...continued to help keep the White House off balance and unable to distract the nation from the subject of the Libby indictments, the hyping of Iraq WMD intelligence, and prisoner detention abuse. This morning on National Public Radio, Lawrence Wilkerson made the statement that Vice President Cheney is the individual most responsible for the pervasive and disturbing prisoner abuse scandal.
Wilkerson made splash with statements about the Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal that hijacked foreign policy and prevented exposure of their controversial views to the State Department and others who might have convinced the President that their might be a different view. Wilkerson's boss, Colin Powell was set up to sell the invasion of Iraq to the UN with information that was known to be false. Powell blamed the false information not on his friend CIA Director Tenet, but on lower level CIA personnel. The infamous source code named 'Curveball', was the source of information, an Iraq defector who had never been debriefed by he CIA had "been flagged by the Defense Intelligence Agency as a liar, a fabricator."
The 'Curveball' debacle reveals either incompetence or subterfuge in the top two people of the CIA, Tenet and McLaughlin, his Director of Operations. Both have more recently denied any knowledge of information that 'Curveball' might not be a good resource.
A week before Christmas 2002, McLaughlin's executive assistant held two meetings to discuss Curveball. One of Pavitt's aides told the group about Drumheller's meeting, and expressed other doubts. She also "made clear" that Pavitt's division "did not believe that Curveball's information should be relied upon." The Curveball expert from WINPAC angrily argued back and apparently prevailed, the commission found. An official summary of the meeting later "played down" any doubts and said Curveball had been judged credible "after an exhaustive review."
Several weeks later, Drumheller discovered that his warning had been ignored when his executive officer brought him an advance copy of Powell's Feb. 5, 2003, speech to the U.N. Drumheller said he then arranged a meeting in McLaughlin's office and described what the German operative had told him over lunch several months earlier. After listening for 10 minutes, Drumheller said, McLaughlin responded by saying, "Oh my! I hope that's not true." McLaughlin, who retired in January after 32 years at the CIA, said he did not recall the meeting and denied that Drumheller told him Curveball might be a fabricator. "I have absolutely no recall of such a discussion. None," McLaughlin said in a statement Friday. "Such a meeting does not appear on my calendar, nor was this view transmitted to me in writing." He said he was "at a loss" to explain the conflicting accounts.
But another red flag appeared. On Jan. 27, 2003, the CIA's Berlin station warned in a message to headquarters that Curveball's information "cannot be verified." Drumheller, meanwhile, said he never heard from McLaughlin or anyone else to confirm that Curveball's material had been deleted from Powell's speech. So when Tenet called him at home on another matter the night before Powell was to speak in New York, Drumheller said he raised the Curveball case. "I gave him the phone number for the guy he wanted," Drumheller recalled. "Then it struck me, 'I better say something.' I said, 'You know, boss, there's problems with that case.' He says, 'Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm exhausted. Don't worry about it.' " In a seven-page statement, Tenet sharply challenged much of that account.
When Bush became President, thanks to Rumsfeld and Cheney, he brought into his administration a group of ideologues, some of whom should by all rights register as being an agent of a foreign power, Israel. After 9-11, this small group of "neo-conservatives" made major changes in traditional American foreign and security policy essentially by replacing key positions in DoD, the Pentagon, and the CIA with people who supported their goals. The Bush Doctrine became a reality. The very means used to change the political landscape in America's foreign policy instruments created a filter on intelligence that limited fast tracked information that furthered the cause and often screened out that which contradicted it. Lieutenant Karen Kwiatkowski, a career officer at the Pentagon now retired, describes how the process worked.
Salon.com
In the spring of 2002, I was a cynical but willing staff officer, almost two years into my three-year tour at the office of the secretary of defense, undersecretary for policy, sub-Saharan Africa. In April, a call for volunteers went out for the Near East South Asia directorate (NESA). None materialized. By May, the call transmogrified into a posthaste demand for any staff officer, and I was "volunteered" to enter what would be a well-appointed den of iniquity. The education I would receive there was like an M. Night Shyamalan movie -- intense, fascinating and frightening.
While the people were very much alive, I saw a dead philosophy -- Cold War anti-communism and neo-imperialism -- walking the corridors of the Pentagon. It wore the clothing of counterterrorism and spoke the language of a holy war between good and evil. The evil was recognized by the leadership to be resident mainly in the Middle East and articulated by Islamic clerics and radicals.
But there were other enemies within, anyone who dared voice any skepticism about their grand plans, including Secretary of State Colin Powell and Gen. Anthony Zinni. From May 2002 until February 2003, I observed firsthand the formation of the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans and watched the latter stages of the neo-conservative capture of the policy-intelligence nexus in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. This seizure of the reins of U.S. Middle East policy was directly visible to many of us working in the Near East South Asia policy office, and yet there seemed to be little any of us could do about it. I saw a narrow and deeply flawed policy favored by some executive appointees in the Pentagon used to manipulate and pressurize the traditional relationship between policymakers in the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence agencies. I witnessed neoconservative agenda bearers within Office of Special Plans usurp measured and carefully considered assessments, and through suppression and distortion of intelligence analysis promulgate what were in fact falsehoods to both Congress and the executive office of the president.
So when the Administration turns out it's spokespersons for Sunday mornings TV talk show blitz, look for the latest Republican talking points designed to deflect attention away from the facts of a conspiracy to defraud the American people.
What are the R[epublican] talking points?
1. Clinton threatened Saddam and thought there were WMD - blame Bill.
2. Kerry, HRC and other Dems made supportive noises - blame them.
3. Butler, SSCI and all the other political reports cleared the US and made it a matter of bad intellegence - blame the CIA.
4. Dana Priest used the word 'covert' in her article - blame the media.
5. Thinking Bush lied is Oliver Stone territory - blame you.
The pattern continues - it's always everyone else's fault. It's never the President's. But R's and their apologists don't seem to get it, even though the American public (alas, a year too late) does – the buck stops at Bush's desk whether he blows smoke or not. And when he denies his own responsibility (as he has his entire adult life from TANG to DC), the public figures he's just a failure as a leader. Period. And no Bush apologist is going to change their minds....
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