So I’ve been the victim of a hit-and-run post from one Eric Norlin, who dislikes my recent statement that “If U.S. intelligence is broken, it’s clear that the Bush White House broke it”:
Really? anyone remember when the CIA bombed the Chinese embassy on accident during the Clinton administration? Or how about when we blew up the baby food factory in Khartoum? Gimme a fucking break – the Bush administration didn’t “break” the US Intel community…..its basically the toughest job in the world — sorting through more data than any Netizen can imagine and making judgement calls as to what is actually important.
Sorry guys — if you’ve never worked in the US intel community, then you simply cannot even come close to fathoming what these people do on a daily basis. Its amazing they ever get anything right….and when shitheads talk outta line because they don’t like the current administration….well….ugh. |
Well…ugh indeed. Let’s ignore Norlin’s specious notion that the fact that I’ve “never worked in the US intel community” somehow disqualifies me from understanding anything about intelligence. (By the same token, I could say to Norlin, hey, if you’ve never been managing editor of a Web site, then you “simply cannot even come close to fathoming what I do on a daily basis”! Silliness.)
Norlin is saying that the CIA made mistakes before Bush ever came into office. Of course. My post wasn’t suggesting that somehow a hitherto flawlessly functioning intelligence agency was wrecked by Bush. The argument, one more time for Mr. Norlin’s sake, is specifically with the mendacity of the Bush team’s sequence of statements about U.S. intelligence regarding Saddam’s WMD. Let’s recap:
(1) Before the war, the Bush hawks complained that, though they knew for certain that Iraq was sitting on big WMD stockpiles, tipped off as they had been by their own informants among the Iraqi exile community, the CIA (along with fellow-traveler wimps at State) refused, out of wimpiness or stubbornness or who knows what, to confirm what they knew. So Cheney, Rumsfeld & co. bypassed standard CIA procedure and “stovepiped” a variety of reports that the CIA’s own analysts had deemed untrustworthy: That means they took these reports out of context and fast-tracked them to the Oval Office. They said to the CIA, “Why can’t you deliver the intelligence we need to support our policies? We don’t trust your skepticism here. We know Saddam has WMD, and we’re overruling you.” Seymour Hersh’s reports in the New Yorker painstakingly and devastatingly chronicled this process, and today’s Salon column by Sidney Blumenthal offers yet more detail.
(2) Now that the WMD have failed to turn up on schedule, just as the CIA tried to tell the Bush hawks, the administration has the chutzpah to say that the whole WMD fiasco is the result of an “intelligence failure.” It was the CIA’s fault, see? This exercise in finger-pointing is an absurdist scandal. It was abuse of U.S. intelligence for political ends, not failure of intelligence-analysis capability, that led to this mess. That’s what I meant by arguing that, if you want to view the failure to gauge Iraq’s possession of WMD accurately as an indication that U.S. intelligence is broken, then you have to accept that it was the Bush administration that did the breaking.
Incidentally, if you are following my argument here, you will notice that it displays considerable respect for the men and women working at “the toughest job in the world,” as Norlin puts it — more respect than Bush’s crew showed by ignoring their own intelligence agency’s “judgement calls as to what is actually important” and insisting that the world was the way it had to be in their war plans.
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