Sam Seder just announced that BooTrib front-pager and intel analyst Larry Johnson will be on with him and Janeane Garofalo today. Larry will talk about last night’s CNN stunner, “CNN Presents: Dead Wrong.” Larry was interviewed extensively for the special; in one part, Johnson suggests that Curveball’s name should have been “‘Screwup’ or ‘A Lying Sack of Manure’.”
Update [2005-8-22 20:30:9 by susanhu]: Larry’s UP after the commercials. – Susan, 5:29pm PT. Listen to Air America’s Majority Report (7-10pm ET) now. You can listen to the archived show at Air America Place. Check out Larry’s stories and diaries at BoomanTribune.com. BELOW, clips of Johnson’s remarks in “Dead Wrong”:
DAVID ENSOR, CNN CORRESPONDENT: At the Pentagon, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld sets up a special office to provide him with alternative intelligence analysis, focusing on a possible link between Saddam and al Qaeda. The Pentagon unit is not mentioned by the president’s commission.
LARRY JOHNSON, FORMER STATE DEPARTMENT OFFICIAL: They even briefed their findings to the community and the community would come back and say, wait a second, you don’t know what you’re talking about. That’s garbage. That’s misleading, that misrepresents.
ENSOR: Larry Johnson was a counterterrorism official in the State Department and the CIA before leaving government in 1993.
JOHNSON: And then they would take the same brief or an even more extreme version and brief it directly to people like the vice president.
ENSOR: The spies called it cherry-picking, choosing scraps of intelligence to prove a worst-case scenario.
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ENSOR: Powell was also not told that the prime source, an Iraqi defector, codenamed “Curveball” had never been debriefed by the CIA.
JOHNSON: Maybe the name of agent was alarming enough. Maybe it should have been “Screwup” or “A Lying Sack of Manure.” Something like that. But to know that you’re giving the president a ticket to go to war based on one source, at that point you want to drag the source in and talk to him yourself.
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ENSOR: When the White House blames Tenet, he takes public responsibility and so offers cover for the president. It is an old Washington pattern.
JOHNSON: The CIA was not the one who said hey, let’s invade Cuba and launch the Bay of Pigs. That was a direction from Dwight Eisenhower and then it was continued by John Kennedy. The CIA wasn’t the one who said, hey, let’s go into Vietnam and set up assassination teams. Again, that direction came from Lyndon Baines Johnson. Hey, let’s get involved and see if we can launch a coup in Chile. That came from Richard Nixon.
And when you come to Iran-Contra, that came from Ronald Reagan. And yet the CIA has become the convenient whipping dog that when things go back you’ve got to have somebody to kick, and they end up being the dog that gets kicked.