Founding fathers would be appalled and ashamed

When politics trumps governance, our nation loses

LEIGH POMEROY

From "Warnings on WMD 'Fabricator' Were Ignored, Ex-CIA Aide Says," by Joby Warrick,
Washington Post:

In late January 2003, as Secretary of State Colin Powell prepared to argue the Bush administration's case against Iraq at the United Nations, veteran CIA officer Tyler Drumheller sat down with a classified draft of Powell's speech to look for errors. He found a whopper: a claim about mobile biological labs built by Iraq for germ warfare.

Drumheller instantly recognized the source, an Iraqi defector suspected of being mentally unstable and a liar. The CIA officer took his pen, he recounted in an interview, and crossed out the whole paragraph.

A few days later, the lines were back in the speech. Powell stood before the U.N. Security Council on Feb. 5 and said: "We have first-hand descriptions of biological weapons factories on wheels and on rails."

The sentence took Drumheller completely by surprise.

[...]

Drumheller said he called the office of John E. McLaughlin, then the CIA deputy director, and was told to come there immediately. Drumheller said he sat across from McLaughlin and an aide in a small conference room and spelled out his concerns.

McLaughlin responded with alarm and said Curveball was "the only tangible source" for the mobile lab story, Drumheller recalled, adding that the deputy director promised to quickly investigate.

Portions of Drumheller's account of his meetings with McLaughlin and Tenet appear in the final report of the Silberman-Robb commission, which was appointed by Bush to investigate prewar U.S. intelligence failures on Iraq's weapons programs. The report cites e-mails and interviews with other CIA officials who were aware of the meetings.

In responding to questions about Drumheller, McLaughlin provided The Post with a copy of the statement he gave in response to the commission's report. The statement said he had no memories of the meeting with Drumheller and had no written documentation that the meeting took place.

"If someone had made these doubts clear to me, I would not have permitted the reporting to be used in Secretary Powell's speech," McLaughlin said in the statement.

In their briefings to Powell on Feb. 4, one day before the secretary's U.N. speech, Tenet and McLaughlin expressed nothing but confidence in the mobile-lab story, according to Wilkerson, Powell's chief of staff, who was present during the briefings.

From an email with the subject "This has to be close to legal malfeasance, it seems to me..." from retired CIA officer Joe Turner to a friend:

I've got to believe Drumheller, the former chief of the European Division on this one, but I'm sorry to have to say so because I don't like to think what it means that he directly contradicts the stories of both McLaughlin and Tenet. Nevertheless, other Agency people were aware of the meeting that Drumheller describes so it seems hard to come up with any other explanation other than [the] information that would have jeopardized the case for war was deliberately withheld by the DCI [Director of Central Intelligence] and the DDCI [Deputy Director of Central Intelligence] in response to White House wishes, whether express or implied.

The evidence is now absolutely clear that the Bush administration selectively chose evidence to take the U.S. into war against Saddam Hussein, leaving Iraq in an even worse situation that it was under that tyrant's leadership, costing tens of thousands of innocent lives, and indebting American taxpayers to the tune of a trillion dollars or more.

Why is this not malfeasance?

In a court of law it would be fraud.

It was fraud in the Enron case, resulting in the conviction of many of its top executives. But that's because Enron collapsed.

But the U.S. has not collapsed. And such an event appears unthinkable, both because the economy is doing well and because the international economy is so interwoven with that of the U.S. that if the U.S. economy tanked, so would the rest of the world's. Yet there are those with impeccable credentials who think it may yet happen.

It is true that only the losers are saddled with crimes. Incompetent corporate executives are given golden parachutes to get rid of them if their companies survive their tenure; they are sometimes given jail terms if the companies don't, as in the case of Enron.

In war, both sides commit atrocities. But it is only the leaders of the losing side who are put on trial afterwards.

As long as George Bush remains in the White House and the Republicans control Congress, any discussion of his malfeasance will have to be in the press, in chat rooms and emails, in empty chambers and committee rooms in the Capitol. Those words will only peripherally be heard in a court of law (as in the Abramoff case, still to come, and the administration's lame attempts to bring so-called "terrorists" to trial) or on the House floor as articles of impeachment.

Because Congress shirks its duty to reign in a White House that has no regard for truth, what should be an impeachment trial must be played out in the public sphere. Participants in the scandal argue about evidence. Former intelligence and administration officials take sides. The press, the pundits, the bloggers chime in. It is a freeform discussion played to the American people, the ultimate jury.

But is the jury listening? All too many have turned a deaf ear to the cacophony; many say, "We don't get involved in politics."

Those of us who are involved want to scream, "Forget politics! This is your future! Your children's future!" But talking to many of the citizenry is like trying to communicate with a teenager. If you're greeted with only a blank stare you think you've won half a victory.

To be a patriot is to care, to look back at the great ideas and ideals upon which this country was founded and ask, "Are we living up to this great gift passed on to us by this country's founders?"

Clearly today the answer is "no." For in 2006 too many of our elected leaders and representatives are being politicians instead of patriots.

That is why our founding fathers would be more than disgusted with today's White House and Congress. They would be appalled and ashamed.

(Please see related article by former CIA analyst Ray McGovern, "Intelligence Officers, Learn From History".)