“The President wants us to go to war, and our job is to give him a reason to do it.”
YIKES…How do these people live with themselves now?
As far as I am concerned, it’s been well proven from many angles that the Iraq war was a wet dream of the Boy King, who was set on attacking Iraq and simply needed to find a way to justify it.
The icing on the cake was the Downing Street documents, a series of memos prepared in 2002 by the British Intelligence service in which they admit that the claim that Iraq had links with al Qaeda was ‘frankly unconvincing,’ but since George was determined to invade Iraq, ‘the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.’
Old news. Yet the evidence continues to come out.
A very important, yet little-noted book appeared on the scene about a month ago, keying on the intelligence leading up to the ‘Yellowcake Uranium’ claims in the State of the Union speech that were later debunked - the same claims that led to the outing of Valerie Plame as a covert CIA Agent.
The Italian Letter: How the Bush Administration Used a Fake Letter to Build the Case for War in Iraq covers Alan Foley, who, as the head of the CIA’s Weapons Intelligence Non-Proliferation and Arms Control Center (WINPAC), was a front-and-center cheerleader for the Iraq war.
WINPAC led the CIA’s analysis of Iraq’s purported WMD, so Foley himself was at the center of the effort to drum up support for the dubious war.
The book, written by award winning authors Peter Eiser and Knut Royce, reports:
One day in December 2002, Foley called his senior production managers to his office. He had a clear message for the men and women who controlled the output of the center’s analysts: “If the president wants to go to war, our job is to find the intelligence to allow him to do so.” The directive was not quite an order to cook the books, but it was a strong suggestion that cherry-picking and slanting not only would be tolerated, but might even be rewarded.
Other books back up this assertion. In A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse of America’s Intelligence Agencies, James Bamford reports on a high up CIA case officer who spent years running agents overseas. He had been reassigned to the unit charged with finding weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq, but told Bamford that no one in his group ever found any indications of WMD in Iraq.
Bamford continues:
Nevertheless, there was a great deal of pressure to find a reason to go to war with Iraq. And the pressure was not just subtle; it was blatant. At one point in January 2003, the person’s boss called a meeting and gave them their marching orders. “And he said, ‘You know what—if Bush wants to go to war, it’s your job to give him a reason to do so’… He said it at the weekly office meeting. And I just remember saying, ‘This is something that the American public, if they ever knew, would be outraged’…He said it to about fifty people. And it’s funny because everyone still talks about that — ‘Remember when [he] said that.’”
In Blowing My Cover: My Life as a CIA Spy, Lindsay Moran comes out like a female Jack Bauer in a real life “24” series.
She writes:
During my short tenure in Iraqi Operations, I met one woman who had covered Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction program for more than a decade. She admitted to me, unequivocally, that the CIA had no definitive evidence whatsoever that Saddam Hussein’s regime possessed WMD, or that Iraq presented anything close to an imminent threat to the United States. Another CIA analyst, whose opinion I’d solicited about the connection between Al-Qa’ida and Iraq, looked at me almost shamefacedly, shrugged, and said, “They both have the letter q?” And a colleague who worked in the office covering Iraqi counterproliferation reported to me that her mealy-mouthed pen pusher of a boss had gathered together his minions and announced, “Let’s face it. The president wants us to go to war, and our job is to give him a reason to do it.”