Posted on 10/09/2004 11:40:34 PM PDT by hippy hate me
Edited on 10/09/2004 11:48:58 PM PDT by Admin Moderator. [history]
A powerful "old guard" faction in the Central Intelligence Agency has launched an unprecedented campaign to undermine the Bush administration with a battery of damaging leaks and briefings about Iraq.
The White House is incensed by the increasingly public sniping from some senior intelligence officers who, it believes, are conducting a partisan operation to swing the election on November 2 in favour of John Kerry, the Democratic candidate, and against George W Bush.
Head to head: Bush and Kerry
Jim Pavitt, a 31-year CIA veteran who retired as a departmental chief in August, said that he cannot recall a time of such "viciousness and vindictiveness" in a battle between the White House and the agency.
John Roberts, a conservative security analyst, commented bluntly: "When the President cannot trust his own CIA, the nation faces dire consequences."
Relations between the White House and the agency are widely regarded as being at their lowest ebb since the hopelessly botched Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba by CIA-sponsored exiles under President John F Kennedy in 1961.
There is anger within the CIA that it has taken all the blame for the failings of pre-war intelligence on Saddam Hussein's weapons programmes.
Former senior CIA officials argue that so-called "neo-conservative" hawks such as the vice president, Dick Cheney, the secretary of defence, Donald Rumsfeld, and his number three at the defence department, Douglas Feith, have prompted the ill-feeling by demanding "politically acceptable" results from the agency and rejecting conclusions they did not like. Yet Colin Powell, the less hardline secretary of state, has also been scathing in his criticism of pre-war intelligence briefings.
The leaks are also a shot across the bows of Porter Goss, the agency's new director and a former Republican congressman. He takes over with orders from the White House to end the in-fighting and revamp the troubled spy agency as part of a radical overhaul of the American intelligence world.
Bill Harlow, the former CIA spokesman who left with the former director George Tenet in July, acknowledged that there had been leaks from within the agency. "The intelligence community has been made the scapegoat for all the failings over Iraq," he said. "It deserves some of the blame, but not all of it. People are chafing at that, and that's the background to these leaks."
Fighting to defend their patch ahead of the future review, anti-Bush CIA operatives have ensured that Iraq remains high on the election campaign agenda long after Republican strategists such as Karl Rove, the President's closest adviser, had hoped that it would fade from the front pages.
In the latest clash, a senior former CIA agent revealed that Mr Cheney "blew up" when a report into links between the Saddam regime and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the terrorist behind the kidnappings and beheadings of hostages in Iraq, including the Briton Kenneth Bigley, proved inconclusive.
Other recent leaks have included the contents of classified reports drawn up by CIA analysts before the invasion of Iraq, warning the White House about the dangers of post-war instability. Specifically, the reports said that rogue Ba'athist elements might team up with terrorist groups to wage a guerrilla war.
Critics of the White House include officials who have served in previous Republican administrations such as Vince Cannistraro, a former CIA head of counter-terrorism and member of the National Security Council under Ronald Reagan.
"These have been an extraordinary four years for the CIA and the political pressure to come up with the right results has been enormous, particularly from Vice-President Cheney.
"I'm afraid that the agency is guilty of bending over backwards to please the administration. George Tenet was desperate to give them what they wanted and that was a complete disaster."
With the simmering rows breaking out in public, the Wall Street Journal declared in an editorial that the administration was now fighting two insurgencies: one in Iraq and one at the CIA.
In a difficult week for President Bush leading up to Friday's presidential debate, the CIA-led Iraqi Survey Group confirmed that Saddam had had no weapons of mass destruction, while Mr Rumsfeld distanced himself from the administration's long-held assertion of ties between Saddam and the al-Qaeda terror network.
Earlier, unguarded comments by Paul Bremer, the former American administrator of Iraq who said that America "never had enough troops on the ground", had given the row about post-war strategy on the ground fresh impetus.
With just 23 days before the country votes for its next president, both sides are braced for further bruising encounters.
That's a house that's long overdue a good cleaning. I think it's time to clear out some of the dead wood that's been rotting back there.
A search on "guard" would reveal this previously posted.
This has been fairly to anybody who's paying attention.
Amazing how the article omits that the CIA has a duty to serve the President. Its function within the executive branch is not to sabotage a sitting President. I hope many bureaucratic heads roll after Bush wins in November.
Missed it on the "CIA" search. I'll have to be more thorough next time.
Yeah, I tried searching "CIA" too ('cause I remember the other post), but FR doesn't search on 3 letters or less.
>>>That's a house that's long overdue a good cleaning. I think it's time to clear out some of the dead wood that's been rotting back there.
Dittos for the State Department. It needs a good flush.
Stansfield Turner (Carter's old Roomate) wrecked the CIA during the Carter years and loaded the adminstration with RATS coasting on government jobs and collecting goverment benifits. Time to clean house.
I think that article is a lot of hype. There may be problems between some Bush people & the agency or former agency folks - but by and large people working for the CIA are extremely patriotic, and extremely RIGHT WING. They don't want to see Kerry elected, and serve to gain nothing by undermining Bush in such an overt way. Anybody doing that would be rogue in my estimation, not part of a large group.
To call them all idiots is just flat wrong - I spent some time dealing w/ the agency - and they were some of the smartest people I ever met. The organization itself has all kinds of bureaucratic problems - but you just can't blame everyone working there for the fact that the agency itself may be in bad need of an overhaul.
It is time for a house cleaning at the CIA.
Enough is enough.
New eras require new thinking. The question about these guys is why they didn't tell us the era had changed. In with the new, out with the old. That's the American way!
The leaker should be fired. It seems they alway exist no matter who is in power.
All the Clinton era puppets just have to go. When Clinton politicized the CIA it was the worst thing he could ever have done. It fell apart, to the point that there wasn't even ONE Arab speaking agent. They FAILED in many ways BEFORE Bush even became president. Clarke was one of those disasters. How many more Clarkes are there?
fairly obvious-I meant to say
No amount of revisionist history will change the fact that fewer Coalition troops have died in the War on Terror than Americans died in the WTC on 9-11. Tens of thousands of allied deaths were projected, prior to the invasion of Iraq, by talking heads in the MSM. Based on written transcripts and video of President Bush's speeches and statements, it appears that President Bush is one of the very few who did NOT lie.
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