Ping
Pinz
Wilsongate: Motive, Means, and Opportunity
After the second Bush administration came into office, the Vice President’s office and Pentagon set up their own intelligence channel “stovepipe” which connected with Chalabi by flowing around the Clinton-era intelligence channels centered in the CIA and the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR). This move prompted a chorus of protests from far-left opponents of Bush like IPS, as well as anti-Bush outlets marketing to far-right anti-Semitic groups like Lyndon LaRouche’s Executive Intelligence Review (EIR).52 Both extremes united in their hatred of Bush’s Middle Eastern policy and found a lowest common denominator in conspiracy theories alleging that the Bush administration’s foreign policy was controlled by a cabal of pro-Israeli “neoconservatives”. These extremist allegations were mediated to the mainstream media by a group of former intelligence agents founded in January 2003 calling themselves Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), founded by retired CIA agent Ray McGovern. Following his retirement in 1990 McGovern, who holds a certificate in Theological Studies from Georgetown University, took leadership positions in the left-wing religious charities Bread for the City (descended from the Vietnam-era antiwar group Community for Creative Non-Violence) and Servant Leadership School. In 1993 he disrupted services at Georgetown’s Holy Trinity Parish by standing during Mass every week to protest the Catholic Church’s policy on women’s ordination. Within a week of 9/11 McGovern publicly blamed Israel for terrorism in a Christian Science Monitor editorial, and when the Iraq War arrived he elaborated conspiracy theories attributing the war to “Oil, Israel, and Logistics”, which embarrassed a meeting of House Democrats on June 16, 2005 when he told them that "Israel is not allowed to be brought up in polite conversation. . .The last time I did this, the previous director of Central Intelligence called me anti-Semitic."53 Joining McGovern on the original VIPS Steering Group was former CIA agent David MacMichael, who had been investigated by the FBI for his contact with the IPS-linked pro-Sandinista groups the Council on Hemispheric Affairs (COHA, tied to the Soviet front the World Peace Council and Communist agent Orlando Letelier) and the Center for Development Policy (CDP, cofounded by Letelier) in the 1980s before going on in 1989 to found the Association of National Security Alumni (ANSA), which partnered at a January 1993 Moscow conference with longtime CIA critic Victor Marchetti and retired KGB agents from the Association of Foreign Intelligence Veterans Association (aka Foreign Intelligence Veterans Association, FIVA) in calling for intelligence “reforms”.54 Other VIPS charter members were Bill and Kathleen Christison (who announced their resignation from VIPS on July 15, 2003), longtime apologists for the Palestinian cause whose articles are regularly posted on websites with an anti-Zionist slant such as Alexander Cockburn’s Counterpunch, the Holocaust revisionist site Institute for Historical Review, and the white supremacist site Stormfront.org.55 VIPS’ email address and articles were initially hosted in early 2003 at Counterpunch by Cockburn, whose was simultaneously a columnist for the relatively more mainstream The Nation and The Los Angeles Times. Articles by VIPS and McGovern also appeared in LaRouche’s Executive Intelligence Review starting in February 2003.56 VIPS’ extremist views were broadcast to a mainstream audience from March 2003 on by sources such as AP writer John Lumpkin, longtime IPS associate Seymour Hersh, Agence France Presse, New York Times writer Nicholas Kristof, and Reuters writer Jim Wolf. Particularly noteworthy was a full-length Hersh piece in the October 2003 The New Yorker echoing VIPS complaints about the Pentagon’s intelligence “stovepipe”.57