Must read tomorrow: Thomas Powers on the CIA at NYRB

http://www.nybooks.com/




The winter books issue (which is not up as of 2:40 a.m. ET, Tuesday 11/30) includes several articles that must be read, in particular Thomas Powers' chilling assessment of what's gone wrong at the CIA: in essence, despite their vaunted war with the Pentagon, they have been covering for the Bush admin, to the point of falling on the sword twice in a big way, once on 9/11 and once on WMD in Iraq. Powers makes a strong case for skepticism about the CIA's alleged intelligence failures on both scores. He argues that the CIA warned the Bushists over and over in the months leading up to 9/11 and the Bushists for mysterious reasons--but without doubt--chose to do nothing. (He doesn't make the case for LIHOP or MIHOP, to be sure. But he does make the case that they were amply warned and, therefore, HAD to have chosen to do nothing, for whatever reason .)

As for Iraq, Powers wonders why it took CIA analysts who had been thinking about and working on the WMD question for a decade nearly a year and a half after Baghdad fell to officially conclude that there were no WMD in Iraq. Powers thinks the delay was designed purely to take the eyes off the Bushists. Why did they do this? Because it's their job and a kind of code. But with Goss in charge tossing careerists out left and right and making ass-covering part of the job description, Powers fears a sea change is in the works, and it seems to be spelling a grim future in which intelligence becomes neutered, tamed, a made to toe the administration line. Good bye to the unvarnished truth.

but it's worth buying the issue for this one, for one by Chris Hedges on two books about the Iraq war, and one by Michael Massing on the press and the election.

Perhaps Goss is weakening the CIA in order that the DoD/ White House Intelligence "group" can take firmer control.

wants in charge, nice loyal Nazi that he is.

and that it is a large step in a dangerous direction.

Intelligence is supposed to serve the truth. The Bushists will make it serve them. As they already have been doing, only worse.

Ready or not, here we come. All the signs are there that they're going to pull the WMD shit all over again. Some supporting evidence from today's NY Times:

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/30/international/middleeast/30iran.html?8br

"The Bush administration has repeatedly tried without success to persuade its fellow board members to debate Iran's case in the Security Council. But it decided to go along with the board's decision to accept the resolution, only to turn around to vent its disappointment and rage.

"In a nine-page statement to the closed-door session of the board after the resolution passed, Jackie Wolcott Sanders, the head of the American delegation, accused Iran of deceit and the board of the I.A.E.A, the United Nations' nuclear monitoring organization, of irresponsibility."

(The Powers article is still not up at the NYRB site as of 3:20 ET, 11/30. Still worth buying the issue to read it.

;)

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/17637

Now is a good time for Americans to pause and consider our progress in what the Bush administration chooses to call the war on terror. Osama bin Laden remains at large three years after the attacks of September 11, the war in Iraq has reached a kind of stasis of escalating violence matched by an erosion of our ability to control events there, new crises loom with other members of the "axis of evil" defined by President Bush in January 2002, and the President's reelection rules out the likelihood of any sudden change in American policy. With suspense on that point ended for the moment, we ought to weigh what we have learned from the linked disasters of September 11 and the war in Iraq, and what we should fear or expect next as American plans and facts on the ground sort themselves out in the Middle East.

The Central Intelligence Agency finds itself at the center of this unfolding story in a way we have come to expect from its conflicted history as a tool of the White House and as the nation's principal collector and analyst of secret information. The CIA is not only deeply involved in the day-to-day fighting of the war on terror, but is simultaneously charged with knowing, and with telling those who have a need to know, who our enemies are, what dangers they pose, whether American efforts are working, and how other governments react to what we are doing. Intelligence is a function of the executive branch of government and as such it answers to the president--just as the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the United States Forestry Service do. Like them it is supposed to serve the nation as a whole, but like them it can also be used by the White House to help the president politically--in the case of the CIA, generally by controlling the flow of information to ensure that good news reaches the public while bad news remains secret, compartmented, and codeword-protected beyond the scrutiny of Congress and public alike.

A kind of rough etiquette has evolved around this fact of life--presidents are granted a lot of latitude when it comes to classifying information, but they cross the line when they use the CIA directly against political opponents, as Richard Nixon did during the Watergate episode; or when they use the CIA to do secretly what Congress has forbidden, as Ronald Reagan did during the Iran-contra affair; or when they suborn the CIA to exaggerate, distort, or misrepresent intelligence findings, as I believe the White House of George Bush did during the run-up to the Iraq war. The reports of the CIA's Iraq Survey Group and the Senate Intelligence Committee do not reach but lend support to this conclusion and thus invite us to consider again, as previous reports have done, the difficulties encountered by democratic governments when they grant national leaders more or less unsupervised control over secret intelligence services.

What we have learned from the history of the CIA is that it is subject to extraordinary internal stresses whenever American presidents encounter unexpected challenge or failure abroad. Past agonies are captured in a string of names, each in its own way a rich mosaic of illusion and failure--Cuba, Vietnam, Iran, Nicaragua--and it is already clear that Iraq must be added to that list. Indeed it is my guess that Iraq will be cited as the outstanding object lesson for decades to come of the ways in which evidence can be tortured to justify what presidents want to do. It is a tossup whether the President or the agency will be blamed once the dust has settled. But if history is our guide we must expect the CIA to take the fall, and it is not yet clear whether it will survive this latest trauma, or in what form.

kick

:kick:

This may be the single most important thread on DU at this time. It is about a subject that the rest of the world recognizes could set off -- without sounding paranoid -- an actual WMD war. There is no doubt that a group within this administration is pushing for a strike on Iran. One need only look at the nature of the documents that Franklin was caught trying to pass to the Israeli front.

Likewise, there is a segment within the Israeli government that is actively considering a strike. And although there is no reason to think that Iran's WMDs are possessed primarily for Israel, one can understand why Israel is concerned that Iran has them.

In fact, when we look at the Middle East and surrounding areas, we find that more and more nations have WMDs. And some of these are not among the more stable nations on earth. I think that it is unlikely that Pakistan will have the same "moderate" government in four years.

Now, back to Iran. The truth is that a strike by the Israeli's could almost definitely hit no more than 85% of the weapon sites that are there. And most of those are buried deep in well-protected bunkers. I think we can all do the math: such an action can only lead to terrible consequences for the entire world.

If we are going to talk about religion and science on DU, it might be better to focus that discussion on the fact that those who advocate a strike on Iran happen to fall squarely into a category of either believing in a "Greater Israel" based on the OT, or in an Apocalypse based on a confused interpretation of the NT.

We might want to consider the role that those of us who voted for Kerry can play in this. We are in a dangerous time. If the administration decides to give the green light to Israel, it will not be in the distant future. This is something we need to address now.

Thank you for keeping this thread going.

and for keeping the thread going.

this is important

The manipulation of the media has begun. The only thing I can hope for at the moment is that the media knows that it was manipulated once and will not fall for the propaganda this time. I have some thread of hope after seeing Aaron Brown's coverage of the psy-ops game played on CNN by the Pentagon.

Keep the discussion going.