27 Year CIA Analyst Ray McGovern, on George Tenet, Neocons, 911

by Nathan Callahan

OpEdNews.Com

When I ask Ray McGovern if the findings of President Bush’s commission on intelligence failures in Iraq will be insightful, he has a one word answer: “No.”

McGovern is a measured man with a steady voice. For 27 years — from JFK to George H. W. Bush — he worked as a CIA analyst, chairing National Intelligence Estimates and preparing the President’s Daily Brief.

Although he's speaking with me on Weekly Signals, a KUCI radio show hosted by Mike Kaspar, I take McGovern’s thumbs down on Bush’s commission to be part of my daily intelligence briefing.

What I need next is a run down on the current Director of the CIA George Tenet. After all, Tenet is to intelligence what Mel Gibson is to crucifixions.

"I think that Tenet will be around at least through the election," McGovern says. "There are two reasons for this. They're the same two reasons that kept him around after September 11, 2001."

"Explain," I say trying to sound presidential.

“One would have thought that the raison d’être for the Central Intelligence Agency was to prevent another Pearl Harbor," McGovern says. "One would have thought that the person most responsible for this would have been cashiered on September 12. Not so. So the question is: Why not so?

"So, why not?" I interject.

“First of all, George Tenet warned the President of the United States about the threat of terrorism almost ad nauseam during the entire spring and summer of 2001. In the final analysis, the president had been warned often enough and long enough. He should have done something about it.”

“Why didn’t he?” I wonder.

“Bush didn’t know what to do,” McGovern says. “And Condoleezza Rice, his advisor on such things, didn’t know a thing about terrorism. By her own admission she hadn’t opened the file that [Clinton’s National Security Advisor] Sandy Berger left behind that said ‘Read This File First.’ She knew a lot about the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, but nothing about terrorism. The charitable explanation for why nothing was done is gross ineptitude and gross malfeasance."

"What about Tenet?"

“George Tenet no doubt has a little computer disc with the 27 or so warnings that he gave the president starting in spring and going right up until September 2001," says McGovern. "The president and his advisors in the White House, knowing this, didn’t dismiss Tenet after 911 because it was too much of a risk. Were they to have dismissed Tenet on September 12, they could not have been sure that he wouldn’t have said, ‘Wait a second. Let me print off some of these warnings. Let me show you what I told the president in the president’s daily brief on August 6, 2001.’ So that’s reason number one.

“Reason number two is that Tenet is simply too useful of a guy to have around. He does what he’s told. If he’s told to do an estimate and told to make sure the conclusions come out the same as a Dick Cheney speech from the month before, he’ll do it.”

McGovern is referring to the National Intelligence Estimate (pdf file here) that Tenet cranked out after Cheney’s August 2002 WMD pep rally. It was a cart before the horse exercise in policy making. The politician, Cheney, makes unsubstantiated claims. The intelligence agency fashions a report to cover his backside.

According to an article penned by McGovern for TomPaine.com, “The conclusions of that estimate have now been proven — pure and simple — wrong.”

The real reasons for the Iraq War, he says, are to be found online at the neo-conservative website The Project for a New American Century. "And I would simply add, not as an afterthought, but as a core part of this whole calculus, that this war was fought as much for Israeli strategic objectives as it was for American strategic objectives. As a matter of fact, the people running our policy toward Iraq have great difficulty distinguishing between the two."

As McGovern is speaking, I notice a slight rise in the pitch of his voice — an almost imperceptible quarter step jump.

“If I’m sounding a little angry here,” he says, “there’s no word to describe it."

There's a silence.

“Outrage is just too pale of a word to describe how we intelligence officials feel about George Tenet being so willing to prostitute our intelligence product — to cook it up to the recipe of high policy. That is the unpardonable sin of intelligence and he’s still doing it."

An image of George Tenet pandering outside the Capitol in a bustier, fishnet stockings and spiked heals interrupts my train of thought. The big eyebrows have got to go.

McGovern erases the image. Apparently, he experienced this type of intelligence whoring first hand.

“I saw it in Vietnam,” he says. “And usually it was the President himself or the White House that was responsible in the final analysis. Think Gulf of Tonkin.”

McGovern is referring to the non-event that became the rationale for the escalation of U.S. involvement in Vietnam.

“We knew that there was no incident that night," McGovern says. "McGeorge Bundy [Lyndon Johnson's National Security Advisor] knew that there was no incident that night. And yet LBJ with his towering presence, his total power — corrupting totally — leaned over and said ‘McGeorge, are you going up to the hill to sell this resolution?’ Bundy admitted on McNeil Lehrer Newshour, one painful show: ‘So, I went. I went up and I lied to Congress.’

“So, it’s happened before. What’s different this time is that we have a situation where, over a two-year period, an incredibly clever orchestrated campaign was waged to exploit the trauma of the American people — the trauma of 911. To exploit it in such a way as to achieve the aims of the…“

McGovern stops to find the word.

“I don’t call them neo-conservatives," he says, "because I’m conservative. I call them neo-fascists, because that’s what they are. And what these neo-fascists did was see 911 as a golden opportunity.”

Holy Benito! Neo-fascists? I ask McGovern if he's using Mussolini’s definition of fascism. As Il Duce said, "Fascism should more properly be called corporatism, since it is the merger of state and corporate power." Think Halliburton U.S.A.

McGovern agrees, but adds more.“I’m also talking about the measures that were taken in Nazi Germany after the fire that burned down the Reichstag, Germany’s parliament building, in 1933. It was that fire that allowed Hitler to institute his own legislation."

McGovern draws a parallel between 911 and the Reichstag fire. After claiming that the Communists committed arson, Hitler used the incident to declare a state of emergency and suspend some of the constitutionally protected personal freedoms of German citizens. These rights included freedom of speech and assembly.

“Very much like post-911 legislation instituted here in this country to curtail civil liberties,” McGovern says, "to make people feel that if they speak out against what is happening, they are unpatriotic."

My briefing is almost over. One final question: How does the Arab world see us?

"It’s really remarkable," McGovern says. "People like Donald Rumsfeld are intelligent and it’s embarrassing how they scratch their heads and they say ‘I don’t know what makes a suicide bomber. I don’t know what makes people do that.’

“Well, if he watched Al Jazeera for a couple of nights. If he watched Israeli bulldozers knocking down Palestinians homes and he saw Israelis shooting up Palestinians in the occupied territories, then maybe he would get some sense as to why people of Palestinian or Arab or Islamic heritage – why they might look askance at the one country that they know makes this all possible. That’s the United States of America.”

Nathan Callahan of NathanCallahan.com is a writer for the OC Weekly and Friction.