Could Dick Cheney Go to Prison?

By Ray McGovern, Consortium News. Posted July 18, 2009.

Tenet explains lamely, "I should have told the vice president privately that, in my view, his speech had gone too far ... and not let [my] silence imply agreement."

Yes, George; and you should have resisted White House pressure for a dishonest NIE to grease the skids to unnecessary war.

In fact Cheney, as well as Tenet, knew very well that Cheney's assertions were lies.

How? Saddam's son-in-law, Hussein Kamel, whom Saddam had put in charge of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons, as well as missile development, told the United States when he defected in mid-1995 that all (that's right, all) such weapons had been destroyed at his order by the summer of 1991.

In mid-2002, the Iraqi foreign minister, whom CIA operatives had recruited and persuaded to remain in place, was telling us the same thing.

Unwelcome Intelligence

When they briefed the president and his senior advisers on this, CIA operations officers were astonished to learn firsthand that this intelligence was unwelcome.

These officers, who had used every trick in the book to "turn" the foreign minister and get him working for us, were told that further reporting from this source was not needed: "This isn't about intel anymore. This is about regime change," they were told.

Tenet was hardly astonished at reports of the nonexistence of WMD. From documentary evidence in the "Downing Street Minutes" we know that Tenet, on July 20, 2002, told the chief of British intelligence that the intelligence was being "fixed" around the policy.

And former U.N. inspectors, like Scott Ritter, could verify that 90 percent of the WMD Iraq earlier possessed had been destroyed -- some during the Gulf War in 1991, but most as a result of the inspections conducted by the United Nations.

The reporting from Kamel and the Iraqi foreign minister, sources with excellent access, was suppressed in favor of "evidence" -- from forgeries, for example, like the infamous Iraq-Niger yellowcake report.

When finally U.S. officials were forced to concede that the Iraq-Niger information was based on a forgery, lawmakers such as Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., protested loudly -- but too late.

Three days before Bush let slip the dogs of war, NBC's Tim Russert braced Cheney with the assertion by the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency that Saddam did not have a nuclear program.

Cheney strongly disagreed and cited support for his view from the CIA and other parts of the intelligence community. He even ratcheted up his bogus assessment of Iraq's nuclear capability: "We believe he has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons."

We? Maybe his wife, Lynne, and Liz were on board for that judgment; few others believed it.

Marine Gen. Anthony Zinni, retired CENTCOM commander but still enjoying access to the most sensitive information on Iraq, was sitting in the audience on Aug. 26, 2002, and later described himself as astonished at the Iraqi threat as described by Cheney.

The most knowledgeable analysts -- those who knew Iraq and nuclear weapons -- scoffed at Cheney's faith-based intelligence.

In our July 14, 2003, appeal to Bush to ask for Cheney's resignation, we warned of the likelihood that intelligence analysts would conclude that the best way to climb the ladder of success is to acquiesce in the cooking or "fixing" of their judgments, since neither senior nor junior officials would ever be held accountable.

This remains as acute a concern as the tolerance for torture and the like.

We shall have to demand that Attorney General Eric Holder do his duty and move quickly to start the process to hold accountable those responsible for dragging our country down into a moral abyss.

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Former CIA analyst Ray McGovern is co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.

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