THE CAMPAIGN FOR THE ACCOUNTABILITY OF AMERICAN BASES

http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0530-06.htm

Published on Friday, May 30, 2003 by the New York Times

Save Our Spooks

by Nicholas D. Kristof

On Day 71 of the Hunt for Iraqi W.M.D., yesterday, once again nothing
turned up.

Maybe we'll do better on Day 72. But we might have better luck
searching for something just as alarming: the growing evidence that
the administration grossly manipulated intelligence about those
weapons of mass destruction in the runup to the Iraq war.

A column earlier this month on this issue drew a torrent of covert
communications from indignant spooks who say that administration
officials leaned on them to exaggerate the Iraqi threat and deceive
the public.

"The American people were manipulated," bluntly declares one person
from the Defense Intelligence Agency who says he was privy to all the
intelligence there on Iraq. These people are coming forward because
they are fiercely proud of the deepest ethic in the intelligence
world - that such work should be nonpolitical - and are disgusted at
efforts to turn them into propagandists.

"The Al Qaeda connection and nuclear weapons issue were the only two
ways that you could link Iraq to an imminent security threat to the
U.S.," notes Greg Thielmann, who retired in September after 25 years
in the State Department, the last four in the Bureau of Intelligence
and Research. "And the administration was grossly distorting the
intelligence on both things."

The outrage among the intelligence professionals is so widespread
that they have formed a group, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for
Sanity, that wrote to President Bush this month to protest what it
called "a policy and intelligence fiasco of monumental proportions."

"While there have been occasions in the past when intelligence has
been deliberately warped for political purposes," the letter said,
"never before has such warping been used in such a systematic way to
mislead our elected representatives into voting to authorize
launching a war."

Ray McGovern, a retired C.I.A. analyst who briefed President Bush's
father in the White House in the 1980's, said that people in the
agency were now "totally demoralized." He says, and others back him
up, that the Pentagon took dubious accounts from émigrés close to
Ahmad Chalabi and gave these tales credibility they did not deserve.

Intelligence analysts often speak of "humint" for human intelligence
(spies) and "sigint" for signals intelligence (wiretaps). They refer
contemptuously to recent work as "rumint," or rumor intelligence.

"I've never heard this level of alarm before," said Larry Johnson,
who used to work in the C.I.A. and State Department. "It is a misuse
and abuse of intelligence. The president was being misled. He was ill
served by the folks who are supposed to protect him on this. Whether
this was witting or unwitting, I don't know, but I'll give him the
benefit of the doubt."

Some say that top Pentagon officials cast about for the most
sensational nuggets about Iraq and used them to bludgeon Colin Powell
and seduce President Bush. The director of central intelligence,
George Tenet, has been generally liked and respected within the
agency ranks, but in the last year, particularly in the intelligence
directorate, people say that he has kowtowed to Donald Rumsfeld and
compromised the integrity of his own organization.

"We never felt that there was any leadership in the C.I.A. to qualify
or put into context the information available," one veteran said.
"Rather there was a tendency to feed the most alarming tidbits to the
president. Often it's the most ill-considered information that goes
to the president.

"So instead of giving the president the most considered, carefully
examined information available, basically you give him the garbage.
And then in a few days when it's clear that maybe it wasn't right,
well then, you feed him some more hot garbage."

The C.I.A. is now examining its own record, and that's welcome. But
the atmosphere within the intelligence community is so poisonous, and
the stakes are so high - for the credibility of America's word and
the soundness of information on which we base American foreign policy
- that an outside examination is essential.

Congress must provide greater oversight, and President Bush should
invite Brent Scowcroft, the head of the President's Foreign
Intelligence Advisory Board and a man trusted by all sides, to lead
an inquiry and, in a public report, suggest steps to restore
integrity to America's intelligence agencies