Many of us intelligence analysts have found utility in relying, in part, on short studies applying psychoanalysis to develop profiles of foreign leaders. (This marriage of psychoanalysis and intelligence work actually goes back to the early 1940s, when the OSS commissioned such studies on Hitler.) We called them “at-a-distance personality assessments.”
Three years ago Justin Frank, M.D., a psychiatrist here in Washington, wrote a book “Bush on the Couch” in which he provided keen insights into the president’s mode of thinking—or not thinking.
Eager to use every tool at our disposal, VIPS recently asked Dr. Frank to update his observations, with a view to forecasting, to the extent possible, how Bush is likely to react to the building pressures of the coming weeks and months. We will issue, perhaps as early as this week, Dr. Frank’s latest analysis, fortified by our own input. But we already have his preliminary analysis; there is no other word for it: Scary.
In a quick note to us this morning [July 23], Dr. Frank noted we are “dealing with a potentially cornered man [who] could lash out, and it is possible that the best way would be to bomb Iran.... Whatever the root causes of Bush’s pathology, we have a dangerous man running things...grandiose and unchecked.”
Some snippets from the Memorandum that Dr. Frank is drafting for issuance under VIPS auspices:
George W. Bush is without conscience...and destructive, willfully so. He has always liked to break things...most shocking is the way he is breaking our armed forces.
He doesn’t care about others, is indifferent to their suffering...He is almost constitutionally missing the ability to sympathize or empathize...More indifferent to reality than out of touch with it, he makes up whatever story he wants.
Ultimately, he is psychologically unstable...His goal is to destroy things [and he can do that] without experiencing anxiety or a sense of responsibility. An equally important goal is to protect himself from shame, from being wrong, from being found small and weak.
So what do we do?
At a similarly critical juncture, Dr. King was typically direct: "We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak.... there is such a thing as being too late.... Life often leaves us standing bare, naked, and dejected with lost opportunity.... Over the bleached bones of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words: ‘Too late.’”
There is today another Edmund Pettus Bridge to cross, John. And it has fallen to you to lead us across.
With respect,
/s/
Ray McGovern -------------------------------- Ray McGovern had was a CIA analyst from the administration of John F. Kennedy to that of George H. E. Bush. Three months before the attack on Iraq, he joined with other intelligence community alumni in founding Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), in order to warn that intelligence was being manufactured to justify an unnecessary war.
Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in Washington, DC. During his 27-years as a CIA analyst, he chaired NIEs: he is now on the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).
