Blast From The Past : Robert Dreyfuss : The Pentagon Muzzles the CIA

[Trajan]

Note the date ... This is an early report on the arm twisting committed by the WHIG group on the CIA, who was actually the good actor in this awful farce ....

http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewPrint&articleId=6636

The Pentagon Muzzles the CIA

Devising bad intelligence to promote bad policy

By Robert Dreyfuss
Issue Date: 12.16.02

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Even as it prepares for war against Iraq, the Pentagon is already engaged on a second front: its war against the Central Intelligence Agency. The Pentagon is bringing relentless pressure to bear on the agency to produce intelligence reports more supportive of war with Iraq, according to former CIA officials. Key officials of the Department of Defense are also producing their own unverified intelligence reports to justify war. Much of the questionable information comes from Iraqi exiles long regarded with suspicion by CIA professionals. A parallel, ad hoc intelligence operation, in the office of Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas J. Feith, collects the information from the exiles and scours other raw intelligence for useful tidbits to make the case for preemptive war. These morsels sometimes go directly to the president.

The war over intelligence is a critical part of a broader offensive by the party of war within the Bush administration against virtually the entire expert Middle East establishment in the United States -- including State Department, Pentagon and CIA area specialists and leading military officers. Inside the foreign-policy, defense and intelligence agencies, nearly the whole rank and file, along with many senior officials, are opposed to invading Iraq. But because the less than two dozen neoconservatives leading the war party have the support of Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, they are able to marginalize that opposition.

Morale inside the U.S. national-security apparatus is said to be low, with career staffers feeling intimidated and pressured to justify the push for war. At the State Department, where Secretary of State Colin Powell's efforts at diplomacy have thus far slowed the relentless pressure for war, a key bureau is chilled by the presence of Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Near East Affairs Elizabeth L. Cheney, the vice president's daughter, who is in charge of Middle East economic policy, including oil. "When meets, there is no debate," says Parker Borg, who served in the State Department for 30 years as an ambassador and deputy chief of counterterrorism. "How vocal would you be about commenting on Middle East policy with the vice president's daughter there?" Undersecretary of State John Bolton is also part of the small pro-war faction.

And at the Pentagon, where a number of critical offices have been filled by hawkish neoconservatives whose commitment to war with Iraq goes back a decade, Middle East specialists and uniformed military officers alike are seeing their views ignored. "I've heard from people on the Middle East staff in the Pentagon," says Borg, referring to the staff under neocon Peter Rodman, the assistant secretary of defense for International Security Affairs. "The Middle East experts in those officers are as cut off from the policy side as people in the State Department are."

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It's worth a fresh read to remind us of what actually happened in that time frame ... How the WH crammed their notions and lies down the throats of the very organization our nation depends on to gather VALID intelligence about REAL threats we may face ...

THIS WH .... used our collective security as a tool in their desire to acquire ill-gotten wealth ...

They are shameless traitors to our nation ....