How W and his pals corrupted the spooks

The latest issue of The New York Review of Books includes letters by Fulton Armstrong and Thomas Powers on
The CIA and WMDs: The Damning Evidence.
Following are excerpts from Armstrong's letter:

I was ... national intelligence officer (NIO) for Latin America, from 2000 to 2004. ... The first congressional briefing I ever took part in as an NIO, along with my colleagues, included discussion of WMDs, and it started with ... praise by ... Republicans on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, for our intelligence work ... Intelligence officers are all trained to remind the recipients of their reports that they are never to take sides in a policy debate. These NIOs, however, said nothing and were clearly happy with the praise by the Republican committee members.

The National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) produced by these NIOs on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, with the participation of the CIA and other intelligence agencies, was not subjected to the customary “peer review” ... because, after delaying the project for months, the NIOs didn’t have a spare hour for the discussion and debate ... they would eagerly report their progress in dividing the fifteen coordinating agencies that had contributed to the NIE. They boasted how, after an obviously extensive search, they finally found an Energy Department employee willing to contradict his agency’s consensus position that Iraq’s missile tubes were not, as the administration and the NIOs asserted, centrifuge tubes.

The NIOs who were preparing the NIE also boasted how they found an Air Force analyst to dissent from his service’s position that Iraq’s little unmanned surveillance planes could not be armed. They were happy that challenges to their and the administration’s assumptions about Iraq’s chemical weapons and biological weapons capabilities were minimal; after all, who’s going to try to prove a negative?

The most back-patting, however, was reserved for their success in forcing the State Department’s intelligence shop, the Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), to take a “footnote”—a dissent at the bottom of the page—on a lesser judgment in the paper rather than on the overarching judgment that Saddam Hussein had WMDs.

The National Intelligence Council and director of central intelligence, George Tenet, gave the NIOs concerned with WMDs big cash awards for producing the NIE, and seven years later and seventeen months into the Obama administration they remain in the same or equivalent jobs.

Read more: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/aug/19/cia-and-wmds-damning-evidence/

Thank you for the K&R.

And thanks to other astute DUers for the additional R's.

when Porter Goss took over the CIA.

But W took it to a whole new level.

But that was a pathetic thing for him to say about where rockets come down.

The Soviets got what was left over.

Tom Lehrer was just kidding about where the rockets came down.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEJ9HrZq7Ro