Blog

By Peter Eisner and Knut Royce

Today we'll let our sources do the talking. We brought four of them together at a forum last month at the University of the District of Columbia.

The collective knowledge was deep—the participants were former CIA analysts Mel Goodman and Larry Johnson; W. Patrick Lang, who ran the Middle East section  for the Defense Intelligence Agency; and retired Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, who was Secretary of State Colin Powell's chief of staff.

All four are angry about the Iraq invasion, and name culprits in the creation of one of the greatest messes in U.S. history.

Dick Cheney as Geppetto:

Mel Goodman:

"…it was just a classic case of agitprop: There was a propaganda campaign, and we were taken in by it, and the press was taken in by it—but the chief operator in all this, let's call him "Geppetto," was Dick Cheney. This is Dick Cheney's war. It has always been Dick Cheney's war….the one thing that Dick Cheney needed to sell this war, to market his war, was nuclear reconstitution. And remember, I think it was September the 8th, [2002], when all of the high-level members of the Bush Administration went on national television with "smoking gun" and the mushroom cloud. And what Joe Wilson was threatening, was to take down the argument about nuclear reconstitution, when he said, "I'll tell you what I found in Niger. I found nothing."

So, you had only two pins for nuclear reconstitution. It was Niger, enriched uranium, and the phony 16 words; and you had the aluminum tubes. And frankly, I'll pass the question to Larry, because people feel that Tenet should have resigned. I've always thought that Colin Powell should resign. Colin Powell is a hell of a lot more popular in this country than George Bush. If Colin Powell had stood up, and said what he thought, and told us what he knew, there would have been no war."

Tenet and his Medals

 Larry Johnson:

"George Tenet has tried to run away from the letter that several of us drafted decrying his book, and calling upon him to give back the proceeds, at least some of the proceeds, from his advance, to the soldiers, and the families of soldiers, who were killed or wounded in Iraq. Because in my view, and our view, the man has blood on his hands. He had a chance, if he would have spoken up, he could have stopped this rush to war. He chose to remain silent, but not just remain silent, he chose to be an active participant in a deception that was carried out, not only against other U.S. government officials, but against the American people."

Who lied?

 Lawrence Wilkerson:

"Either George Tenet is lying through his teeth, or Tyler Drumheller is lying through his teeth—the chief of the European division for CIA—with regard to one of the most important pillars of Secretary Powell's presentation at the United Nations: the mobile biological laboratories. One of the things Secretary Powell and I told Mr. Tenet and Mr. McLaughlin at the outset of our frenetic five or six days, trying to get ready for the UN, was "multiple sources." We will not take anything and put it in this presentation, unless there are multiple, independently corroborated sources for the items we're putting in the testimony. That was the going-in position.

Now, I learn, I think—although George has again put some doubt in my mind—that there was a single source for the mobile biological laboratories; that his codename was Curveball; and that there were several, some very key, dissents as to this individual's testimony, during or before the preparation of the Secretary of State. None of that, ladies and gentlemen, none of that was revealed to the Secretary of State, or to me, or to any member of my team, by either John McLaughlin or George Tenet. So, that's my first area of concern: Who's lying? This isn't an intelligence matter. This is worse, far worse. This isn't just cherry-picking, or political spin on intelligence. This is plain-out outright falsehood to the Secretary of State."

      Mel Goodman:

"George Tenet is an apparatchik. I'm not impressed with George Tenet. He should never have been CIA Director. But how did Colin Powell, a military officer, a Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, get taken in by the aluminum tubes, which was driven by a kid, a young kid engineer by the name of Joe Turner, at the CIA, who stood up somehow to all of the PhD scientists of the weapons labs, and Department of Energy, because Foley [Alan Foley, the head of WINPAC at CIA] wanted this argument out there to make the case for war. I think Powell could have stopped this."

  Look to the process

Wilkerson:

"Our political process, not just the Federal bureaucracy, but our political process is broken. And somehow, we as Americans have allowed that to happen. And I don't know what you think about it, but I'm damned mad about it, and I'm doing everything I can, across the country, to tell people that I believe this; to tell them how I think the Federal bureaucracy needs to be repaired—including the Congress of the United States; its committee relationship with the Executive branch is absurd, it's an anachronism. The Congress needs to be reformed, the Executive branch needs to be reformed.

But the big problem we're confronted with is going to come to bear again, very shortly: it's this insane process where you have less than 50% of Americans electing our President. And if you think about that, that means one in four, actually elect him or her. And this insane process of primaries, and factions, as Washington called it—not parties; he called it "factions"—who go out there and appeal to their extremes, and are successful in doing so! We have to do something about that, and the only people who can do something about that, are us."

The bottom line

Lawrence Wilkerson:

"I think our Founding Fathers would be appalled, that in some 200-plus years, we never used that clause they put in our Constitution, except fecklessly, and in one case, successfully. The Articles of Impeachment that threatened Richard Nixon certainly were the reason he decided to resign. I believe, if you asked Hamilton, Madison, Monroe, even Washington, they would probably say, ‘Yeah, probably about every 30 years, they'll take somebody out.’ And if you look at Clinton, and the peccadilloes for which they brought impeachment proceedings against him, as compared with the ‘high crimes and misdemeanors’—and that's a direct quote from Article II of the Constitution—with regard to Cheney and Bush, I think there's a helluva lot better case, with regard to Cheney and Bush."