Will the CIA fight back?

[mourningdove92]

Do you really think that Tenant wil "fall on the sword" for Bush? How ugly is this going to get?

I don't know about the rest of you, but todays report was the most frightening thing I have ever witnessed. Thanks to Bush, America has been shown as incompetent, war mongering, and a true danger to the world. Thousands have died. We have to own that.

US deaths topped the 1000 mark today. My heart goes out to the families listening to the news today.

[elfwitch]

1. that's been my question too

I don't see this going well.

[TrogL]

2. I think that will be putting it mildly

The CIA has long shown an ability to fend for itself that spans administrations.

I do not believe Tenant will "fall on the sword" for Dubya. He may do so for the CIA itself by testifying how the Dubya administration would not listen to anything except what it wanted to hear (and it rhymes with "Madam").

[Rabrrrrrr]

3. Yes

AndI they have already been fighting back.

Shrubbie McDickhead picked the wrong group - the worst possible wrong group - to harass and lay blame on.

I assume you're talking about the press conference with Rockefeller and - crap, forgot the name, Roberts? I listned to that one. Incredible. Rockefeller seemed really pissed but holding it back.

[Pathwalker]

4. How ugly will it get? Uglier than Linda Tripp's soul.

n/t

[Killarney]

5. For the past year, I've thought...

the CIA isn't going to take any more of this shit. Being thrown under the bus for everything. They'll fight back.

But they haven't.

WHY?

Because of Poppy Bush. Poppy was the head of the CIA for many years. Therefore, Bush Jr is untouchable.

[Media_Lies_Daily]

11. They haven't been fighting back??? You've obviously been missing...

...all of the major leaks that the CIA has been dumping since shortly after Plame was exposed.

[Killarney]

15. I guess I have missed it.

what "major leaks" have the CIA dumped that have hurt Bush?

All I've seen is Bush using the CIA as his scapegoat whipping board and the media lapping it up like poor Bushy boy was misled by the big bad CIA.

I haven't seen the CIA push back at all. If they wanted to, they could... right now, today. Tenet could speak out. They could release damaging info about Bush.

[enough]

6. I agree with you that the report today was devastating.

Even though DU is furious that the blame gets shiifted to the CIA, the over-all effect of that news converence announcing the findings of the report was absolutely overwhelming. It is now agreed by all that we went to war on the basis of a pack of lies. Bush is the guy in the chair, no matter how they try to deflect it.

[elfwitch]

9. I don't think that people are going to hear it that way...

They are going to hear that the big bad evil CIA lead poor Georgie astray. They are going to hear that it was the CIA that convinced Chimpy to go to war. They are going to believe that the CIA was the bad guy and that after the war had started GW had a moral obligation to finish what was started not matter how bogus the reason for going in the first place was.

[Media_Lies_Daily]

10. That's YOUR opinion...I give the American people a lot more credit...

...that you do for having a brain and knowing how to use it.

[mourningdove92]

12. I believe elfwitch has a valid concern.

There are many out there that are desperately looking for ways to justify the fact that WMDs have not been found. Now thay have a scapegoat to protect Herr Bush.
However, I too believe that the majority of Americans will see through this.
The cable news is being awfully quiet about this. Something of this magnitude should be discussed, dissected and belabored all day, you know, like the Scott Peterson thing or the Kope Bryant thing....oh silly my...guess I have my priorities mixed up.

My guess is thay haven't been given their official talking points from the White House yet. I kinda think that Jay Rockerfeller threw a small bomb in the works.

[elfwitch]

14. Well if they do have one...

they haven't been shown to be using it up to this point. A large majority of people believe Saddam was directly involved in 9/11. A large majority of people believed that Iraq had WMDs. A large majority of people believe there is a "liberal media" bias. There is a decent list of things that the American public believed that have since turned out to be completely false. Free Republic is a nice sample of what some of the American public does with the brains they have.

How many times this week have you heard stories about how Edwards is too young and too inexperienced and too liberal to handle the job of VP? how many times in the last month have you heard people say that Michael Moore is not presenting facts in F9/11?

Did you see the report yesterday about a study that showed an overall decline of 10 percent in "literary reading" from 1982 to 2002, with the rate of decline increasing nearly three-fold in the last decade? People are getting dumber and less critical. I give the American very little credit for anything.

If the American public has these so-called "brains" you give them credit for - things would not be in as bad of shape as they are right now.

[muriel_volestrangler]

7. Look for them shifting the blame to the OSP

and William Luti and Abram Shulsky. Back in 2003, Seymour Hersh, in the New Yorker said the OSP had pushed aside the CIA and DIA:

Rumsfeld and his colleagues believed that the C.I.A. was unable to perceive the reality of the situation in Iraq. “The agency was out to disprove linkage between Iraq and terrorism,” the Pentagon adviser told me. “That’s what drove them. If you’ve ever worked with intelligence data, you can see the ingrained views at C.I.A. that color the way it sees data.” The goal of Special Plans, he said, was “to put the data under the microscope to reveal what the intelligence community can’t see. Shulsky’s carrying the heaviest part.”

Even before September 11th, Richard Perle, who was then the chairman of the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board, was making a similar argument about the intelligence community’s knowledge of Iraq’s weapons. At a Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee hearing in March, 2001, he said, “Does Saddam now have weapons of mass destruction? Sure he does. We know he has chemical weapons. We know he has biological weapons. . . . How far he’s gone on the nuclear-weapons side I don’t think we really know. My guess is it’s further than we think. It’s always further than we think, because we limit ourselves, as we think about this, to what we’re able to prove and demonstrate. . . . And, unless you believe that we have uncovered everything, you have to assume there is more than we’re able to report.”

Last October, an article in the Times reported that Rumsfeld had ordered up an intelligence operation “to search for information on Iraq’s hostile intentions or links to terrorists” that might have been overlooked by the C.I.A. When Rumsfeld was asked about the story at a Pentagon briefing, he was initially vague. “I’m told that after September 11th a small group, I think two to start with, and maybe four now . . . were asked to begin poring over this mountain of information that we were receiving on intelligence-type things.” He went on to say, “You don’t know what you don’t know. So in comes the daily briefer”—from the C.I.A.—“and she walks through the daily brief. And I ask questions. ‘Gee, what about this?’ or ‘What about that? Has somebody thought of this?’” At the same briefing, Rumsfeld said that he had already been informed that there was “solid evidence of the presence in Iraq of Al Qaeda members.”

[mmonk]

13. The average American

that watches TV news has no clue as to the existence or what the OSP is. We live in a somewhat closed media driven society that controls the flow of information to its benefit however it sees it.

[Spazito]

8. I hope Tenet has told the investigators ALL regarding the Plame...

outing, I suspect he did, and that will be a big part of the CIA fighting back, imo.