Gathered around kung pao chicken in Hamilton Hall, UNC students got a unique opportunity Tuesday night to hear first-hand knowledge on international intelligence.
Former CIA analyst Ray McGovern made his appearance before two dozen students as part of an informal discussion focusing on the situation in Iraq and the intelligence McGovern said misled the country into war.
McGovern said that early on, the Bush administration had decided to go into Iraq and was searching for a way to go about it - resulting in poor intelligence that misled Congress.
"That intelligence had nothing to do with the decision of whether to go to war with Iraq," he said. "It was not if or when, it was how do we get (Saddam Hussein)."
He added that the only real solution is to pull out of Iraq and that U.S. presence has only caused an increase in the number of homegrown and foreign terrorists within Iraqi borders.
The Fordham University graduate said that somewhere, the CIA lost its way and for a long time has been focused on telling the administration what they want to hear instead of reporting the truth.
McGovern, a 27-year veteran of the CIA, said solutions like creating a national intelligence director are unnecessary because the central intelligence director simply needs broader powers.
He also called the 9/11 Commission a whitewash, stating that because members were not willing to point the finger and find out who was to blame, the real answers could not be found.
"If only half of the government had done its job ... there would be no 9/11," he said. "Don't believe them when they say 9/11 couldn't have been prevented."
