Ray McGovern, a CIA analyst for 27 years, is co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.
In our various oral and written presentations on Iraq, my veteran intelligence officer colleagues and I took no delight in sharply criticizing what we perceived to be the corruption of intelligence analysis at CIA. Nothing would have pleased us more than to have been proven wrong. It turns out we did not know the half of it.
Several of us have just spent a painful weekend digesting the report of the Senate Intelligence Committee on prewar intelligence assessments on Iraq. The corruption is far deeper than we suspected. The only silver lining is that corrupter-in-chief George Tenet is now gone.
el - I also heard him last night on Pacifica KPFT driving back from Carol and Peter's, a long drive, and thought he was devastating to anyone who believes this administration. If anything as a long-term CIA veteran, former daily briefer to Bush I, he is much more supportive of the agency than those outside of it. I think there was more political corruption earlier than he acknowledges. As an analyst he was less exposed to the more corrupt operations side. Not only did Cheney and Rumsfeld set up an outside shop to bypass the CIA, inside the CIA managers cynically played along.
Mike Hersh has more on the media taking this Whitewash Report to forgive the White House, Bush didn't know - the CIA was stupid. In another political decision the investigation of administration failures does not come until after the election.
Unfortunately the Senate Committee chose to blame the CIA and ignore the Bush administration's hand-picked intelligence mini-agency, the Office of Special Plans' active participation in this willful deception - at least until after the November 2 election. How convenient. Now reconsider the Senate "report" and the eager beaver media cover-up in lieu of real coverage.
Bush and most of his top-level national security team are guilty of manufacturing lies about Iraqi nuclear and other weapons programs to frighten Americans into backing his war. Bush himself certified dishonest "intelligence" under oath in his presentation to the Congress.
This remains largely unreported, left to small magazines and muckraking books. Not even Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9-11 mentioned these facts, and of course they have never seen the light of a cathode ray tube. ABC, CBS, NBC and the "Clinton News Network" just blithely blame the CIA and sit back as Bush and Cheney question others' national security credentials.
Anyone who considers the media "liberal" is raving. Bush is in office now - after getting away with his selection rather than election and not impeached for high crimes before and after seizing office - only because the corporate media protect Bush and his corrupt, inept administration.
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