[Peace-discuss] Bush's lies

[patton paul]

No President has Lied so Baldly and so Often and so Demonstrably'
by Andrew Gumbel


The intelligence process is a bit like virginity," says Ray McGovern, who
worked as a CIA analyst for 27 years. "Once you prostitute it, it's never
the same. Your credibility never recovers.

"Watching what has happened with Iraq over the past several months has
been like watching your daughter being raped."

Such is an indication of the extraordinary depth of feeling within the US
intelligence community as the Bush administration's basis for the war in
Iraq - the weapons of mass destruction, the dark hint of links between
Saddam Hussein and al-Qa'ida - has been shown to have been built on air.

Mr McGovern worked near the very top of his profession, giving direct
advice to Henry Kissinger during the Nixon era and preparing the
President's daily security brief for Ronald Reagan. Now he is co-founder
of a group of former CIA employees called Veteran Intelligence
Professionals for Sanity, or Vips for short.

What the Bush White House has done, he believes, is far worse than the
false premise that dragged the United States into the Vietnam War - a
reported second attack on a US destroyer in the Gulf of Tonkin which later
turned out not to have taken place. "The Gulf of Tonkin was a
spur-of-the-moment thing, and Lyndon Johnson seized on that. That's very
different from the very calculated, 18-month, orchestrated, incredibly
cynical campaign of lies that we've seen to justify a war. This is an
order of magnitude different. It's so blatant."

Mr McGovern accuses Mr Bush of an extraordinary act of chutzpah - taking
advantage of his authority as President of the United States to make
people believe there must be something to his insistent allegations that
Iraq possessed potentially devastating weaponry.

"Many of us felt there had to be something there ... If this had been
another country, one would have written a convincing analysis that this
guy is lying through his teeth, that there are no weapons in Iraq. But
people thought, the President can't say he knows something if he doesn't.
That was persuasive, in a way.

"Now we know that no other President of the United States has ever lied so
baldly and so often and so demonstrably ... The presumption now has to be
that he's lying any time that he's saying anything."

It will, Mr McGovern believes, take a change of president and a change of
CIA director to even begin to repair the damage done by what he sees as an
overt politicisation of the intelligence business. But even that may not
be enough.

"Unless what has happened in the past year and a half is recognised as a
scandal, in which the CIA has been badly abused, then there's no hope," he
said. "I pin my hopes mostly on the press these days. Turns out, surprise
surprise, that even the US press doesn't like to be lied to."

 2003 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd