Ray McGovern is no hero

McGovern, whose skewering of Rumsfeld at a speaking engagement yesterday has been in heavy rotation on CNN  and MSNBC for 24 hours, who is getting a lot of play in the blogosphere and being lauded for “speaking truth to power,” has an unsavory history as a conspiracist.

In 2002, the Washington Post reported that McGovern participated in

a mock impeachment inquiry over the Iraq war. As luck would have it, all four of the witnesses agreed that President Bush lied to the nation and was guilty of high crimes — and that a British memo on “fixed” intelligence that surfaced last month was the smoking gun equivalent to the Watergate tapes.

Apparently the session was taped for C-SPAN. (I have yet to look into this.) McGovern was one of the “witnesses”:

The session took an awkward turn when witness Ray McGovern, a former intelligence analyst, declared that the United States went to war in Iraq for oil, Israel and military bases craved by administration “neocons” so “the United States and Israel could dominate that part of the world.” He said that Israel should not be considered an ally and that Bush was doing the bidding of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.

“Israel is not allowed to be brought up in polite conversation,” McGovern said. “The last time I did this, the previous director of Central Intelligence called me anti-Semitic.”

Good on the former DCI.

What a hideous creep McGovern is.