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.
Sorry - I just buy that think leftists have ever worked at the CIA. Disgruntled bureaucrats, sure. The occasional Aldrich Ames, sure. But liberals just don't join the CIA, nor are they wanted at Langley.
It's been my experience that all large organizations, whether governmental or in the private sector, can easily have all kinds of bureaucratic problems. That the CIA is more secretive than most may, however, make it a better candidate for organizational entropy than most.
YES! This whole story smells.....sorta like some crap spun up by dimmies for some reason I can't yet fathom.....but I can smell something rotten ... Just like the sabotage of the election process
When Clinton took office, he fired all federal prosecuting attorneys, paving the way for the HillBilly shenanigans during the '90s.
I have little info on what the Clintons did to the intelligence community but history shows they were isolated and ignored. The State Dept. was policy and the policy was Clinton's (whatever that was) and from Jan-Sept 2001, little had changed there. Remember the summer of 2001; Bush appointments were delayed, harangued and left hanging. The Senate was in the control of the Democrats. Summer break was a political tool.
After 9/11/01, Bush had to work with the crew he had and their loyalties are suspect and confused.
Hope for reelection and a Spring cleaning.
And GO YANKEES
Yeah sure right...The guys who blew so much fopr sooo very long and at such a great cost to the US are now bitching because they have been found out? How many more moles and useless lackies have to surface before someone calls the CIA and the FBI out for what they are...useless pieces of deadwood run by longterm political hacks
I should mention they Fxxxed the first Twin Tower bombing too. They can't tie their tennis shoes and chew bubble gum at different times.
I'd say it's time to order some polygraphs. Based on those results, can their traitorous asses.
Ditto. Thanks for saving me the time. ;-)
Seems fairly obvious to me. The CIA serves to provide the President with intelligence and to carry out covert actions at his disgression, with the advice and consent of the congress. People in the CIA are at liberty to disagree with whomever they like, they just don't have the right to leak, sabotage, or publicly disagree with the President, PERIOD. Those that have should be fired.
Elected officials are fighting bureaucracy throughout the federal government. They have created a monster that has a life of its own and bureaucrats can't stand the well-deserved criticism of their wasteful spending and incompetence.
America has a federal government chock full of buildings loaded with people who shuffle paper, play solitaire games on the computer and scratch their butts in a nearly infinite number of cubicles. The CIA is no exception. The CIA is like those giant high-rise public housing projects that become so rat-infested and uninhabitable, they have to be torn down.
Some of those people in the "house of mirrors" have long memories.
Regards,
Instead it -- like any other such "central" independent agency -- creates a new goal: self-aggrandissment.
Particular goals become counter-productive to that main goal -- why? Because they restrict its operation, they limit its turf. Especially when they are goals within turf the collossus has already claim staked.
What does "central" mean" anyway? Only that any particular goal is less than central, any particular goal is always off-center.
That is, its ONLY mission becomes to battle for turf from anyone or anything. Until it becomes the true "center" of everything.
Back in '94, I was rushing to get paperwork signed by these bureaucrats so that the merger of two companies could occur. There was an anti-trust issue and these bureaucrats needed to sign off on the paperwork before I could submit it to the U.S. Justice Dept. The deadline was that day. It was hell.
The highlight was at the U.S. Dep't of Transportation where I had to wait while the gatekeeper to a bureaucrat sat and played a video game at his desk for about 15 minutes while I stood there waiting for him to take the paperwork to his boss. It was only when the game was over that he decided to acknowledge me and take another half hour to get the signature. There was no doubt that this was his way of getting back at The Man.
The White House, that is.
Bush pressured the CIA into providing false info on WMD. Shame on the CIA for caving -- but Bush has to go!
I'm voting for Badnarik, but even Kerry would be better at this point.
The "president" is not a dictator whose every whim must be "served." The CIA's first loyalty should be to the Constitution and the nation. In short, it should not provide false intel on WMD simply because the "president" wants it.
Really, it's the president, and the CIA, who are servants of the people. And as one of the people, I'm not at all pleased with Servant Bush's performance. I hope we fire him in November.
I believe that's also the way in Britain and France.
Polygraphs prove nothing. That's why they're inadmisable in court.
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