Boston Globe Editorial Board: The CIA Failed, But The White House Misled

[G_j]

The CIA Failed, But The White House Misled

The Boston Globe Editorial Board
Thursday 9:43 AM

In a political deal, the Senate Intelligence Committee agreed with the White House demand to put off assessing the White House's use of the Intelligence Community's pronouncements until effectively after the elections. That will allow the White House to blame the CIA for misleading it. The Boston Globe says that puts the cart before the elephant.
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http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/editorials/articles/2004/07/08/wrongly_blame_the_cia/

GLOBE EDITORIAL
Wrongly blame the CIA
July 8, 2004

IT IS VERY much in the national interest to review and correct intelligence errors made before the Sept. 11 attacks and before the war in Iraq. But evaluations of what has gone wrong in the gathering, analysis, and use of intelligence must be kept uncontaminated by partisan politics.

This is a hard thing to do in the heat of a presidential campaign. Nevertheless, the bipartisan National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States did make an admirable effort to avoid the partisan blame game. Unfortunately, early accounts of a forthcoming Senate Select Committee report on prewar intelligence about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction suggest an inclination to absolve President Bush and Vice President Cheney of any responsibility for mistaken assumptions about those weapons, shifting a preponderance of the blame onto the CIA and its outgoing director, George Tenet.

This is the effect of a disclosure in the committee's report that some relatives of Iraqi scientists told agency officers they thought Saddam Hussein's WMD programs had been discontinued. As reported by The New York Times, the CIA's failure to tell Bush and Cheney what those relatives of Iraqi scientists had said makes it appear that the agency deceived the president and vice president into taking the nation to war on a false premise.

There are many grounds for criticizing things that were done or left undone during Tenet's seven-year tenure at the CIA. But a voluminous public record of the back and forth between Tenet and the Bush administration's policy makers indicates that CIA analysts were often skeptical of assumptions about Saddam's WMDs that Bush, Cheney, and other consumers of intelligence wanted to propound as the primary justification for the war that removed Saddam from power. Tenet persuaded Bush to delete from a speech he gave in Cincinnati a false claim about an Iraqi purchase of uranium yellowcake from the African nation of Niger.
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[papau]

1. Well said - but US national broadcast media doesn't have guts for truth

telling

[G_j]

2. yea the broadcast media

is last in line alright. SOME of the print media is getting better, but then how many Americans actually read as opposed to listing to radio or TV?

[bandagainstbush]

4. Real key

I think that's the real key. Keep 'em dumb, then they won't know what they're up to

[teryang]

3. Yes there is the superficial conflict of analysis

...that goes on between the DOD political appointees and the career analysts. This makes for good play in the press and "plausible deniability." However, the covert operations side in the CIA and the hard core of financial elites in the defense sector, banking, and oil are all cut from the same unnaccountable and ruthless cloth. The story of intelligence negligence and exaggeration is a convenient cover for an aggressive plan to go to war to shore up a failing economic system and illegitimate government by embarking on conquest abroad and reaction at home.

Meanwhile the distressed American public sinks to lower levels while listening to fairy tales about "US" foreign policy and national defense.