Former Intelligence Agents Demand Bush Fire Cheney

In a boldly worded statement, a group of retired intelligence officers are calling for President George Bush to fire Vice President Richard Cheney for his role in "cooking" evidence to support the US invasion and occupation of Iraq ...

It is now dawning on our until-now somnolent press that your national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, shepherds the foreign affairs sections of your state-of-the-union address and that she, not Tenet, is responsible for the forged information getting into the speech. But the disingenuousness persists. Surely Dr. Rice cannot persist in her insistence that she learned only on June 8, 2003 about former ambassador Joseph Wilson’s mission to Niger in February 2002, when he determined that the Iraq-Niger report was a con-job. Wilson’s findings were duly reported to all concerned in early March 2002. And, if she somehow missed that report, the New York Times’ Nicholas Kristoff on May 6 recounted chapter and verse on Wilson’s mission, and the story remained the talk of the town in the weeks that followed.

Rice’s denials are reminiscent of her claim in spring 2002 that there was no reporting suggesting that terrorists were planning to hijack planes and slam them into buildings. In September, the joint congressional committee on 9/11 came up with a dozen such reports.

There is just too much evidence that Ambassador Wilson was sent to Niger at the behest of Vice President Cheney’s office, and that Wilson’s findings were duly reported not only to that office but to others as well.

Equally important, it was Cheney who launched (in a major speech on August 26, 2002) the concerted campaign to persuade Congress and the American people that Saddam Hussein was about to get his hands on nuclear weapons—a campaign that mushroomed, literally, in early October with you and your senior advisers raising the specter of a “mushroom cloud” being the first “smoking gun” we might observe.

That this campaign was based largely on information known to be forged and that the campaign was used successfully to frighten our elected representatives in Congress into voting for war is clear from the bitter protestations of Rep. Henry Waxman and others. The politically aware recognize that the same information was used, also successfully, in the campaign leading up to the mid-term elections—a reality that breeds a cynicism highly corrosive to our political process.

The fact that the forgery also crept into your state-of-the-union address pales in significance in comparison with how it was used to deceive Congress into voting on October 11 to authorize you to make war on Iraq.

As a coda to his nuclear argument, Cheney told NBC’s Meet the Press three days before US/UK forces invaded Iraq: “we believe he (Saddam Hussein) has reconstituted nuclear weapons.”

Mr. Russert: …the International Atomic Energy Agency said he dose not have a nuclear program; we disagree?

Vice President Cheney: I disagree, yes. And you’ll find the CIA, for example, and other key parts of the intelligence community disagree ... we know he has been absolutely devoted to trying to acquire nuclear weapons. And we believe he has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons. I think Mr. ElBaradei (Director of the IAEA) frankly is wrong.

Contrary to what Cheney and the NIE said, the most knowledgeable analysts—those who know Iraq and nuclear weapons—judged that the evidence did not support that conclusion. They now have been proven right.

Recommendation #1

We recommend that you call an abrupt halt to attempts to prove Vice President Cheney “not guilty.” His role has been so transparent that such attempts will only erode further your own credibility. Equally pernicious, from our perspective, is the likelihood that intelligence analysts will conclude that the way to success is to acquiesce in the cooking of their judgments, since those above them will not be held accountable. We strongly recommend that you ask for Cheney’s immediate resignation.

Recommendation #2

We repeat, with an additional sense of urgency, the recommendation in our last memorandum to you (May 1) that you appoint Gen. Brent Scowcroft, Chair of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board to head up an independent investigation into the use/abuse of intelligence on Iraq.

Recommendation #3

We recommend that you immediately invite the UN inspectors back into Iraq. This would go a long way toward refurbishing your credibility. Equally important, it would help sort out the lessons learned for the intelligence community and be an invaluable help to an investigation of the kind we have suggested you direct Gen. Scowcroft to lead.