As the LNS has chronicled for the long, painful years since 9/11, there is "something rotten in the state of..." and significant elements of the intelligence establishment, the military establishment, and the foreign policy establishment (and hopefully, the law enforcement establishment) are struggling against the Bush abomination. This struggle -- from John O'Neill to Richard Clarke and Joseph Wilson, and beyond -- has been recorded here, and elsewhere, thanks to the Internet-based Information Rebellion (and the free press of our European allies)...Yes, the Halliburton scandals (there are several) are heating`up. Even the WASHPS and the NYTwits have noticed. Although if you want the truth of it stick to the Financial Times and the press releases of Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA.) And yes, the LNS's suspicions about the increasingly unhinged and incredibly shrinking _resident's father distancing himself from Junior on the war in Iraq has been corrborated in Capitol Hill Blue, but we are going to stay focused and disciplined...So many "high crimes and misdemeanors," so little time...
Mark Follman, Salon, interviews Thomas Powers: Author
Thomas Powers says the White House's corruption of
intelligence has caused the greatest foreign policy
catastrophe in modern U.S. history - and sparked a
civil war with the nation's intel agencies.
The U.S. is now waging three wars, says
intelligence expert Thomas Powers. One is in Iraq. The
second is in Afghanistan. And the third is in
Washington - an all-out war between the White House
and the nation's own intelligence agencies.
Powers, the author of "Intelligence Wars: American
Secret History From Hitler to Al Qaeda," charges that
the Bush administration is responsible for what is
perhaps the greatest disaster in the history of U.S.
intelligence. From failing to anticipate 9/11 to
pressuring the CIA to produce bogus justifications for
war, from abusing Iraqi prisoners to misrepresenting
the nature of Iraqi insurgents, the Bush White House,
the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies they
corrupted, coerced or ignored have made
extraordinarily grave errors which could threaten our
national security for years. By manipulating
intelligence and punishing dissent while pursuing an
extreme foreign-policy agenda, Bush leaders have set
spy against U.S. spy and deeply damaged America's
intelligence capabilities.
"It's a catastrophe beyond belief. Going into
Afghanistan was inevitable, and in my opinion the
right thing to do. But everything since then has been
a horrible mistake," Powers says. "The CIA is
politicized to an extreme. It's under the control of
the White House. Tenet is leaving in the middle of an
unresolved political crisis - what really amounts to a
constitutional crisis."
Repudiate the 9/11 Cover-Up and the Iraq War Lies,
Show Up for Democracy in 2004: Defeat Bush (again!)
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/061504E.shtml
A Temporary Coup
By Mark Follman
Salon.com
Monday 14 June 2004
Author Thomas Powers says the White House's corruption
of intelligence has caused the greatest foreign policy
catastrophe in modern U.S. history - and sparked a
civil war with the nation's intel agencies.
The U.S. is now waging three wars, says
intelligence expert Thomas Powers. One is in Iraq. The
second is in Afghanistan. And the third is in
Washington - an all-out war between the White House
and the nation's own intelligence agencies.
Powers, the author of "Intelligence Wars: American
Secret History From Hitler to Al Qaeda," charges that
the Bush administration is responsible for what is
perhaps the greatest disaster in the history of U.S.
intelligence. From failing to anticipate 9/11 to
pressuring the CIA to produce bogus justifications for
war, from abusing Iraqi prisoners to misrepresenting
the nature of Iraqi insurgents, the Bush White House,
the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies they
corrupted, coerced or ignored have made
extraordinarily grave errors which could threaten our
national security for years. By manipulating
intelligence and punishing dissent while pursuing an
extreme foreign-policy agenda, Bush leaders have set
spy against U.S. spy and deeply damaged America's
intelligence capabilities.
"It's a catastrophe beyond belief. Going into
Afghanistan was inevitable, and in my opinion the
right thing to do. But everything since then has been
a horrible mistake," Powers says. "The CIA is
politicized to an extreme. It's under the control of
the White House. Tenet is leaving in the middle of an
unresolved political crisis - what really amounts to a
constitutional crisis."
The bitterest dispute, though not the only one, is
between the CIA and the Pentagon, whose own secret
intelligence unit, the Office of Special Plans,
aggressively promoted the war on Iraq. While departing
CIA Director George Tenet played along with the Bush
administration - a fact which Powers says reveals the
urgent need for a truly independent intelligence chief
- much of the agency is enraged at the Pentagon, which
put intense pressure on it to produce reports tailored
to the policy goals of the Bush White House. The
simmering tensions between the Pentagon, with its
troika of Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Feith, and rank and
file CIA personnel boiled over in July 2003, when the
White House trashed the career of veteran CIA
operative Valerie Plame by leaking her identity. The
move was a crude retaliation against Plame's husband,
former U.S. ambassador Joseph Wilson, who had exposed
the Bush administration's specious claim that Saddam
had sought "yellowcake" from Africa to build a nuclear
bomb.
The struggle between the CIA and the Defense
Department reached a bizarre climax a few weeks ago
when Ahmed Chalabi's office was very publicly
ransacked by officers working under the command of the
CIA; the Iraqi exile leader was later accused of
leaking vital information to Iran, among other
allegations. The abrupt fall from grace of the man
hand-picked by neoconservative policymakers to lead
post-Saddam Iraq, says Powers, lays bare the brutal
turf war between the two sides.
"It reveals an extraordinary level of bitter
combat between the CIA and the Pentagon. It's
astonishing that the CIA actually oversaw a team of
people who broke into Chalabi's headquarters - which
was paid for by the Pentagon - and ransacked the
place. The CIA single-handedly destroyed him."
The collapse of U.S. intelligence and the
arrogance and extremism at the top of the Bush
administration are also at the root of the torture
scandal at Abu Ghraib prison, Powers says. With U.S.
troops facing a mounting insurgency from an enemy they
couldn't find, Powers believes Bush officials signed
off on a systematic policy of hardcore interrogation
in a frantic attempt to deal with the problem. He says
that while it's unlikely Defense Secretary Rumsfeld
gave specific orders as to what type of abuse should
be meted out to the Iraqi prisoners, there is strong
reason to believe Rumsfeld "issued blanket permission
for them to turn up the heat."
In an explosive conjecture, Powers also speculates
that the Israelis, "who've had the most experience,"
cooperated with the U.S. on the techniques used to
humiliate and break Arabs, including sexual
degradation.
As for the dubiously timed Tenet resignation -
with its fairy-tale like cover story of "I'll be
spending more time with my family" - Powers thinks one
possibility is that the CIA director may have been
forced out after Pentagon officials, enraged by the
Chalabi debacle, pressured Bush to get rid of him.
But what troubles Powers the most, he says, is
that the Bush administration completely subverted
American democracy, browbeating Congress and the
national security agencies to launch a war. "They
correctly read how the various institutions of our
government could be used to stage a kind of temporary
coup on a single issue: Whether or not to go to war
with Iraq."
Salon reached Powers by phone at his office in
Vermont.
Let's start with the problems inside Iraq itself.
We know there was a dearth of intelligence assets on
the ground for years before the war. What's your
assessment of the situation now?
This is one of the most closely guarded secrets of
the agency, and I don't know anybody outside of it who
really has a sense of the assets they had inside the
country then, or what they have there now. But I don't
think that was the biggest problem.
The biggest problem has to do with the decision at
very high levels to look at things in a certain way.
There was no shortage of warnings in the U.S.
government from various branches and offices that the
postwar period was going to be complicated and
difficult. In that respect there was no failure of
intelligence. But for institutional reasons -
political reasons - the White House and the Defense
Department didn't want to hear it. The Defense
Department was very explicit that they weren't going
to pay attention to those studies, that they wouldn't
seriously consider increasing their estimate of how
much money and troops would be required - because once
that went down on a piece of paper Congress would want
to see it.
There is already ample evidence that the abusive
treatment of Iraqi prisoners proceeded from systematic
policy at some level. With U.S. forces facing a rising
insurgency and a severe lack of intelligence
infrastructure there, do you think Bush policymakers
decided that the situation required a kind of dragnet
interrogation system? That in order to deal with the
problem they had to round up anybody remotely
suspicious and "take the gloves off" - as Rumsfeld
ordered done with American Taliban John Walker Lindh -
in order to figure out who and where the enemy was?
Well, we know Gen. [Geoffrey D.] Miller went from
Guantanamo to Iraq [last August] in order to beef up
the whole intelligence gathering apparatus so that we
could try to begin to understand who we were fighting
there. For a long time the administration had been
claiming we were fighting Baathists and dead-enders,
or foreign terrorists pouring in across Iraq's
borders. Part of the reason for those claims was that
politically that's what was needed to explain the
continuing resistance. It was also clear that we
didn't really know who we were fighting.
Fallujah is a good example: The administration has
never given a clear answer as to who we've been
fighting there. Our behavior suggests that when we
finally decided to back off, we had concluded that
whoever it was didn't pose a direct threat to us. It
was a resistance to us - but we were perfectly
prepared to live with it. We turned it over to an
Iraqi officer and said, "Hey, you deal with this."
They didn't have to shoot all the Iraqi insurgents,
they reached an agreement and the fighting appeared
suddenly to just stop.
How would you connect that to the administration's
broader interrogation policy?
I think the attempts at Abu Ghraib - and in many
other places, I'm sure - to extract information about
what was happening on the ground were based on a real
need. But the military had at least one success that
suggested how they might do it correctly: tracking
down Saddam Hussein. As far as I understand it, that
was essentially a bookkeeping success. They really
paid attention to detail, kept very good files and
eventually identified and located everybody who was
connected to Saddam, to 10 degrees of separation. They
realized that somebody would tell somebody else in
that network where he was. So that kind of complete
encompassing of the subject appears to have been
effective.
But the notion that Abu Ghraib prison was chaotic
and out of control, that's what people say who don't
want to take responsibility for it. I don't believe
that for a second. Rumsfeld wouldn't sit down and say,
"The best way is to photograph these guys pretending
to masturbate," but I think he did create the
circumstances and the pressure for that kind of thing
- in effect issued blanket permission for them to turn
up the heat.
Then you have to ask who actually instructed U.S.
interrogators in Arab psychology and suggested this
would be a good way to get Arabs to feel powerless and
vulnerable and tell you what you want to know. My
guess is the people who've had the most experience in
that, namely the Israelis, who've been at war with
Arabs for decades, must've cooperated with us on a
method. Of course, that's pure speculation on my part.
Clearly this kind of treatment shatters the U.S.
relationship to the Geneva Accords, not to mention the
professed morality of our mission. What do you make of
the latest Pentagon memo to come to light, which said
the president could ignore the anti-torture laws?
The answer seems pretty clear to me. The U.S.
government has people who specialize in interrogation,
and they have a long list of things they can't do. But
when you're feeling desperate, you simply take some of
the things from list B, what you're not allowed to do,
and you move them over to list A, the things you are
allowed to do.
What do you make of the Byzantine twists of the
Ahmed Chalabi story? By the time photos of his
ransacked Baghdad compound filled the newspapers, the
tale of his rise and fall seemed almost unbelievable,
the stuff of a spy novel.
I think it reveals an extraordinary level of
bitter combat between the CIA and the Pentagon. It's
astonishing that things would get to such a level,
where the CIA actually oversaw a team of people who
broke into Chalabi's headquarters - which was paid for
by the Pentagon - and ransacked the place and carried
away his computers. Who do you think bought those
computers? Those are your American tax dollars at
work.
That level of internal animosity is amazing. Look
at the chronology: First you have a moment when the
Pentagon announces that it's cutting off the funds to
Chalabi's intelligence operation. A few days later
this raid takes place. Well, it looks pretty clear
that somebody warned the Pentagon this was going to
happen, so that they could at least cut off his
funding and not be caught with their pants down.
Chalabi was the Pentagon's candidate to run Iraq.
Richard Perle [the influential neoconservative advisor
to the Pentagon] still says that the single greatest
mistake we've made so far was not putting Chalabi in
power as soon we got there.
And who has actually gone into power now? The
CIA's man: Iyad Allawi [the interim Iraqi prime
minister]. That's a dramatic shift. As it was, Chalabi
didn't appear to be the candidate that [U.N. envoy]
Lakhdar Brahimi was going to choose, but that invasion
of Chalabi's office made it an impossibility. The CIA
single-handedly destroyed him by doing that.
Chalabi is clearly a shady figure, but given the
timing and chronology here, do you find the recent
charges that he could be working for the Iranians
believable? Or is it ultimately a smear campaign?
What's at the center of all this?
Who knows! [Laughs]. We can only try to follow the
logic of where the information about the leaked
Iranian code would've come from. The conversation
between Chalabi and the Iranian intelligence office
was likely collected by the National Security Agency,
which is normally in charge of that kind of data, who
would've then passed it on to counterintelligence in
the CIA. Or, the CIA might have actually sent a team
into Chalabi's office to plant bugs or broadcasting
devices, they might have conducted that type of
black-bag operation in order to get access to that
communication traffic. It's also conceivable the
[Pentagon's] Defense Intelligence Agency was involved.
The information about Chalabi could certainly be
real, but meanwhile, the CIA's guy Allawi apparently
benefits by the removal from the scene of a principle
rival - right before Brahimi gets to choose the new
government.
So this is ultimately the CIA fighting back
against the Pentagon?
I think so - can it really be a coincidence that
this happens right before Brahimi announces the new
government? U.S. intelligence knew about the
compromised Iranian code about six weeks before the
raid. So why wait till just before Brahimi's
announcement? And why the large team of people and the
very public display of trashing Chalabi headquarters
and carting everything away? Regardless of the truth,
when something like this happens, Brahimi is incapable
of sorting it out. He just has to step away. It's one
of those things you can't touch with a 10-foot pole.
I don't know exactly what it all represents, but
I'm certain that it involves bad blood between the CIA
and the Pentagon. It puzzled me at first why Tenet
would be resigning after this apparent CIA triumph. I
did wonder if the Pentagon had mustered enough
high-level fury to reach the president.
How else do you view Tenet's resignation? The
innocuous framing of it accompanies perhaps the
biggest series of intelligence disasters in U.S.
history.
There is no question that over the last couple of
years it's become clear that the various U.S.
intelligence agencies have numerous weaknesses and
institutional deficiencies. But the biggest problem is
really the politicization of intelligence under Bush.
It's happened in two ways. First, because of the
politics surrounding 9/11, the intelligence agencies
have not been able to speak about it honestly and
directly. Iraq is the other big issue: The
intelligence agencies have not been able to speak
about that honestly and directly either, because
they've been pressured by the White House, especially
before the war, to take a certain view.
That's where all this internal trouble with the
intelligence system comes from. It's not as if they're
all Keystone Kops who can't figure out where their
left shoes are. It's all about the politics of it.
And that's only further complicated by the long
history of turf wars between the agencies, between the
FBI and CIA, and now apparently between the State
Department and the Pentagon intelligence operations.
Exactly, and now they're all fighting over a
policy which represents perhaps the single most
aggressive and resolute endeavor in the history of
U.S. foreign relations. It's astonishing, not just
that President Bush got a bee in his bonnet that he
had to invade another country and establish a major
new American military presence in the Middle East, but
that he would do it in this way.
Do you think Tenet essentially was pushed out by
the White House?
Tenet was pushed out by the accumulating
circumstances, not because he failed to do what Bush
wanted him to do, which was essentially two things:
The first was to not speak too clearly about the
warnings that he'd given the White House before 9/11.
You can be certain that it was not easy for Tenet to
do that. Tenet has never spoken out clearly and said,
"I told the president everything he needed to know to
at least start responding to the threat."
Secondly, Tenet hasn't spoken clearly on the
reason why they got Iraqi WMD wrong. And it's not
because people in the bowels of the agency had it all
balled up, it's because in the process of writing
finished intelligence - which was required to extract
a vote for war from congress - it got turned on its
head at the upper levels of the CIA. They found
certainty where there wasn't any; the evidence for WMD
stockpiles and programs was extremely thin. Who else
could have created this situation besides the
policymakers themselves?
What about the timing of Tenet's departure? It
comes in tandem with more alerts about terrorist
attacks this summer, and right around the June 30
transition of power in Iraq. Do you think Tenet was
explicitly asked to leave?
I think he was definitely asked to leave. He
showed every sign of extreme distress.
And there's been plenty of speculation that has to
do with the forthcoming congressional reports on 9/11
and Iraq intelligence, which won't look good for him.
The obvious answer is probably the correct one.
Tenet would spend all his time defending himself
against the reports. Everybody knows that another guy
could run the agency just as well and could run it the
same way. Bush has even made sure it'll be run the
same way by keeping the same leadership, with [Deputy
Director] John McLaughlin taking over. Bush would end
up spending a lot of political capital fighting for
Tenet; it's much simpler just to get him off the stage
- just like they did with Gen. Ricardo Sanchez in
Iraq. Once somebody made clear that Sanchez knew about
Abu Ghraib, they didn't argue about it. They got rid
of him.
What does Tenet's departure say about the state of
the agency at a critical time for U.S. national
security operations?
The agency is politicized to an extreme. It is
under the control of the Bush White House. Tenet is
leaving in the middle of an unresolved political
crisis - what really amounts to a constitutional
crisis. It's somewhat like Iran-Contra, though on a
totally different scale. The president wanted to go to
war. He's supposed to have the support of the
Congress. How did he get it? Well, his administration
made up a scary story about imminent dangers.
Doesn't Tenet's departure make him the fall guy
implicitly, even if President Bush delivered him
cordially?
Of course the implicit blame is there, and that's
one of the reasons why he looked and sounded so
distressed. He had plenty reason to be; there was a
cumulative insistence that the CIA had to be at fault.
He could change that picture dramatically by standing
up and saying, "Look, you want to know what I really
told the president before 9/11? Here it is." Obviously
that would be quite a bombshell and you can be sure
the president would never speak to him again.
I think the truth about what happened at the
policy level will eventually come out. We know,
because it was on paper, that on Aug. 6, 2001 the CIA
gave the president a very explicit warning. When 9/11
actually occurred, you would expect to look back and
see, once the distress light was on, various U.S.
intelligence and police organizations scurrying around
frantically responding to the warning. But what do you
find? Nothing.
While Tenet appears to have equivocated about
Iraqi WMD in some instances, we also know that the CIA
expressed significant doubt about specific
intelligence on Iraq long before the war - the bogus
Niger-uranium report, for example - that the Bush
administration still used to make its case. How can
the administration possibly continue to promote the
idea that the CIA got it all wrong?
Well, who else is the administration going to
blame? If they don't say that, then they would have to
ask, "Why did the CIA write a report that went in
certitude beyond the evidence?" The answer is very
likely to be, "Because that's what the president
wanted, and he made sure that was understood."
Is the war inside the U.S. intelligence system
completely off the charts historically? Is there any
precedent for this?
I can't think of any. It's not uncommon for the
various secret branches of the U.S. government to be
at odds with each other. The CIA quarreled with the
Defense Department for years over Soviet missiles, but
I don't remember anything like this. The CIA was
present when that team of Iraqi police went in and
ransacked Chalabi's compound. I mean, that's amazing.
The only thing that would've made it more amazing was
if it had happened in Washington.
In a way it reminds me of the "Night of the long
knives" in 1934, the night when Hitler got rid of the
Brown Shirts, the street fighting organization that
had helped the Nazi Party come to power. It was a
highly organized institution bitterly hated by the
army. It was run by a bunch of people who were
politically ambitious and were direct rivals of the
group that came into power with Hitler. Literally in
one night the offices and headquarters of this group
were raided and many of them were killed in their
beds. Immediately all kinds of propaganda came out
about their low behavior and betrayal. It was an
internal government bloodletting where one faction
just simply swept the other off the scene.
What the CIA did to Chalabi isn't exactly the
same, but it makes me worry even more about the level
of covert fighting inside our own government.
Just last week the New York Times reported that
the CIA is still struggling with a "major flaw" in its
operations. A senior agency official, Jami Miscik,
described conditions still ripe for the distortion of
information, and similar problems reportedly plague
the Defense Intelligence Agency. What's your view of
the rising chorus within Congress to overhaul the
intelligence system?
I think it's a good idea, and I never thought that
before. It ought to be set up with a devoted Cabinet
post, a secretary of intelligence who would have a
wide range of powers and authority to oversee the
whole system. But that person can't run everything;
each of the agencies is distinct for good reasons, and
each one has to be run by its own chief.
Separating intelligence and police operations is
absolutely essential. If you put it all under a single
authority it would represent the greatest threat by
far to American democracy. Other countries have proven
that. A single intelligence organization will abuse
the power of secrecy to protect itself - all
intelligence organizations routinely abuse the power
of secrecy to protect themselves.
Just look back at the way we got into this war:
There was nobody in the public who had the capacity to
seriously question the CIA's evidence and arguments.
We just had to take it on trust.
And that's a dangerous prospect when you have a
White House with an inflexible agenda that's in
control of the system.
I think so. I don't know how else to explain
getting it completely wrong. If you go back and look
at Powell's speech at the U.N., he makes dozens of
claims and not one of them was ever robustly confirmed
- in fact, almost all of them were completely false. I
mean, how could he get it that wrong?
The most important thing to do now is to alter the
chain of command. I think it makes sense to have the
secretary of intelligence serve for a four-year term
that overlaps presidential terms, an appointment that
begins at the end of the first year of every
presidential term. In other words, each president
coming into office inherits the previous intelligence
leader for at least a year. That provides continuity
and avoids election year politics.
How do you view the Bush administration in terms
of dealing with this whole series of intelligence
problems that have come to light?
It's a catastrophe beyond belief. Going into
Afghanistan was inevitable, and in my opinion the
right thing to do. But everything since then has been
a horrible mistake, one that has made it more
difficult to fight the war on terror, has driven away
allies and diminished the degree of cooperation from a
number of intelligence services and governments in the
Arab world. And it promises to get worse. This was a
completely unnecessary, distracting, expensive war
that has isolated the United States.
It seems like there has almost never been direct
acknowledgement by the White House of any policy
problems.
Yes, but they've done something else which
troubles me more than anything. They correctly read
how the various institutions of our government could
be used to stage a kind of temporary coup on a single
issue: Whether or not to go to war with Iraq.
President Bush used the intelligence system as a
blunt instrument, and they forced Congress to go along
- the Congress was in an almost impossible position.
When the president uses the maximum power of his own
office and says, "I am soberly telling you that this
is necessary for the safety of the country," you gotta
listen to the guy. At least once.
-------