[Peace-discuss] Fwd: How intelligence was corrupted to "justify" an unjustifiable war

[Chuck Minne]

    While it is altogether appropriate for Congress's attention to be riveted on the future and, specifically, on how to end the disaster in Iraq, we Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) continue to be asked about the past and how the George W. Bush administration was able to create/corrupt intelligence to convey a false picture of the need for war on Iraq in the first place.
   
  Don't despair. We in VIPS have been hard at work on this issue since well before the war. Indeed, it was/is our raison d'être.
   
  Where to look for the answers? Try the just published "Neo-CONNED Again!" a collection of essays and interviews by and with VIPS and other professionals. My colleague Col. W. Patrick Lang, USA (ret) and I have authored chapters devoted specifically to how intelligence was corrupted to "justify" an unjustifiable war - or, in the words of the Downing Street Minutes, how "intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."
   
  Pat's article, "Drinking the Kool-Aid: Making the Case for War with Compromised Integrity and Intelligence," was originally published in the summer 2004 Middle East Policy Journal. Mine is titled "Sham Dunk: Cooking Intelligence for the President." The text is posted here. 
   
  Sham Dunk: Cooking Intelligence for the President
  Ray McGovern
  Let’s review. It was bad intelligence that forced an unwitting president to invade Iraq, right?
  The sad fact that so many Americans believe this myth is eloquent testimony to the effectiveness
  of the White House spin machine. The intelligence was indeed bad – shaped that way by an
  administration determined to find a pretext to effect “regime change” in Iraq. Senior
  administration officials – first and foremost Vice President Dick Cheney – played a strong role in
  ensuring that the intelligence analysis was corrupt enough to justify,” ex post facto, the decision
  to make war on Iraq. It is not altogether clear how witting President George W. Bush was of all
  this, but there is strong evidence that he knew chapter and verse. Had he been mouse trapped into
  this “preemptive” war, one would expect some heads to roll. None have. And where is it, after all,
  that the buck is supposed to stop?
  The intelligence-made-me-do-it myth has helped the Bush administration attenuate the acute
  embarrassment it experienced early last year when the casus belli became a casus belly laugh.
  When U.S. inspector David Kay, after a painstaking search to which almost a billion dollars – and
  many lives – were given, reported that there had been no “weapons of mass destruction” (WMD)
  in Iraq since 1991, someone had to take the fall. Elected was CIA director George Tenet, the
  backslapping fellow from Queens – always eager to do whatever might be necessary to play with
  the bigger kids. For those of you just in from Mars, the grave danger posed by Iraqi “weapons of
  mass destruction” was what President Bush cited as the casus belli for invading Iraq. It was only
  after Kay had the courage to tell the truth publicly that Bush fell back on the default rationale for
  the war – the need to export democracy, about which we are hearing so much lately.
  Not surprisingly, the usual suspects in the mainstream media that played cheerleader for the
  war are now helping the president (and the media) escape blame. “Flawed intelligence that led the
  United States to invade Iraq was the fault of the US intelligence community,” explained the
  Washington Times last July 10, after regime loyalist Senator Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), chairman of
  the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, released his committee’s findings.1 Nine months
  later, after publication of similar findings2 by a commission handpicked by the president, the
  Washington Post’s lead headline was “Data on Iraqi Arms Flawed, Panel Says.” The date was,
  appropriately, April Fools Day, 2005. In a word, they are playing us for fools. The remarkable
  thing is that most folks don’t seem able, or willing, to recognize that – or even to mind.
  On May 1, 2005, a highly sensitive document published by The Sunday Times of London
  provided the smoking gun showing that President Bush had decided to make war on Iraq long
  before the National Intelligence Estimate was produced to conjure up “weapons of mass
  destruction” there and mislead Congress into granting authorization for war. The British
  document is classified “SECRET AND STRICTLY PERSONAL – U.K. EYES ONLY.” And
  small wonder. It contains an official account of Prime Minister Tony Blair’s meeting with top
  advisers on July 23, 2002, at which Sir Richard Dearlove, head of MI6 (the U.K. equivalent to the
  CIA) – simply “C” in the written document – reported on talks he had just held in Washington
  with top U.S. officials. (Blair has now acknowledged the authenticity of the document.)
  As related in the document, Dearlove told Blair and the others that President Bush wanted to
  remove Saddam Hussein through military action, that this “was seen as inevitable,” and that the
  attack would be “justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD.” He continued: “...but the
  intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy” (emphasis added), and tacked on yet
  another telling comment: “There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after
  military action.” British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw concurred that Bush had made up his mind
  to take military action, but noted that finding justification would be challenging, for “the case was
  thin.” Straw pointed out that Saddam was not threatening his neighbors, and his WMD capability
  was less than that of Libya, North Korea, or Iran.
  As head of MI6, Dearlove was CIA Director George Tenet’s British counterpart. We
  Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) have been saying since January 2003 that
  the two intelligence chiefs’ marching orders were to “fix” the intelligence “around the policy.” It
  was a no-brainer. Seldom, however, does one acquire documentary evidence that this – the
  unforgivable sin in intelligence analysis – was used by the most senior government leaders as a
  way to “justify” a prior decision for war. There is no word to describe our reaction to the fact that
  the two intelligence chiefs quietly acquiesced in the corruption of our profession on a matter of
  such consequence. “Outrage” doesn’t even come close.
  Denial: not an Option
  What has become painfully clear since the trauma of 9/11 is that most of our fellow citizens
  have felt an overriding need to believe that administration leaders are telling them the truth and to
  ignore all evidence to the contrary. Many Americans seem impervious to data showing that it was
  the administration that misled the country into this unprovoked war and that the “intelligence”
  was conjured up well after the White House decided to effect “regime change” in Iraq (or
  introduce democracy, if you favor the default rationale) by force of arms.
  I have been asking myself why Americans find it so painful to delve deeper and let their
  judgment be influenced by the abundance of evidence showing this to be the case. Perhaps it is
  because most of us know that responsible citizenship means asking what might seem to be
  “impertinent” questions, ferreting out plausible answers, and then – if necessary – rectifying the
  situation and ensuring it does not happen again. Resistance, however, is strong. At work – in all
  of us to some degree – is the same convenient denial mechanism that immobilized so many
  otherwise conscientious German citizens during the 1930s, enabling Germany to launch its own
  unprovoked wars and curtail civil liberties at home. Taking action, or just finding one’s voice,
  entails risk; denial is the more instinctive, easier course.
  So, fair warning. If you prefer denial, you may wish to page directly to the next chapter. No
  hard feelings.
  Iraq: Prime Target From the Start
  Was the intelligence bad? It was worse than bad; it was corrupt. But what most Americans
  do not realize is that the intelligence adduced had nothing to do with President Bush’s decision to
  make war on Iraq.
  On January 30, 2001, just ten days after his inauguration, when George W. Bush presided
  over the first meeting of his National Security Council (NSC), he made it clear that toppling
  Saddam Hussein sat atop his to-do list, according to then Secretary of the Treasury Paul O’Neil
  sworn in earlier that day. (The Treasury Secretary is by statute a full member of the NSC.) O’Neil
  was thoroughly confused: why Saddam, why now, and why was this central to U.S. interests, he
  asked himself. The NSC discussion did not address these questions. Rather, at the invitation of
  then-National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, George Tenet showed a grainy overhead photo
  of a factory in Iraq that he said might produce either chemical or biological material for weapons.
  Might. There was nothing – in the photo, or in other intelligence sources – to support that
  conjecture, but it was just what Doctor Rice ordered. The discussion then turned from
  unconfirmed intelligence, to which targets might be best to begin bombing in Iraq. Tenet had
  shown his mettle. The group was off and running; the planning began in earnest. And not only for
  war. O’Neil says that two days later the NSC reconvened to discuss Iraq, and that the
  deliberations included not only planning for war, but also for how and with whom to divide up
  Iraq’s oil wealth.
  Saddam and al-Qaeda
  Seven months later, the terrorist attacks of 9/11 raised the question of possible Iraqi
  complicity, and on 9/12 White House terrorism adviser Richard Clarke experienced rather crass
  pressure directly from the president to implicate Saddam Hussein. To his credit, Clarke resisted.
  This did not prevent the White House from playing on the trauma suffered by the American
  people and falsely associating Saddam Hussein with it. Following Clarke’s example, CIA
  analysts also held their ground for many months, insisting that there was no good evidence of
  such an association. Lt. Gen. Brent Scowcroft, national security advisor to the first President
  Bush and chairman of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board until just a few
  months ago, supported them by stating publicly that evidence of any such connection was
  “scant,” while Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was saying it was “bulletproof.” And
  President Bush said flat out a year after 9/11, “You cannot distinguish between al-Qaeda and
  Saddam when you talk about the war on terror.” The 9/11 commission has now put the lie to
  those claims, but the PR campaign has been enduringly effective. According to a recent poll, most
  Americans have not been able to shake off the notion, so artfully fostered by the administration
  and the compliant media, that Saddam Hussein played some role in the events of 9/11. (This,
  even though the president himself, in a little noticed remark on September 17, 2003, admitted for
  the first and only time that there was “no evidence Hussein was involved” in the 9/11 attacks.)
  Weapons of Mass Destruction
  Unable to get enough intelligence analysts to go along with the carefully nurtured “noble lie”
  that Iraq played a role in 9/11, or even that operational ties existed between Iraq and al-Qaeda, the
  administration ordered up a separate genre of faux intelligence – this time it was “weapons of
  mass destruction.” This was something of a challenge, for in the months before 9/11,
  Condoleezza Rice and then-Secretary of State Colin Powell had said publicly that Saddam
  Hussein posed no security threat. On February 24, 2001, for example, Powell said, “Saddam
  Hussein has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction.
  He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbors.” And just six weeks before
  9/11, Condoleezza Rice told CNN: “...let’s remember that his [Saddam’s] country is divided, in
  effect. He does not control the northern part of his country. We are able to keep his arms from
  him. His military forces have not been rebuilt.” Conveniently, the U.S. media pressed the delete
  button on these statements.
  And, as is well known, after 9/11 “everything changed” – including apparently Saddam’s
  inventory of “weapons of mass destruction.” We were asked almost immediately to believe that
  WMD wafted down like manna from the heavens for a soft landing on the sands of Iraq. Just days
  after 9/11, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld began promoting the notion that Iraq might have weapons
  of mass destruction and that “within a week, or a month, Saddam could give his WMD to al-
  Qaeda.” (This is an early articulation of the bogus “conjunction of terrorism and WMD,” now
  immortalized in the minutes recording Richard Dearlove’s report to Tony Blair ten months later,
  as the way the attack on Iraq would be “justified.”) And it was not long before the agile Rice did
  a demi-pirouette of 180 degrees, saying, “Saddam was a danger in the region where the 9/11
  threat emerged.” By the summer of 2002, the basic decision for war having long since been taken,
  something persuasive had to be conjured up to get Congress to authorize it. Weapons of mass
  deception, as one wag called them, were what the doctor ordered. The malleable Tenet followed
  orders to package them into a National Intelligence Estimate, which Colin Powell has admitted
  was prepared specifically for Congress.
  What about the CIA? Sadly, well before the war, truth took a back seat to a felt need on the
  part of then-CIA Director George Tenet to snuggle up to power – to stay in good standing with a
  President, vice president, and secretary of defense, all of whom dwarfed Tenet in pedigree,
  insider experience, and power; and all hell-bent and determined to implement “regime change” in
  Iraq.
  So What Really Happened?
  In our various oral and written presentations on Iraq, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for
  Sanity (VIPS) colleagues and I took no delight in exposing what we saw as the corruption of
  intelligence analysis at CIA. Nothing would have pleased us more than to have been proven
  wrong. As it turned out, we did not know the half of it. Last year’s Senate Intelligence Committee
  report on prewar intelligence assessments on Iraq showed that the corruption went far deeper than
  we had thought. Both Senator Pat Roberts and the latest presidential panel have insisted,
  disingenuously, that no intelligence analysts complained about attempts to politicize their
  conclusions. What outsiders do not realize is that each of those analysts was accompanied by a
  “minder” from Tenet’s office, minders reminiscent of the ubiquitous Iraqi intelligence officials
  that Saddam Hussein insisted be present when scientists of his regime were interviewed by U.N.
  inspectors. The hapless Democrats on Roberts’ committee chose to acquiesce in his claim that
  political pressure played no role – this despite the colorful testimony by the CIA’s ombudsman
  that never in his 32-year career with the agency had he encountered such “hammering” on CIA
  analysts to reconsider their judgments on operational ties between Iraq and al-Qaeda. It is no
  surprise that the president’s own commission parroted the Roberts’ committee’s see-no-evil
  findings regarding politicization, even though the commission’s report is itself replete with
  examples of intelligence analysts feeling the political heat.
  Last July, George Tenet resigned for family reasons the day before the Senate committee
  issued its scathing report. He left behind an agency on life support – an institution staffed by
  careerist managers and thoroughly demoralized analysts embarrassed at their own naiveté in
  having believed that the unvarnished truth was what they were expected to serve up to their
  masters in the agency and the White House.
  The Senate report and now the presidential commission’s findings have performed
  masterfully in letting the White House off the hook. With copious instances of unconscionable
  intelligence missteps to draw from, it was, so to speak, a slam dunk – hardly a challenge to pin all
  the blame on intelligence. George had supplied the petard on which they hoisted him – and the
  intelligence community. The demonstrated malfeasance and misfeasance are a sharp blow to
  those of us who took pride in working in an agency where our mandate – and our orders – were to
  speak truth to power; an agency in which we enjoyed career protection from retribution from
  powerful policymakers who wished to play fast and loose with intelligence; an agency whose
  leaders in those days usually had the independence, integrity, and courage to face down those
  who would have us sell out in order to “justify” policies long since set in train.
  Off-Line “Intelligence:” The Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans
  The various committees and commissions assessing intelligence performance on Iraq
  avoided investigating the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans (OSP), whose de facto chain of
  command, from division chief to commander-in-chief, was a neocon dream come true: from
  Abram Shulsky to William Luti to Douglas Feith to Paul Wolfowitz to Donald Rumsfeld to Dick
  Cheney and George W. Bush. Journalist Seymour Hersh rightly calls this a stovepipe. It is also a
  self-licking ice cream cone. The lower end of this chain paid for and then stitched together bogus
  “intelligence” from the now thoroughly discredited Ahmed Chalabi and his Pentagon-financed
  Iraqi National Congress. Then Shulsky, Luti, and Feith cherry-picked “confirmation” from
  unevaluated reports on Iraq from other agencies, and served up neatly packaged, alarming soundbites
  to “Scooter” Libby, Cheney’s chief of staff. Whereupon Libby would scoot them right in to
  Cheney for him to use with the president, the Congress, and the media. But what about the CIA
  and the rest of our $40 billion intelligence establishment? Tenet and his crew were seen as far too
  timid, not “forward leaning” enough. The attitude in the world of the OSP was a mixture of
  chutzpah and naiveté: after our cakewalk into Baghdad, let the intelligence analysts eat cake.
  Since this was all done off-line, and not, strictly speaking, as part of the activities of the
  “intelligence community,” it could conveniently be ignored in the various inquiries into
  intelligence performance on Iraq3 – effectively letting the Defense Department off the hook,
  while putting the spotlight on CIA and other intelligence professionals. Also ignored was the
  OSP-like operation4 of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s office and its role in providing
  “intelligence,” possibly including the famous forgeries – in which neocon operative Michael
  Ledeen reportedly played a key role – regarding Iraq’s alleged attempts to acquire “yellowcake”
  uranium.
  Even though quintessential Republican loyalist Pat Roberts characterized the activities of the
  Office of Special Plans as possibly “illegal,” official responses to queries about the rogue OSP
  have ducked the issue. Some, like Senator John Kyl5 and Paul Wolfowitz, the former deputy
  secretary of defense, maintain that the OSP provided a valuable service by exercising initiative
  and challenging the assumptions of the intelligence community. Cherry-picking intelligence,
  according to them, is simply taking a hard look at the intelligence community’s analysis and
  “going against the grain” in an effort to think creatively and critically about conclusions made by
  analysts. The problem is that the OSP was pushing the same wrong conclusion vis-à-vis the
  danger posed by Iraq that those most politicized within the intelligence community were pushing.
  The OSP – like Tenet and Co. – ignored the analysts’ conclusions in favor of feeding the
  administration what it wanted to hear. Call it “thinking outside the box” if you like; it was also
  acting out of bounds.
  The other response from the Pentagon is equally disingenuous. Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and
  Feith have argued that OSP activity was merely an effort by two individuals to assist the
  Department of Defense in reviewing intelligence on Iraq in order to “assist [Feith] in developing
  policy recommendations.” There is, of course, a multi-billion dollar Defense Intelligence Agency
  with the charter to do just that, but, to their credit, DIA analysts could not always be counted on
  to cook the intelligence to the Rumsfeld/Wolfowitz/Feith recipe. And, while Rumsfeld keeps
  repeating that the OSP assisted Feith in “developing policy recommendations,” it is no secret that
  the policy – “regime change” by force in Iraq – came well before the “intelligence.” The OSP
  simply worked hard to provide the nation’s leadership with “evidence” that such a policy should
  be pursued. Seymour Hersh and others6 have reported credibly on this effort by the OSP to
  discredit the analysis of the intelligence community and to push its own, much more sinister
  picture of Iraq’s capabilities and intentions.
  Having to contend with Feith-based “intelligence” from the OSP and its powerful patrons
  greatly increased political pressure on intelligence analysts throughout the community to come up
  with conclusions that would “justify” policy decisions. Worst of all, George Tenet lacked the
  courage to stand up to Feith, Wolfowitz, and Rumsfeld. Neither would Porter Goss, Tenet’s
  successor, have the backbone to go to the mat with Rumsfeld (or his own patron, Dick Cheney)
  on the role of the OSP, as was made clear when this whole question arose during Goss’s
  nomination hearings. It was clear, for that matter, that Goss would not go to the mat over
  anything else either.
  The Cancer of Careerism
  Within the intelligence community, the ethos in which fearless intelligence analysis
  prospered began to evaporate big-time in 1981, when CIA Director William Casey and his
  protégé Robert Gates in effect institutionalized the politicization of intelligence analysis. Casey
  saw a Russian under every rock and behind every “terrorist,” and summarily dismissed the idea
  that the Soviet Union could ever change. Gates, a former analyst of Soviet affairs, knew better,
  but he quickly learned that parroting Casey’s nonsense was a super-quick way to climb the career
  ladder. Sadly, many joined the climbers, but not all. Later, as CIA director, Gates adhered closely
  to the example of his avuncular patron Casey. In an unguarded moment on March 15, 1995, Gates
  admitted to Washington Post reporter Walter Pincus that he had watched Casey on “issue after
  issue sit in meetings and present intelligence framed in terms of the policy he wanted pursued.”
  In the early eighties, after Casey became director, many bright analysts quit rather than take
  part in cooking intelligence-to-go. In contrast, those inspired by Gates’ example followed suit and
  saw their careers prosper. By the mid-nineties senior and mid-level CIA managers had learned
  well how to play the career-enhancing political game. So it came as no surprise that director John
  Deutch (1995–96) encountered little opposition when he decided to cede the agency’s world-class
  imagery analysis capability – lock, stock, and barrel – to the Department of Defense. True, all of
  Deutch’s line deputies sent him a memo whimpering their chagrin over his giving away this
  essential tool of intelligence analysis. Only his statutory Deputy Director of Central Intelligence,
  George Tenet, thought it a great idea. (Tenet set the tone even in those days, by repeatedly
  referring to his boss – often in his presence – as “the great John Deutch.”)
  Deutch went ahead and gave imagery analysis away, apparently out of a desire to ingratiate
  himself with senior Pentagon officials. (No other explanation makes sense. He had made no
  secret of his ambition to succeed his good friend and former colleague William Perry as soon as
  the latter stepped down as secretary of defense.) But still more shameless was Deutch’s order to
  agency subordinates to help the Pentagon cover up exposures to chemicals that accounted, at least
  in part, for the illnesses of tens of thousands of Gulf-War veterans. Sadly, with over a decade’s
  worth of the go-along-to-get-along ethos having set in among CIA managers, Deutch could
  blithely disregard the whimpers, calculating (correctly) that the whimperers would quietly
  acquiesce.
  Corruption is contagious and has a way of perpetuating itself. What we are seeing today is
  largely the result of senior management’s penchant for identifying and promoting compliant
  careerists. Deutch did not stay long enough to push this trend much farther; he did not have to. By
  then functionaries like John McLaughlin, who was Tenet’s deputy director, and whose meteoric
  rise began with Gates, had reached very senior positions. In September 2002, when Tenet and
  McLaughlin were asked to cook to Cheney’s recipe a National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq’s
  putative “weapons of mass destructive,” they were able to tap a number of willing senior coconspirators,
  and what emerged was by far the worst NIE ever produced by the U.S. intelligence
  community. Several of the key managers of that estimate were originally handpicked by Gates for
  managerial positions. These include not only McLaughlin but also National Intelligence Officer
  Larry Gershwin, who gave a pass to the infamous “Curveball” – the main source of the
  “intelligence” on Iraq’s biological weapons program – and Alan Foley who led those who
  mishandled analysis of the celebrated (but non-nuclear-related) aluminum tubes headed for Iraq
  and the forged documents about Iraqi efforts to acquire uranium from Niger. More recently, a
  rising star who grew up in this ambience explained to me, “We were not politicized; we were just
  leaning forward, given White House concern over Iraq.” Far from being apologetic, he actually
  seemed to have persuaded himself that “leaning forward” is not politicization!
  Leaning Forward...or Backward
  More recently, McLaughlin and Tenet have been accused by senior CIA officers of the
  operations directorate of suppressing critical information that threw strong doubt on the reliability
  of Curveball and his “biological weapons trailers.” That highly dubious information was peddled
  by then-Secretary of State Colin Powell – with artists’ renderings on the big screen, no less – at
  the U.N. on February 5, 2003.
  If the accusers are telling the truth, what could McLaughlin and Tenet have been thinking in
  failing to warn Powell? Clearly, someone should ask them – under oath. Perhaps it was what
  intelligence officers call “plausible denial,” one of the tricks of the trade to protect senior officials
  like Powell. (He could not be accused of lying about what he didn’t know.) But could CIA’s top
  two officials have thought the truth would not eventually get out? It seems likely that their
  thinking went something like this: When Saddam falls and the Iraqis greet our invading forces
  with open arms and cut flowers, who at that victorious point will be so picayune as to pick on the
  intelligence community for inaccuracies like the absence of the “biological weapons trailers?” I
  don’t know where they got the part about the open arms and cut flowers – perhaps it came from
  the Office of Special Plans.
  What Casey Begat
  Casey begat Gates. And Gates begat not only John McLaughlin but also many others now at
  senior levels of the agency – notably the malleable John Helgerson, CIA’s inspector general. No
  one who worked with these three functionaries for very long was surprised when Helgerson
  acquiesced last summer in the suppression of his congressionally mandated report on intelligence
  and 9/11. In December 2002 Helgerson was directed by Congress to determine “whether and to
  what extent personnel at all levels should be held accountable” for mistakes that contributed to
  the failure to prevent the attacks on 9/11. After 18 months, his report was finally ready in the
  spring of 2004, and it identified individual officers by name. But many of those officers had
  records of the umpteen warnings they had provided the White House before 9/11, not to mention
  painful memories of the frustration they felt when they and Richard Clarke were ignored. It
  would have been far too dangerous to risk letting that dirty linen hang out on the line with the
  approach of the November election.
  To his credit, knowing the report was ready, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Peter
  Hoekstra (R-Michigan) asked Helgerson to release it to the committee. In an August 31, 2004,
  letter, Helgerson told Hoekstra that then-Acting Director John McLaughlin had broken with usual
  practice and told him not to distribute his report. The tenacious chairman of the Senate
  Intelligence Committee, Pat Roberts, called the postponement “uncommon but not abnormal.”
  His meaning is clearer than it might seem. Indeed, it is not abnormal. The whole episode was just
  further confirmation that Roberts takes his orders from the White House, that checks and balances
  are out the window, and that people like Helgerson can still be counted upon to play along to get
  along. Helgerson’s report has still not been released. And it may be some time before it is, for the
  CIA Inspector General’s job jar is full to overflowing. Managing inquiries into alleged CIA
  involvement in torture and “extraordinary renderings,” and now into L’ Affaire Curveball as well,
  Helgerson is a busy man. But don’t hold your breath; these things take time.
  Defining Politicization
  An unusually illustrative first-hand example of politicization of intelligence became
  available in relation to the recent nomination of former Under Secretary of State John Bolton to
  be U.S. ambassador to the U.N., with the declassification and release to the Senate Foreign
  Relations Committee of email exchanges involving Bolton’s office. In one of those emails,
  obtained in April by The New York Times, Bolton’s principal aide, Frederick Fleitz proudly told
  his boss that he had instructed State Department intelligence analyst Christian Westermann on
  whose prerogative it properly is to interpret intelligence. Said Fleitz (who we now know was a
  CIA analyst on loan to Bolton), “I explained to Christian that it was a political judgment as to
  how to interpret this data [on Cuba’s biological warfare capability], and the intelligence
  community should do as we asked” (emphasis mine).
  Were it not for the numbing experience of the past four years, we intelligence professionals,
  practicing and retired, would be astonished at the claim that how to interpret intelligence data is a
  political judgment. But this is also the era of the Rumsfeld maxim: “Absence of evidence is not
  evidence of absence,” and the Cheney corollary: “If you build it, they will come” – meaning that
  intelligence analysts will come around to any case that top administration officials may build. All
  it takes is a few personal visits to CIA headquarters and a little arm-twisting, and the analysts will
  be happy to conjure up whatever “evidence” may be needed to support Cheneyesque warnings
  that “they” – the Iraqis, the Iranians, it doesn’t matter – have “reconstituted” their nuclear
  weapons development program.
  George Tenet, however docile, could not have managed the cave-in on Iraq all by himself.
  Sadly, he found willing collaborators in the generation of CIA managers who bubbled to the top
  under Casey and Gates. In other words, Tenet was the “beneficiary” of a generation of malleable
  managers who prospered under CIA’s promotion policies starting in the early eighties.
  Why dwell on Gates? Because, a careerist in both senses of the word, he bears the lion’s
  share of responsibility for institutionalizing the corruption of intelligence analysis. It began bigtime
  when he was chief of the analysis directorate under Casey. Since this was well known in
  intelligence circles in late 1991 when President George H. W. Bush nominated Gates to be CIA
  director, all hell broke loose among the rank and file. Former Soviet division chief Mel Goodman
  had the courage to step forward to give the Senate Intelligence Committee chapter and verse on
  how Gates had shaped intelligence analysis to suit his masters and his career. What followed was
  an even more intense controversy than that precipitated in April by the equally courageous Carl
  Ford, former director of intelligence at the State Department, who spoke out strongly and
  knowledgeably against John Bolton’s attempts to skew intelligence to his own purposes.
  At the hearings on Gates, Goodman was joined at once by a long line of colleague analysts
  who felt strongly enough about their chosen profession to put their own careers at risk by
  testifying against Gates’ nomination. They were so many and so persuasive that, for a time, it
  appeared they had won the day. But the fix was in. With a powerful assist from George Tenet,
  then staff director of the Senate Intelligence Committee, members approved the nomination. Even
  so, 31 senators found the evidence against Gates so persuasive that, in an unprecedented move,
  they voted against him when the nomination came to the floor.
  “Centrifuge/Subterfuge Joe”
  A corrupted organization also breeds people like “centrifuge/subterfuge Joe.” Although it
  was clear to us even before we created VIPS in January 2003 that the intelligence on Iraq was
  being cooked to the recipe of policy, not until the Senate report of July 2004 did we learn that the
  recipe included outright lies. We had heard of “Joe,” the nuclear weapons analyst in CIA’s Center
  for Weapons Intelligence and Arms Control, and had learned that his agenda was to “prove” that
  the infamous aluminum tubes sought by Iraq were to be used for developing nuclear weapons.
  We did not know that he and his CIA associates deliberately cooked the data – including that
  from rotor testing ironically called “spin tests.”
  “Who could have believed that about our intelligence community, that the system could be
  so dishonest,” wondered the normally soft-spoken David Albright, a widely respected authority
  on Iraq’s moribund nuclear program. We in VIPS share his wonderment. I am appalled – and
  angry. You give 27 years of your professional life to an institution whose main mission – to get at
  the truth – you are convinced is essential for orderly policy making, and then you find it has been
  corrupted. You realize that your former colleagues lacked the moral courage to rebuff efforts to
  enlist them as accomplices in gross deception – deception that involved hoodwinking our elected
  representatives in Congress into giving their blessing to an unnecessary war. Even Republican
  stalwart Senator Pat Roberts has said that, had Congress known before the vote for war what his
  committee has since discovered, “I doubt if the votes would have been there.”
   
  Contined at: http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/downloads/mcgovern.pdf





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