January 2003: CIA Officer Tells 50 CIA Subordinate Officers To Produce Intelligence that Supports Case for War with Iraq

An unnamed CIA case officer with the agency’s Directorate of Operations (DO) will later say that during a January 2003 weekly office meeting, his or her boss told about fifty CIA employees: “You know what—if Bush wants to go to war, it’s your job to give him a reason to do so.” The case officer later explains to national security expert James Bamford how he felt upon hearing those instructions. “And I said, ‘All right, it’s time, it’s time to go.’ I remember, when it happened I looked around and I said, ‘This is awful.’ He said it at the weekly office meeting. And I just remember saying, ‘This is something that the American public, if they ever heard, if they ever knew, they would be outraged.’ The fact that we’re sitting in the meeting and we’re not outraged at this, and we can’t do anything—it was just against every moral fiber of my being. He said, ‘If President Bush wants to go to war, ladies and gentlemen, your job’s to give him a reason to do so.’ He said it to about fifty people. And it’s funny because everyone still talks about that—‘Remember when [he] said that.’” [Bamford, 2004, pp. 333-334] Another DO case officer later says of the meeting: “The fact that someone could say that in the agency and get away with it is just disgusting. He said that to his full staff. I can’t believe that someone would say that openly and get away with it. But there was a lot of that.… And for me that was the final straw. It was criminal the way we were implicitly deceiving people.… You know, what I heard from everyone was that this had been planned for a long time.” [Bamford, 2004, pp. 337]