I read a few articles and watched a few clips in which a man named Ray McGovern referred to some of the affluent individuals in the US administration as ‘crazies’. The men who decide on foreign policy today did not come out of the blue, they slowly rose to the top over a period of many years. Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Bill Kristol, etc. It is known that during the first Iraq war these men were pushing for the full occupation of the region. Luckily the elder Bush was able to keep these men in line since none of them were in an influential position such as the secretary of state or defense.

Fast-forward to the year 2000 when all these individuals are placed into significant positions and are itching to finish the job that was started ten years earlier. I know people have different opinions about what happened next but let’s just say everything worked out great for the neoconservatives. Some of you may disbelieve that these men would go to war out of desire rather than necessity and dismiss all this a conspiracy rubish. But don’t take my word for it…

“The people running our policies in Iraq and Iran were widely known in the 80s as the ‘crazies’. You come in on Monday morning and someone would say ‘guess what the crazies did late Friday night’ and you’d know who exactly the reference was to, it was to Wolfowitz, it was to Perle. All the same folks, some of whom have deserted the sinking ship like proverbial rats but it was Fife, Wolfowitz and the rest of them, they were the ‘crazies’.

-Ray McGovern

Here is also an extract from one of McGovern’s articles:

“[Colin] Powell’s misgivings became still more obvious in a book by BBC broadcaster James Naughtie published a year and a half ago. Naughtie quoted Powell describing the neoconservatives in control of policy toward Iraq as “f*cking crazies.” (At a reporter’s suggestion that Powell use this sobriquet as a title for his memoirs, the then-secretary of state laughed uncontrollably.)

“Crazies” (with or without the preceding adjective) is an epithet in use for over 25 years to refer to Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, and other ideologues of the extreme Right, at a time when they were deliberately restricted to mid-level positions in the Reagan and Bush administrations so they could not cause major trouble. The words escaped Powell’s mouth during a telephone conversation with his counterpart Jack Straw during the run-up to the war, according to Naughtie.”

So, why should you take McGovern’s word over mine? Because he was a Federal employee under seven U.S. presidents over 27 years, a mid level officer in the CIA in the 1960s where his focus was analysis of Soviet policy toward Vietnam. McGovern was one of President Ronald Reagan’s intelligence briefers from 1981-85 when he was in charge of preparing daily security briefs for the President, the Vice President, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Cabinet and National Security Advisor. Later, McGovern was one of several senior CIA analysts who prepared the President’s Daily Brief (PDB) for President George Herbert Walker Bush.

Note: Upon retirement, McGovern was awarded the Intelligence Commendation Medal from George Herbert Walker Bush which he later returned in a protest of torture to Congressman Pete Hoekstra and Chair of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. He argued that he did “not wish to be associated, however remotely, with an agency engaged in torture,” and that “this is an order of magnitude different from my experiences in the past — there has been torture before, but never before has it been ordered and openly justified.”