It would behoove you to listen to Mr. McGovern, Mr. Powell.
A Day of Reckoning is coming. You, Sir, surely must know that, because as D.C. Insiders go, I believed you were a good man, once, for the most part.
Yet, Cheney and Junior and their Neocon pals (remember the effing crazies?) either blind-sided you or you are complicit. They either used you and your reputation to commit the "mother of all war crimes" or you allowed yourself to be used for this purpose and then bailed when it all began to unravel, hoping you would not be associated with the Neocon gang of international criminals when that Day of Reckoning comes or when Americans, with the attention span of a gnat, forget all about your role in the American government war crimes of Iraq. I think that the day of the attention deficit disordered American electorate are over, at least for awhile; I hope forever. What this administration has done is too big for even the most asleep, distracted or in denial among us to ignore.
A Time of Reckoning must come. It is simply the way of things, Mr Powell. As some would say, don't be sad or fearful. It is just life. Some might call it the Tao. Some might call it the the Christ.
Admittedly, it doesn't happen in the courts of men as often as it should, by far. Nevertheless, there always comes a time when those over-taken by greed, lust for power, fear-mongering, deception and worse are held responsible and accountable and that time usually occurs when too many ordinary people have been harmed egregiously and heinously by horribly corrupt leadership, no matter what form it takes or the image it wants to project or the nation it governs.
You may recall from your history that European royal heads rolled, there for a time, so to speak. Not many democratically elected heads have rolled, though a few have been blown apart right here, in the U.S. of A. and, as I hear it, our government, under both Republican and Democratic administrations as well as congresses, has been responsible for a few "rolling heads" in other democratically elected governments, around the world. Iran comes to mind.
The point I am making, Mr. Powell, is that a time of huge accountability is coming. Of course, while we all hope we are beyond be-headings and other uncivilized ways of dealing with criminals/terrorists and people we just don't like very much; people who hold great wealth and power and are found guilty of grand theft on a global scale, treason, murder and international crimes galore, crimes against their own people, and God only knows what all else, there will be trials and accountability, humiliation before the whole world, the loss of everything that is important, as well as their wealth. In most cases these people will be deprived of their freedom to move among the ordinary people of the world, possibly for their own life's sake, if not for their crimes.
You have a chance to cop a plea and turn states evidence, Mr. Powell, as the say on Law and Order. I, like Mr. McGovern and Mr. Daniel Elsberg, believe you still know more than you are saying. Don't do what Gerald Ford did. Wait until you are dead for the whole truth to come out and allow you opinions to be expressed. Times have changed. You don't have that much time. The truth, most of it damning, is already out.
Mr. Powell, I know much about loyalty. Most people consider it a good quality, but that is all it is. Just a quality. It can be misplaced very easily. People were loyal to the Nazi party. As a matter of fact, the Nazis demanded it, as do all criminals. Loyalty is not a virtue in itself. Faith is the virtue that loyalty often disguises itself as.
I understand a little, too, about what it means to have spent most all of ones life as a "good soldier." In this time and space, that will be no excuse for those who held power and kept a very sick secret in this government., when the time comes for accountability.
Now is the time. Tell us everything you know or even think you know. Hind-sight is not so bad, especially when you come across other reliable information. This is the American electorate, the Court of Public Opinion. We don't care about hear-say rules as courts do. If what you have to say fits with what is clearly known and documented by reliable people, not fringe groups or extreme partisans , you will have done your nation and the world a tremendous service.
Don't put it in a book.
Call a press conference.
Americans should not have to pay $30.00 or more for information this serious about it's own government. Surely there is a time when we can put country and the well-being of us all, over the almighty dollar.
By Ray McGovern
Dear Colin,
16/08/08 "ICH" -- -- You have said you regret the “blot” on your record caused by your parroting spurious intelligence at the U.N. to justify war on Iraq. On the chance you may not have noticed, I write to point out that you now have a unique opportunity to do some rehab on your reputation.
If you were blindsided, well, here’s an opportunity to try to wipe off some of the blot. There is no need for you to end up like Lady Macbeth, wandering around aimlessly muttering, Out damn spot…or blot.
It has always strained credulity, at least as far as I was concerned, to accept the notion that naiveté prevented you from seeing through the game Vice President Dick Cheney and then-CIA Director George Tenet were playing on Iraq.
And I was particularly suspicious when you chose to ignore the strong dissents of your own State Department intelligence analysts who, as you know, turned out to be far more on target than counterparts in more servile agencies.
It was equally difficult for me to believe that you thought that, by insisting that shameless George Tenet sit behind you on camera, you could ensure a modicum of truth in your speech before the U.N. Security Council. You were far savvier than that.
That is certainly the impression I got from our every-other-morning conversations in the mid-80s, before I went in to brief the President’s Daily Brief to your boss, then-Defense Secretary Casper Weinberger, one-on-one.
I saw the street smarts you displayed then. The savvy was familiar to me. I concluded that it came, in part, from the two decades you and I spent growing up in the same neighborhood at the same time in the Bronx.
On those Bronx streets, rough as they were, there was also a strong sense of what was honorable -honorable even among thieves and liars, you might say. And we had words, which I will not repeat here, for sycophants, pimps, and cowards.
Your U.N. speech of Feb. 5, 2003 left me speechless, so to speak - largely because of the measure of respect I had had for you before then.
Outrage is too tame a word for what quickly became my reaction and that of my colleagues in Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), as we watched you perform before the Security Council less than six weeks before the unnecessary, illegal attack on Iraq.
The purpose - as well as the speciousness - of your address were all too transparent and, in a same-day commentary, we VIPS warned President George W. Bush that, if he attacked Iraq, “the unintended consequences are likely to be catastrophic.”
That’s history. Or, as investigative reporter Ron Suskind would say, “It’s all on the record.”
You have not yet summoned the courage to admit it, but I think I know you well enough to believe you have a Lady Macbeth-type conscience problem that goes far beyond the spot on your record.
With 4,141 American soldiers - not to mention hundreds of thousands of Iraqi citizens - dead, and over 30,000 GIs badly wounded, how could you not?
What Did You Know…and When?
Here is what could be good news for you, Colin.
Information that has come to light over the past two years or so could wipe some of the blot fouling your record. It all depends, I guess, on how truthful you are prepared to be now.
Much of the new data comes from former CIA officials who, ironically, have sought to assuage their own consciences by doing talk therapy with authors like Sidney Blumenthal and Ron Suskind.
At first blush, these revelations seem so outlandish that they themselves strain credulity. But they stand up to close scrutiny far better than what you presented in your U.N. speech, for example.
If you now depend on the fawning corporate media (FCM) for your information, you will have missed this very significant, two-pronged story.
In brief, with the help of Allied intelligence services, the CIA recruited your Iraqi counterpart, Saddam Hussein’s foreign minister, Naji Sabri, and Tahir Jalil Habbush, the chief of Iraqi intelligence. They were cajoled into remaining in place while giving us critical intelligence well before the war - actually, well before your speech laying the groundwork for war.
In other words, at a time when Saddam Hussein believed that Sabri and Habbush were working for him, we had “turned” them. They were working for us, and much of the information they provided had been evaluated and verified.
Most important, each independently affirmed that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, information that should have prevented you from making a fool of yourself before the U.N. Security Council.
The Iraqi Foreign Minister
The FCM gave almost no coverage (surprise, surprise!) to the reporting from Naji Sabri, which continues to be pretty much lost in the woodwork.
In case you missed it, we now know from former CIA officials that his information on the absence of WMD was concealed from Congress, from our senior military, and from intelligence analysts - including those working on the infamous National Intelligence Estimate of Oct. 1, 2002.
That NIE, titled “Iraq’s Continuing Programs for WMD,” was the one specifically designed to mislead Congress into authorizing the president to make war on Iraq.
One question is whether it is true that Sabri’s reporting was also concealed from you.
Tyler Drumheller, at the time a division chief in CIA’s clandestine service, was the first to tell the story of Naji Sabri, who is now living a comfortable retirement in Qatar. On CBS’s “60 Minutes” on April 23, 2006, Drumheller disclosed that the CIA had received documentary evidence from Sabri that Iraq had no WMD.
Drumheller added, “We continued to validate him the whole way through.”
Then two other former CIA officers confirmed this account to author Sidney Blumenthal, adding that George Tenet briefed this information to President George W. Bush on Sept. 18, 2002, and that Bush dismissed the information as worthless.
Wait. It gets worse. The two former CIA officers told Blumenthal that someone in the agency rewrote the report from Sabri to indicate that Saddam Hussein was “aggressively and covertly developing” nuclear weapons and already had chemical and biological weapons.
That altered report was shown to the likes of UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, who was “duped,” according to one of the CIA officers.
Worse still, the former CIA officials reported that George Tenet never shared the unadulterated information from the Iraqi foreign minister with you, the Secretary of State and Naji Sabri’s counterpart. Again, whether that is true is a very large outstanding question.
The Chief of Iraqi Intelligence
Again, Colin, I am assuming you take your information from the FCM, so let me brief you, as in the old days, on what else has popped up over the past couple of weeks.
Two other CIA clandestine service officers have told author Ron Suskind that Iraqi intelligence chief Habbush had become one of our secret sources on Iraq, beginning in January 2003.
I hope you are sitting down, Colin, because Habbush also told us Iraq had no WMD. One of the helpful insights he passed along to us was that Saddam Hussein had decided that some ambiguity on the WMD issue would help prevent his main enemy, Iran, from thinking of Iraq as a toothless tiger.
Habbush, part of Saddam’s inner circle, had direct access to this kind of information. But when President Bush was first told of Habbush’s report that there were no WMD in Iraq, Suskind’s sources say the president reacted by saying, “Well, why don’t you tell him to give us something we can use to make our case?”
Apparently, Habbush was unable or unwilling to oblige by changing his story.
Nevertheless, later in 2003, when it became clear that he had been telling the unwelcome truth, Habbush was helped to resettle in Jordan and given $5 million to keep his mouth shut.
Suskind also reveals that in the fall of 2003, Habbush was asked to earn his keep by participating in a keystone-cops-type forgery aimed at “proving” that Saddam Hussein did, after all, have a direct hand in the tragedy of 9/11.
This crude forgery was not unlike the one that originally gave us the yarn about yellowcake uranium going from Niger to Iraq.
You will hardly be surprised to hear there is evidence, much of it circumstantial, that Vice President Dick Cheney was the intellectual author of both incredibly inept forgery operations.
Sorry to have to bring this up, but there is something else about Habbush that you need to know. He had actually been in charge of overseeing what was left of the Iraqi biological weapons program after the 1991 Gulf War, and reported that it was stopped in 1996.
Sabri vs. Curveball
Before the attack on Iraq, Tenet’s deputy, John McLaughlin, was repeatedly briefed on Sabri’s information, but complained that it was at variance with “our best source” - a reference to the infamous “Curveball,” the con-man whom German intelligence had warned the CIA not to take seriously.
You may recall hearing that on the evening before your U.N. speech, Drumheller warned Tenet not to use the information from Curveball on mobile biological weapons laboratories; Tenet gave Drumheller the brush-off.
The CIA artists’ renderings of those laboratories, to which you called such prominent attention during your speech, were spiffy, but bore no relationship to reality. Tenet and McLaughlin knew this almost as well as Sabri and Habbush did.
“We have firsthand descriptions of biological weapons factories on wheels and rails,” you will recall telling the world. Later, you lamented publicly that you had not been warned about Curveball either.
McLaughlin seemed to confirm that this was so, in an interview with the Washington Post in 2006: “If someone had made those doubts clear to me, I would not have permitted the reporting to be used in Secretary Powell’s speech.”
This is highly disingenuous, even by McLaughlin’s and Tenet’s standards, since they had deliberately chosen to ignore Drumheller’s warning. I know Drumheller; he is a far better bet for truthfulness that the other two.
Outright Lies
Although I am against the death penalty, I can sympathize with the vehement reaction of normally taciturn Carl Ford, head of State Department intelligence at the time. Ford has revealed that both Tenet and McLaughlin went to extraordinary lengths, and even took a personal hand in trying to salvage some credibility for the notorious Curveball.
In an interview for Hubris, a book by Michael Isikoff and David Corn, Carl Ford spared no words, asserting that Tenet’s and McLaughlin’s analysis “was not just wrong, they lied…they should have been shot.”
Though I’ve been around a while, I am not the best judge of character, Colin, and perhaps I am being too credulous in giving you the benefit of the doubt concerning what you knew - or didn’t. It could be, I suppose, that you were fully briefed on Naji Sabri, Habbush, Curveball, and all the rest of it, and have been able to orchestrate plausible denial.
If that is the case, I suppose it would seem safer to you to let sleeping dogs lie.
If, on the other hand, what my former colleagues say about your having been fenced off from this key intelligence is true, your reaction seems a bit … how shall I describe it? … understated.
Perhaps you are too long gone from the Bronx. Back there, back then, letting folks use you and make a fool of you without any response was just not done.
It was the equivalent to running away when someone was messing with your sister. And letting oneself be bullied always set a bad precedent, affirming for the bullies that they can push people around - especially understated ones - and risk nothing.
In sum, the CIA had both the Iraqi foreign minister and the Iraqi intelligence chief “turned” and reporting to us in the months before the war (in Naji Sabri’s case) and the weeks before your U.N. speech (in the case of Tahir Jalil Habbush).
Both were part of Saddam Hussein’s inner circle; both reported that there were no weapons of mass destruction.
But this was not what the president wanted to hear, so Tenet put the kibosh on Habbush and put Sabri on a cutter to Qatar.
So Here’s Your Opportunity
Either you knew about Sabri, Habbush and Curveball, or you did not. If you knew, I suppose you will keep hunkering down, licking your blot, and hoping that plausible denial will continue to work for you.
If you were kept in the dark, though, I would think you would want to raise holy hell - if not to hold accountable those of your former superiors and colleagues responsible for the carnage of the past five years, then at least to try to wipe the “blot” off your record.
Granted, it probably strikes you as a highly unwelcome choice - whether to appear complicit or naïve. Here’s an idea. Why not just tell the truth?
If House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers is any guide, Congress seems quite taken with the explosive revelations in Ron Suskind’s book “The Way of the World.”
On Thursday, Conyers joined Suskind on Amy Goodman’s “Democracy Now,” and declared that he is “the third day into the most critical investigation of the entire Bush administration.” (He clearly was referring to the Suskind revelations.)
Conyers emphasized that, even though Congress is in recess, “We’re starting our work, and … I’m calling everyone back. We’ve got a huge amount of work to engage in.”
At the same time, though, Conyers said he is “maybe the most frustrated person attempting to exercise the oversight responsibilities that I have on Judiciary.”
A good deal of his frustration comes from stonewalling by the Bush/Cheney administration, which will surely cite national security or executive privilege to justify withholding any damaging information.
Bush Visits CIA
It was, no doubt, pure coincidence that President Bush made a highly unusual visit to CIA headquarters, also on Thursday, before leaving for Crawford on vacation.
The official line is that he wanted an update on the situation in Georgia and the Russian role there, but Bush did not need to go to Langley for that
Rather, given the record of the past seven years, it is reasonable to suggest that he also wanted to assure malleable Mike Hayden, the CIA director, and his minions that they will be protected if they continue to stiff-arm appropriate congressional committees, denying them the information they need for a successful investigation.
Pardons dangled as hush money? Not so bizarre at all.
Some will recall that George H.W. Bush, just before leaving the White House, pardoned one of your former bosses, Casper Weinberger, who had been indicted and was about to go to trial for lying about his role in the Iran-Contra fiasco.
If past is precedent, sad to say, Conyers is not likely to get to first base, UNLESS he can get knowledgeable witnesses to come forward.
On Thursday he did not rule out a suggestion that Habbush be asked to come before Congress to testify, but the CIA can easily thwart that kind of thing - or delay it indefinitely.
In any case, your own credibility, though damaged, has got to be greater than Habbush’s.
Let me suggest that you offer yourself as a witness to help clear the air on these very important issues. This would seem the responsible, patriotic thing to do in the circumstances and could also have the salutary effect of beginning the atonement process for that day of infamy at the Security Council.
If we hear no peep out of you in the coming weeks, we shall not be able to escape concluding one of two things:
(1) That, as was the case with the White House Situation Room sessions on torture, you were a willing participant in suppressing/falsifying key intelligence on Iraq; or
(2) That you lack the courage to expose the scoundrels who betrayed not only you, but also that segment of our country and our world that still puts a premium on truth telling and the law.
Think about it.
With all due respect,
Ray McGovern
Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. During his 27-year career in CIA’s analysis ranks, he chaired National Intelligence Estimates and briefed the President’s Daily Brief to the most senior national security officials. He is co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).
This article was first published at Consortium News
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)
The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.
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