The CIA Did It! [Mother Jones}

[truthisfreedom]

excellent article with great links. read it all!

http://www.motherjones.com/news/dailymojo/2004/07/07_810.html

July 12, 2004


The CIA Did It!


By Tom Engelhardt


…or was it Colonel Mustard in the drawing room with the rope? On Friday the Republican-controlled Senate Intelligence Committee issued its 511 page report --an estimated 20% already censored out by the CIA (so assume this was the best news available) -- and as all press reports in this country indicate, it savaged the Agency. Its essential implied conclusion was that the CIA more or less single-handedly led a misinformed Congress and a misadvised administration into war. ("The committee did not find any evidence that administration officials attempted to coerce, influence or pressure analysts to change their judgments related to Iraq's weapons of mass destruction capabilities.") The committee Democrats signed off on this and then held edgy press conferences or like House minority leader Nancy Pelosi released statements indicating that it probably wasn't this way at all.


So, gee, like they used to say when I was a kid about those drawings that had five-legged cows floating through the clouds, what's wrong with this picture? To make sense of all this, it helps to compare the shameful CIA intelligence record on Saddam's Iraq to the various pretzled legal memos the Defense Department, the CIA, and others solicited from working groups of administration legal brains on the issue of torture and the president's power to create an offshore torture system. Like the CIA's October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iraq, with its even more doctored, unclassified public version (a White House construct which took much heat in the Committee report), these were essentially after-the-fact efforts to bolster decisions already taken or in the process of being taken by top administration officials who had, until then, largely consulted each other.


Remember, long before that NIE was produced, top administration figures were already out on the national and international hustings selling their wares and their prospective war with their own "intelligence" right at the tips of their tongues. As Dick Cheney, for instance, said in August 2002 speech to the VFW, "Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction"; while the President addressed the UN General Assembly thusly in September of that year, "Right now, Iraq is expanding and improving facilities that were used for the production of biological weapons," and so on, ad nauseam. And keep in mind, they already had their own outfit, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith's Office of Special Plans (OSP), set up in the Pentagon in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, to create a perfect storm of intelligence exactly to the administration's liking.

<snip>

[amber dog democrat]

1. I am betting the ex CIA head is relieved to have quit - or was he fired?

Anyway he's out of it now. But having the AGENCY fall on its sword to shore up the sagging credibility of a mendacity-prone administration ( honeslty I don't believe anything that junta says anymore ), - is not too smart a move.

CIA spooks have a tendency to leak whistleblowing info if the agenda calls for it.
There are professionals within the agancy who are fuming at this most recent whitewash job.

It will be interesting to see if more scandals are revealed from anonymous sources during this election cycle.

[Disturbed]

2. CIA rank and file.

These folks are not pleased with the V. Plame outing or the BushCo scapegoating. I smell a heavy wind of payback.