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Today's
Stories
February 12, 2004
Saul Landau
Elegy to the Salton Sea
February
11, 2004
Cockburn
/ St. Clair
Hail, Kerry: Senator Facing-Both-Ways
Steve Perry
Bush
v. Bush?
February
10, 2004
Kurt
Nimmo
Inquisition in Iowa
Ron Jacobs
Politics and the Beatles: Don't
You Know You Can Count Me Out (In)
Elizabeth
Schulte
The Many Faces of John Kerry
Mickey
Z
Meet the Oxmans: "The Rich
Shouldn't Sleep at Night Either"
February
9, 2004
Michael
Donnelly
Will Skull and Bones Really Change
CEOs? Inside John Kerry's Closet
Chris Floyd
Smells Like Team Spirit: the Bush
B-Boys Replay Their Greatest Hits
Bill
Christison
What's Wrong with the CIA?
Dr. Susan
Block
Janet Jackson's Mammary Moment:
Boob Tube Super Bowl
February
7/8, 2004
Kathleen
Christison
Offending Valerie: Dealing with
Jewish Self-Absorption
Jeff Ballinger
No Sweat Shopping
Dave
Lindorff
Spray and Pray in Iraq: a Marine
in Transit
Alexander
Cockburn
McNamara: the Sequel
February
6, 2004
Ron
Jacobs
Are the Kurds in the Way?
Joanne
Mariner
Anita Bryant's Legacy
Saul
Landau
Happiness and Botox
Kurt Nimmo
Horror Non-fiction: A How-To Guide
from Perle and Frum
Niranjan
Ramakrishnan
The Real Intelligence Failure:
Our Own
February
5, 2004
Benjamin
Shepard
Turning NYC into a Patriot Act Free
Zone
Khury
Petersen-Smith
A Report from Occupied Iraq: "We Don't Want Army USA"
Mokhiber
/ Weissman
The 10 Worst Corporations of 2003
Teresa
Josette
The Exeuctioner's Pslam? Christian Nation? Yeah, Right
David Krieger
Why Dr. King's Message on Vietnam is Relevant to Iraq
Christopher
Brauchli
Monkey Business: Of Recess and Evolution in Georgia Schools
Norman
Solomon
The Deadly Lies of Reliable Sources
Cockburn
/ St. Clair
Presenting President Edwards!
February
4, 2004
Brian
McKinlay
Bush's Australian Deputy: Howard's
Last Round Up?
Mark
Gaffney
Ariel Sharon's Favorite Senator: Ron Wyden and Israel
Judith
Brown
Palestine and the Media
Frederick
B. Hudson
Moseley-Braun and the Butcher: Campaign for Justice or Big Oil's
Junta?
Kurt Nimmo
Bush's Independent Commission: Exonerating
the Spooks
M.
Junaid Alam
Philly School Workers Fight for Fair Contract
Fran Shor
Whose Boob Tube?
Kevin
Cooper
This is Not My Execution and I Will Not Claim It
February
3, 2004
Alan
Maass
The
Dems' New Mantra: What They Really Mean by "Electability"
Nick
Halfinger
How the Other Half Lives: Embedded
in Iraq
Rahul
Mahajan
Our True Intelligence Failure
Neve Gordon
The Only Democracy in the Middle East?
Laura
Carlsen
Mexico: Two Anniversaries; Two Futures
Jordan
Green
Democratic Patronage in Northern New
Mexico
Terry
Lodge
An Open Letter to Michael Powell from the Boobs & Body Parts
Fairness Campaign
Hammond
Guthrie
Investigating the Meaningless
Website
of the Day
Waging Peace
February
2, 2004
Gary
Leupp
The Buddhist Nun in Tom Ridge's Jail
Justin
E.H. Smith
The Manners of Their Deaths: Capital Punishment in a Smoke-Free
Environment
Tom
Wright
The Prosecution of Captain Yee
Winslow
Wheeler
Inside the Bush Defense Budget
Lee Ballinger
Janet Jackson's Naked Truth
Leonard
Pitts, Jr
For Blacks, the Game of Justice is
Rigged
Jeffrey
St. Clair
The Hollow Candidate:
The Trouble with Howard Dean
Website
of the Day
Resistance:
In the Eye of the American Hegemon
Jan. 31 / Feb 1, 2004
Paul
de Rooij
For Whom the Death Tolls: Deliberate
Undercounting of Coalition Fatalities
Bernard
Chazelle
Bush's Desolate Imperium
Jack
Heyman
Bushfires on the Docks
Christopher
Reed
Broken Ballots
Michael
Donnelly
An Urgent Plea to Progressives: Don't Give in to Fear
Rob Eshelman
The Subtle War
Lee
Sustar
Palestine and the Anti-War Movement
George
Bisharat
Right of Return
Ray
McGovern
Nothing to Preempt
Brian Cloughley
Enron's Beady-Eyed Sharks
Conn
Hallinan
Nepal, Bush & Real WMDs
Kurt Nimmo
The Murderous Lies of the Neo-Cons
Phillip
Cryan
Media at the Monterrey Summit
Christopher
Brauchli
A Speech for Those Who Don't Read
John
Holt
War in the Great White North
Mickey
Z.
Clueless in America: When Mikey Met Wesley
Mark
Scaramella
The High Cost of Throwing Away the Key
Tariq Ali
Farewell, Munif
Ben
Tripp
Waiter! The Reality Check, Please
Poets'
Basement
LaMorticella, Guthrie, Thomas and Albert
January 30, 2004
Saul
Landau
Cuba High on Neo-Con Hit List
Michael
Donnelly
Bush's Second Front: The War in
the Woods
Elaine
Cassel
Worse Than Jacko: Child Abuse at Gitmo
David Vest
More Halliburton News, Brought to You by Halliburton
Mike
Whitney
The Kay Report: Still Defending Aggression
David
Miller
The Hutton Whitewash
Sam
Husseini
How Many People Must Die Because of This "Mistake",
Senator Kerry?
January 29, 2004
Patricia
Nelson Limerick
John Ehrlichman, Environmentalist
Ron
Jacobs
Homeland Security and "Legalized"
Immigration
Rahul Mahajan
New Hampshire v. Iraq
Greg
Weiher
Bush Calls for Preemptive Strike on
Moon and Mars
Norman
Solomon
The State of the Media Union
Cockburn
/ St. Clair
Does NH Mean Anything?
January
28, 2004
Kathy
Kelly
Bearing Witness Against Teachers of
Torture and Assassination
Hot Stories
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Subcomandante Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click Here
for More Stories.
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February
12, 2004
A Disingenuous Tour
de Force
Tenet
and the King's New Clothes
By RAY McGOVERN
US President George W. Bush seemed quite nervous
on TV last Sunday as he defended his policy on Iraq. The American
press now has its hands full in trying to draw something positive
from the president's appearance on "Meet the Press."
But still more irony can be seen in the
fact that February 5 has been chosen two years running for rhetoric
aimed at what Socrates termed "making the worse cause appear
the better"--last year by Secretary of State Colin Powell
at the UN and Thursday by CIA Director George Tenet at Georgetown
University.
As in the case of Powell's spurious depiction
of the threat from Iraq, Tenet's disingenuous tour de force becomes
more embarrassing the closer you look.
Tenet chose to defend the indefensible--the
bogus National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) hurriedly conjured
up in September 2002 to support spurious charges made by Vice
President Dick Cheney on August 26, 2002 in beating the drum
for war on Iraq. The conclusions of that estimate have now been
proven --pure and simple--wrong.
Even so, that is not the most important
point. What all should know is that the Bush administration's
decision for war against Iraq came well before any intelligence
estimate. There is ample evidence that that decision was made,
at the latest, by spring 2002.
That there was no NIE before that speaks
volumes. During my 27 years of service as a CIA analyst, never
was a foreign policy decision of that magnitude made without
FIRST commissioning a National Intelligence Estimate. Why did
Tenet not take the initiative and see that one was done? Surely,
if he did not know that decisions on war and peace were being
made at the White House and Pentagon in early 2002, he was the
only one in Washington so unaware.
There was no NIE because Tenet realized
that an honest one would show how little the intelligence community
knew about the threat from Iraq and would hardly support a case
for war. And so, consummate bureaucrat that he is, he kept his
head down for as long as he could.
It was only when the somnolent Senator
from Florida, Bob Graham, then Chair of the Senate Intelligence
Committee, was nudged awake by committee colleague Dick Durbin
that Graham nodded, yes it did seem odd that no NIE had been
prepared. And especially odd at a time when Congress was being
asked to cede to the president its constitutional prerogative
to declare war.
So Graham called Tenet, and Tenet got
the go-ahead from his masters in the White House--WITH THE PROVISO
that the estimate's conclusions dovetail with the case for war
just made by Cheney. Tenet saluted, and then picked his most
malleable manager, Robert Walpole, to ensure that a politically
correct NIE was produced.
In other words, the purpose of the estimate
was not to inform an (already reached) decision on whether war
was necessary. Rather, it was to enlist intelligence in the campaign
to deceive Congress into thinking that Iraq posed such a threat
that the legislative branch's prerogative must be surrendered
to the president, and--not incidentally--to make so persuasive
a case to the nation that those who dared vote against the president
would be highly vulnerable in the mid-term election of 2002.
That worked too.
Thanks to inspector David Kay's refreshing
honesty, we now know that Cheney's charges, and the cognate conclusions
of the estimate, were bogus.
The NIE: Lynchpin
or Window-Dressing?
Am I saying that the fall 2002 Estimate
on Iraq's "weapons of mass destruction" was irrelevant?
In the narrow sense that it was ex post facto the decision for
war, yes. It was decidedly NOT the "linchpin of the Bush
administration's case for invasion," that former CIA analyst
and Iraq specialist Kenneth Pollack recently claimed it was.
But enlisting the intelligence community
in a deliberate campaign to mislead our elected representatives
into surrendering their power under the Constitution--that is
highly relevant, and unconscionable. In 40 years of following
such issues quite closely, I have never seen politicization of
intelligence so cynical, so sustained, so consequential. And
I was there for Vietnam.
Bob Graham voted against the war. But
he was never able to stay awake long enough tell his colleagues
they were being conned. His behavior, and that of House Intelligence
Committee Porter Goss, give an entirely new meaning to the word
"oversight" customarily used to describe their committees'
function.
The Tenet Speech on
Thursday
"Now I am sure you are asking:
Why haven't we found the weapons? I have told you the search
must continue and it will be difficult."
But, Mr. Tenet, it has been over ten
months since we invaded Iraq. Your former chief inspector David
Kay concluded "probably 85 percent of the significant things"
have now been found--but no WMD. And his successor, Charles Duelfer
told the press four weeks ago "the prospect of finding chemical
weapons, biological weapons is close to nil at this point."
On what basis do you now say "we are nowhere near 85 percent
finished"?
Tenet is obediently arguing the administration's
brief that the search for WMD is far from over and that it will,
in Cheney's words, "take some additional considerable period
of time in order to look in all the cubbyholes and ammo dumps."
A safe guess is that the administration's current plan is to
drag out the quest until after the election in November.
Taking his cue from Cheney, Defense Secretary
Rumsfeld, in testimony before Congress on Wednesday, also stressed
the need for additional time. And yesterday, in an unguarded
moment, Rumsfeld gave the game away, when he disparaged David
Kay's judgment on the status of the search for WMD:
"Kay said we're about 85 percent
complete. Tenet said what I said: there's work yet to be done."
Indeed, Tenet says what Rumsfeld and
Cheney say. Tenet is the quintessential "team player,"
an attribute antithetical to his statutory duty to tell the emperor
when he had no clothes on. Former House speaker Newt Gingrich,
like Cheney a frequent visitor to CIA Headquarters, recently
told the press "George Tenet is so grateful to the president
[presumably for not firing him on Sept. 12, 2001] that he will
do anything for him."
Are you surprised that intelligence has
been politicized?
Ray McGovern
is a 27-year veteran CIA analyst whose duties included chairing
National Intelligence Estimates. He is co-founder of Veteran
Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, and co-director of the
Servant Leadership School, an outreach ministry in the inner
city of Washington, DC. He can be reached at: rmcgovern@slschool.org
Weekend
Edition Features for February 1, 2004
Paul
de Rooij
For Whom the Death Tolls: Deliberate
Undercounting of Coalition Fatalities
Bernard
Chazelle
Bush's Desolate Imperium
Jack
Heyman
Bushfires on the Docks
Christopher
Reed
Broken Ballots
Michael
Donnelly
An Urgent Plea to Progressives: Don't Give in to Fear
Rob Eshelman
The Subtle War
Lee
Sustar
Palestine and the Anti-War Movement
George
Bisharat
Right of Return
Ray
McGovern
Nothing to Preempt
Brian Cloughley
Enron's Beady-Eyed Sharks
Conn
Hallinan
Nepal, Bush & Real WMDs
Kurt Nimmo
The Murderous Lies of the Neo-Cons
Phillip
Cryan
Media at the Monterrey Summit
Christopher
Brauchli
A Speech for Those Who Don't Read
John
Holt
War in the Great White North
Mickey
Z.
Clueless in America: When Mikey Met Wesley
Mark
Scaramella
The High Cost of Throwing Away the Key
Tariq Ali
Farewell, Munif
Ben
Tripp
Waiter! The Reality Check, Please
Poets'
Basement
LaMorticella, Guthrie, Thomas and Albert
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