Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity

Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) is a group of former officers of the United States Intelligence Community. It was formed in January 2003 to protest the use of faulty intelligence to justify that year's US-led invasion of Iraq, in which several European nations also participated. The group issued a letter stating that intelligence analysts were not being heeded by policy makers. The group initially numbered 25, mostly retired analysts.[1]

February 2003 memo

On February 7, 2003, VIPS released a "Memorandum for The President" criticizing Secretary Powell's speech before the United Nations and stating that VIPS was afraid Saddam Hussein would use his chemical weapons against U.S. troops if the U.S. invaded. In May 2003, The New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof said that widespread outrage among intelligence professionals had led to the establishment of VIPS.[2] After the CIA chief weapons inspector David Kay in 2004 announced no stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction could be found in Iraq, Michael W. Robbins opined in the magazine Mother Jones that VIPS "produced some of the most credible, and critical, analyses of the Bush Administration's handling of intelligence data in the run-up to the March 2003 invasion of Iraq."[3]

August 2010 memo

On August 3, 2010, VIPS publicly released another "MEMORANDUM FOR: The President" claiming that the government of Israel has a record of deceiving the U.S. government and estimated that Israel would unilaterally attack Iran "as early as this month."[4][5]

August 2013 memo

After the Ghouta chemical attack VIPS issued an "open letter" to President Obama claiming that their "co-workers" and "numerous sources in the Middle East" have informed them that Bashar al-Assad was not responsible for the attack, contrary to the position of U.S. and foreign intelligence agencies. "VIPS' most sensational claims" were based on an article from Michel Chossudovsky's "Global Research" conspiracy theory website and Infowars, the radio show of the far right commentator and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones.[6]

July 2017 memo

On July 24, 2017, VIPS released a memorandum for President Donald Trump arguing that forensic evidence was inconsistent with claims by U.S. intelligence and CrowdStrike that the 2016 Democratic National Committee email leak was the result of a Russian hack, stating instead "that a locally executed leak is the far more likely explanation."[7] The memorandum was cited in an article in The Nation by Patrick Lawrence, which repeated the claims made by the organization.[8]

See also

References

  1. ↑ "Ex-CIA Accuse Bush of Manipulating Iraq Evidence". Associated Press. March 17, 2003.
  2. ↑ "Save Our Spooks". The New York Times. 30 May 2003.
  3. ↑ Michael W. Robbins, The Skeptical Spy, Mother Jones, March 10, 2004.
  4. ↑ Lahav Harkov, Obama misplaced trust in Netanyahu, Jerusalem Post, August 5, 2010.
  5. ↑ Dana Karni, Will Israel Bomb Iran This Month? Archived August 15, 2010, at the Wayback Machine., Fox News, August 5, 2010.
  6. ↑ Muhammad Idrees Ahmad, The New Truthers: Americans Who Deny Syria Used Chemical Weapons, New Republic (September 11, 2013).
  7. ↑ Lawrence, Patrick (2017-08-10). "A New Report Raises Big Questions About Last Year's DNC Hack". The Nation. Retrieved 2017-08-11.
  8. ↑ Bershidsky, Leonid (2017-08-10). "Why Some U.S. Ex-Spies Don't Buy the Russia Story". Bloomberg News. Retrieved 2017-08-12.
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