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Default (OT) Shades of Spiro Ahnew


Cheney must go
In a letter to President Bush, a group of CIA veterans charge the vice
president drove the U.S. to war with a "campaign of deceit" -- and call
for his head.

Editor's note: Following is the full text of Veteran Intelligence
Professionals for Sanity's open letter to President Bush, originally
published on July 14.

- - - - - - - - - - - -



July 16, 2003 |

MEMORANDUM FOR: The President

FROM: Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity

SUBJECT: Intelligence Unglued

The glue that holds the Intelligence Community together is melting under
the hot lights of an awakened press. If you do not act quickly, your
intelligence capability will fall apart -- with grave consequences for
the nation.

The Forgery Flap

By now you are all too familiar with the play-by-play. The
Iraq-seeking-uranium-in-Niger forgery is a microcosm of a mischievous
nexus of overarching problems. Instead of addressing these problems,
your senior staff are alternately covering up for one another and gently
stabbing one another in the back. CIA Director George Tenet's extracted,
unapologetic apology on July 11 was classic -- I confess; she did it.

It is now dawning on our until-now somnolent press that your national
security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, shepherds the foreign affairs
sections of your state-of-the-union address and that she, not Tenet, is
responsible for the forged information getting into the speech. But the
disingenuousness persists. Surely Dr. Rice cannot persist in her
insistence that she learned only on June 8, 2003, about former
ambassador Joseph Wilson's mission to Niger in February 2002, when he
determined that the Iraq-Niger report was a con-job. Wilson's findings
were duly reported to all concerned in early March 2002. And, if she
somehow missed that report, the New York Times' Nicholas Kristof on May
6 recounted chapter and verse on Wilson's mission, and the story
remained the talk of the town in the weeks that followed.

Rice's denials are reminiscent of her claim in spring 2002 that there
was no reporting suggesting that terrorists were planning to hijack
planes and slam them into buildings. In September, the joint
congressional committee on 9/11 came up with a dozen such reports.

Secretary of State Colin Powell's credibility, too, has taken serious
hits as continued non-discoveries of weapons in Iraq heap doubt on his
confident assertions to the UN. Although he was undoubtedly trying to be
helpful in trying to contain the Iraq-Niger forgery affair, his recent
description of your state-of-the-union words as "not totally outrageous"
was faint praise indeed. And his explanations as to why he made a point
to avoid using the forgery in the way you did was equally unhelpful.

Whatever Rice's or Powell's credibility, it is yours that matters. And,
in our view, the credibility of the intelligence community is an
inseparably close second. Attempts to dismiss or cover up the cynical
use to which the known forgery was put have been -- well, incredible.
The British have a word for it: "dodgy." You need to put a quick end to
the dodginess, if the country is to have a functioning intelligence
community.

The Vice President's Role

Attempts at coverup could easily be seen as comical, were the issue not
so serious. Highly revealing were Ari Fleisher's remarks early last
week, which set the tone for what followed. When asked about the
forgery, he noted tellingly -- as if drawing on well memorized talking
points -- that the Vice President was not guilty of anything. The
disingenuousness was capped on Friday, when George Tenet did his awkward
best to absolve the Vice President from responsibility.

To those of us who experienced Watergate these comments had an eerie
ring. That affair and others since have proven that coverup can assume
proportions overshadowing the crime itself. All the more reason to take
early action to get the truth up and out.

There is just too much evidence that Ambassador Wilson was sent to Niger
at the behest of Vice President Cheney's office, and that Wilson's
findings were duly reported not only to that office but to others as well.

Equally important, it was Cheney who launched (in a major speech on
August 26, 2002) the concerted campaign to persuade Congress and the
American people that Saddam Hussein was about to get his hands on
nuclear weapons -- a campaign that mushroomed, literally, in early
October with you and your senior advisers raising the specter of a
"mushroom cloud" being the first "smoking gun" we might observe.

That this campaign was based largely on information known to be forged
and that the campaign was used successfully to frighten our elected
representatives in Congress into voting for war is clear from the bitter
protestations of Rep. Henry Waxman and others. The politically aware
recognize that the same information was used, also successfully, in the
campaign leading up to the mid-term elections -- a reality that breeds a
cynicism highly corrosive to our political process.

The fact that the forgery also crept into your state-of-the-union
address pales in significance in comparison with how it was used to
deceive Congress into voting on October 11 to authorize you to make war
on Iraq.

It was a deep insult to the integrity of the intelligence process that,
after the Vice President declared on August 26, 2002, that "we know that
Saddam has resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons," the National
Intelligence Estimate (NIE) produced during the critical month of
September featured a fraudulent conclusion that "most analysts" agreed
with Cheney's assertion. This may help explain the anomaly of Cheney's
unprecedented "multiple visits" to CIA headquarters at the time, as well
as the many reports that CIA and other intelligence analysts were
feeling extraordinarily great pressure, accompanied by all manner of
intimidation tactics, to concur in that conclusion. As a coda to his
nuclear argument, Cheney told NBC's Meet the Press three days before
US/UK forces invaded Iraq: "We believe he (Saddam Hussein) has
reconstituted nuclear weapons."

Mr. Russert: the International Atomic Energy Agency said he does not
have a nuclear program; we disagree?

Vice President Cheney: I disagree, yes. And you'll find the CIA, for
example, and other key parts of the intelligence community disagree. We
know he has been absolutely devoted to trying to acquire nuclear
weapons. And we believe he has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons.
I think Mr. ElBaradei (Director of the IAEA) frankly is wrong.

Contrary to what Cheney and the NIE said, the most knowledgeable
analysts -- those who know Iraq and nuclear weapons -- judged that the
evidence did not support that conclusion. They now have been proven right.

Adding insult to injury, those chairing the NIE succumbed to the
pressure to adduce the known forgery as evidence to support the Cheney
line, and relegated the strong dissent of the State Department's Bureau
of Intelligence and Research (and the nuclear engineers in the
Department of Energy) to an inconspicuous footnote.

It is a curious turn of events. The drafters of the offending sentence
on the forgery in the president's state-of-the-union speech say they
were working from the NIE. In ordinary circumstances an NIE would be the
preeminently authoritative source to rely upon; but in this case the NIE
itself had already been cooked to the recipe of high policy.

Joseph Wilson, the former US ambassador who visited Niger at Cheney's
request, enjoys wide respect (including, like several VIPS members, warm
encomia from your father). He is the consummate diplomat. So highly
disturbed is he, however, at the chicanery he has witnessed that he
allowed himself a very undiplomatic comment to a reporter last week,
wondering aloud "what else they are lying about." Clearly, Wilson has
concluded that the time for diplomatic language has passed. It is clear
that lies were told. Sad to say, it is equally clear that your vice
president led this campaign of deceit.

This was no case of petty corruption of the kind that forced Vice
President Spiro Agnew's resignation. This was a matter of war and peace.
Thousands have died. There is no end in sight.

Recommendation #1

We recommend that you call an abrupt halt to attempts to prove Vice
President Cheney "not guilty." His role has been so transparent that
such attempts will only erode further your own credibility. Equally
pernicious, from our perspective, is the likelihood that intelligence
analysts will conclude that the way to success is to acquiesce in the
cooking of their judgments, since those above them will not be held
accountable. We strongly recommend that you ask for Cheney's immediate
resignation.

The Games Congress Plays

The unedifying dance by the various oversight committees of the Congress
over recent weeks offers proof, if further proof were needed, that
reliance on Congress to investigate in a non-partisan way is pie in the
sky. One need only to recall that Sen. Pat Roberts, Chair of the Senate
Intelligence Committee, has refused to agree to ask the FBI to
investigate the known forgery. Despite repeated attempts by others on
his committee to get him to bring in the FBI, Roberts has branded such a
move "inappropriate," without spelling out why.

Rep. Porter Goss, head of the House Intelligence Committee, is a CIA
alumnus and a passionate Republican and agency partisan. Goss was
largely responsible for the failure of the joint congressional committee
on 9/11, which he co-chaired last year. An unusually clear indication of
where Goss' loyalties lie can be seen in his admission that after a leak
to the press last spring he bowed to Cheney's insistence that the FBI be
sent to the Hill to investigate members and staff of the joint committee
-- an unprecedented move reflecting blithe disregard for the separation
of powers and a blatant attempt at intimidation. (Congress has its own
capability to investigate such leaks.)

Henry Waxman's recent proposal to create yet another congressional
investigatory committee, patterned on the latest commission looking into
9/11, likewise holds little promise. To state the obvious about
Congress, politics is the nature of the beast. We have seen enough
congressional inquiries into the performance of intelligence to conclude
that they are usually as feckless as they are prolonged. And time cannot
wait.

As you are aware, Gen. Brent Scowcroft performed yeoman's service as
National Security Adviser to your father and enjoys very wide respect.
There are few, if any, with his breadth of experience with the issues
and the institutions involved. In addition, he has avoided blind
parroting of the positions of your administration and thus would be seen
as relatively nonpartisan, even though serving at your pleasure. It
seems a stroke of good luck that he now chairs your President's Foreign
Intelligence Advisory Board

Recommendation #2

We repeat, with an additional sense of urgency, the recommendation in
our last memorandum to you (May 1) that you appoint Gen. Brent
Scowcroft, Chair of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board
to head up an independent investigation into the use/abuse of
intelligence on Iraq.

UN Inspectors

Your refusal to allow UN inspectors back into Iraq has left the
international community befuddled. Worse, it has fed suspicions that the
US does not want UN inspectors in country lest they impede efforts to
"plant" some "weapons of mass destruction" in Iraq, should efforts to
find them continue to fall short. The conventional wisdom is less
conspiratorial but equally unsatisfying. The cognoscenti in Washington
think tanks, for example, attribute your attitude to "pique."

We find neither the conspiracy nor the "pique" rationale persuasive. As
we have admitted before, we are at a loss to explain the barring of UN
inspectors. Barring the very people with the international mandate, the
unique experience, and the credibility to undertake a serious search for
such weapons defies logic. UN inspectors know Iraq, know the weaponry in
question, know the Iraqi scientists/engineers who have been involved,
know how the necessary materials are procured and processed; in short,
have precisely the expertise required. The challenge is as daunting as
it is immediate; and, clearly, the US needs all the help it can get.

The lead Wall Street Journal article of April 8 had it right: "If the US
doesn't make any undisputed discoveries of forbidden weapons, the
failure will feed already-widespread skepticism abroad about the motives
for going to war." As the events of last week show, that skepticism has
now mushroomed here at home as well.

Recommendation #3

We recommend that you immediately invite the UN inspectors back into
Iraq. This would go a long way toward refurbishing your credibility.
Equally important, it would help sort out the lessons learned for the
intelligence community and be an invaluable help to an investigation of
the kind we have suggested you direct Gen. Scowcroft to lead.

If Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity can be of any further
help to you in the days ahead, you need only ask.

Ray Close, Princeton, NJ

David MacMichael, Linden, VA

Raymond McGovern, Arlington, VA

Steering Committee, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.

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