MEMORANDUM FOR: The President-elect
FROM: Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS)
SUBJECT: Attempts to Sucker You Into Russia-Bashing
Dear President-elect Biden,
“Fool Me Once …” You may recall that President George W. Bush could not remember the last part of that aphorism. No matter. It turned out that – on Iraq – Bush was not fooled by bad intelligence. Rather, he and Vice President Dick Cheney were determined to attack Iraq and asked malleable former colleagues of ours to manufacture intelligence to “justify” that catastrophic war.
It was so bad that Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Jay Rockefeller described prewar intelligence as “unsubstantiated, contradicted, or even non-existent.” James Clapper, who was in charge of imagery analysis, admits in his memoir that the Bush/Cheney pressure to document a rogue WMD program in Iraq was so intense that “intelligence officers, including me, were so eager to help that we found what wasn’t really there.”(Emphasis added).
That coterie of “intelligence officers” – first and foremost CIA Director George Tenet and his protégé Michael Morell – were able to pull the wool over the eyes of enough members of Congress to grease the skids for unnecessary war. Many of the latest crop of intelligence leaders bubbled up to the top for services rendered under the malleable Tenet, and seem to have adopted his flexible attitude toward truth.
Continue reading “Intel Vets to Biden: Don’t Be Suckered on Russia”