Photograph Source: Aude – CC BY-SA 3.0

The Washington Post’s senior national security columnist, David Ignatius, is the mainstream media’s leading apologist for the Central intelligence Agency, American foreign policy, and Israel. Last week, Ignatius described the politicization of U.S. intelligence by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard. In the same column, however, he praised former acting CIA director John McLaughlin, who was responsible for the most costly intelligence failure in CIA’s history—the phony intelligence on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction used to justify the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. McLaughlin’s role in this debacle is public knowledge, but Igatius chooses to ignore or forget.

Tulsi Gabbard, who is completely unqualified to serve as DNI, ordered the rewrite of an intelligence assessment to protect the lies of Donald Trump regarding Venezuela’s connection to a terrorist gang, Tren de Aragua. Trump’s lies were used to justify the deportation of hundreds of migrants—including Kilmar Abrego Garcia—to a notorious jail in El Salvador. The government has admitted that Abrego Garcia was wrongfully deported. Gabbard not only stopped the intelligence assessment that exposed Trump’s lies, but she summarily fired two leading intelligence officials who simply did their job, preparing an honest assessment.

Ignatius exposed the wrongful actions of the DNI and her top officials, but closed his column by citing remarks by McLaughlin, a leading supporter of the CIA’s torture and abuse program as well as the officer in charge of the so-called “slam dunk” briefing. It was CIA director George Tenet who promised President George W. Bush that he could provide an assessment that would allow Bush to make a convincing case for war against Iraq to the American people. Tenet said it would be a “slam dunk” to prepare such a document. McLaughlin, who was described by Tenet as the “smartest man he ever met,” was in charge of that effort and personally delivered the “slam dunk”........

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