- "The intelligence process is a bit like virginity,"
says Ray McGovern, who worked as a CIA analyst for 27 years. "Once
you prostitute it, it's never the same. Your credibility never recovers.
-
- "Watching what has happened with Iraq over the past
several months has been like watching your daughter being raped."
-
- Such is an indication of the extraordinary depth of feeling
within the US intelligence community as the Bush administration's basis
for the war in Iraq - the weapons of mass destruction, the dark hint of
links between Saddam Hussein and al-Qa'ida - has been shown to have been
built on air.
-
- Mr McGovern worked near the very top of his profession,
giving direct advice to Henry Kissinger during the Nixon era and preparing
the President's daily security brief for Ronald Reagan. Now he is co-founder
of a group of former CIA employees called Veteran Intelligence Professionals
for Sanity, or Vips for short.
-
- What the Bush White House has done, he believes, is far
worse than the false premise that dragged the United States into the Vietnam
War - a reported second attack on a US destroyer in the Gulf of Tonkin
which later turned out not to have taken place. "The Gulf of Tonkin
was a spur-of-the-moment thing, and Lyndon Johnson seized on that. That's
very different from the very calculated, 18-month, orchestrated, incredibly
cynical campaign of lies that we've seen to justify a war. This is an order
of magnitude different. It's so blatant."
-
- Mr McGovern accuses Mr Bush of an extraordinary act of
chutzpah - taking advantage of his authority as President of the United
States to make people believe there must be something to his insistent
allegations that Iraq possessed potentially devastating weaponry.
-
- "Many of us felt there had to be something there
... If this had been another country, one would have written a convincing
analysis that this guy is lying through his teeth, that there are no weapons
in Iraq. But people thought, the President can't say he knows something
if he doesn't. That was persuasive, in a way.
-
- "Now we know that no other President of the United
States has ever lied so baldly and so often and so demonstrably ... The
presumption now has to be that he's lying any time that he's saying anything."
-
- It will, Mr McGovern believes, take a change of president
and a change of CIA director to even begin to repair the damage done by
what he sees as an overt politicisation of the intelligence business. But
even that may not be enough.
-
- "Unless what has happened in the past year and a
half is recognised as a scandal, in which the CIA has been badly abused,
then there's no hope," he said. "I pin my hopes mostly on the
press these days. Turns out, surprise surprise, that even the US press
doesn't like to be lied to."
-
-
-
- http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/story.jsp?story=461946
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