9/11 And The Betrayal Of The Nation

by Nathan Callahan

When I ask Ray McGovern if the findings of President Bush's commission on intelligence failures in Iraq will give us answers -- even if it doesn't get them to us until well after the November election -- he has a one-word answer: "No."

He's now co-director of Servant Leadership School in Washington, D.C., an inner-city school that provides training and other support for the poor.

I take McGovern's thumbs-down on Bush's commission as part of my daily brief. What I need next is a rundown on current CIA director George Tenet, the man who is to intelligence what Mel Gibson is to crucifixions.

"I think Tenet will be around at least through the election," McGovern says. "There are two reasons for this -- the same two reasons that kept him around after Sept. 11, 2001."

"Explain," I say trying to sound presidential.

"One would have thought that the raison d'etre for the Central Intelligence Agency was to prevent another Pearl Harbor," McGovern says. "One would have thought that the person most responsible for this would have been cashiered on Sept. 12. Not so. So the question is: Why not so?"

"So, why not?" I ask.

"First of all, George Tenet warned the president of the United States about the threat of terrorism almost ad nauseam during the entire spring and summer of 2001. In the final analysis, the president had been warned often enough and long enough. He should have done something about it."

"Why didn't he?" I wonder.

"Because Bush didn't know what to do," McGovern says. "And Condoleezza Rice, his adviser on such things, didn't know a thing about terrorism. By her own admission, she hadn't opened the file that [Clinton National Security Advisor] Sandy Berger left behind that said, 'Read This File First.' She knew a lot about the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe but nothing about terrorism. The charitable explanation for why nothing was done is gross ineptitude and gross malfeasance."

"What about Tenet?"

"George Tenet no doubt has a little computer disc with the 27 or so warnings that he gave the president starting in spring and going right up until September 2001," says McGovern. "The president and his advisers in the White House, knowing this, didn't dismiss Tenet after Sept. 11 because it was too much of a risk. Were they to have dismissed Tenet on Sept. 12, they could not have been sure that he wouldn't have said, 'Wait a second. Let me print off some of these warnings. Let me show you what I told the president in the President's Daily Brief on Aug. 6, 2001.' So that's reason #1.

"Reason No. 2 is that Tenet is simply too useful of a guy to have around," McGovern continues. "He does what he's told. If he's told to do an estimate and told to make sure the conclusions come out the same as a Dick Cheney speech from the month before, he'll do it."

McGovern is referring to the National Intelligence Estimate that Tenet cranked out after Cheney's August 2002 WMD pep rally. It was a cart-before-the-horse exercise in policy-making: Cheney makes unsubstantiated claims in public. The intelligence agency fashions a report to cover his backside. According to an article penned by McGovern for TomPaine.com, "The conclusions of that estimate have now been proven -- pure and simple -- wrong."

The real reasons for the Iraq War, he says, are to be found online at the neo-conservative website the Project for the New American Century (newamericancentury.org). "And I would simply add, not as an afterthought but as a core part of this whole calculus, that this war was fought as much for Israeli strategic objectives as it was for American strategic objectives. As a matter of fact, the people running our policy toward Iraq have great difficulty distinguishing between the two."

As McGovern is speaking, I notice a slight rise in the pitch of his voice -- an almost imperceptible quarter-step jump.

"If I'm sounding a little angry here," he says, "well, there's no word to describe it." There's a silence. "Outrage is just too pale a word to describe how we intelligence officials feel about George Tenet being so willing to prostitute our intelligence product, to cook it up to the recipe of high policy. That is the unpardonable sin of intelligence, and he's still doing it."

Apparently McGovern experienced this type of intelligence whoring first-hand. "I saw it in Vietnam," he says. "And usually it was the president himself or the White House that was responsible in the final analysis. Think Gulf of Tonkin."

On Aug. 5, 1964, intelligence officials told the media that North Vietnamese gunboats had attacked U.S. Navy destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin. It was pure fiction, but it became Lyndon Johnson's rationale for escalating the U.S.'s involvement in Vietnam and cleared the way for a decade of war.

"We knew that there was no incident that night," McGovern says. "McGeorge Bundy [Johnson's National Security Advisor] knew that there was no incident that night. And yet LBJ, with his towering presence, his total power -- corrupting totally -- leaned over and said, 'McGeorge, are you going up to the Hill to sell this resolution?' Bundy [later] admitted on McNeil-Lehrer Newshour, one painful show: 'So I went. I went up, and I lied to Congress.'"

"So it's happened before," McGovern continues. "What's different this time is that we have a situation where, over a two-year period, an incredible, cleverly orchestrated campaign was waged to exploit the trauma of the American people, the trauma of Sept. 11, and to exploit it in such a way as to achieve the aims of the..."

McGovern stops to find the right word. "I don't call them neo-conservatives," he says, "because I'm conservative. I call them neo-fascists because that's what they are. And what these neo-fascists did was see Sept. 11 as a golden opportunity."

Neo-fascists? I ask McGovern if he's using Mussolini's definition of fascism. As Il Duce said, "Fascism should rightly be called corporatism, as it is the merger of corporate and government power." Think Halliburton, USA.

McGovern agrees but adds more. "I'm also talking about the measures that were taken in Nazi Germany after the fire that burned down the Reichstag, Germany's parliament building, in 1933. It was that fire that allowed Hitler to institute his own legislation."

McGovern draws a parallel between Sept. 11 and the Reichstag fire. After claiming that communists committed arson, Hitler used the incident to declare a state of emergency and suspend some of the constitutionally protected personal freedoms of German citizens. These rights included freedom of speech and assembly. "Very much like post-Sept. 11 legislation instituted here in this country to curtail civil liberties," McGovern says, "to make people feel that if they speak out against what is happening, they are unpatriotic."

My briefing is almost over. One final question: How does the Arab world see us?

"It's really remarkable," McGovern says. "People like Donald Rumsfeld are intelligent, but it's embarrassing how they scratch their heads, and they say, 'I don't know what makes a suicide bomber. I don't know what makes people do that.'

"Well, if he watched Al Jazeera for a couple of nights, if he watched Israeli bulldozers knocking down Palestinians homes and he saw Israelis shooting up Palestinians in the occupied territories, then maybe he would get some sense as to why people of Palestinian or Arab or Islamic heritage -- why they might look askance at the one country that they know makes this all possible. That's the United States of America."