Dear friends,
The indictments
rocking the current administration are only the tip of the iceberg. As Jeff
Stein, national security reporter at the Congressional Quarterly,
points out in the informative article below, the deeper story has to do with
intelligence schisms and fabrication of intelligence for the purpose of drawing
the US into war. Those in power know that war, whether justified or not,
is the most reliable profit-producing activity around. When the ruling
elite care more about profits than about doing what is best for the nation
and world, we end up in protracted wars like Vietnam and Iraq. These wars
provide huge profits to the military/industrial
complex and oil industries, yet generally create suffering and unnecessary
loss for many US families and for civilians in the war zone.
For a
wealth of information on how war is used to pad the pockets of the ruling
elite, see our War Information Center at http://www.WantToKnow.info/warinformation.
The eye-opening essay "War
is a Racket" by a highly decorated US General is particularly revealing.
By sharing this important information with our friends and colleagues, we
can put pressure on those in power to place what's best for all of us above
what brings the most profit to Wall Street. By working together, we can and
will build a brighter
future for ourselves and future generations.
With best wishes,
Fred Burks for the WantToKnow.info Team
Former language interpreter
for Presidents Bush and Clinton
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/10/26/MNG62FDUGL1.DTL
The below San Francisco Chronicle article is excerpted from the Congressional
Quarterly
Bush team sought to snuff CIA doubts
Differences over Iraq WMD latest attempt to override agency
Wednesday, October 26, 2005
Jeff Stein, Special to The Chronicle
Washington --
Whether or not Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald decides to bring indictments
in the outing of Valerie Plame as a CIA operative -- and whether or not any
crimes were actually committed -- one element of the case is central to an
understanding of what happened and why: At the time of the leak, administration
supporters of the Iraq war were determined to neutralize the CIA's doubts
about the White House case that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction,
most notably nuclear weapons.
It is also not the first time -- and it most likely won't be the last -- that
conflicts over intelligence have had momentous political consequences.
As far back as the 1950s, when the Air Force claimed there was a missile gap
between the United States and Russia, the CIA proved to be a sticking point.
Only when the agency sent its new U-2 spy plane soaring over the Soviet Union,
taking pictures of air bases and missiles from 80,000 feet, did U.S.
arms-control advocates have the ammunition they needed to beat back the furor.
In the
1970s, when President Richard Nixon's policy of détente was under attack
by some former military officials and conservative policy intellectuals, Ford
administration officials Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld were among those
challenging as too soft the CIA's estimate of Moscow's military power.
Rumsfeld
and Cheney wanted to create a "Team B," which would have access to the
CIA's data on the Soviets and issue its own conclusions. Cheney, as White
House chief of staff, and Rumsfeld, as secretary of Defense, championed Team
B, whose members included the young defense strategist Paul Wolfowitz, who
a quarter-century later would be one of the chief architects of the 2003 invasion
of Iraq.
CIA Director
William Colby rejected the Team B idea and was fired. Colby's successor as
head of the spy agency, George H.W. Bush, the current president's father,
accepted it.
Team B's conclusion that the CIA was indeed soft on the Soviets was leaked to
sympathetic journalists and generated public support for a new round of military
spending, particularly on missiles. Team B's conclusions turned out, years
later, to be false.
"In retrospect,
and with the Team B report and records now largely declassified, it is possible
to see that virtually all of Team B's criticisms ... proved to be wrong,"
Raymond Garthoff, a former U.S. ambassador to Bulgaria, wrote in a paper for
the CIA's Center for the Study of Intelligence three years ago. "On several
important specific points it wrongly criticized and 'corrected' the official
estimates, always in the direction of enlarging the impression of danger and
threat."
Another run
at controlling the CIA was taken when then-President Ronald Reagan appointed
businessman William Casey CIA director with a mandate to ride herd on supposed
agency liberals. Casey set up the irregular, covert operation led by Marine
Corps Col. Oliver North, which eventually ended in the Iran-Contra arms-for-hostages
scandal. Likewise, when Reagan's Secretary of State George Schultz wanted
to secretly back Saddam Hussein against the Iranians, Schultz bypassed the
CIA and sent Rumsfeld, then a businessman, to Baghdad to seal the deal.
The path to Plame's outing also led through Baghdad, this time via Iraqi
exile Ahmed Chalabi, who had been abandoned by the CIA in the late 1990s as too
troublesome, unreliable and corrupt.
Among Chalabi's key supporters were Rumsfeld, Cheney and Wolfowitz. When the
three came back into power in January 2001, the CIA and State Department still
refused to back Chalabi.
Cheney began visiting CIA headquarters to challenge its analysts over their
intelligence on Hussein's weapons. To Richard Kerr, the former chief of CIA
analysis who later studied the agency's pre-war reporting on Iraq, Cheney
displayed no anti-CIA animus at the time.
"My experience was to the contrary," Kerr said by e-mail. "He would not
accept all our analysis without skepticism and believed we were better on some
subjects than others. But those are the characteristics of a good customer."
Over at the
Pentagon, however, Rumsfeld was reprising Team B by creating his own intelligence
shop. The Chalabi organization's alarmist reports on Hussein's nuclear weapons,
which later proved to be false, bypassed the CIA and went directly to the
White House.
"That's why they set up an intelligence unit in [Undersecretary of Defense
Douglas] Feith's office," said intelligence historian James Bamford. "The whole
purpose was to get that kind of information and send it to Cheney."
In 2002, CIA analysts thought so little of a report that Hussein had obtained
uranium yellow cake from Niger to build a bomb that they didn't even include it
in the president's daily briefing, Bamford said.
"The Pentagon got it and flagged it to get Cheney's attention," he added,
riling the White House further. Then covert CIA officer Plame, a specialist on
weapons of mass destruction, helped arrange for her husband, career diplomat
Joseph Wilson, to investigate the yellow cake claim in Niger.
As the world now knows, Wilson reported that there was nothing to it. And
after President Bush offered the Niger intelligence as fact in his 2003 State of
the Union speech, Wilson went public with his findings in an opinion piece in
the New York Times later that year.
The fallout
may be enough to put someone in jail for a time, and it may shake up the White
House in major ways. But as past episodes have shown, even that will probably
not disarm the combatants in the long and unending war over who controls intelligence.
Jeff Stein
is National
Security Editor at Congressional Quarterly where a longer version of this
article originally appeared.
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