CIA Dirty Tricks?
The New York Post’s Deborah Orin has written a great companion article to Clarice Feldman’s commentary in RealClearPolitics. Here’s a sampling of Ms. Orin’s writings:
CIA agents on the front lines in Iraq and Afghanistan have done amazing, brave things. But when it comes to intelligence, the agency keeps getting the big things wrong. It missed 9/11. The Iraq war began a day early when then-CIA chief George Tenet claimed to have “pretty darn good intelligence” on where Saddam Hussein was hiding out; it turned out to be pretty darn wrong intelligence. And Tenet wrongly insisted to a skeptical President Bush that CIA had a “slam-dunk case” on Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction.
This fits in nicely with Ms. Feldman’s article. The CIA is mounting a misinformation campaign to distract people from their legendary screw-ups. If the results didn’t have such dangerous consquences, it’d be laughable.
What’s worse is that they’ve now tried to hide their mistakes by letting a liar tell whoppers of unthinkable proportions. When they ‘recruited’ (annointed is more appropriate)Joe Wilson to get a firsthand look at whether an Iraqi trade delegation had visited Niger, they recruited a political hack with a partisan point to prove.
Keep in mind Ms. Feldman’s questioning the logic behind the CIA not forcing Wilson to sign a non-disclosure agreement prior to the trip. Let’s also not forget that CIA referrals to the Justice Department aren’t supposed to be made public. Why wasn’t this referral kept hush-hush? Finally, let’s not forget that the CIA never had Wilson submit a written report and they also didn’t tell the White House about this trip. they didn’t know about it until Wilson blindsided them with his “Bush lied” op-ed in the NY Times where he said that Bush lied because Iraq hadn’t purchased yellowcake from Niger.
Ms. Orin continues:
But the CIA also, as Moynihan noted wryly to columnist Mary McGrory, has a history of covering its butt by coming up with “revisionist rumbles” to claim it had really gotten things right somewhere, buried in a secret footnote. Would Moynihan see the leak case as a familiar tale of the agency again getting things wrong, and looking for someone else to blame?
“Revisionist rumbles” is an interesting and apt description of the CIA’s actions. They aren’t so much interested in the truth, it seems, as it’s interested in obfuscation and deception. I can understand that to an extent due to the nature of their work but that can’t be SOP when dealing with the President.
Remember, they were the ones who (along with every other intel agency in the world) had insisted that Saddam had WMD’s, but no WMD’s were being found. Having Wilson go public was very useful to the CIA, especially the division where his wife worked, because it served to shift blame for failed “slam dunk” intelligence claims away from the agency. To say that Bush “twisted” intelligence was to presume, falsely, that the CIA had gotten it right.
Ms. Orin, it’s impossible to forget those monumental screw-ups.
Cross-posted at Let Freedom Ring