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They then performed what in Army parlance is called a “midnight requisition,” finding the only Defense Intelligence Agency analyst sympathetic to their position and getting him to provide DIA “coordination,” (which was almost immediately withdrawn by DIA).
On May 29, President George W. Bush, visiting Poland, proudly announced on Polish TV, “We have found the weapons of mass destruction.” (For a contemporaneous debunking of the CIA-DIA report, see “America’s Matrix,” http://www.consortiumnews.com/2003/060103a.html)
When the State Department's Intelligence and Research (INR) analysts realized that this was not some kind of Polish joke, they “went ballistic,” according to Carl Ford, who immediately warned Powell there was a very large problem. Tenet, in turn, must have learned of this quickly, for he called Ford on the carpet, literally, the following day. No shrinking violet, Ford held his ground. He told Tenet and McLaughlin, “That report is one of the worst intelligence assessments I’ve ever read.”
What seems clear is that Tenet and McLaughlin learned nothing from their decision just four months earlier to play fast and loose with intelligence—regardless of the risk of heavy embarrassment to the Secretary of State or, in this case, the President.
“They Should Have Been Shot”
This episode—and several like it—are described in Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War by Michael Isikoff and David Corn, who say that Ford is still angry over the fraudulent paper. Ford told the authors:
“It was clear that they [Tenet and McLaughlin] had been personally involved in the preparation of the [bio-weapons labs] report. As it turned out, that analysis was unprofessional and even unethical. People did funny thing with the evidence…It wasn’t just that it was wrong. They lied…they should have been shot.” (Page 229)
Small wonder Ford has remained angry—like Wilkerson. It was all just too much. Ford knew he had made a huge mistake in early Feb. 2003, by assuming that Colin Powell would face down the blandishments of Tenet, McLaughlin, and the White House members of Wilkerson’s team.
The way these things normally work, it was not unreasonable for Ford to assume further that he would have the opportunity, in extremis, to trade on his credibility with, and entrée to, Secretary Powell to thwart the CIA seniors, if they peddled their meretricious wares at CIA headquarters.
In the end, Powell went along; Col. Wilkerson was left to twist slowly in the wind, so to speak. Bush, Cheney, and their courtiers prevailed and our country embarked on what the post-WWII Nuremberg Tribunal termed the “supreme international crime”—a war of aggression.
Sad. Very sad. Criminal, I would say.
A version of this article first appeared at Consortiumnews.com.
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