Is Impeachment Necessary to Protect the Constitution?
March 11th, 2008 by CD
Judson Memorial Church, 55 Washington Square South, NYC
March 9, 2008
Statement by Ray McGovern
Congressman Nadler, I am Ray McGovern, born and bred in the Bronx a bit north of your district.
I regret not being able to be with you in person to give my perspective on whether impeachment is necessary to protect the Constitution—and specifically, whether the manufacturing of false intelligence to “justify” an unprovoked war fits the category of “high crime or misdemeanor.”
I was an analyst at the CIA for 27 years, after serving as an Army infantry/intelligence officer in the early Sixties. You may recall that we first met on June 16, 2005, in the basement of the Capitol, the only room made available to Congressman John Conyers to take testimony on the Downing Street Minutes.
The minutes were the official British record of a briefing of then-Prime Minister Tony Blair on July 23, 2002. At that briefing, the chief of British intelligence reported on his discussions with his counterpart in Washington, who told him three days earlier that, President George W. Bush had decided to make war on Iraq, and that “the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.”
In my testimony in the Capitol that day I drew attention to the words of Vice President Dick Cheney on August 26, 2002—words that framed the discussion for the next 45 days during which Congress was deliberately misled into giving the president approval to make war on Iraq.
This is what Cheney said:
“We now know that Saddam has resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons. Among other sources, we’ve gotten this from the firsthand testimony of defectors—including Saddam’s own son-in-law.”
This was a lie.
Saddam’s son-in-law told us just the opposite when he defected in 1995.
You can find it on page 13 of his debriefing report. He said: “All weapons – biological, chemical, missile, nuclear were destroyed.”
Cheney continued:
“Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction…Many of us are convinced that [Saddam] will acquire nuclear weapons fairly soon.”
In a memoir published last year, then-CIA director George Tenet complained that Cheney did not follow the usual practice of clearing the speech with the CIA, and that what Cheney said “went well beyond what our analysis could support.”
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