[Mb-civic] Ray McGovern: CIA v. Cheney

[Mike Blaxill]

Mr McGovern is always smokin! 
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/110905Y.shtml

CIA v. Cheney 
    By Ray McGovern 
    t r u t h o u t | Perspective 

    Wednesday 09 November 2005 

    Allegations keep cropping up in the press
that CIA professionals are undermining the
administration. In at least one sense, I suppose,
this is true. For when an administration embarks
on a war justified by little or no intelligence,
speaking truth can be regarded as treachery. The
country could use more of that kind of
"treachery." 

    Vice President Cheney in Trouble 

    Cheney's current situation has the makings of
a Greek tragedy in the way he is about to
self-destruct. The tragic flaw of overweening
arrogance - the Greeks called it hubris - did not
begin with Euripides. Nor will it end with the
inexorably approaching demise of the vice
president and other leaders of the current US
administration. 

    Richard Nixon's first vice president, Spiro
Agnew, aside from his fulsome rhetoric, was
hardly a heroic figure. So when his petty crimes
were brought to light, he left the White House
quietly by the side door. This is not Dick
Cheney's style. And it is probably too late now
for that kind of denouement. He is far more
likely to press the self-destruct button, and
perhaps even bring President George W. Bush down
with him. Absolute power does indeed corrupt
absolutely. Small wonder that Republican
stalwart, and national security adviser to George
H.W. Bush, Gen. Brent Scowcroft, who has worked
closely with Cheney over the years, now says "I
do not know Dick Cheney." 

    Patriotic truth-tellers are coming out of the
woodwork. For example, Larry Wilkerson, who was
former Secretary of State Colin Powell's chief of
staff, has made public his conclusion that Cheney
was the main author of this administration's
policy of torturing detainees "as appropriate and
as consistent with military necessity." Leaks in
the dike are proliferating. Perhaps worst of all,
from the president's point of view, is the fact
that Karl Rove has pulled his finger out of the
dike - preoccupied as he is in avoiding
indictment and jail. Katrina-type flooding is
threatening the White House. 

    For Cheney, the disclosures regarding the
network of overseas prisons run by the CIA,
together with his dogged opposition to
Congressional restraints on interrogation
techniques, may prove the last straw. There are
signs he might be foolish enough to pull the
strings on genuine-investigation-averse Pat
Roberts (R, Kan.), chair of the Senate Select
Committee on Intelligence, to gather a posse to
"bring to justice" the administration sources who
gave chapter and verse to the Washington Post's
Dana Priest for her detailed article on the
prisons last week. If Roberts launches an
investigation, he is likely to round up first the
usual suspects in the CIA, for which Cheney has
such deep distrust. But none of this would help. 

    Cheney, Wilson, Plame 

    L'Affaire Cheney-and-the-Wilsons would never
sell as a novel. It is nonetheless fascinating as
a "now-running" tragic drama in which the main
player is once again done in by hubris. The
affair is most important, though, as a harbinger
of things to come. It provides a case study of
how Cheney, in a self-destructive way, lashed out
at the CIA when he became convinced that Agency
officials were deliberately undermining his
attempts to conjure up "intelligence" to justify
war on Iraq. It is a telling lesson - and worth a
short review, starting with a query that has
troubled more than one questioner. 

    "It just doesn't parse," they complain, "if
Vice President Dick Cheney was aware from the
start of the very fragile nature, regarding both
provenance and substance, of the report on Iraq
seeking uranium in Niger, what was he thinking
when he asked the CIA to look into it?" The
Agency rank and file and Cheney were no friends.
He was already having a very hard time
muscle-wrestling CIA analysts into seeing
"evidence" of a relationship between al-Qaeda and
Iraq, to enable the administration to provide
"evidence" for the campaign to associate Saddam
Hussein with the attacks of 9/11. 

    There is ample evidence that the vice
president saw the reluctance of CIA analysts to
jump on that bandwagon as recalcitrance - indeed,
as sabotage. They continued, for example, to pour
cold water on a report that one of the 9/11
hijackers, Mohammed Atta, had met with an Iraqi
intelligence officer in Prague, even though the
Cheney-Rumsfeld "cabal" (Wilkerson's word) kept
citing that spurious report as evidence of Iraqi
ties to 9/11. The CIA ombudsman testified to
Congress that, in 32 years of experience in
Agency's analytical ranks, he had never before
witnessed such "hammering" on intelligence
analysts to hold their noses and give their
blessing to dubious evidence. On this issue, at
least - as opposed to the issue of (non-existent)
"weapons of mass destruction" in Iraq, Agency
analysts refused to allow themselves to be
corrupted - until their director, George Tenet,
caved in for Colin Powell's (in)famous UN speech
of February 5, 2003. 

    It is worth recalling that, before Tenet
caved, CIA analysts were receiving outside
encouragement from the likes of Gen. Brent
Scowcroft, who saw the whole game for what it was
and gratuitously told the press that the evidence
of Iraq-al-Qaeda ties was "scant," while
"cabalist" Rumsfeld was saying the evidence was
"bulletproof." Scowcroft was fired almost a year
ago from his position as chairman of the
President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board.
Being right does not help. 

    So, Again, the Question 

    In the face of such recalcitrance, why would
the vice president ask CIA officials, of all
people, to investigate other dubious "evidence"
of nefarious activity by Iraq? 

    Answer: He did not anticipate what they would
do. Nothing was further from his mind. He set in
train something he never intended. Cheney was
hoisted on his own petard. 

    When the cockamamie story of Iraq seeking
yellowcake uranium in Niger first came to the
attention of CIA analysts in Washington, they
threw it into the circular file for very good
substantive reasons. First and foremost, with an
international consortium led by the French
tightly controlling the export of uranium mined
in Niger, the chances were virtually nil that the
Iraqis could bring this off. As the
Silberman-Robb Commission makes clear, it was the
Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency, not the
CIA, that wrote up the analytical report that
found its way onto Cheney's desk. 

    Why did Cheney ask his CIA briefer what he
thought of the DIA analysis? 

    Answer: He was in the habit of "hammering" on
CIA analysts - during his "multiple visits" to
CIA headquarters, for example - to beat them into
submission so they would serve up the politically
correct answer on such matters. 

    In sum, in my opinion, it probably did not
occur to the vice president that the CIA would
take his query so seriously as to send a highly
qualified person down to Niger who, in turn,
would be able to give the lie to the report. I
can vouch from personal experience that, when the
vice president of the United States expresses
interest in more information on a specific
report, the Agency will hop to and pursue the
matter aggressively, as it should. A mite too
aggressively, in this case, for Cheney's
objectives. 

    Enter the Nonproliferation Division 

    The Nonproliferation Division of the
Directorate of Operations, in which Valerie
Wilson was working, was told of Cheney's query
and asked former ambassador Joseph Wilson, who
during his earlier service in Africa became
intimately familiar with the mining industry in
Niger, to travel to Niger to check out the
report. Wilson's findings were duly reported and
disseminated. (When the vice president asks the
bureaucracy a question, you can count on it being
answered one way or another.) At the time, Wilson
did not know that the Iraq-Niger canard had been
woven out of whole cloth by forgerers. Still, his
account should have put the last nail in the
coffin into which that dead duck should have been
thrown. 

    It is a safe assumption that Cheney was not
pleased, to put it mildly, when he learned that
the CIA had responded quickly by sending Wilson
to Niger. 

    It was not pure paranoia. In Cheney's mind,
Wilson had three main things against him. 

*	Rather than following the customary
ex-ambassador routine of grousing privately over
cocktails in Georgetown parlors, Wilson had been
drawing on his considerable substantive expertise
in speaking out strongly - often publicly -
against the planning for and execution of the war
with Iraq; 
*	As the diplomat who faced down Saddam Hussein
during the Gulf War (for which former president
George H.W. Bush had called him "an American
hero"), Wilson enjoyed particularly wide respect
and credibility; and 
*	Baffled by President George W. Bush's citing of
the worn-out and discredited Iraq-Africa-uranium
fairytale in his State of the Union address in
January 2003, Wilson had been making
not-so-discreet inquiries as to why the president
chose to repeat the fable. Did he perhaps have
better evidence? The answer was no.

    Wilson concluded, correctly in my opinion,
that the administration had shown itself prepared
to twist intelligence to "justify" attacking Iraq
and that it had little else upon which to base
the conjuring up of the "mushroom cloud" that
deceived Congress into voting for war. Several
months into the war, no evidence of weapons of
mass destruction (much less of the
"reconstituted" nuclear weapons development
program repeatedly advertised by Cheney) had been
found. And the "explanation" offered by the
Cheney/Rumsfeld "cabal," namely, that patience
was needed because Iraq is the size of
California, was wearing thin. The Iraq-Niger
story was about all they had left. 

    Then, a Double Whammy 

    It was bad enough for the administration when
Wilson's op-ed, "What I Didn't Find in Africa,"
appeared in the New York Times on July 6, 2003;
and worse still when this consummate ambassador
permitted himself to tell Washington Post
reporters that the Iraq-Niger affair "begs the
question regarding what else they are lying
about." But when Cheney learned that the former
ambassador's wife, Valerie Wilson née Plame,
worked in the Nonproliferation Division that sent
Wilson off on the mission to Niger, the vice
president would almost certainly have seen
deliberate sabotage by the CIA 

    I believe Cheney smelled a rat, the rat of
deliberate defiance - in Cheney's eyes a mutinous
attempt to deny him the kind of "intelligence" he
knew would be required to deceive Congress. Mrs.
Wilson is a veteran CIA operative trained to spot
a spurious report a mile away. Cheney could only
assume that she would have recognized the
Iraq-Niger canard for what it was, and sent her
husband to Niger to give the lie to the report.
Policymakers immersed in the world of politics
often have difficulty distinguishing between
honest efforts by intelligence professionals to
pursue the truth on the one hand and
insubordination/sabotage on the other. 

    The Iraq-Niger fish story had already begun
to stink. Tenet had insisted on deleting it from
the president's "mushroom-cloud" speech on
October 7, 2002, just three days before Congress
voted to approve war. Yet the White House was
acutely embarrassed when it had to retract the
story after it had found its way into the
president's State of the Union address the
following January. As for then-Secretary of State
Colin Powell, although he used a plethora of
spurious material in his UN speech of February 5,
2003, the Niger story smelled so bad that it did
not meet even that low threshold. And it did not
help a bit when Powell was asked why the
president had repeated the story in late January,
while he (Powell) chose not to use it just a week
later; Powell damned the president's words with
very faint praise, saying they were "not
completely outrageous." 

------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Ray McGovern, co-founder of Veteran
Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), was
a CIA analyst for 27 years. His responsibilities
included daily briefings of the vice president
and other senior officials. Ray now works for
Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the
ecumenical Church of the Saviour in Washington,
DC.