OUTRIGHT LIES REVEALED IN SENATE INTELLIGENCE COMMITTEE REPORT ON PREWAR INTELLIGENCE

Ray McGovern, a CIA analyst for 27 years and co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), analyzes the report of the Senate Intelligence Committee on prewar intelligence. It is a must read. Excerpts:

It is said that truth is the first casualty of war. Sadly, in the case of Iraq, even before the war truth took a back seat to a felt need to snuggle up to power—to stay in good odor with a president and his advisers, all well known to be hell-bent on war on Iraq.
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This is precisely the spin that the Bush administration wants to give to the Senate report; i. e., that the president was misled; that his decision for war was based on spurious intelligence about non-existent weapons of mass destruction.

But the president’s decision for war had little to do with intelligence on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. It had everything to do with the administration’s determination to gain control of strategic, oil-rich Iraq, implant an enduring military presence there, and—not incidentally--eliminate any possible threat from Iraq to Israel’s security.

These, of course, were not the reasons given to justify placing US troops in harms way, but even the most circumspect senior officials have had unguarded moments of candor. For example, when asked in May 2003 why North Korea was being treated differently from Iraq, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz responded, “Let’s look at it simply…The country (Iraq) swims on a sea of oil.”

And basking in the glory of “Mission Accomplished” shortly after Baghdad had fallen, Wolfowitz admitted that the focus on weapons of mass destruction to justify the attack on Iraq was “for bureaucratic reasons.” It was, he added, “the one reason everyone could agree on”—meaning, of course, the one that could successfully sell the war to Congress and the American people.

The Israel factor? In another moment of unusual candor—this one before the war—Philip Zelikow, a member of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board from 2001 to 2003 (and now executive director of the 9/11 commission), pointed to the danger that Iraq posed to Israel as “the unstated threat—a threat that dare not speak its name…because it is not a popular sell.”

Last, but hardly least. It was not until several months after the Bush White House decided to make war on Iraq that the weapons-of-mass-destruction-laden National Intelligence Estimate was commissioned, and then only because Congress needed to be persuaded that the threat was so immediate that war was necessary. Vice President Dick Cheney set the main parameters in a major speech on August 26, 2002, in which he declared, "We know that Saddam has resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons." The estimate Tenet signed dutifully endorsed that spurious judgment—with "high confidence," no less.