems -- that it would take "several hundred thousand troops to keep the peace in postwar Iraq." Korb also cites the formation earlier this year of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, a group of a few dozen former intelligence officials from Army Intelligence, CIA, FBI, Defense and State Departments, to protest what they saw as a misuse of intelligence for the purposes of building a case for war. "This will also have long-term ramifications," Korb says.
On the VIPS steering committee sits 27-year CIA veteran Ray McGovern, one of President Ronald Reagan's intelligence briefers from 1981-85, who still has many contacts within several intelligence agencies. McGovern tells Salon that he believes the Bush administration's pressure on and manipulation of intelligence agencies was "worse than the Gulf of Tonkin," when President Lyndon Johnson falsified information in order to secure authorization to escalate the Vietnam War. At least back then it was done "in his quick, manipulative way," McGovern says. "This was so premeditated."
McGovern, who opposes the war in Iraq, says "the intelligence just wasn't there, so in such a case the president who wants to pursue this war and his advisors will either manufacture it or cook whatever is there to the recipe they want to pursue."
Korb and McGovern are just two such voices in a chorus of seemingly credible, if mostly anonymous, critics. On Thursday, a senior CIA official told the Washington Post that Cheney and his staff "sent signals, intended or otherwise, that a certain output was desired from here." There was the story about Powell, first reported by U.S. News & World Report, preparing for his testimony before the United Nations in February and so exasperated with dubious information provided to him that he threw the documents in the air and declared, "I'm not reading this. This is bullshit." There's the Time magazine story reporting that an Army intelligence officer said Defense Secretary Donald "Rumsfeld was deeply, almost pathologically distorting the intelligence." On Thursday, the Wall Street Journal quoted a State Department intelligence official who said of the pre-war WMD information that "much of it wasn't very solid, and the fragmentary information sometimes produced fierce internal disagreements about its meaning." Then there was the individual from the Defense Intelligence Agency who told the New York Times that "the American people were manipulated."
Similar statements and charges are being made to the media in London by British government and intelligence sources. On Wednesday, Blair faced an angry crowd at the House of Commons calling for an inquiry into whether his administration misused intelligence information. An influential BBC report from last week quoted a "senior British official" accusing Blair of exaggerating items from an intelligence dossier released last September that stated that Iraq had "military plans for the use of chemical and biological weapons, including against its own Shia population. Some of these weapons are deployable within 45 minutes of an order to use them."
The official said that the Blair government wanted intelligence to make the 50-page document "sexier" than an earlier version, so they added the "deployable within 45 minutes" detail, even though that information came from only one source, and intelligence protocol requires that most key information have two reliable sources before it is released. "Most people in intelligence weren't happy with the dossier because it didn't reflect the considered view they were putting forward," the unnamed official said to the BBC.
Additionally, two of Blair's former Cabinet officials -- Robin Cook and Clare Short, both of whom resigned because they opposed the war in Iraq -- accused Blair of misleading the public. "I have concluded that the prime minister decided to go to war in August sometime and he duped us all along," Short said. "There was political spin put on the intelligence information to create a sense of urgency." She said that Blair "duped," "misled" and "deceived" the British people.
Since early May, Britain's Parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee has been looking into the reliability of the intelligence. But on Wednesday, the Conservative leader, Smith, said that wouldn't suffice. "The prime minister will only let that committee see the intelligence reports he wants them to see," he said, since "it reports directly to him, and he can withhold any part or all of its reports."
On Wednesday, Blair agreed to cooperate with the House of Commons Foreign Relations Committee, which announced that it sought to investigate the pre-war intelligence on WMD. Blair asserted that he had "absolutely no doubt at all that ... the clearest possible evidence of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction" would be found. He reminded listeners of the track record of his accusers. "In the end, there have been many claims made about the Iraq conflict, that hundreds of thousands of people were going to die, that it was going to be my Vietnam, that the Middle East was going to be in flames and this latest one, that weapons of mass destruction were a complete invention by the British government."
