http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1261721,00.htmlThe Senate's report is very revealing about Bush and his apostles - but the clues are buried deep
-snip-
What the report does not note is the name or background of the NIE's director: Robert Walpole, a former national intelligence officer on nuclear weapons, a factotum of the secretary of defence, Donald Rumsfeld. Walpole had demonstrated his bona fides in an incident that prefigures the WMD debacle, the writing of the alarmist report of the Rumsfeld commission in 1998, which asserted the ballistic missile threat from "rogue states" was imminent. That claim, used to bolster the case for a Star Wars programme, had been rejected by a similar commission two years earlier.
-snip-
But buried in the appendix, Senator John D Rockefeller, Democrat of West Virginia, included an account of an internal operation against the CIA conducted by the under-secretary of defence, Douglas Feith, an entrenched neo-conservative.
While the CIA composed a report on the Iraq-al-Qaida connection, which the administration still trumpets, and for which the intelligence community could never find proof, Feith held briefings trashing the CIA on its impending report. Then, without informing the CIA, Feith's version was presented to the deputy national security adviser and vice-president.
Colin Powell put himself in the hands of people he hoped would protect him. Predictably, he was betrayed. Before his February 5 2002 speech to the United Nations, making the case for WMD, Powell spent days at the CIA. He was given disinformation about mobile biological weapons laboratories, which came from Iraqi exile sources that the CIA didn't trust. The day before Powell's speech, one CIA official wanted to warn him. Another replied, "As I said last night, let's keep in mind the fact that this war's going to happen regardless of what
said or didn't say, and the Powers That Be probably aren't terribly interested in whether knows what he's talking about." Powell was sent before the world to speak the falsehoods with CIA director George Tenet sitting behind him. Never before has a secretary of state, the highest ranking cabinet officer, been treated with such contemptuous manipulation by his own administration.
-snip-
--------------------------------
but my dear, he swallowed and took it and still does what they want.
you can't get out of gangs alive.