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Editor's Note: An important back story of the Iraq War disaster has been the Bush administration's success in manipulating and/or ignoring intelligence that didn't fit with preordained decisions. Indeed, often the concept of objective intelligence was turned on its head. Rather than carefully analyzed facts guiding the decision-making, the decisions came first and the intelligence was then shaped into propaganda themes to induce the American people to go along. In this guest essay, former CIA analyst Ray McGovern observes that the latest twist in this twisting of intelligence is that George W. Bush and his top aides are operating in a vacuum of no intelligence at all:
Have you noticed? Neither President George W. Bush nor Vice President Dick Cheney have cited any U.S. intelligence assessments to support their fateful decision to send 21,500 more troops to referee the civil war in Iraq. This is a far cry from October
2002, when a formal National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) was
rushed through in order to trick Congress into giving its
nihil obstat for the attack on Iraq. So the White House is playing it safe, avoiding like the plague any estimate that would raise doubts about the wisdom of the decision to surge. And that is precisely what an honest estimate would do. With “sham-dunk” former CIA director
George Tenet and his accomplices no longer in place as intelligence
enablers, the White House clearly prefers no NIE to one that
would inevitably highlight the fecklessness of throwing 21,500
more troops into harm’s way for the dubious purpose of holding
off defeat for two more years. Deputy Director of National Intelligence
for Analysis, Tom Fingar, is a State Department professional
not given to professionally selling out. And his boss, John
Negroponte, is too smart to end his government career by following
the example of his servile predecessors in conjuring up “intelligence”
to please the President—not even for a Presidential Medal of
Freedom. And an NIE produced in April ‘06
on global terrorism concluded that the invasion of Iraq led
to a marked increase in terrorism, belying administration claims
that the invasion and occupation had made us “safer.” Then the White House learned of
an impending strike-three—this one an NIE assessing the future
in Iraq and apparently casting doubt on the advisability of
U.S. escalation. In a classic Cheneyesque pre-emptive strike,
the estimate was put on hold; Negroponte was given a pink slip
and assigned back to the State Department. There are rumors
that Fingar is clearing out his desk as well. In times past, presidents and their
senior advisers actually read them and often took their judgments
into account in the decision-making process. In the latter category, an NIE of Sept. 19, 1962, entitled “The Military Build-Up in Cuba” estimated that the Soviet Union would not introduce strategic offensive missiles into Cuba (even while such missiles were en route). Embarrassing, but an honest mistake. The NIE issued on Oct. 1, 2002, 10 days before the congressional vote on the war, was dishonest from the get-go. It was prepared by spineless functionaries eager to please their boss (Tenet) and his boss (Bush) by parroting the faith-based analysis of senior analyst Dick Cheney. It is by far the worst NIE ever
produced by the U.S. intelligence community. But, hey, it achieved
its primary purpose of scaring Congress into approving a war
of aggression. Thus, it was a very welcome surprise
to learn, thanks to patriotic truth-tellers, of the gutsy judgments
of more recent NIEs—and to discover that a remnant of analysts
of the old truth-to-power school have been able to ply their
trade unencumbered under Fingar and Negroponte. All too many bore this title: “Probable
Reactions to Various Courses of Action With Respect to North
Vietnam.” Typical of the kinds of question the President and
his advisers wanted addressed: Can we seal off the Ho Chi Minh
Trail by bombing it? If the U.S. were to introduce X thousand
additional troops into South Vietnam, will Hanoi quit? Okay,
how about XX thousand? Besides, if Cheneyesque pressure
were again to be applied to intelligence analysts, there is
a growing risk that this might turn some of them into patriotic
truth-tellers. Besides, we already have the needed authorization—and
even enough funding to send 21,500 additional troops. Ray McGovern chaired NIEs and prepared the President’s Daily Brief during his 27-year career as a CIA analyst. He now works with Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in Washington, D.C. (This article first appeared at TomPaine.com.)
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