This piece was reprinted by OpEd News with permission or license. It may not be reproduced in any form without permission or license from the source.
Ford told the authors: "It was clear that they [Tenet and McLaughlin] had been personally involved in the preparation of the report. " It wasn't just that it was wrong. They lied. " they should have been shot."
Too bad the outspoken Carl Ford made the incorrect assumption that he could rely on his credibility and entree with Secretary Powell to thwart the likes of Tenet and McLaughlin, as they peddled their meretricious wares at CIA headquarters.
Col. Wilkerson, whom Powell had put in charge of overseeing the UN speech, rued the fact that he did not insist that Ford take part on his team. "I wanted Carl -- or even more so, one of his deputies whom I knew well and trusted completely, Tom Fingar, to be on my team."
Key Intelligence Kept From Powell?
Some honest intelligence analysts surely would have been important if the goal was to make a truthful presentation to the United Nations. But it's clear from a historical perspective that honesty was not foremost on the Bush administration's agenda; it was trying to extract a Security Council resolution giving legal cover to the invasion.
For instance, we now know that, with the help of Allied intelligence services, the CIA had recruited Naji Sabri, Saddam Hussein's foreign minister, and Tahir Jalil Habbush, the chief of Iraqi intelligence. They were cajoled into remaining in place while giving the United States critical intelligence well before the war and before Powell's speech laying the groundwork for the war.
In other words, at a time when Saddam Hussein believed that Sabri and Habbush were working for him, they had been "turned" into U.S. agents, providing information that was evaluated and verified. The trouble was they weren't saying what Bush and his neocon advisers wanted to hear. The pair independently affirmed that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
So, what to do? Former CIA officials have said that this information on the absence of WMD was then concealed from Congress as well as from senior U.S. military officers and from intelligence analysts, including those working on the infamous Iraq-WMD National Intelligence Estimate of Oct. 1, 2002. Even Secretary of State Colin Powell, Naji Sabri's U.S. counterpart, was kept in the dark.
As Col. Wilkerson noted, Vice President Cheney was the real person in charge of foreign policy, intelligence and Iraq War. Knowledgeable officials at State, CIA and elsewhere were forced to look on as what we used to call "straphangers," when they were allowed in the room at all.
I vividly recall Wilkerson fielding a question from Rep. Walter Jones, R-North Carolina, at a congressional hearing on June 25, 2006...
Jones: "My point is as a congressman who trusted what I was being told. ... And I wish I'd [had] the wisdom then that I might have now. I would have known what to ask. ... So where along the way -- how did these people so early on get so much power that they had more influence ... in the administration to make decisions than you the professionals?"Wilkerson: "I'd answer you with two words. Let me put the article in there and make it three. The Vice President."
So, even if Powell suspected he was being lied to by Tenet and McLaughlin, he would have been unlikely to call them out on it with the Vice President and his bloated staff standing foursquare behind the whole charade.
The UN speech was hardly Powell's first display of abject acquiescence. The Bush administration documents on the crafting of imprisonment and torture policy show Powell, though a military man knowing the risks to American soldiers from the U.S. government casting aside legal conventions against torture, unwilling to stand up for what he knew was right, i.e., not to torture or play word games about torture.
A year before his UN speech, rather than confront President Bush personally on White House pressure for legal wiggle-room for torture, Powell asked State Department lawyers to engage White House counsel Alberto Gonzales and Cheney's legal adviser David Addington in what Powell knew would be a quixotic effort, absent his personal involvement.
Powell's lawyers put in writing his concern that making an end-run around the Geneva protections for prisoners of war "could undermine U.S. military culture which emphasizes maintaining the highest standards of conduct in combat, and could introduce an element of uncertainty in the status of adversaries."
But when Gonzales and Addington simply declared parts of the Geneva Conventions "quaint" and "obsolete," Powell caved, acquiescing in the corruption of the Army to which he owed so much. We know the next chapters of that story. They are entitled CIA "black sites," Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
3
3
2
