Bush Gets Intelligence Group Award

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Every winter for the past several years, the CIA Officers Memorial Foundation has held a glittering dinner around Washington attended by hundreds of top intelligence and corporate officials. The stated purpose of the event, where the cost of sponsor tables ranges from $12,000 to $100,000, is to help raise money for the spouses and children of agency operatives killed in the line of battle since the September 11, 2011 terrorist attacks. But it also serves as an annual reunion of sorts for top intelligence officials and the corporate chieftains of America’s biggest military contractors.

This year’s off-the-record event, officially the Ambassador Richard M. Helms Award Ceremony, named for a Cold War-era CIA director, honored former President George W. Bush, an odd choice, it would seem, given all the trouble his administration caused the CIA (and NSA) during its eight years in office.

Whatever its accomplishments in Afghanistan and Iraq--or theaters unknown--the CIA seemed constantly in hot water under the Bush administration, from its failure to disrupt the 9/11 plot, to its false reports on Saddam Hussein’s nonexistent weapons of mass destruction to justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq, to its use of torture on detainees under White House guidance. And more.

But all that was forgiven, apparently, when the former president was honored at the foundation’s hitherto unreported March 4 dinner at the Ritz Carlton Hotel in Tyson’s Corner, Virginia, a few miles down the road from the spy agency’s headquarters in Langley.

In past years, the CIA and the White House have helped publicize the dinners. In 2014 the agency posted a keynote address at the dinner by agency director John Brennan on its website. This year, however, even though Brennan introduced Bush, the agency was mum on the event, declining to comment and referring an inquiry to the foundation.


http://www.newsweek.com/bush-gets-intelligence-group-award-317548?piano_d=1