red onion

I posted this letter to a friend. The only thing I would add, is that the "outing" of Valerie Plame as a CIA operative, by someone in the White House was the final humiliation for the CIA. Number one, it shows such a lack of respect for that agency, and the almost complete contempt the White House shows for the CIA. It did no good for the CIA to bend over in order to manipulate intelligence so that the White House could have its war in Iraq. Valerie Plame and interagency operations are the ones who paid for it.

The White House would have never had the balls to out a CIA operative, if the CIA had stood firm in its intelligence reports. Screw you, you don't get your war, in other words. But the CIA did not stand firm, and the White House, in thanks, pissed on them again by outing Plame.

The CIA is growing its balls back, and look out. Here is my letter:

J,

I think the CIA was pressured to comform to the war wishes of this administration, as evidenced in this Walter Pincus article in the Wash. Post. CIA officers are career people, and there is a lot of pride in their work. They are not political appointees, advancing certain ideology. But what you have under Bush is ideology colliding with actual intelligence gathered by the CIA. What won out, is ideology, for now.

There is also this story, published in the Nation way back on October 10, 2002, detailing the schizoid split, if you will, within the CIA. I think they were being pulled in one direction by the idealogues, while their intelligence actually supported another direction. The final humiliation was the attempt to blame Tenet for the 16 words uttered in the State of the Union Speech. That's when Tenet, according to 'C' on Daily Kos, took off the gloves.

Other articles of note: one by KAREN KWIATOWSKI , a retired Air Force colonel, who in her last three years, worked in the Office of the Secretary of Defence's Under-Secretariat for Policy. She said:

3. Groupthink. Defined as "reasoning or decision-making by a group, often characterized by uncritical acceptance or conformity to prevailing points of view," groupthink was, and probably remains, the predominant characteristic of Pentagon Middle East policy development. The result of groupthink is the elevation of opinion into a kind of accepted fact, and uncritical acceptance of extremely narrow and isolated points of view. Groupthink leading to invasion and occupation of Iraq will be found, I believe, to have caused a subversion of constitutional limits on executive power and a co-optation through deceit of a large segment of the Congress.

Based on groupthink, actual intelligence was subverted, and the CIA intelligence officers were swept along in this, much to their dismay. Now the CIA is finding a way to weild its power in the Plame Affair.

Also a hint of things to come was this letter to the White House from retired CIA officers, who called themselves the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, letter dated May 1:

On October 4, 2002, a week before Congress voted on the war resolution, the National Intelligence Council, an interagency body under the CIA Director as head of the entire Intelligence Community, published an unclassified version of a memorandum that had been briefed to Congressmen and Senators over the previous weeks.

Among the key judgments: “Most analysts assess Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program.”

The clumsy clause conceals a crass cave-in. The preponderant view, then as now, among nuclear scientists and engineers of the Intelligence Community and the Department of Energy’s national laboratories is that Iraq had not been able to reconstitute in any significant way the nuclear development program dismantled by UN inspectors prior to 1998. The conclusions of the vast majority of analysts dovetailed with the findings repeatedly presented to the UN by International Atomic Energy Agency Director Mohamed ElBaradei and his inspectors after their inspection work at the turn of the year; i. e., that Iraq had no nuclear program worthy of the name.

It's my view 'J', that we aren't the only ones who desire a regime change at home. I'm betting that the CIA resents how it was manipulated to back the invasion of Iraq, and now they are beginning to weild their political muscle. Good for them.

Elizabeth