Sunday, January 07, 2007

Holding Intelligence Liars Accountable

By Ray McGovern and W. Patrick Lang
January 6, 2007

Lies have consequences.

All those who helped President George W. Bush launch a war of aggression—termed by Nuremberg “the supreme international crime”—have blood on their hands and must be held accountable. This includes corrupt intelligence officials. Otherwise, look for them to perform the same service in facilitating war on Iran.

“They should have been shot,” said former State Department intelligence director, Carl Ford, referring to ex-CIA director George Tenet and his deputy John McLaughlin, for their “fundamentally dishonest” cooking of intelligence to please the White House. Ford was alluding to “intelligence” on the menacing but non-existent mobile biological weapons laboratories in Iraq.

Ford was angry that Tenet and McLaughlin persisted in portraying the labs as real several months after they had been duly warned that they existed only in the imagination of intelligence analysts who, in their own eagerness to please, had glommed onto second-hand tales told by a con-man appropriately dubbed “Curveball.”

In fact, Tenet and McLaughlin had been warned about Curveball long before they let then-Secretary of State Colin Powell shame himself, and the rest of us, by peddling Curveball’s wares at the U.N. Security Council on Feb. 5, 2003.

Read on.

1 comment:

Crazy East Coast Uncle said...

Could Rumsfeld's resignation and his replacement, Gates, be due to Gates behind-the-scenes slight of hand skills, that Rumsfeld's bull in a china shop character, obviously didn't have?

In other words, with Congress going over to the Dems, did the Bush Administration need the skills of Gates, with his history from the Iran-Contra days, instead of Rumsfeld's bully skills. Without Congress approving money for the Iraq/Afghan wars, Gates skills at getting things done behind the back of Congress would be more valuable than Rumsfeld style of getting things done.

I am afraid that while Congress decides to investigate "everything" from the past six years, that they will take their eye off of Gates, while he is performing his magic tricks. Will he help fund the wars when Congress doesn't? And who should be watching? Besides us all!?