It is repeated endlessly that Plame was outed in "retaliation" against Wilson, or to "discredit" him.  Often it's even said that "Wilson claims" it was retaliation.  He does not.  In June and July 2003, multiple intelligence sources were speaking to the press and complaining of pressure they received from the Cheney camp, including multiple visits from Cheney himself, to "pump up" the WMD intelligence on Iraq.  Wilson himself says his wife was "hit" in order to silence these people.  She was, and it worked.

As much as we may dislike Cheney, I think it's wise of us lefties to recall how much we've despised the CIA in times past.

Mossadegh, Arbenz, Lumumba, Castro and exploding cigars, the Phoenix Program and tiger cages, Air America, William Casey and the pumping up of statistics on the Soviet Union, and for Cheney, the Agency's missing Saddam's nuclear program in the '80's -- the list goes on and on.

The CIA -- a dysfunctional bureaucracy whose senior management is so old and fat they can barely get out of their overstuffed chairs to attend to the gossip at the water cooler.

Sorry, can't type.

Should be

http://www.calvinross.com/newnormal/

Thanks.

"As much as we may dislike Cheney, I think it's wise of us lefties to recall how much we've despised the CIA in times past.  Mossadegh, Arbenz, Lumumba, Castro and exploding cigars..."

Speak for yourself, not "us".

The CIA works for the President.  All of those operations you cite were Presidential operations, mostly under Republican Presidents.  They weren't the CIA operating freelance.

"The CIA -- a dysfunctional bureaucracy whose senior management is so old and fat they can barely get out of their overstuffed chairs to attend to the gossip at the water cooler."

Maybe if you'd met some civil servants, you wouldn't slander them that way.  They are folks who wanted to serve their country.

The CIA is a big place. You have very long hallways full of amazingly knowledgable people -- several universities worth of Phds across a wide spectrum of fields. There are amazingly dedicated people both at headquarters and in the field.

That said - it is a disfunctional place as well. The problem of the politicization has been there for a long time. However, the consequences of intelligence manipulation has never been as great as in the case of Iraq.

The Cheney cabal brought a new level of ferociousness to the politicization of intelligence. But "B teams", stove-piping, and cherry picking are not new. Read Melvin Goodman's articles  (a senior analyst on Soviet policy at the CIA from 1966 to 1986) about earlier episodes of politicized intelligence. The consequences of episodes of this during the cold war were deficit spending, lost opportunities, and setting ourselves up for blowback. As great as those costs were, they pale in comparison to what we currently face.

I think the key is effective oversight that ensures the broad professionals intelligence community in which we've invested many billions of dollars is allowed to provide truely independent assessments. It has occurred to me that both the neocons and those in the intelligence community who had more cautious views about going to war with Iraq would both agree with this statement: "If the intelligence bureaucracy had been allowed to work, we would never be in Iraq."

Maybe if you'd met some civil servants, you wouldn't slander them that way.  They are folks who wanted to serve their country.  petey

Well, petey, the CIA Inspector General doesn't seem to agree with you -- although you're sure on board with Porter Goss.

Let's see.  Khalid Al-Midhar and Nawaf Alhazmi? CIA knows the al Qaeda operatives and future hijackers have entered the United States (LAX) but just can't seem to get itself together enough to notify the FBI.

Ah well; at least they wanted to serve their country.  Maybe they just couldn't.  Old and fat? 

The CIA did a lot of reprehensible (it's in fashion so I'll use it too) things. But the things Ellen cites--operational stuff from the exploding-cigar crowd--is not what Cheney objects to. He and his buds despise the analytical people there because they don't like their meat raw and bloody the way he does. And as far as they're concerned, Brewster Jennings, technically in ops, might as well have been analytical because their job was to do wussy things like track WMD shipments and get them seized, not to make things go bang. Nobody's going to miss them, you bet.

On the other hand, bush and his family, and Cheney too, can't get enough of ops. Ops did all that great regime-change stuff Ellen mentioned, plus a whole bunch of other things they can't tell anyone about. Porter Goss, I think, is there to destroy the analysts and to unleash the exploding cigars.

. The point raised that the CIA did alot of stupid things on behalf of past White Houses can't be denied, they also took the fall, when those things blew up in everyones faces. I saw something today, I forget where that the Bushites were upset that the CIA missed the 9/11 attacks. "Bin Laden determined to attack...." seemed pretty good, given the nature of the enemy. I guess W and Condi were needing his e-mail address.

Bill Moyers has a post on the HuPo on the current landscape. He hits one of his important themes. These guys hate government, they came to destroy it, it wound it, to leave it crippled, and bankrupt. They have been engaged among themselves for the last 25 years in a race to the extremes of their party. Just look at Jean Schmidt, that's one scary bitch.

I think the importance of the Plame case is due to the fact that what Joe Wilson reported on, if Iraq was buying yellow cake or not, was the key argument that Bush was using to invade Iraq. It all goes right back to WMD. This is why it was so important to discredit anyone who got in their way and it is also why the whole thing is still important today. It was Bush’s main argument for war.

Since Bush kept putting pressure on the CIA to come up with “evidence” for WMD and a connection between Saddam and al Queda it is laughable that they would then turn around and blame the CIA for giving them information that they then personally cherry picked for their own pleasure and enjoyment in order to take the country to the land of Oz.

Anyone know how to get back to Kansas?

I don't think there are any illusions about the CIA on this site but when they provide good information/analysis and it is ignored because it is not the answer the adminstration or the VP wanted then we should all have a problem even good old self described for our purposes "lefties" like Ellen 

Ellen uses "us lefties" perhaps for comical effect. It would be more convincing if her posts honestly and simply made the conservative points she likes to make.

My take on the outing of Plame is that it was a desperate attempt to conceal the fact that Cheney had been briefed on Joe Wilson's trip to Niger IMMEDIATELY after Wilson's return to the US -- in March '02.

That is EXACTLY what Wilson claimed in his NYT OpEd, and if true, it would be strong evidence that the "smoking gun ... mushroom cloud" hysteria (many months later) was a willful and deliberate BushCo lie.

Recall that the administration's reaction to Wilson's OpEd was primarily focused on denying that Cheney had any knowledge of Wilson's trip. However, no one could possibly believe such a story if Joe Wilson was dispatched to Niger in response to an inquiry by Cheney. If the VP asked the question, there can be no doubt that the  VP got the answer. Promptly!

Thus, they needed a cover story to explain why Wilson went to Niger without the knowledge of anyone in the administration.  Valerie just happened to be handy -- she sent hubby on "a junket" ...uh, maybe because he needed  some frequent flier miles.

Not for revenge, not to discredit Wilson's (un)findings, but to conceal the fact that the yellowcake bu__sh__! was a pack of DELIBERATE lies.

Col Bat


"An awkward, unscientific lie is often as ineffectual as the truth."
-- Mark Twain

We had one knowledge base before the Congressional vote forced Saddam to blink and readmit Inspectors and another four months later. That is the doughnut hole and one in which exactly one person was strutting around insisting "the decision has not been made" and "I get to decide".

Congress gave the keys to the car to Bush in Fall 2002, he started the car in March 2003. In between was a lifetime of intelligence, much of it gained right on the ground in Iraq. Not everything has swirled down the Memory Hole. This is Bush's War. And at one point he was bragging about that exact point.

"I get to decide". He did. And he doesn't get a "Share the Blame, Get Out of Jail (Iraq) Card" here. Becuase you can bet he wouldn't have shared the credit if it had come out the way the PNAC boys bet it would.

... not to mention Operation Mongoose and involvement at some level in the JFK assassination and coverup.

... but let's not deny that OPS has done some really rotten stuff. Check out the involvement of the Operation Mongoose group in the JFK assassination and cover-up.

"... but let's not deny that OPS has done some really rotten stuff."

No doubt.  My point is that the CIA is like a gun - it's value neutral.  What matters is who wields the gun.

What the CIA did during the Eisenhower administration is the responsibility of the Eisenhower administration, not the CIA.  Most of those operations wouldn't have come off if it had been a Truman or Stevenson administration.  (Truman had already vetoed plans to fuck around in Iran.)

"Check out the involvement of the Operation Mongoose group in the JFK assassination and cover-up."

My reading of the coup in Dallas is that the operation came out of the Pentagon, not Langley.

You know, I tossed this whole mess around in my mind yesterday. I reached the point that I was willing to accept that perhaps it wasn't blatant lying. That it was all a matter of the kind of incompetance we've grown to expect from this administration. That they rushed to war based on flimsy evidence at a time when there was no immediacy. They whipped up the rhetoric, taking those "maybes" and "potentials" cited in intelligence reports to assert "clear evidence" of WMDs and al Qaeda links. I was happy to accept incompetance as good enough to justify continued criticism of the administration.

No more. It now becomes apparent they shopped for a friendly, loyal stooge who would tell them what they wanted to hear by forming the secret intelligence group outside the CIA, with Feith as the leader. In other words, they didn't tell Feith to gather intelligence, they told him to find something to prove their already formulated case, and like a good protege, he did just that.

The most chilling words I've read are those scribbled by Cheney on the Feith report: "This is very good indeed … Encouraging … Not like the crap we are all so used to getting out of CIA."

Good for what? If the CIA wasn't giving them what they needed to justify war, then it must be crap? My impression is they weren't even concerned about verifying the Feith information as long as it was "encouraging." And they continued to ignore the CIA's claim that the Prague meeting with Atta was impossible, even though the CIA could definitively show it was not possible.

NO doubt about it. They lied.

My thought exactly, dzonko. The answer, of course, is: in the sense that it provides justification for a course of action which one is already inclined to pursue -- namely, lauching a war against Saddam's regime.

Is it still possible to defend Cheney's honesty on matters of pre-war intelligence?

As he launches increasingly rabid attacks on his critics, I'm really starting to wonder what makes this guy tick.  What went on inside this guy's skull when he circumvented the CIA to promote the most paranoid estimates available of Iraqi weapons and terror ties, and what is he thinking now as he tries to blame everything on "bad intelligence" from the CIA?

I think the key to understanding Cheney lies in his recent speech where he emphasizes that the "burden of proof" was on Saddam to prove that he had no weapons of mass destruction.  

Given the impossibility of proving a negative, and the lunacy of this guilty-until-proven-innocent attitude, this comment makes it abundantly clear that war in Iraq was probably a foregone conclusion on 9/12/01.  But more importantly, this shows us that Cheney viewed his own role in the leadup to war as that of a prosecutor in a kangaroo court.

He never had any interest in developing an accurate intelligence estimate to promote an honest national conversation about the case for war.  The Bush Administration had decided to take out Saddam, and Cheney was intent on building the strongest possible case against Saddam.  Every damning piece of evidence, however unreliable, was included.  Every doubt, caveat, and piece of exculpatory evidence was sanitized from the evidence presented to the public.  He intended to convince Congress, the elite media, and the rest of America to invade Iraq.  No more, no less.

From this particular frame of mind, Cheney has done nothing dishonest or wrong.  He did his job successfully, made his case, and the suckers bought it.

This runs much deeper than spin and manipulation.  This is about raw power.  In this neocon worldview, the President of the United States leads the world by fiat, and assembles evidence only when necessary to convince people that he's right.  The intelligence was never intended to be used as the basis for a rational conclusion about whether Saddam was a genuine threat.  It was all just evidence for the prosecution.

And THAT is why these people are dangerous.

I think all of us are perhaps missing the obvious here: this was not so much a strike against Wilson/Plame as it was against the CIA, and more specifically, Brewster Jennings, because they were too effective in stopping WMDs in Iraq. Thus taking away the primary rationale for the invasion.

I expected BushCo to plant WMDs, and then "discover" them. Why didn't they?

From the Wayne Madsen Report http://www.waynemadsenreport.com/

    November 11, 2005 -- New aspect of Valerie Plame/Brewster Jennings exposure revealed. According to U.S. intelligence sources, the White House exposure of  Valerie Plame and her Brewster Jennings & Associates was intended to retaliate against  the CIA's work in limiting the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. WMR has  reported in the past on this aspect of the scandal. In addition to identifying the involvement of individuals in the White House who were close to key players in nuclear  proliferation, the CIA Counter-Proliferation Division prevented the shipment of binary VX  nerve gas from Turkey into Iraq in November 2002. The Brewster Jennings network in Turkey  was able to intercept this shipment which was intended to be hidden in Iraq and later used  as evidence that Saddam Hussein was in possession of weapons of mass destruction. U.S.  intelligence sources revealed that this was a major reason the Bush White House targeted  Plame and her network.

CIA counter-proliferation  network prevented a WMD "salting" operation by Bush White House in Iraq.