Robert Dreyfuss, www.tompaine.com: Now, believe it or
not, they want you to think that it was the CIA that
got it wrong. That it was the CIA that presented the
White House with alarmist intelligence about the
supposed threat from Iraq. And that—acting on the
CIA’s conclusions—the White House and Pentagon went to
war. David Kay, who helped lead the snark hunt in Iraq
that failed to find a thing, now says that the CIA
owes Bush an apology, that he could find no evidence
of political pressure on the CIA, and that it was all
just a big mistake. “Sorry, world,” says Kay. “It was
the CIA’s fault.”
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The CIA Ate My Homework
Robert Dreyfuss is a freelance writer based in
Alexandria, Virginia, who specializes in politics and
national security issues. He is currently working on a
book about America's policy toward political Islam
over the past 30 years.
Can President Bush, Vice President Cheney and the
Pentagon neoconservatives get away with blaming the
Central Intelligence Agency for the mess in Iraq?
They’re trying.
In the year and half before the war began in March,
Cheney and the neocons constantly disparaged the CIA
for underestimating the threat posed by Iraq. In
public and in private, they lambasted the agency for
overcautiousness. Behind the scenes, they pressured
analysts—not to mention George Tenet, the CIA
director, whose spine seems made of soft clay—to find
more, more, more evidence of Iraq’s WMD and of Iraq’s
(nonexistent) connections to Al Qaeda. They created a
mini-intelligence unit inside the Pentagon, staffed by
neoconservative ideologues such as Abram Shulsky and
David Wurmser, to scour mounds of intelligence tidbits
and extract incriminating evidence to prove what
wasn’t provable. They treated Ahmed Chalabi of the
Iraqi National Congress as a virtual Oracle of Delphi,
giving credence to the lying defectors and bogus
intelligence he produced, even as the CIA warned that
Chalabi was a fraud. They gave credence to the
cockeyed theories of Laurie Mylroie, who believed not
only that Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9/11 but
that he was the mastermind behind Tim McVeigh’s
Oklahoma City bombing, too. And, disregarding CIA
warnings, they convinced Bush to say that Iraq was
secretly trying to buy uranium for A-bombs in West
Africa, even though the documents they cited were
forged.
Now, believe it or not, they want you to think that it
was the CIA that got it wrong. That it was the CIA
that presented the White House with alarmist
intelligence about the supposed threat from Iraq. And
that—acting on the CIA’s conclusions—the White House
and Pentagon went to war. David Kay, who helped lead
the snark hunt in Iraq that failed to find a thing,
now says that the CIA owes Bush an apology, that he
could find no evidence of political pressure on the
CIA, and that it was all just a big mistake. “Sorry,
world,” says Kay. “It was the CIA’s fault.”
Yet Bush isn’t quite ready himself to go to war with
the CIA—don’t expect him to demand an apology anytime
soon.
That’s the secret behind the White House’s decision to
support an investigation into the Iraq intelligence
mess. Faced with the nonexistence of WMD in Iraq, the
White House finally realized that it couldn’t keep
saying, in effect, “Wait a little longer. We’ll find
them.” (Or, as Bush actually did say last summer, “We
found them.”)
But the president couldn’t attack the CIA himself. Not
only would that look silly and unpresidential, but it
would probably unleash a flood of resignations, op-eds
by former CIA officials, leaks to the media by current
ones, and more. The CIA may not be very good at covert
operations, but they’d manage to run an effective one
against the White House.
So, aided by the malleable Kay, the White House
decided to punt, calling for one of those
Kissingeresque blue-ribbon commissions that will
report back in, oh, say, 2005. And though its scope is
supposedly undecided as yet, you can count on it
picking apart years of CIA reports on Iraq while
avoiding an inquiry into Cheney’s office and the
Pentagon’s Shulsky-Wurmser Office of Special Plans.
Same in Congress: the GOP-led intelligence committees
have no intention of investigating the politically
explosive Cheney-OSP nexus, and they’re resisting
Democratic demands for a wider inquiry.
The only important question doesn’t have anything to
do with the commission the White House wants—whose
conclusions will probably end up on President Kerry’s
desk, anyway—or with the weak-kneed congressional
panels. That question is: do the Democrats have the
courage to make the Bush-Cheney lies and exaggerations
over Iraq a campaign issue? Stay tuned.
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Published: Feb 03 2004