OpEdNews - Page 2 of Article: Ray McGovern: Remembering an: Ill-Starred Day Four Years Ago

“There is a cloud over the vice president.... And that cloud remains because this defendant obstructed justice”... There is a cloud over the White House. Don’t you think the FBI and the grand jury and the American people are entitled to straight answers?”

Libby was convicted, and it was widely expected that President Bush would pardon him. Not yet. A pardon would have allowed Fitzgerald to put Libby back on the stand having forfeited the advantage of being able to plead Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination. So the Bush/Cheney lawyers advised the president to defer a pardon until later and simply commute Libby’s 30-month jail sentence. The president commuted it to zero before Libby spent one day in jail.

According to Michael Isikoff, veteran investigative journalist for Newsweek, there was no doubt where Cheney stood on the need to spare Libby before the rigors of prison might prompt him to sing about Cheney’s and Bush’s own knowledge of and involvement in what Libby had been doing. And there was no doubt about the powerful influence the vice president had on the commutation decision. One White House adviser told Isikoff, “I’m not sure Bush had a choice; if he didn’t act, it would have caused a fracture with the vice president.” Interesting. So who is in charge over there?

So Libby walks, and Bush and Cheney remain protected precisely because, as Fitzgerald put it, “Libby threw sand in the eyes of the FBI and grand jurors, obstructed justice, and stole the truth from the judicial system.”

Out of a similarly cynical past, Ollie North’s reported words come immediately to mind: “Is this a great country or what?” In any case, this new Donnybrook started with Novak’s column exactly four years ago, on July 14, 2003.

Second, that same day we Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) sent a formal Memorandum to President Bush, recommending strongly that he “ask for Cheney’s immediate resignation.” This unprecedented appeal even caught the eye of the corporate press—the more so, inasmuch as our Memorandum for the President reviewed some of the deceit engineered by the vice president in conjuring up a rationale for war on Iraq and leading the cheerleading for it.

We noted that Cheney, skilled at preemption (and an expert on clouds), had stolen a march on his vacationing colleagues by launching, in a major speech on August 26, 2002, a meretricious campaign to persuade Congress and the American people that Iraq was about to acquire nuclear weapons. That campaign mushroomed, literally, in early October, with Bush and his senior advisers raising the specter of a “mushroom cloud” over American cities. (Never mind how Iraq could mount such a strike with no nuclear weapons and no delivery systems with enough range.) To any serious onlooker, the synthetic mushroom clouds bore the label “made in the office of the vice president.”

And poor George Tenet. In his recent book he complains that Cheney’s claim on August 26, 2002 that Iraq would acquire nuclear weapons “fairly soon” did not square with the intelligence community’s assessment that Iraq could not do so until the end of the decade, if then. The former CIA director adds, “I was surprised when I read about Cheney’s assertion, ‘Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction.’” Tenet whines that the vice president did not send him an advance copy of the speech. Not one to cause trouble, the malleable CIA director quickly got over it, and told CIA analysts to compose the kind of National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) that would provide ex post facto support for Cheney’s bogus assertions and help deceive Congress into approving war.

Tenet believes President Bush, too, was blindsided by Cheney, and writes lamely, “I should have told the vice president privately that, in my view, his speech had gone too far...and not let silence imply agreement.”

But wait, George. You were, by law, the president’s principal intelligence adviser. Did it not occur to you to fulfill your statutory responsibility and tell the president what was going on? At very least, you might have summoned the courage to resist Cheney’s pressure for a dishonest NIE—the one you signed on October 1, 2002—to support an unnecessary war with the entirely predictable consequences the world is now experiencing.

Afraid of being cut from the White House team? Were you not smart enough to recognize this as, in any case, inevitable? And, please, you are very familiar with Georgetown University’s propensity for hiring celebrities, including war criminals like Douglas Feith. There would always be a large soft chair there for you. Ironically, that’s where you now sit anyway—having brought disgrace to the profession of intelligence analysis and fitting right in with the Feiths of this world.

They Knew All Too Well

In fact Cheney, as well as Tenet, knew very well that Cheney’s assertions were lies. How? Saddam’s son-in-law, Hussein Kamel, whom Saddam had put in charge of chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons, as well as missile development, told us when he defected in mid-1995 that all (that’s right, ALL) such weapons had been destroyed at his order in July 1991 after the Gulf War.

And not only that. In mid-2002, Iraq’s foreign minister, Naji Sabri, whom my former CIA colleagues had recruited in place, was telling us the same thing. When CIA operations officers, justifiably proud at having recruited Sabri, briefed the president and his senior advisers on what Sabri had said, they were astonished to be treated like skunks at a picnic—shocked to experience first hand that their hard won intelligence was decidedly not welcome. They had used almost every trick in the thick book of tradecraft to “turn” the foreign minister and get him working for us. Now they were being told that the White House wanted no further reporting from him: “This isn’t about Intel anymore. This is about regime change.”

Astonished Tenet was not. From the documentary evidence in the authoritative Downing Street Minutes we know that he told the chief of British intelligence, Richard Dearlove, during his visit to CIA headquarters on July 20, 2002, that the intelligence was being “fixed” around the policy. That is precisely what Dearlove reported back to then-prime minister Tony Blair and his senior national security officials at Downing Street three days later.

Meanwhile, former UN inspectors like Scott Ritter were saying that some 90 percent of the WMD Iraq earlier possessed had been destroyed—some during the Gulf War in 1991, but most as a result of the inspections conducted by the UN. No one had seen any of the “missing” ten percent, and even freshmen analysts found it unprofessional to apply to serious intelligence work either the newly introduced concept of “faith-based analysis” or, worse still, the Rumsfeld Theorem: “The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”

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