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.”
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
but you see, it was Bush's fault.
"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.
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.
Yawn. Haven't we been around this block at least two or three times? Including a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing or two?
Thanks for posting all of that!
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.
Exactly--He preferred Kerry's "nuanced" approach. The American voters didn't. But he and his cronies have Pincus' shoulder to cry on.
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.”
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.
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.
Ping.