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Ex-CIA official faults use of data on Iraq
msnbc ^ | Feb. 9, 2006 | By Walter Pincus

Posted on 02/09/2006 10:12:01 PM PST by fight_truth_decay

The former CIA official who coordinated U.S. intelligence on the Middle East until last year has accused the Bush administration of "cherry-picking" intelligence on Iraq to justify a decision it had already reached to go to war, and of ignoring warnings that the country could easily fall into violence and chaos after an invasion to overthrow Saddam Hussein. Paul R. Pillar, who was the national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia from 2000 to 2005, acknowledges the U.S. intelligence agencies' mistakes in concluding that Hussein's government possessed weapons of mass destruction. But he said those misjudgments did not drive the administration's decision to invade. "Official intelligence on Iraqi weapons programs was flawed, but even with its flaws, it was not what led to the war," Pillar wrote in the upcoming issue of the journal Foreign Affairs. Instead, he asserted, the administration "went to war without requesting -- and evidently without being influenced by -- any strategic-level intelligence assessments on any aspect of Iraq."

(Excerpt) Read more at msnbc.msn.com ...


TOPICS: Extended News; Foreign Affairs; Government; News/Current Events; War on Terror
KEYWORDS: cia; duplicate; marcruelgerecht; paulpillar; paulrpillar; pillar; pincus; walterpincus
Flash back to September 27, 2004
The CIA's War Against President Bush
powerlineblog.com/archives

CUT

"We have talked repeatedly about the guerrilla war that the CIA, long a Democratic stronghold, has conducted for years against the Bush administration. Increasingly, that war is breaking out into the open, and we are sorry to see that our old friend (and Deacon's former roommate) Paul Pillar appears to be playing a key role. Robert Novak reports:

"A few hours after George W. Bush dismissed a pessimistic CIA report on Iraq as ''just guessing,'' the analyst who identified himself as its author told a private dinner last week of secret, unheeded warnings years ago about going to war in Iraq. This exchange leads to the unavoidable conclusion that the president of the United States and the Central Intelligence Agency are at war with each other."

"Paul R. Pillar, the CIA's national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia, sat down Tuesday night in a large West Coast city with a select group of private citizens. He was not talking off the cuff. Relying on a multi-paged, single-spaced memorandum, Pillar said he and his colleagues concluded early in the Bush administration that military intervention in Iraq would intensify anti-American hostility throughout Islam. "

"The Bush-CIA tension escalated Sept. 15 when the New York Times reported a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) that was circulated in August (not July, as the newspaper reported), spelling out ''a dark assessment of Iraq'' with civil war as the ''worst case'' outcome. The NIE was prepared by Pillar, and well-placed sources believe Pillar leaked it, though he denied that at Tuesday night's dinner."

"For President Bush to publicly write off a CIA paper as just guessing is without precedent. For the agency to go semi-public is not only unprecedented but shocking."

"The CIA official spokesman said Pillar's West Coast appearance was approved by his ''management team'' at Langley as part of an ongoing ''outreach'' program. However, the spokesman said, Pillar told him that the fact I knew his name meant somebody had violated the off-the-record nature of his remarks. In other words, the CIA bureaucracy wants a license to criticize the president and the former DCI without being held accountable."

"Through most of the Bush administration, the CIA high command has been engaged in a bitter struggle with the Pentagon."

CUT

"It was widely reported that the CIA had not a single human agent in Iraq as of Sept. 11, 2001. That alone shows the magnitude of the failure of those people now leaking and whining as they finally leave."

"In July, 2004 Marc Ruel Gerecht wrote a critique of the CIA in the Weekly Standard accusing it of failing to develop the operational methods necessary to penetrate its targets. Gerecht was a former CIA officer now with the American Enterprise Institute."

"He believed the core problem facing the CIA was there was "no way that case officers--who still today are overwhelmingly deployed overseas under official cover or, worse, at home in ever-larger task forces--can possibly meet, recruit, or neutralize the most dangerous targets in a sensible, sustainable way." Most of America's agents were foreigners on the periphery of enemy secrets handled by American bureaucrats unable or unwilling to make the make the final run in."

"When I entered the CIA in 1985, Aldrich Ames's treason and the Iran-contra scandal were in gestation, yet headquarters in Langley, Virginia, seemed a happy place. ... But in practice the good old days were mostly a myth. For the Directorate of Operations, the 1980s were years of routine operational dishonesty, whose principal source was a defective system for determining who got promoted."

"Under this system, thousands of agents were recruited abroad neither for their intelligence-reporting potential nor their operational utility. They were put on the books--case officers often referred to the sport as "collecting scalps"--because that is how CIAoperatives earned promotion. ... For most case officers, the Cold War was a backdrop for the constant search for an easy "developmental," somebody who could be quickly turned into a "recruitment" for the annual performance report. ..."

"It is also absolutely true that George Tenet's CIA failed to penetrate Saddam Hussein's inner circle. And only penetrations at the highest political and scientific levels could have possibly given us evidence that Saddam Hussein had decided to give up his billion-dollar, decades-long quest to develop weapons of mass destruction. (And note the plural "penetrations": Against such a proficient counterespionage regime, there would have to be more than one penetration, assessed for protracted periods of time, before it would be possible to believe that the information from these assets was not disinformation.) But it is also true that the CIA failed to penetrate Moscow's inner circle in the Cold War and that the great agents we did have (the most valuable were probably scientists) were all volunteers."

"The CIA was not similarly lucky with Saddam Hussein's regime, whose Orwellian grip on Iraqi society was as savage as Joseph Stalin's on the USSR. It's a very good bet that the CIA has not had a single penetration in the inner circle of any of its totalitarian adversaries. The same is probably true for the French, British, and Israeli foreign intelligence services. In other words, one simply cannot judge the caliber of a Western espionage service by its ability to penetrate the power circles of totalitarian regimes. The difficulties are just overwhelming."

"One can, however, grade intelligence services on whether they have established operational methods that would maximize the chances of success against less demanding targets--for example, against Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda, which is by definition an ecumenical organization constantly searching for holy-warrior recruits. It is by this standard that George Tenet failed and the CIA will continue to fail, assuming it maintains its current practices. But the odds are poor that the White House, Congress, and the press will condemn the Agency for its failure to develop a workable strategy and tactics against the Islamic terrorist target." - http://discerningtexan.blogspot.com/2004_11_01_discerningtexan_archive.html

1 posted on 02/09/2006 10:12:04 PM PST by fight_truth_decay
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To: fight_truth_decay

but you see, it was Bush's fault.


2 posted on 02/09/2006 10:14:54 PM PST by ferri (Be Politically Incorrect: Support the Constitution!)
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To: All

"It was widely reported that the CIA had not a single human agent in Iraq as of Sept. 11, 2001. That alone shows the magnitude of the failure of those people now leaking and whining as they finally leave."

There Period.


3 posted on 02/09/2006 10:14:54 PM PST by TheSpy
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To: fight_truth_decay

So his complaint amounts to: "Yes, the CIA was wrong about Iraq. But what caused us going to war is that W didn't ask for our opinion." Wow.


4 posted on 02/09/2006 10:20:04 PM PST by ModelBreaker
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To: fight_truth_decay

Yawn. Haven't we been around this block at least two or three times? Including a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing or two?


5 posted on 02/09/2006 10:48:48 PM PST by hsalaw
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To: fight_truth_decay

Thanks for posting all of that!


6 posted on 02/09/2006 10:51:37 PM PST by nopardons
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To: fight_truth_decay

With the Attorney General (finally) looking into the source(s) of damaging leaks of classified information, this may be an attempt to firmly establish this Pillar's "whistle blower" bona fides, so that he and the MSM can claim that he's being "witch hunted" and "persecuted" if he's indicted and sent to the pokey.


7 posted on 02/09/2006 11:08:47 PM PST by pawdoggie
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To: pawdoggie

Think you got it PD.


8 posted on 02/10/2006 12:04:33 AM PST by MNJohnnie ("Vote Democrat-We are the party of reactionary inertia".)
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To: fight_truth_decay

Exactly--He preferred Kerry's "nuanced" approach. The American voters didn't. But he and his cronies have Pincus' shoulder to cry on.


9 posted on 02/10/2006 12:20:53 AM PST by the Real fifi
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To: fight_truth_decay

Paul R. Pillar, former deputy chief of counterterrorism at the CIA under Clinton.

According to Paul R. Pillar of the CIA’s counter terrorism centre, “fewer Americans die from it than drown in bathtubs.”

10 posted on 02/10/2006 12:32:46 AM PST by kcvl
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"nonpartisan" Brookings Institution


Vice President Al Gore delivered a campaign speech at Brookings Institution. The speech, along with campaign banners hung on the walls, was unusual for a tax-exempt and officially nonpartisan think tank.



The current president is Strobe Talbott, who previously was the Deputy Secretary of State in the Clinton administration and an editor at Time Magazine.



Brookings currently has over 140 resident and nonresident scholars. Like Talbott, many of them served in the Carter and Clinton administrations, including Charles L. Schultze, Alice Rivlin, Kenneth Pollack, Robert Litan, Susan Rice, Christopher Foreman, William Galston, and Isabel Sawhill. Some of its notable resident scholars include:

* E.J. Dionne, Washington Post columnist
* Michael O'Hanlon, expert on terrorism and foreign affairs
* Alice Rivlin, expert on the United States budget process, Clinton Administration
* Stephen Hess, Distinguished Research Professor of Media and Public Affairs, The George Washington University




Quote, November 4, 2002

Michael O'Hanlon

“The claims of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney that Iraq might join with terrorists to strike the United States at any time are far-fetched. Very little about the historical record or current intelligence lends credence to that view.” Therefore his pursuit of such weapons are aimed merely at deterring US interventionism in the Middle East. The op-ed concluded, “Mr. Cheney and Mr. Rumsfeld would be more credible and more effective in making their case for threatening force against Mr. Hussein if they cut back on the overdramatizations and stuck to the facts.” [Baltimore Sun, 9/26/02, Los Angeles Times, 11/4/02]


11 posted on 02/10/2006 12:46:25 AM PST by kcvl
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To: kcvl

This overeducated twit wrote in Security Management for May 2001, "Is the Terrorist Threat Misunderstood?" The title is autobiographical. He has claimed that terrorism cannot be defeated only controlled. If that is the case, what happened to the Molly Maguires, the Sydney Ducks, the Red Army Brigades, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the SS, etc., etc., etc.


12 posted on 02/10/2006 5:36:32 AM PST by gaspar
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To: fight_truth_decay

Pillar recommends that the intelligence community be granted autonomous status, like the Federal Reserve, so that they are not subordinate to the corrupting politicization of the ignoramuses who move into and out of the White House every few years. That way, their oracular pronouncements and policy preferences would be ritualistcally obeyed by their inferiors at the WH and Pentagon, without such unqualified nitwits as Dick Cheney or Don Rumsfeld being allowed to ask pesky questions about the sufficiency of their reporting and reasoning on al Qaeda-Saddam ties.

A more thoroughly asinine and blindly arrogant suggestion from a more self-important score-settling popinjay bureaucrat can hardly be imagined. Among many other idiotic aspects, it would require a neutering of the President's explicit Constitutional authority as Commander in Chief.


13 posted on 02/10/2006 5:55:07 AM PST by Buckhead
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To: fight_truth_decay
As I posted on an earlier thread:

Paul R. Pillar, who was the national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia from 2000 to 2005

Pillar's critique is one of the most severe indictments of White House actions by a former Bush official since Richard C. Clarke, a former National Security Council staff member, went public with his criticism of the administration's handling of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and its failure to deal with the terrorist threat beforehand.

Let's see, who was the president in 2000 when Mr. Pillar was appointed to this post... mmmmm.... that would be the stain, Slick Willie himself ... so please, don't call this assclown a former Bush official.

In todays' world I believe both he and Clarke should be referred to as sleepers; left behind by the previous occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

14 posted on 02/10/2006 8:17:35 AM PST by tx_eggman (Islamofascism ... bringing you the best of the 7th century for the past 1300 years.)
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To: piasa

Ping.


15 posted on 02/10/2006 10:20:19 AM PST by Fedora
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To: gaspar

"He has claimed that terrorism cannot be defeated only controlled."

Well, actually, I sort of agree with this statement. While certain terror groups can be crushed, it is naive to say that "terrorism" can be completely eliminated. There are too many angry people in the world and there always will be.


16 posted on 02/10/2006 11:45:11 AM PST by Maine For Bush
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To: Maine For Bush

Sorry, but there is a great difference between your use of the word "eliminated" and his use of the word "defeated".


17 posted on 02/11/2006 6:25:51 AM PST by gaspar
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To: Maine For Bush

Sorry, but there is a great difference between your use of the word "eliminated" and his use of the word "defeated".


18 posted on 02/11/2006 6:26:56 AM PST by gaspar
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To: gaspar

Fine... I will re-state my opinion: It is naive to say that "terrorism" can be completely defeated. To me, the point stays valid.


19 posted on 02/12/2006 6:37:16 AM PST by Maine For Bush
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