NYT: An Inquiry That's Awash in Disputes at the Outset

[kskiska]

WASHINGTON, Feb. 1 — Intelligence officials have long been wary of outsiders' second-guessing. But they have reluctantly begun to acknowledge that a major overhaul could be in order after what may be two of the greatest intelligence setbacks in decades: the failure to anticipate the Sept. 11 attacks and the misjudgment of Iraq's weapons stockpiles. They hope the independent commission President Bush will appoint can offer them more help and less finger pointing.

Within the Central Intelligence Agency in particular, the words intelligence review still conjure bitter memories from the 1970's and the Congressional inquiry by the committee headed by Senator Frank Church, whose effort to unearth abuses and impose reforms is remembered by many as an inquisition. The kinds of solutions recommended for spy agencies by Congressional panels and blue-ribbon commissions have been derided, then and since, by many intelligence professionals as naïve or unworkable.

"Unless we're prepared for another intelligence failure, we need to get about the business of improving our intelligence service," said Representative Porter J. Goss, the Florida Republican who, as chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and as a former spy, is perhaps the C.I.A.'s most important ally on Capitol Hill.

Mr. Goss is among those who have argued that any new intelligence inquiry should look forward, rather than dwell on any past mistakes.

That approach, of course, is the most politically palatable one, and it is the one that raises fewest hackles among intelligence professionals.

Others, including Senator John D. Rockefeller IV of West Virginia, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, have made clear that they will seek to ensure that any inquiry takes the Bush administration to task for building what they call a flawed case that the United States needed to act quickly to wage war against Iraq.

more…
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/02/international/middleeast/02ASSE.html?hp

[grytpype]

1. Get this: the CIA is not taking this lying down!!!

In a sign of the continuing defensiveness within intelligence agencies, senior intelligence officials even this weekend were refusing to acknowledge that the C.I.A. and others got it wrong when it came to Iraq and its stockpiles of illicit weapons, days after David A. Kay, the former chief weapons inspector, drew that conclusion in public.

[Beetwasher]

2. The Battle Is Joined: Clash of The Titans

This is going to be very interestinf...

[frank frankly]

4. that is how I see it, too

good to have some of the dirty ops crew on our side...or at least against the same enemy.

you don't ratfuck the cia.

[Beetwasher]

5. You Know What's Great About This Article Though?

They're tying it together: Intel failures, 9/11 and Iraq. That's big...

[Democat]

3. "They hope the independent commission President Bush will appoint"

Bush will appoint someone to investigate himself, yet they call it independent?

[Oilwellian]

6. I'm re-posting this article

I posted this article last week and it sank very quickly due to the NH primary. It will explain in great detail why Goss doesn't want to "dwell on any past mistakes." It's long but well worth the read to get a better understanding of how the neo-cons have controlled the CIA's analytical division for decades.

<snip>
Dating Back to Watergate

Though one cost of corrupting U.S. intelligence can now be counted in the growing U.S. death toll in Iraq, the origins of the current problem can be traced back to the mid-1970s, when conservatives were engaged in fierce rear-guard defenses after the twin debacles of the Vietnam War and Watergate. In 1974, after Republican President Richard Nixon was driven from office over the Watergate political-spying scandal, the Republicans suffered heavy losses in congressional races. The next year, the U.S. –backed government in South Vietnam fell.

At this crucial juncture, a group of influential conservatives coalesced around a strategy of accusing the CIA’s analytical division of growing soft on communism. These conservatives – led by the likes of Richard Pipes, Paul Nitze, William Van Cleave, Max Kampelman, Eugene Rostow, Elmo Zumwalt and Richard Allen – claimed that the CIA’s Soviet analysts were ignoring Moscow’s aggressive strategy for world domination. This political assault put in play one of the CIA’s founding principles – objective analysis.

Since its creation in 1947, the CIA had taken pride in maintaining an analytical division that stayed above the political fray. The CIA analysts – confident if not arrogant about their intellectual skills – prided themselves in bringing unwanted news to the president’s door. Those reports included an analysis of Soviet missile strength that contradicted John F. Kennedy’s “missile gap” rhetoric or the debunking of Lyndon Johnson’s assumptions about the effectiveness of bombing in Vietnam. While the CIA’s operational division got itself into trouble with risky schemes, the analytical division maintained a fairly good record of scholarship and objectivity.

But that tradition came under attack in 1976 when conservative outsiders demanded and got access to the CIA’s strategic intelligence on the Soviet Union. Their goal was to contest the analytical division’s assessments of Soviet capabilities and intentions. The conservatives saw the CIA’s tempered analysis of Soviet behavior as the underpinning of then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s strategy of détente, the gradual normalizing of relations with the Soviet Union. Détente was, in effect, a plan to negotiate an end to the Cold War or at least its most dangerous elements.

This CIA view of a tamer Soviet Union had enemies inside Gerald Ford’s administration. Hard-liners, such as William J. Casey, John Connally, Clare Booth Luce and Edward Teller, sat on the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. Another young hard-liner, Dick Cheney, was Ford’s chief of staff. Donald Rumsfeld was then – as he is today – the secretary of defense.

Team B

The concept of a conservative counter-analysis, which became known as “Team B,” had been opposed by the previous CIA director, William Colby, as in inappropriate intrusion into the integrity of the CIA’s analytical product. But the new CIA director, a politically ambitious George H.W. Bush, was ready to acquiesce to the right-wing pressure.

<much more>
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2003/102203.html

[Zhade]

8. This is how you beat B*sh.

For his part, the younger George Bush has shown little but disdain for any information that puts his policies or “gut” judgments in a negative light. In that sense, Bush’s thin skin toward contradiction can’t be separated...

Just tell him, over and over, exactly how and why he's wrong. Always wrong. All his life.

Keep stabbing him with this truth, and he'll get so angry and out of control that he'll hang himself. He'll blow like Chernobyl and slip up in a big way. Maybe even say something that will destroy his loyal followers' deeply-held, and deeply flawed, beliefs in him.

[Seldona]

7. Bush is going to lose. And big.

We should constantly be reviewing our policies, constantly be looking at those sanctions to make sure that they are directed toward that purpose. That purpose is every bit as important now as it was ten years ago when we began it. And frankly they have worked. He has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbors. So in effect, our policies have strengthened the security of the neighbors of Iraq...

Powell from http://www.thememoryhole.org/war/powell-no-wmd.htm


CIA Intelligence Reports Seven Months Before 9/11 Said Iraq Posed No Threat To U.S., Containment Was Working

By Jason Leopold
Seven months before two-dozen or so al-Qaida terrorists hijacked three commercial airplanes and flew two of the aircrafts directly into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, killing 3,000 innocent civilians, CIA Director George Tenet, testified before Congress that Iraq posed no immediate threat to the United States or to other countries in the Middle East.

http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0306/S00211.htm

A couple seconds on Google turns this shit up.

I just don't see how they will walk away from it all.

If that happens, there really is no justice.

[Gingersnapsback]

9. Living wages

I know someone that is a Muslim, born in Egypt, speaks Arabic, is a US citizen, college grad with degree in International Relations, and strong computer skills. He applied for a position with the CIA. They told him the pay was $40K, he laughed and is successful elsewhere. I couldn't quite believe it, but I didn't doubt it was close to the true amount. Does anyone know what they actually pay a new recruit?