Their "proof" of "proof" is cooked....

Ray McGovern, ex-CIA analyst describes on Amy Goodman's "Democracy Now" program ....

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=03/07/15/1423259

Amy: I'm puzzled Ray by the response of President Bush, Rumsfeld and others, Condoleeza Rice as well the National Security Advisor saying that technically they were accurate saying, quoting a British report. Yet it was the US itself who had sent on a CIA sponsored mission ambassador Joseph Wilson to Niger to investigate. And he had comeback well before the State of the Union address and said that the documents were bogus.

Ray: Yes, its all very disingenous isn't it Amy? The play-by-play has really been extraordinary. The White House has shown itself unable to cope even with the correct spin. I think probably they're calling up Karen Hughes now and asking Ari to please come back because there is great disarray in trying to handle these questions because essentially, they are deceptions and they can't really be handled by anyone, even accomplished people such as the spin doctors in the White House. Let me take a leaf out of Andrew's book (Andrew Wilkie), who I admire soo much for doing what he did when he did it and doing it soo publicly and resigning under protest when he saw the fraudulant means being used to justify this war.
What I'd like to do is just say a word about the forgery in context. The focus on the State of the Union address is almost a red herring. I'll tell you what I mean by that. It's bad enough that the President did say that, but that pales in significance to the reality that the forgery, the information from that forgery, was used deliberately, knowing it was a forgery, in September and October to frighten our duly elected Representatives and Senators into approving a resolution empowering the President to make war on another country. That is an incredibly complex, grave Constitutional crisis. When the administration deliberately uses false evidence, evidence it knows to be false, to trick essentially, our elected representatives into ceding their power on declaring war and saying - yes, Mr. President we're frightened enough, we hear all about this mushroom cloud and the people have too, we will give you the right to wage war even though there's no provocation - and I can outline how that all happened, basically, in a nutshell, they didn't have anything else. The Al-Qaeda thing they didn't have because the CIA analysts, to their great credit, refused to contrive a connection between Iraq and Al-Qaeda. They didn't have much on Bio or chemical warfare because the DIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency analysts, to their credit, said there's no reliable sources on those things. The alluminum tubes? That argument bent as easily as alluminum bends, so they couldn't use that either. So as they looked around for something to persuade Congress to authorize a war, they dusted off these documents known to be forgeries and said - before anybody finds out about the forgery, we can number 1, get the resolution to approve a war. Number 2, we can have our war and number 3 we can relish the victory and whose gonna care if part of the rationale was based on a forgery when we have a victory? And that's the fatal miscalculation. Because the press and the American people DO care when they're lied to. That's what we're seeing be played out right now.

Amy: There were reports in June of Dick Cheney going personally with his most senior aide making multiple trips to the CIA over the past year to question analysts studying Iraqs weapons programs and alleged links to Al-Qaeda. What does it mean when the Vice President personally goes to the CIA?

Ray: It means that this is the first time it happened. I spent 27 years working for the CIA and never once, ever once in all that time did a Vice President of the US come to visit us on a working visit. The routine is you do your analysis alone, thank you very much. You amass all your facts, you do your best with coming up with estimates, and you take that down to the White House, Vice Presidents office, wherever, and then if he needs more information you bring the specialist down the next day.
This is unprecedented. It's a crude attempt at intimidation. And it was at a time when the premier publication of the CIA and the whole intelligence community, a so-called NATIONAL INTELLIGENCE ESTIMATE, was being prepared. Now one little footnote about that estimate. There was a real split on whether Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear program. A real split in the community. In this controversy, the bogus evidence, known to be a forgery, was introduced into the substantive analysis and indeed, appeared in the NATIONAL INTELLIGENCE ESTIMATE, which I find unconscionable. And the ironic twist here is that, here Condoleeza Rice has been telling us over the last couple of days that - Hey, the drafter of the State of the Union address, he was depending on the ESTIMATE. Of course he was because the ESTIMATE is supposed to be the most authoritative statement of what Iraq is up to. But the reality was, and this is the irony, the ESTIMATE had already been cooked. And I'm sure it was cooked under the influence of folks like Cheney and his staff who made these unprecedented visits out to CIA headquarters. High Irony there....