The CIA 'old guard' goes to war with Bush

[donsu]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/10/10/wbush10.xml&sSheet=/news/2004/10/10/ixnewstop.html

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.

-snip-

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.
-snip-
-------------------------------

could it be possible the 'real' CIA is fighting back?

possible good news

[TrustingDog]

1. my memory ain't that great, but I do...

clearly recall that during the pre-Iraq invasion news chatter there were a lot of reports on the Mess media from the CIA saying that they were not convinced of Iraq having WMDs, etc. Most definitely a feeling of 'We are Not Sure'.

but now Bush is making it sound like it was the intelligence community that hoodwinked him and tricked him into going into battle. bastard liar.

I never thought I'd be defending the CIA on anything, but this one I may have to.

sic 'em!, boys and girls.

[Warpy]

3. Right, a bare whisper of it from a press that was hot for war

Bush has lost the military, the FBI and much of his own party, not to mention the CIA careerists. Installing a neocon yes man as CIA director is not going to do anything but increase the resentment within that agency, which is why I suspect the Democrats didn't put up a fight over his confirmation.

Pushing Porter Goss on that agency may have been one of his more serious blunders in his heavy handed retooling of all governmetn agencies with a habit of presenting facts that run counter to his dogma.

It will be fun to watch.

[Kolesar]

2. DU blast from the past

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=104&topic_id=4047