Salon: Spooked by the White House (CIA is furious)

[kskiska]

A CIA veteran says a growing faction of the U.S. intelligence community is furious over the way the administration corrupted the system -- and that the nation's security is at grave risk.

Late last week the White House sought to close the books on the Iraq-Niger-uranium debacle, with President Bush officially pronouncing CIA director George Tenet responsible for the intelligence blunder. At the same time, the president reaffirmed his "absolute confidence" in Tenet and the rest of the agency.

But according to a former CIA officer, the politicization of U.S. intelligence has devastated many in the field -- and dangerously weakened our country's security.

"We're hearing from dozens of people. A lot of them are very demoralized," says Ray McGovern, a 27-year CIA veteran who worked as an agency analyst under seven presidents, from Kennedy to the first President Bush. "The cardinal sin in this business is to cook intelligence to the recipe of high policy," he says.

(snip)

Do you think the American public is ultimately willing to overlook the major intelligence failures of the Bush administration, including the Iraq-Niger report?

The important thing will be what happens on the ground in Iraq. Nobody I know expects the administration to be able to extricate itself quickly from what's happening. With each week that produces a handful of U.S. casualties, more questions will be asked. If I were a father of a son who died over there, I'd be banging on the White House door, wanting to know why he was sent over to disarm Iraq of WMD that don't appear to exist.

more…
http://salon.com/news/feature/2003/07/18/vips/index.html

[Submariner]

1. It looks to me

like we need a Special Prosecutor to sort all this stuff out. There is so much confusing intel now. A few CIA inside leaks to the press could help right now.

Your bolded question bothers me too. If it's too apathetic out there in the hinterland we could be stuck with this punk until 2008.

[kskiska]

2. I bolded the question

only because a good part of the article is question and answer, and I wanted to make it clear an interviewer was asking. The interviewee also demands Cheney's resignation, and says that Rice is in this deeper than Tenet.

[snippy]

4. John Dean agrees with you.

"What I found, in critically examining Bush's evidence, is not pretty. The African uranium matter is merely indicative of larger problems, and troubling questions of potential and widespread criminality when taking the nation to war. It appears that not only the Niger uranium hoax, but most everything else that Bush said about Saddam Hussein's weapons was false, fabricated, exaggerated, or phony."
. . .

"So egregious and serious are Bush's misrepresentations that they appear to be a deliberate effort to mislead Congress and the public. So arrogant and secretive is the Bush White House that only a special prosecutor can effectively answer and address these troubling matters. Since the Independent Counsel statute has expired, the burden is on President Bush to appoint a special prosecutor - and if he fails to do so, he should be held accountable by Congress and the public."

http://writ.news.findlaw.com/dean/20030718.html

This is a very good article.

[JackSwift]

3. The Junta made the mistake of thinking that the CIA and military want war

I'm reminded of a story of a buddy of mine who was drafted to go to Vietnam. He says his drill instructor (and I don't care what they are really called) said: "It's a lousy war, but it's the only war we've got." The BushReich makes hundreds of billions on war spending (if not trillions) and it makes them feel very important. They love war because they don't ever personally fight them or get bombed. But military people and intelligence people hate war. Most of them have seen it either directly as combatants, or through the eyes of their colleagues who have. Patton types are despised.

There are a lot of military and intelligence people who are going to be very much a liability for the Junta types in the future.