No one seems to be writing opinion pieces quite the way I would, so I decided to do it myself.

The name? Taverns are places where one goes to discuss the interesting events and things in the world, so this is my tavern.

I will offer my views on politics, economics, and whatever else strikes my fancy.
I will occasionally publish the entire article from another journal for purposes of causing discussion.

 

Why hasn't the report been issued?

After 9/11 a commission was set up to determine what the government knew before 9/11 which might have led to preventing it. That report was ready for release in December 2002. It hasn't been released yet because the Bush administration is going over it carefully to make sure it says what they want it to say.

So what DID the government know before 9/11? 27-Year CIA Veteran Ray McGovern interviewed by Will Pitt tells what he knows in an interview. Several things stand out to me.

Here was an agency that was created expressly to prevent another Pearl Harbor. That was why the CIA was created originally in 1947. Harry Truman was hell-bent on making sure that, if there were little pieces of information spread around the government, that they all came to one central intelligence agency, one place where they could be collated and analyzed, and the analysis be given to policy people.

So here is September 11, the first time since Pearl Harbor that this system failed. It was worse than Pearl Harbor. More people were killed on September 11 than were killed at Pearl Harbor, and where were the pieces? They were scattered all around the government, just like they were before Pearl Harbor. For George Bush to go out to CIA headquarters and put his arm around George Tenet and tell the world that we have the best intelligence services in the world, this really called for some analysis, if you will.

My analysis is that George Bush had no option but to keep George Tenet on as Director, because George Tenet had warned Bush repeatedly, for months and months before September 11, that something very bad was about to happen.

McG: On August 6, the title of the briefing was, “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in the US,” and that briefing had the word “Hijacking” in it. That’s all I know about it, but that’s quite enough. In September, Bush had to make a decision. Is it feasible to let go of Tenet, whose agency flubbed the dub on this one? And the answer was no, because Tenet knows too much about what Bush knew, and Bush didn’t know what to do about it. That’s the bottom line for me.

Bush was well-briefed. Before he went off to Texas to chop wood for a month like Reagan did in California, he was told all these things. He didn’t even have the presence of mind to convene his National Security Council, and say, “OK guys, we have all these reports, what are we going to do about it?” He just went off to chop wood.

So how does McGovern think the decision was made? Here is his take:

PITT: LetÂ’s bottom-line it here. In the situation regarding the question of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons in Iraq, where does the fault lie for the manner in which this has all broken down? Was it an intelligence failure on the part of the CIA, or are we talking about the Bush administration misusing both that institution and the information it provided?

McG: It’s both, really. Let’s take the chemical and biological stuff first. At the root of this, as I reconstruct it, is what I call ‘Analysis by Subtraction.’ Let’s take a theoretical example: Iraq had listed 50,000 liters of sarin nerve gas in 1995. The UN is known to have destroyed 35,000 liters of this. Subsequently, US bombing destroyed another 5,000 liters of this. Therefore, QED, they have 10,000 liters of sarin.

There’s no consideration given here to shelf life of sarin, what would be necessary to keep sarin active, where it would be stored, how it would be stored, the correct temperature and all that. Instead, it is, “We think they had this and here is the inventory. We think we destroyed this” or “We know we destroyed that, and so the difference, we assume, is there”

You don’t start a war on an assumption, and with the sophisticated collection devices the US intelligence apparatus has, it is unconscionable not to have verified that so they could say, “Yes sir, we know that it’s there, we can confirm it this and that way.” Instead, as I said, it was analysis by subtraction. We had the inventory here, and we know we destroyed that, so they must have this. Analysis like that, I wouldn’t rehire the analyst who did it if he were working for me. That’s the biological and chemical part.

To be quite complete on this, it encourages me that the analysts at the Defense Intelligence Agency - who share this ethic of trying to tell the truth, even though they are under much greater pressure and have much less career protection because they work for Rumsfeld - to their great credit, in September of last year they put out a memo saying there is no reliable evidence to suggest that the Iraqis have biological or chemical weapons, or that they are producing them.

PITT: Was this before or after Vice President Cheney started making personal visits to the CIA?

McG: It was all at the same time. This stuff doesnÂ’t all get written in one week. It was all throughout the spring and summer that this stuff was being collected. When the decision was made last summer that we will have a war against Iraq, they were casting about. YouÂ’ll recall White House Chief of Staff Andy Card saying you donÂ’t market a new product in August. The big blast-off was CheneyÂ’s speech in Nashville, I think it was Nashville anyway, on August 26. He said Iraq was seeking materials for its nuclear program. That set the tone right there.

They looked around after Labor Day and said, “OK, if we’re going to have this war, we really need to persuade Congress to vote for it. How are we going to do that? Well, let’s do the al Qaeda-Iraq connection. That’s the traumatic one. 9/11 is still a traumatic thing for most Americans. Let’s do that.”

But then they said, “Oh damn, those folks at CIA don’t buy that, they say there’s no evidence, and we can’t bring them around. We’ve tried every which way and they won’t relent. That won’t work, because if we try that, Congress is going to have these CIA wimps come down, and the next day they’ll undercut us. How about these chemical and biological weapons? We know they don’t have any nuclear weapons, so how about the chemical and biological stuff? Well, damn. We have these other wimps at the Defense Intelligence Agency, and dammit, they won’t come around either. They say there’s no reliable evidence of that, so if we go up to Congress with that, the next day they’ll call the DIA folks in, and the DIA folks will undercut us.”

So they said, “What have we got? We’ve got those aluminum tubes!” The aluminum tubes, you will remember, were something that came out in late September, the 24th of September. The British and we front-paged it. These were aluminum tubes that were said by Condoleezza Rice as soon as the report came out to be only suitable for use in a nuclear application. This is hardware that they had the dimensions of. So they got that report, and the British played it up, and we played it up. It was front page in the New York Times. Condoleezza Rice said, “Ah ha! These aluminum tubes are suitable only for uranium-enrichment centrifuges.”

Then they gave the tubes to the Department of Energy labs, and to a person, each one of those nuclear scientists and engineers said, “Well, if Iraq thinks it can use these dimensions and these specifications of aluminum tubes to build a nuclear program, let ‘em do it! Let ‘em do it. It’ll never work, and we can’t believe they are so stupid. These must be for conventional rockets.”

And, of course, thatÂ’s what they were for, and thatÂ’s what the UN determined they were for. So, after Condoleezza RiceÂ’s initial foray into this scientific area, they knew that they couldnÂ’t make that stick, either. So what else did they have?

Well, somebody said, “How about those reports earlier this year that Iraq was trying to get Uranuim from Niger? Yeah…that was pretty good.” But of course if George Tenet were there, he would have said, “But we looked at the evidence, and they’re forgeries, they stink to high heaven.” So the question became, “How long would it take for someone to find out they were forgeries?” The answer was about a day or two. The next question was, “When do we have to show people this stuff?” The answer was that the IAEA had been after us for a couple of months now to give it to them, but we can probably put them off for three or four months.

So there it was. “What’s the problem? We’ll take these reports, we’ll use them to brief Congress and to raise the specter of a mushroom cloud. You’ll recall that the President on the 7th of October said, “Our smoking gun could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.” Condoleezza Rice said exactly the same thing the next day. Victoria Clarke said exactly the same thing on the 9th of October, and of course the vote came on the 11th of October.

Don’t take my word for it. Take Henry Waxman’s word for it. Waxman has written the President a very, very bitter letter dated the 17th of March in which he says, “Mr. President, I was lied to. I was lied to. I was briefed on a forgery, and on the strength of that I voted for war. Tell me how this kind of thing could happen?” That was March 17. He hasn’t received a response from the White House yet.

ThatÂ’s the way it worked, and you have to give them credit. These guys are really clever. It worked.

Then there are McGovern's coments on how the war was sold to the US and the reaction of the Press:

PITT: Where do you see this whole issue of the manner in which the war was sold to the American people going?

McG: The most important and clear-cut scandal, of course, has to do with the forgery of those Niger nuclear documents that were used as proof. The very cold calculation was that Congress could be deceived, we could have our war, we could win it, and then no one would care that part of the evidence for war was forged. That may still prove to be the case, but the most encouraging thing IÂ’ve seen over the last four weeks now is that the US press has sort of woken from its slumber and is interested. IÂ’ve asked people in the press how they account for their lack of interest before the war, and now they seem to be interested. I guess the simple answer is that they donÂ’t like to be lied to.

I think the real difference is that no one knew, or very few people knew, before the war that there werenÂ’t any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Now they know. ItÂ’s an unavoidable fact. No one likes to be conned, no one likes to be lied to, and no one particularly likes that 190 US servicemen and women have been killed in this effort, not to mentioned the five or six thousand Iraqi civilians.

There’s a difference in tone. If the press does not succumb to the argument put out by folks like Tom Friedman, who says it doesn’t really matter that there are no weapons in Iraq, if it does become a quagmire which I believe it will be, and we have a few servicemen killed every week, then there is a prospect that the American people will wake up and say, “Tell me again why my son was killed? Why did we have to make this war on Iraq?”

So I do think that there is some hope now that the truth will come out. It wonÂ’t come out through the Congressional committees. ThatÂ’s really a joke, a sick joke.

PITT: During the Clinton administration, if there was going to be an investigation into something, it was going to come out of the House of Representatives. What would your assessment of the situation be at this point?

McG: It doesnÂ’t take a crackerjack analyst. Take Pat Roberts, the Republican Senator from Kansas, who is chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. When the Niger forgery was unearthed and when Colin Powell admitted, well shucks, it was a forgery, Senator Jay Rockefellar, the ranking Democrat on that committee, went to Pat Roberts and said they really needed the FBI to take a look at this. After all, this was known to be a forgery and was still used on Congressmen and Senators. WeÂ’d better get the Bureau in on this. Pat Roberts said no, that would be inappropriate. So Rockefellar drafted his own letter, and went back to Roberts and said he was going to send the letter to FBI Director Mueller, and asked if Roberts would sign on to it. Roberts said no, that would be inappropriate.

What the FBI Director eventually got was a letter from one Minority member saying pretty please, would you maybe take a look at what happened here, because we think there may have been some skullduggery. The answer he got from the Bureau was a brush-off. Why do I mention all that? This is the same Pat Roberts who is going to lead the investigation into what happened with this issue.

There is a lot that could be said about Pat Roberts. I remember way back last fall when people were being briefed, CIA and others were briefing Congressmen and Senators about the weapons of mass destruction. These press folks were hanging around outside the briefing room, and when the Senators came out, one of the press asked Senator Roberts how the evidence on weapons of mass destruction was. Roberts said, oh, it was very persuasive, very persuasive.

The press guy asked Roberts to tell him more about that. Roberts said, “Truck A was observed to be going under Shed B, where Process C is believed to be taking place.” The press guy asked him if he found that persuasive, and Pat Roberts said, “Oh, these intelligence folks, they have these techniques down so well, so yeah, this is very persuasive.” And the correspondent said thank you very much, Senator.

So, if you’ve got a Senator who is that inclined to believe that kind of intelligence, you’ve got someone who will do the administration’s bidding. On the House side, of course, you’ve got Porter Goss, who is a CIA alumnus. Porter Goss’ main contribution last year to the joint committee investigating 9/11 was to sic the FBI on members of that committee, at the direction of who? Dick Cheney. Goss admits this. He got a call from Dick Cheney, and he was “chagrined” in Goss’ word that he was upbraided by Dick Cheney for leaks coming out of the committee. He then persuaded the innocent Bob Graham to go with him to the FBI and ask the Bureau to investigate the members of that committee. Polygraphs and everything were involved. That’s the first time something like that has ever happened.

Be aware, of course, that Congress has its own investigative agencies, its own ways of investigating things like that. So without any regard for the separation of powers, here Goss says Cheney is bearing down on me, so letÂ’s get the FBI in here. In this case, ironically enough, the FBI jumped right in with Ashcroft whipping it along. They didnÂ’t come up with much, but the precedent was just terrible.

All IÂ’m saying is that youÂ’ve got Porter Goss on the House side, youÂ’ve got Pat Roberts on the Senate side, youÂ’ve got John Warner whoÂ’s a piece with Pat Roberts. IÂ’m very reluctant to be so unequivocal, but in this case I can say nothing is going to come out of those hearings but a lot of smoke.

PITT: So what is the alternative?

McG: The alternative would be an independent judicial commission, such as the one that a lot of the British are appealing for in London. You get a person who is not beholden to George Bush or to the Democrats, a universally respected figure, and let him pick the members of the commission, and you give them access to this material. Not restricted access, like what the 9/11 committee in Congress got. You give them everything, and you let them tell their story. It would take a while, but they would come up with a much better prospect of a fair judgment on what happened.

PITT: ThatÂ’s not going to come unless there is some pretty significant pressure put on the administration from outside Congress.

McG: I wouldnÂ’t see that coming at all, and surely not before 2004.

McGovern also comments on John ONeil and the ability of the FBI to operate as a counter-terrorism agency. Sidney Blumenthal, Presidential Aide to Clinton and author of the excellent boojudgmentinton Wars" calls the FBI the most dysfunctional agency in the FeNeil government. McGovern's comments confirm that judgement.

PITT: Are you aware of the situation surrounding John O’Neill? He was a Deputy Director of the FBI, and was the chief bin Laden hunter. He investigated the first Twin Towers bombing, he investigated the Khobar Towers bombing, he investigated the bombing of our embassies in Africa, and he investigated the bombing of the USS Cole. He was the guy in government who knew everything about bin Laden, and he quit the FBI in protest three weeks before 9/11. He quit because he said he was not being allowed to investigate terror connections to Saudi Arabia, because such investigations threatened the petroleum business we do with that nation. O’Neill quit, took a job as chief of security at the World Trade Center, and died doing his job on September 11. The fact that he was thwarted in his terrorism investigations clearly left a hole in our intelligence capabilities regarding these threats – the guy who knew the most about it was not allowed to pursue those connections to the greatest possible degree.

McG: I am aware of that. There are other FBI folks who have spoken out about this same problem. There is an agent from Chicago named Robert Wright who has spoken out about his being hamstrung in his attempts to investigate these matters. Just read the book about the FBI labs that was written by Warren and Kelley. The corruption and deceit that goes on there, and the headquarters mentality where you can be completely incompetent and still get a Presidential award – which is what happened with the fellow who squashed the Minneapolis Bureau’s requests for action against Moussaoui – there’s something really insidiously wrong there. The problem is that if you ask Pat Roberts or the Judiciary Committee and the Congress to do something about it, well, lots of luck.

There is a great deal more in the interview, including McGovern's opinion on whether the Bush administration is likely to attempt to plant forged WMDs in Iraq and the difficulties of doing it well.

My previous discussion of the report by Ambassador Wilson is here.

My previous discussion of how we got into the war in Iraq is here

posted by Richard at 10:03 AM