William Rivers Pitt
PITT: So what is the alternative? (Cont'd)
Thu Jun 26 22:11:13 2003
208.152.73.31

PITT: So what is the alternative?

McG: The alternative would be an independent judicial commission, such as the one that a lot of the British are appealing for in London. You get a person who is not beholden to George Bush or to the Democrats, a universally respected figure, and let him pick the members of the commission, and you give them access to this material. Not restricted access, like what the 9/11 committee in Congress got. You give them everything, and you let them tell their story. It would take a while, but they would come up with a much better prospect of a fair judgment on what happened.

PITT: That’s not going to come unless there is some pretty significant pressure put on the administration from outside Congress.

McG: I wouldn’t see that coming at all, and surely not before 2004.

PITT: In your time at CIA as a Soviet Foreign Policy analyst, you were directly involved with analyzing Soviet policy issues in the run-up to and duration of the Soviet war in Afghanistan?

McG: Yes.

PITT: How deep into the details of that did you get?

McG: Oh, quite deep. By that time my responsibilities had grown, and I stayed very interested and abreast of what was going on there.

PITT: Could you talk about how America’s involvement in the Soviet war in Afghanistan led to the events of September 11? There are some very clear, straight-line connections – starting with Brzyznski’s ‘Afghan Trap’ in 1978 - between the two events, yes? From your perspective, how did that develop?

McG: The big momentum was put on by a fellow named William Casey, who was head of CIA under Reagan. He saw this as a little war that he could wage and win, and he had a lot of support from folks on the Hill. What they did was arm and recruit folks like Osama bin Laden and others. One of the big decisions they had to make was whether or not to give them Stinger missiles. I remember when that was under discussion. The dangers of giving these uncontrollable folks Stinger missiles was emphasized, but the decision was to go ahead and give them those missiles anyway. In many respects, the folks that were used as our proxies in this war against the Soviets have come back to bite us, and to bite us very hard as we know from 9/11.

PITT: The invasion came in 1979 because the Soviets were worried about their puppet regime in Afghanistan. It became a great Muslim cause to defend Afghanistan against the godless invaders. Osama bin Laden became a hero by funding this fight, and by fighting along with the others. When the war ended in 1989, when the Soviets withdrew with their tail between their legs, Afghanistan was left in an utterly shattered and destroyed state. Given the fact that we basically precipitated the start of that war by arming and training those mujeheddin fighters to go after the Afghan government in 1978 and 1979, why was the decision made in 1989 to leave Afghanistan in such a sorry state? The chaos left in the aftermath of that war led to the rise of the Taliban. Why didn’t we help clean up the terrible mess we had helped to cause?

McG: I hate to be cynical about these things, but once we got the Soviets out, our reason to be there basically evaporated. You may ask about the poor people and the poor country. Well, we have a history of doing this kind of thing, of using people. The Kurds are one example. We use them and betray them, and we don’t care much once our little geopolitical objective has been achieved. That’s what was in play here. Nobody gave a damn. We had a brilliant victory, we got the Soviets out of there, we started pounding our chests, and nobody gave much thought to helping the poor Afghanis that were left behind.

In addition, these bad guys were our good guys. Osama bin Laden and all those folks were people we armed and trained, and when you get that close – and this is a systemic problem within the Agency – when you get that close so that you’re in bed with these guys, you can’t step back and say, “Whoa, wait a second. These guys could be a real danger in the future.” You can’t make a calculated, dispassionate analysis of what might be in store for these guys. It was a poor situation politically, strategically, and as it turned out, analytically as well.

PITT: What we’re talking about is actions and consequences. At the time, there was not a lot of concern for Afghanistan after we had achieved our goals there, and the place was left to fester, and 9/11 became the inevitable consequence of that.

McG: Right.

PITT: Are you aware of the situation surrounding John O’Neill? He was a Deputy Director of the FBI, and was the chief bin Laden hunter. He investigated the first Twin Towers bombing, he investigated the Khobar Towers bombing, he investigated the bombing of our embassies in Africa, and he investigated the bombing of the USS Cole. He was the guy in government who knew everything about bin Laden, and he quit the FBI in protest three weeks before 9/11. He quit because he said he was not being allowed to investigate terror connections to Saudi Arabia, because such investigations threatened the petroleum business we do with that nation. O’Neill quit, took a job as chief of security at the World Trade Center, and died doing his job on September 11. The fact that he was thwarted in his terrorism investigations clearly left a hole in our intelligence capabilities regarding these threats – the guy who knew the most about it was not allowed to pursue those connections to the greatest possible degree.

McG: I am aware of that. There are other FBI folks who have spoken out about this same problem. There is an agent from Chicago named Robert Wright who has spoken out about his being hamstrung in his attempts to investigate these matters. Just read the book about the FBI labs that was written by Warren and Kelley. The corruption and deceit that goes on there, and the headquarters mentality where you can be completely incompetent and still get a Presidential award – which is what happened with the fellow who squashed the Minneapolis Bureau’s requests for action against Moussaoui – there’s something really insidiously wrong there. The problem is that if you ask Pat Roberts or the Judiciary Committee and the Congress to do something about it, well, lots of luck.

PITT: Is there anything else you would like to touch upon before we are finished?

McG: My primary attention is on the forgery of the Niger documents that supposedly proved Iraq was developing a nuclear program. It seems to me that you can have endless arguments about the correct interpretation of this or that piece of intelligence, or intelligence analysis, but a forgery is a forgery. It’s demonstrable that senior officials of this government, including the Vice President, knew that it was a forgery in March of last year. It was used anyway to deceive our Congressmen and Senators into voting for an unprovoked war. That seems to me to be something that needs to be borne in mind, that needs to be held up for everyone to see. If an informed public, and by extension an informed Congress, is the necessary bedrock for democracy, then we’ve got a split bedrock that is in bad need of repair.

I have done a good bit of research here, and one of the conclusions I have come to is that Vice President Cheney was not only interested in “helping out” with the analysis, let us say, that CIA was producing on Iraq. He was interested also in fashioning evidence that he could use as proof that, as he said, “The Iraqis had reconstituted their nuclear program,” which demonstrably they had not.

What I’m saying is that this needs to be investigated. We know that it was Dick Cheney who sent the former US ambassador to Niger to investigate. We know he was told in early March of last year that the documents were forgeries. And yet these same documents were used in that application. That is something that needs to be uncovered. We need to pursue why the Vice President allowed that to happen. To have global reporters like Walter Pincus quoting senior administration officials that Vice President Cheney was not told by CIA about the findings of this former US ambassador strains credulity well beyond the breaking point. Cheney commissioned this trip, and when the fellow came back, he said, “Don’t tell me, I don’t want to know what happened.” That’s just ridiculous.

Cheney knew, and Cheney was way out in front of everybody, starting on the 26th of August, talking about Iraq seeking nuclear weapons. As recently as the 16th of March, three days before the war, he was again at it. This time he said Iraq has reconstituted its nuclear weapons program. It hadn’t. It demonstrably hadn’t. There has been nothing like that uncovered in Iraq. As the first President Bush said about the invasion of Kuwait, this cannot stand.

One other thing I’d like to note is the anomaly that President Bush has succeeded Saddam Hussein in the role of preventing UN inspectors from coming into Iraq. He has not even been asked why.

There is no conceivable reason why the United States of America should not be imploring Hans Blix and the rest of his folks to come right in. They have the expertise, they’ve been there, they’ve done that. They have millions of dollars available through the UN. They have people who know the weaponry, how they are procured and produced. They know personally the scientists, they’ve interviewed them before. What possible reason could the United States of America have to say no thanks, we’ll use our own GI’s to do this. Don’t come in here. That needs to be brought out. For the UN to be waiting with those inspectors at the ready, there has got to be some reason why the United States won’t let them back in.

The more sinister interpretation is that the US wants to be able to plant weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Now, most people will say, “Come on, McGovern. How are you going to get a SCUD in there without everyone seeing it?” It doesn’t have to be a SCUD. It can be the kind of little vile vial that Colin Powell held up on the 5th of February. You put a couple of those in a GI’s pocket, and you swear him to secrecy, and you have him go bury them out in the desert. You discover it ten days later, and President Bush, with more credibility than he could with those trailers will say, “Ha! We’ve found the weapons of mass destruction.”

I think that’s a possibility, a real possibility. I think that, since it is a real possibility, the Democrats’ sheepishness on this, their reluctance to get out on a limb and say there are no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, may be more explainable. But they should come around anyway.

PITT: I have heard that it is difficult to manufacture Iraqi-style weapons of this type, because the Iraqi chemical and biological weapons have a particular signature created in their inception that is hard to duplicate.

McG: It was very difficult to do the forgery, too. A slipshod job was done. When Colin Powell was asked about it , he said, “We have this information. If it is inaccurate, fine.” Like I said before, he and I come out of the same part of the Bronx. He went to Army charm school and I did not. That kind of tone, that kind of attitude, was always accompanied by an obscene gesture and a four-letter word where I came from. But that’s the attitude.

If they can take that kind of attitude on a forgery, they can take the same attitude on this. “You can believe who you want,” they’ll say. “You can believe Hans Blix and Saddam Hussein, or you can believe us. We say we found it there.”

Four months ago, I would have said, “McGovern, you’re paranoid to say stuff like that.” But in light of all that has happened, and light of the terrific stakes involved for the President here – each time he says we’re going to find these things, he digs himself in a little deeper – I think it’s quite possible that they will resort to this type of thing.



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William Rivers Pitt william.pitt@mail.truthout.org  is a New York Times best-selling author of two books - "War On Iraq" available now from Context Books, and "The Greatest Sedition is Silence," now available from Pluto Press at www.SilenceIsSedition.com .