Bushies' War with CIA perpetuates "Team B" conflicts of the '70's

[HereSince1628]

on edit: I don't know if LeMonde is considered conservative or not...so I'll say that I am not a conservative and I am sympathetic with the tone of the article to which I refer. My intent is to draw the readers attention to an article from March 2003 that relates to "intimigate"


Many conservatives opposed the detente that Nixon attempted to achieve with the communist powers.

To change the course of the nation Philip Golub (United States:inventing demons. LeMonde 3 March 2003; http://mondeediplo.com/2003/03/03radicalright) argued that neoconservative elements of the radical right gained access to the national intelligence community in the 1970's and "rigged data, exaggerated the threat, and abused individuals or institutions that dared to contradict them."

Notable notes from Golub's article:

Albert Wohlstetter (then at Rand Corp, and Richard Perle's father in law), published a paper in 1974 accusing the CIA of systematically underestimating Soviet Strength

To counter this sort of systematic bias George Bush Sr. (then rookie CIA director) was convinced to allow to be created intelligence "Team B" which was to provide a voice in the intelligence community to compete with the CIA. Paul Wolfowitz was a member of Team B.

In the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists 49 n 3 1993, Anne Cahn states that Team B produced ideological papers with no basis in fact that inflated the Soviet Risk. Amongst these was an argument that the Soviets were culturally predisposed to make a pre-emptive nuclear attack on the United States.

Paul Prados is cited from the same issue of BAS stating that CIA officals referred to Team B's analysis as an absolute disaster for the CIA.

....


All of this sounds terribly familiar today. Team B, an intelligence failure, has been reconstituted by some of the original players, and it has failed again. This time it exaggerated and inflated the risk of Saddam's WMD's. Not surprisingly they used their previous best tool...the fear of nuclear attack on the US.

We can only guess at the alarm bells that went off within the intelligence community as Rumsfeld created his special intelligence office OSP within Bush's Defense Dept. and pushed them to come up with intelligence that offset the systematic biases of the CIA. We can only guess how Cheney and Libby's visits to the CIA brought to mind the 1970's confrontations with Team B with the CIA's professionals. All those questions everyone talks about asking intelligence pro's probably included things like "why must you be so darned cautious?"

However, it is apparent that Team B's ol' dawgs are doing the same ol' tricks. Unfortunately for Plame and Joe Wilson, the intimidation and attacks on the CIA and its personnel are part of an historic and continuing pattern of bad behavior by Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz that emerged more than 30 years ago.

[DrBB]

1. Yup--a pretty straight line from Team B

...to the current situation, as I've commented many times. The Office of Special Plans is yet another incarnatoin.

And the pattern remains the same: Team B said CIA was grossly underestimating the Soviet threat. But as it turned out, they weren't. Indeed, the fact that CIA didn't predict the fall of the USSR is touted as one of its great failures. Yet we had these Team B guys--some who now have upper echelon positions in the Bush admin--screaming that it was even worse than the CIA thought it was.

And now of course, the same thing with OSP and Iraq. "Oh, those addle-brained softies at CIA! WE'VE got the goods! Our buddy Ahmed Chalabi told us everything! Guess what? He actually IS an Iraqi! So there!"

And once again, there was diddly squat behind it.

And what's so ghastly about all this of course is that there ARE real threats out there that are being ignored in favor of the faked-up ones, and the duplicity has undermined our ability to deal with them.

[displacedtexan]

2. all roads seem to lead to nixon

hhhhhhhhhmmmmmmmmmmmmm...

[HereSince1628]

3. Well to the '70's anyway...Karl Rove was a handyman for Don Segretti.

.

[chookie]

4. Cheney's self-selection as VP

It was fun taking a stroll down Memory Lane with you, uncovering rocks and watching what scurries out from under them.

As events have unfolded during these ghastly few years since they seized the presidency, I have wondered about the following:

Remember how smirky chose Unka Dick to interview the folks he was considering for VP, and, surprise surprise, Cheney came to conluse that he himself was the best choice for him?

smirky is truly an asshole, and ignorant, and devious, and clearly in the game to grab what he can for he and his pals. Although I think smirky spent a lot of time dreaming about fun photo ops, and stealing other people's money, etc, as president, he probably never thought about stuff like the Neo-Con agenda.

But with Cheney choosing himself as VP, he very well may have done so in order to shape smirky's agenda, and did so by reviving his old gang from Team B. Cheney and the rest of the Cabal -- who are clearly barking mad and would never be elected by an American electorate no matter HOW hypnotised by Fox News and fear -- saw this as their opportunity to have *their* administration with smirky the chimp as their ventriloquist dummy. smirky is so ignorant that he is not aware that there are other ways to conduct affairs of state, and thus happily is spoonfed whatever crap the Cabal feed him, hoping they will still let him play in the game with them.

It has always been smirky and Rove's job to create the illusion that he is other than an incompetent little creep, and I think that's all they have time to do, as it is a massive 24/7 job to keep up the illusion. But it's Cheney and the Cabal's job to Have Their Moment in History by forcing, usually by stealth (which is a Rove manuever) the Neo-Con agenda on the world. smirky doesn't know enough to know what questions to ask about, say, WMDs, when they hand him evidence, like, for example "Unka Dick -- are these documents real, or could they possibly be forged?" or "Is it possible Mr Challabi is not telling us the truth?"

Clearly, we know who the real criminals are, and I pray for the day when they will be exposed (again) and this time approriately punished.

[berry]

5. Not conservative--they publish Edward Said (or did until he died

recently). Lots of articles also on globalization issues. They have some sort of reciprocal relationship with Z-net and with the Guardian. Thanks very much for posting this!

Anyway, this is a good overview. And has a few aha! points. I hadn't considered the conservative backlash to Nixon's China policy. But it all fits. It's so easy to see what's happening now as CIA vs. neo-cons, but I wonder how many factions there are in the CIA.

BTW, you need to delete one of the "e"s in your link. It's "mondediplo" not "mondeediplo"--not that people can't figure it out, but...