SubscribeThis started when Rumsfeld go the boot and bush turned back to old pals Baker, Scocroft, et al to produce the Iraq study group report.
The One-Percent Doctrine claims that in the Summer of 2001, the CIA was climbing the walls about a likely imminent Al Qaeda attack
In the spring of 2005 some documents dating back to July 2002 were leaked to the British press. The documents, which came to be known as "the Downing Street Memo," reported on a "perceptible shift" in the attitude in Washington, saying that military action was now seen as "inevitable." One memo records "C," the designation the Brits use for the head of the British Secret Secret Intelligence Service, as saying that "intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.""Playing fast and loose with the evidence" is totally different than "fixing the intelligence."
Sir Richard later told me that he had been misquoted. He reviewed the draft document, objecting to the word "fixed" in particular, and corrected it to reflect the truth of the matter. He said that upon returning to London in July of 2002, he expressed the view, based on his conversations, that the war in Iraq was going to happen. He believed that the momentum driving it was not really about WMD but rather about bigger issues, such as changing the politics of the Middle East.
Dearlove recalled that he had a polite but significant, disagreement with Scooter Libby, who was trying to convince him that there was a relationship between Iraq and al-Qa'ida. Dearlove's strongly held view, based on his own service's reporting, was that any contacts between the two had come to nothing and that there was no formal relationship. He believed that the crowd around the vice president was playing fast and loose with the evidence. In his view, it was never about "fixing" the intelligence itself but rather about the undisciplined manner in which the intelligence was being used.
--no one can understand, much less predict, the behavior of the CIA who does not understand that the agency works for the president. I know of no exceptions to this general rule. In practice it means that in the end the CIA will always bend to the wishes of the president, and as long as the director of central intelligence serves at the pleasure of the president this will continue to be the case. The general rule applies to both intelligence and operations: what the CIA says, as well as what it does, will shape itself over time to what the president wants. When presidents don't like what they are being told they ignore it. When they want something done they press until it happens. As a disciplined organization the agency does not complain about the one [most of the time, it appears], or long resist the other. In a word, it is responsive....There's a long-established pattern of blaming the CIA for doing what the President tells them to do. The responsibility for failing to prevent 9/11 and the decision to go to war with Iraq both belong to George W. Bush. Bush's blaming the CIA is just another example of his refusing to take responsibility for his failures.
Once put into words the general rule seems obvious. Why would the CIA ignore what the president wants or believes? Why would a president tolerate a CIA with an agenda of its own? ... There have been plenty of occasions for denial over the years, but claims that the White House was out of the loop, while routinely accepted, are rarely plausible.
"The administration is not going to be happy," said Mark Lowenthal, a former senior aide to Tenet at the CIA who said he reviewed portions of the book. "But the administration is not happy with George anyway. This administration and the intelligence community became estranged in 2004 to the point where the administration was convinced the CIA was actively working to elect John Kerry."
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Just about every "revelation" he has in this book is already known.
And back when he could have done something about it, he actively cooperated in the deception.
Now he says that all he meant by "slam dunk" was that they could make a good case for it in public, not that it was actually, you know, true.
He says now that there was no discussion of the decision to invade, and that the decisionmakers didn't ask any tough questions about the intelligence. A patriot-- or hell, any competent grown-up-- would have shaken those decisionmakers by the lapels and said, "are you kidding me? We don't have anything to justify this invasion! And we don't think the aftermath would be any good either!" Instead, he just played along.
He sold out the analysts, particularly on the WMD issue, but also the al Qaeda-Iraq link issue, because he liked being the president's little buddy.
posted by ibmcginty at 8:51 PM on April 29, 2007 [4 favorites]