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Intelligence Unglued ... Calls for Cheney to Resign!
(Tom Engelhardt, tomdispatch.com, July 14, 2003)
On a day when it has just been announced that another American soldier died and six were wounded in an ambush near Baghdad, when Secretary of State Rumsfeld is hinting at a future escalation of troop levels in Iraq and the possibility of rising attacks on U.S. forces over the length of the summer, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, a group of retired intelligence agents, have written a memorandum to President Bush pointing the finger directly at the Vice President in the Niger forgery flap and calling for his resignation. ("Sad to say, it is equally clear that your vice president led this campaign of deceit. This was no case of petty corruption of the kind that forced Vice President Spiro Agnew's resignation. This was a matter of war and peace. Thousands have died. There is no end in sight.") . . . If, by the way, you want one piece to bring you fully up to date on the Niger forgery flap, check out Neil Mackay's Niger and Iraq: the war's biggest lie? in the Glasgow Sunday Herald ("One senior western diplomat told the Sunday Herald: 'There were more than 20 anomalies in the Niger documents � it is staggering any intelligence service could have believed they were genuine for a moment.'"). . . . Of course, in a sense Condi Rice is right. This isn't really a flap over sixteen words in a presidential speech. Not faintly. It's about the possible unraveling, under the pressure of unexpected postwar events in Iraq, of a truly audacious and deeply radical policy for global and domestic domination. . . . I received today the following memorandum to the President from Ray McGovern, one of three members of the steering committee of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity. It's a fascinating statement from that group. McGovern is a 27 year veteran from the analysis ranks of the CIA. Here's McGovern's description of VIPS: "This is a group of 30 retired senior intelligence officers formed in January of 2003 to keep watch on the use/abuse of intelligence primarily regarding Iraq. Most of us are from the analytic ranks of the CIA, but we have strong representation from the operations officers as well and we are truly an intelligence community body inasmuch as retired officers from State Department Intelligence, Defense Intelligence, Army Intelligence and the FBI are also members." . . . It's important to keep in mind, as you read this piece and other comments in coming days from retired former members of various branches of American and British intelligence, that people inside the bureaucracy are seldom willing to talk directly for quotation. It's a job-endangering prospect. So, as with the military, it's often retired former members of the "community" who hear from and speak for them.


[Note: Click on the link above to read the full text of McGovern's letter.]

posted by Lorenzo 5:04 PM