Former CIA Officer Denounces Bush’s Underhanded Tactics

INTERNATIONAL—WORLD

by P.B. translated by Bill Scoble

A FORMER CIA MEMBER DENOUNCES BUSH’S UNDERHANDED TACTICS

The accusations of Paul Pillar, former Information Officer

A recent editorial in the New York Times poked fun at Vice-President Dick Cheney after he shot a hunting companion, accusing him of behaving like a child. And one could say the same for George W. Bush, whose lies fly in the face of the world. A former CIA officer accuses the American administration of having manipulated information gathered by the Intelligence services in order to justify after the fact its decision to invade Iraq in 2003. Paul Pillar, former Information Officer for the Middle East and Southeast Asia from 2000 to 2005, knows whereof he speaks. He also states that the Administration of President George W. Bush ignored warnings pointing out the risk of chaos in Iraq in the event of military operations designed to overthrow Saddam Hussein.

"The official intelligence on the Iraqi arms build-up was flawed, but even with all its imperfections, that was not what led to war," Pillar wrote in the journal Foreign Affairs. "Instead," he adds, "the American administration went to war without asking for, and from all available evidence, without even being influenced by, any strategic reports on Iraq from the Intelligence services. The administration used the information not to enable it to make decisions, but rather to justify decisions already made." According to the ex-CIA officer, considered an influential expert in matters of counter-terrorism, the errors committed by the American Intelligence services when they concluded that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (WMD) were not the origin of the decision to invade Iraq. "It had become clear that the official intelligence was not used as the basis for even the most important decisions concerning national security, but that the intelligence was distorted publicly to justify decisions already made," says Pillar.

According to Pillar, the most glaring contradictions between the public declarations of the Bush Administration and the information generated by the Intelligence services centered mainly on the relationship between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda. "The reason this relationship so captured public attention was that the Administration, capitalizing on the militant spirit of the country after September 11, 2001, had linked the war in Iraq with with the war on terrorism, which was the menace that the American public had come to fear the most."