VIPS Warns Trump against Pompeo-Bolton War Agenda

June 22, 2019—Yesterday the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) published a memorandum to President Donald Trump, posted to Information Clearing House, headlined: “VIPS Memo to the President: Is Pompeo’s Agenda the Same as Yours?” It opened,

“We are concerned that you are about to be mousetrapped into war with Iran. ... [W]e have serious doubts about Secretary Pompeo; it is clear to us that he has his own agenda, and we know from our own experience with him that his agenda is not always the same as yours.

“Pompeo’s behavior betrays a strong desire to respond with military force—perhaps even without your express approval—to Iranian provocations (real or imagined).... He is a neophyte compared to his anti-Iran partner John Bolton, whose decades-long dilettante approach to interpreting intelligence, strong advocacy of the misbegotten war on Iraq ... and his own aggressive agenda are a matter of record.”

The memo then reports “our strong doubt regarding [Pompeo’s] trustworthiness on issues of consequence to you and the country,” describing former NSA Technical Director William Binney’s experience in his Oct. 24 2017 meeting with then-CIA Director Pompeo, who refused to follow President Trump’s instruction that he examine Binney’s evidence on the impossibility of the “Russian hack” of the DNC server, at the foundation of the Russiagate myth. It points out that now, having admitted in court submissions that neither the Justice Department nor the FBI ever had access to the DNC computers, nor the final report from “the DNC-hired cybersecurity company, CrowdStrike, upon which Comey chose to rely for forensics on alleged Russian ‘hacking,’ ” Binney’s report that there was no hacking is fully vindicated and Pompeo’s support for the “hacking” lie is fully discredited.

VIPS contrasts the Ivy League tradition of lying on behalf of geopolitical wars from Pompeo (West Point and Harvard Law) and Bolton (Yale) against Iran, McGeorge Bundy (Harvard) against Vietnam, and Rumsfeld (Princeton) with his Iraqi WMD, to self-described “country boy” Binney, who bases his conclusions on “the principles of physics, applied mathematics, and the scientific method,” and cites Binney’s accomplishments as featured in the documentary “A Good American.”

An “updated” version of the Memo, posted today to Consortium News, concludes with additional 10 paragraphs, under the subhead “Cooked Intelligence,” comparing the lying of Gen. William Westmoreland to extend the Vietnam War and lying from CENTCOM in “Cheney-like hyperbole.” They conclude:

“We believe your final decision yesterday was the right one—given the so-called ‘fog of war’ and against the background of a long list of intelligence mistakes, not to mention ‘cooking’ shenanigans.... We are at your disposal, should you wish to discuss any of this with us.”