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June
27, 2003
David
Lindorff
The Catch and Release of "Comical
Ali"
Ray McGovern
Cheney, Forgery and the CIA
June
26, 2003
Sen.
Robert Byrd
The Road of Cover-Up is a Road to Ruin
Jason
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Wolfowitz Instructed the CIA to Investigate
Hans Blix
Paul
de Rooij
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Chris Floyd
Mass Graves and Burned Meat in Bush's New Iraq
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Wolfowitz as Lord High Executioner
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June
25, 2003
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The New Dark Ages
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Bacher
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24, 2003
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June
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Said
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June
21 / 22, 2003
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Cockburn
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June 20, 2003
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June
27, 2003
Cheney, Forgery and
the CIA
Not
Business as Usual
By
RAY McGOVERN
former
CIA Analyst
As though this were normal! I mean the repeated
visits Vice President Dick Cheney made to the CIA before the
war in Iraq. The visits were, in fact, unprecedented. During
my 27-year career at the Central Intelligence Agency, no vice
president ever came to us for a working visit.
During the '80s, it was my privilege
to brief Vice President George H.W. Bush and other very senior
policy-makers every other morning. I went either to the vice
president's office or (on weekends) to his home. I am sure it
never occurred to him to come to CIA headquarters.
The morning briefings gave us an excellent
window on what was uppermost in the minds of those senior officials
and helped us refine our tasks of collection and analysis. Thus,
there was never any need for policy-makers to visit us. And the
very thought of a vice president dropping by to help us with
our analysis is extraordinary. We preferred to do that work without
the pressure that inevitably comes from policy-makers at the
table.
Cheney got into the operational side
of intelligence as well. Reports in late 2001 that Iraq had tried
to acquire uranium from Niger stirred such intense interest that
his office let it be known he wanted them checked out. So, with
the CIA as facilitator, a retired U.S. ambassador was dispatched
to Niger in February 2002 to investigate. He found nothing to
substantiate the report and lots to call it into question. There
the matter rested--until last summer, after the Bush administration
made the decision for war in Iraq.
Cheney, in a speech on Aug. 26, 2002,
claimed that Saddam Hussein had "resumed his effort to acquire
nuclear weapons."
At the time, CIA analysts were involved
in a knock-down, drag-out argument with the Pentagon on this
very point. Most of the nuclear engineers at the CIA, and virtually
all scientists at U.S. government laboratories and the International
Atomic Energy Agency, found no reliable evidence that Iraq had
restarted its nuclear weapons program.
But the vice president had spoken. Sad
to say, those in charge of the draft National Intelligence Estimate
took their cue and stated, falsely, that "most analysts
assess Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program."
Smoke was blown about aluminum tubes
sought by Iraq that, it turns out, were for conventional weapons
programs. The rest amounted to things like Hussein's frequent
meetings with nuclear scientists and Iraq's foot-dragging in
providing information to U.N. inspectors.
Not much heed was paid to the fact that
Hussein's son-in-law, who supervised Iraq's nuclear program before
he defected in 1995, had told interrogators that Iraq's nuclear
capability--save the blueprints--had been destroyed in 1991 at
his order. (Documents given to the United States this week confirm
that. The Iraqi scientists who provided them added that, even
though the blueprints would have given Iraq a head start, no
order was given to restart the program; and even had such an
order been given, Iraq would still have been years away from
producing a nuclear weapon.)
In sum, the evidence presented in last
September's intelligence estimate fell far short of what was
required to support Cheney's claim that Iraq was on the road
to a nuclear weapon. Something scarier had to be produced, and
quickly, if Congress was to be persuaded to authorize war. And
so the decision was made to dust off the uranium-from-Niger canard.
The White House calculated--correctly--that
before anyone would make an issue of the fact that this key piece
of "intelligence" was based on a forgery, Congress
would vote yes. The war could then be waged and won. In recent
weeks, administration officials have begun spreading the word
that Cheney was never told the Iraq-Niger story was based on
a forgery. I asked a senior official who recently served at the
National Security Council if he thought that was possible. He
pointed out that rigorous NSC procedures call for a very specific
response to all vice presidential questions and added that "the
fact that Cheney's office had originally asked that the Iraq-Niger
report be checked out makes it inconceivable that his office
would not have been informed of the results."
Did the president himself know that the
information used to secure congressional approval for war was
based on a forgery? We don't know. But which would be worse--that
he knew or that he didn't?
Ray McGovern,
a CIA analyst from 1964 to 1990, regularly reported to the vice
president and senior policy-makers on the President's Daily Brief
from 1981 to 1985. He now is co-director of the Servant Leadership
School, an inner-city outreach ministry in Washington. He can
be reached at: mcgovern@counterpunch.org.
Weekend
Edition Features
Alexander
Cockburn
My Life as a Rabbi
William
A. Cook
The Scourge of Hopelessness
Standard
Schaefer
The Wages of Terror: an Interview with R.T. Naylor
Ron Jacobs
US Prisons as Strategic Hamlets
Harry
Browne
The Pitstop Ploughshares
Lawrence
Magnuson
WMD: The Most Dangerous Game
Harold
Gould
Saddam and the WMD Mystery
David Krieger
10 Reasons to Abolish Nuclear Weapons
Avia
Pasternak
The Unholy Alliance in the Occupied Territories
CounterPunch
Summer Reading:
Our Favorite Novels
Todd Chretien
Return to Sender: Todd Gitlin, the Duke of Condescension
Maria
Tomchick
Danny Goldberg's Imaginary Kids
Adam Engel
The Fat Man in Little Boy
Poets'
Basement
Guthrie, Albert & Hamod
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