Wednesday, January 13, 2010
John McLaughlin
John McLaughlin, President Barack Obama’s choice to uncover the intelligence failures surrounding the Christmas Day airline bombing attempt and the Fort Hood shootings, has been called one of the brightest minds of the intelligence community. But his career in the shadowy world of intelligence gathering is the very thing that has caused some to question McLaughlin’s selection to shed light on these recent incidents.
McLaughlin’s involvement with the CIA ranges from the Reagan administration, when he went along with the creative intelligence efforts of Director William Casey and Deputy Robert Gates, to the George W. Bush years. In fact, it was McLaughlin, as the No. 2 man in the CIA, who supposedly told then-Director George Tenet it would be a “slam dunk” to provide evidence of Iraq’s secret weapons of mass destruction program and who presented the evidence as such to President George W. Bush. In so doing, McLaughlin chose to ignore warnings from German intelligence agents that the U.S. should not trust information provided by an Iraqi con man known as “Curveball” who claimed Saddam Hussein’s regime had mobile biological laboratories.
Intelligence expert Melvin Goodman has characterized McLauglin as “one of the ideological drivers for the CIA’s policies of torture and abuse, secret prisons and extraordinary renditions.”
-Noel Brinkerhoff
President Obama, the CIA and the Master of the Cover-Up (by Melvin Goodman, Truthout)
The Record on Curveball (National Security Archive)
Statement of John E. McLaughlin (Federation of American Scientists)
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