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Recent
Stories
July
31, 2003
Sheldon
Rampton
and John Stauber
True Lies: Propaganda and Bush's
Wars
July
30, 2003
David
Lindorff
Poindexter the Terror Bookie
Marjorie
Cohn
Why Iraq and Afghanistan? It's About
the Oil
Elaine
Cassel
How Ashcroft Coerces Guilty Pleas
in Terror Cases
Zvi
Bar'el
The Hidden Costs of the Iraq War
Lisa Walsh
Thomas
Killing Mustafa Hussein: Death of a Child, Birth of a Legend?
Sean
Carter
Pat Robertson's Prayer Jihad: God, Sodomy and the Supremes
ND Jayaprakash
India and Ariel Sharon
Steve
Perry
Bush's Top 40 Lies
Standard
Schaefer
Correction about Bloomberg and Outscourcing
Website
of the Day
Bring Them Home Now!
Congratulations
to CounterPuncher Gilad Atzmon! BBC Names EXILE Top Jazz CD
July
29, 2003
Jeffrey
St. Clair
"Journalist Spotted! Journalist
Dead!" Guatemala Bleeds; US Press Yawns
Thomas
J. Nagy
The Belligerent Dr. Pipes
Kurt Nimmo
Tom Delay Goes to Jerusalem
Chris
Floyd
Dead Reckoning: Bush Warriors Sign Off on War Crimes
Robert
Fisk
Another Botched Raid; Another Massacre
Jason Leopold
Did Chalabi Help Write Bush's State of the Union Address?
Conn Hallinan
Food Bully: Bush's Biotech Shock and Awe Campaign
Dan
Bacher
Sacramento's War on Free Speech
Ray
McGovern
Cheney Chicanery
Website
of the Day
Julie Hilden Caught on Tape
July 26 / 27, 2003
Alexander
Cockburn
NYT's Screws Up Again; Uday and
Qusay Deaths Bad for Bush; Gen. Hitchens at the Front
Gary
Leupp
Faith-Based Intelligence
Saul Landau
A Report from Syria
Stan
Goff
Bring 'Em On Home, Now!
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Book Cooking at Boeing
Andrew
Cockburn
The Sons Are Dead; Now the Blood Feud
Begins
Jason Leopold
CIA Points the Finger at the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans
Robert
Fisk
The Power of Death
Joanne
Mariner
Monsieur Moussaoui
Standard
Schaefer
Joblessness and the Invisible Hand
M. Shahid
Alam
The Global Economy Since 1800: a Short History
Harry
Browne
Northern Ireland: the Other Faltering Peace Process
Fidel Castro
Moncada, 50 Years Later
Lula
Democracy Requires Social Justice
Edward
S. Herman
Refuting Brad DeLong's Smear Job on Noam Chomsky
Ron Jacobs
Guided by a Great Feeling of Love: a Review of Gordon's The Company
You Keep
Julie
Hilden
A Photographer, an Offer and Cameron Diaz's Topless Photos
Adam Engel
Man Talk
Poets'
Basement
Keeney, Witherup, Short, Nimba, Guthrie and Albert
July
25, 2003
Francis
A. Boyle
Impeaching Bush
David
Krieger
15 Questions
Harvey
Wasserman
Pat Robertson's Supreme Fatwah
Steve Dunifer
Seize the Airwaves!
Dan
Bacher
Federal Judge Throws Out Bush Salmon Plan for Klamath River
Kurt Nimmo
Bread, Circuses, Uday and Qusay
Steve
Perry
Bush's Wars Weblog
Website
of the Day
Stop the Wall!
July
24, 2003
Elaine
Cassel
Ashcroft Loses...Again
Robert
Fisk
The Ugly Story of Camp Cropper: The
US Torture Camp in Iraq
David
Lindorff
Dumb and Dumber in Iraq
Christopher
Brauchli
Ashcroft Demands Death Penalty in
Puerto Rico
David
Vest
Dylan in Bend
Tom Turnipseed
Killing Saddam & His Family Won't Stop Killing of US Troops
Douglas
Valentine
A Nation of Assassins
Stew Albert
Contract Killing
Steve
Perry
Bush's Wars Weblog
Website
of the Day
Report on Palestinian Child Prisoners
July
23, 2003
Uri
Avnery
Caesar's Favor
David
Lindorff
Lynne Stewart's Big Win: Ashcroft
Rebuked
Mano
Singham
Iraq's Missing WMD Scientists
Steve
Perry
Better Late Than Never: the Press, the Dems, and Bush's Lies
John Stanton
Avoiding Plato's Republic in America: Is Anarchy the Only Hope?
Patrick
Bond
Bush and South Africa: a Petro-Military-Commerce Mission
Harry Browne
A Victory for a Disarming Irishwoman
Paul
Beaulieu
When the WTO Comes to Montreal
Robert
Fisk
The Sons are Dead, But the Resistance
Will Grow
William
Witherup
Georgie Porgie
Website
of the Day
Lieberman & Falwell:
True Love at Last
July
22, 2003
Diane
Christian
Bad Guy / Good Guy: War Forces;
Peace Frees
Jeremy
Brecher
Solidarity and Student Protests in Iran
Steve
Kretzmann
and Jim Vallette
Plugging Iraq into Globalization
Sam
Smith
Greening the Golden Triangle
James
Plummer
Smile, You're on Federal Camera
Lucretia
Stewart
This Day Shall Not Define My Life:
January 18, 2003
Website
of the Day
Iraq Coalition Casualties
Hot Stories
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Elaine
Cassel
Civil Liberties
Watch
Michel
Guerrin
Embedded Photographer Says: "I
Saw Marines Kill Civilians"
Uzma
Aslam Khan
The Unbearably Grim Aftermath of War:
What America Says Does Not Go
Paul de Rooij
Arrogant
Propaganda
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click Here
for More Stories.
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July
31, 2003
Playing
Make-Believe for War...And Not for the First Time
The Prostitution
of Intelligence
By RAY McGOVERN
Former CIA Analyst
To those readers still wandering the labyrinth
of Bush administration explanations regarding how "intelligence"
known to be spurious got into the president's state-of-the-union
address: Don't give up yet. I think I can help.
The White House is on solid ground in
pinning most of the blame on CIA director George Tenet for giving
unwarranted prominence to reporting that Iraq was seeking uranium
in Africa. Why? Because the report was demonstrably implausible
on its face.
"The alleged contract (between Iraq
and Niger) could not have been honored, as the export of uranium
from Niger is fully controlled by international companies,"
is how the International Atomic Energy Agency dismissed the report.
Former US Ambassador Joseph Wilson had already underscored that
in his report on March 9, 2002 following his eight-day fact-finding
trip to Niger. Wilson also described the processes in place for
monitoring and transporting uranium from Niger, processes that
make illicit diversions virtually impossible.
The subsequent revelation that the original
report was not only implausible in substance but based on a forgery
should have driven the final nail into its coffin. Instead, the
report was resuscitated and used last September and October in
a game of "make-believe--"make Congress believe that
the threat from Iraq required a preemptive strike.
Arguably, deceiving Congress on a matter
of war and peace constitutes an even more serious blow to our
constitutional process than the Supreme Court interfering in
a state's own constitutional process for counting ballots. Arguably,
it counts for little that the president misled us in his state-of-the-union
address, when months earlier his administration had used cynically
employed the bogus Iraq-Niger story to deceive our elected representatives
into ceding to him authority to make war.
George Tenet recently has sought to put
daylight between himself and the Iraq-Niger canard. In his "apology"
on July 11, for example, he added: "In the fall of 2002,
my deputy and I briefed hundreds of members of Congress on Iraq.
We did not brief the uranium acquisition story." And CIA
has forced the administration to acknowledge that, at Tenet's
insistence, the story was removed from a major Bush speech.
The Prostitution of
Intelligence
But Tenet was playing a double game.
Under relentless pressure from Vice President Dick Cheney and
top Pentagon officials, the CIA Director acquiesced in introducing
the Iraq-Niger story into the most authoritative analytic product
he gives to the president--a National Intelligence Estimate.
"Iraq's Continuing Programs for
Weapons of Mass Destruction," the NIE signed by Tenet on
October 1, 2002, was crafted to dovetail with Cheney's opening
pitch in rolling out the marketing strategy for war. In an unusually
confrontational speech of August 26, 2002 Cheney had insisted,
"Saddam has resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons."
Now on the defensive as hope fades for
finding any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, Cheney is resorting
once again to the NIE conclusions that he and his staff helped
to corrupt! In a major speech on July 24, he quoted the estimate's
conclusions to justify the administration's decision for war--conclusions
that anyone who has been paying attention now realizes were far
off the mark.
Now that's chutzpah!
The inclusion of the Iraq-Niger story,
together with other indignities shaping those fallacious conclusions,
amount to prostitution of intelligence--big time. And this buck
does stop with Tenet, who heads the entire Intelligence Community.
The State Department's intelligence unit
had the courage to pour cold water on the uranium-from-Niger
reporting, branding it "highly dubious." But State's
view was relegated to a footnote in the NIE.
For Tenet, the chickens came home to
roost on July 17, when the president's spokesman, Scott McClellan,
taking his cue from earlier remarks by National Security Adviser
Condoleezza Rice, singled out the NIE--seven times--as the source
of the spurious information in the president's state-of-the-union
speech.
Tenet Had Bad Examples
Sadly, Tenet is not the first CIA director
to prostitute an NIE under pressure from the Pentagon. In November
1967 as the Vietnam War gathered steam, Richard Helms signed
and gave to President Lyndon Johnson a very important NIE that
Helms knew to be fraudulent.
Painstaking research by my CIA colleague,
the late Sam Adams, had revealed that the Vietnamese Communists
under arms numbered 500,000. But Gen. William Westmoreland in
Saigon, eager to project an image of progress in the US "war
of attrition," had imposed a very low artificial ceiling
on estimates of enemy strength.
We CIA analysts were aghast when Helms
caved in and signed an NIE enshrining Westmoreland's count of
between 188,000 and 208,000. The Tet offensive just two months
later exploded that myth--at great human cost. And the war dragged
on for seven more years.
Then, as now, morale among CIA analysts
plummeted. A senior CIA official made the mistake of jocularly
asking Adams if he thought the Agency had "gone beyond the
bounds of reasonable dishonesty." I had to restrain Sam,
who had not only a keen sense of integrity but first-hand experience
of what our troops were experiencing in the jungles of Vietnam.
Sam would have been equally outraged
at the casualties being taken now by US forces fighting another
unnecessary war, this time in the desert. Kipling's verse applies
equally well to jungle or desert:
"If they ask you why we died,
tell them because our fathers lied."
Ray McGovern
chaired NIEs and briefed the President's Daily Brief during his
27-year career at CIA. He is co-founder of Veteran Intelligence
Professionals for Sanity and co-director of the Servant Leadership
School, an inner-city outreach ministry in Washington, DC. He
can be reached at: rmcgovern@slschool.org
Weekend Edition Features for July 26 / 28, 2003
Alexander
Cockburn
NYT's Screws Up Again; Uday and
Qusay Deaths Bad for Bush; Gen. Hitchens at the Front
Gary
Leupp
Faith-Based Intelligence
Saul Landau
A Report from Syria
Stan
Goff
Bring 'Em On Home, Now!
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Book Cooking at Boeing
Andrew
Cockburn
The Sons Are Dead; Now the Blood Feud
Begins
Jason Leopold
CIA Points the Finger at the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans
Robert
Fisk
The Power of Death
Joanne
Mariner
Monsieur Moussaoui
M. Shahid
Alam
The Global Economy Since 1800: a Short History
Harry
Browne
Northern Ireland: the Other Faltering Peace Process
Fidel Castro
Moncada, 50 Years Later
Lula
Democracy Requires Social Justice
Edward
S. Herman
Refuting Brad DeLong's Smear Job on Noam Chomsky
Ron Jacobs
Guided by a Great Feeling of Love: a Review of Gordon's The Company
You Keep
Julie
Hilden
A Photographer, an Offer and Cameron Diaz's Topless Photos
Adam Engel
Man Talk
Poets'
Basement
Keeney, Witherup, Short, Nimba, Guthrie and Albert
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