Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz were behind exaggerating intel in the 70s!

[Roland99]

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/10/26/MNG62FDUGL1.DTL

In the 1970s, when President Richard Nixon's policy of detente was under attack by some former military officials and conservative policy intellectuals, Ford administration officials Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld were among those challenging as too soft the CIA's estimate of Moscow's military power.

Rumsfeld and Cheney wanted to create a "Team B," which would have access to the CIA's data on the Soviets and issue its own conclusions. Cheney, as White House chief of staff, and Rumsfeld, as secretary of Defense, championed Team B, whose members included the young defense strategist Paul Wolfowitz, who a quarter-century later would be one of the chief architects of the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

<...>

Team B's conclusion that the CIA was indeed soft on the Soviets was leaked to sympathetic journalists and generated public support for a new round of military spending, particularly on missiles. Team B's conclusions turned out, years later, to be false.

"In retrospect, and with the Team B report and records now largely declassified, it is possible to see that virtually all of Team B's criticisms ... proved to be wrong," Raymond Garthoff, a former U.S. ambassador to Bulgaria, wrote in a paper for the CIA's Center for the Study of Intelligence three years ago. "On several important specific points it wrongly criticized and 'corrected' the official estimates, always in the direction of enlarging the impression of danger and threat."

Guess they thought they could pull it off this time by having more of their buddies in key positions in the administration.


WRONG!

[BootinUp]

1. Gee, what a shock this is...

not.

[cliss]

2. Well, well....

It looks like we should have done a little more housecleaning back in the 50's. We've had some king-size cockroaches who had an awfully long life.

[BurgherHoldtheLies]

3. Same people...Different decade

"Deja vu all over again":mad:

[Roland99]

4. 'cept this time....they got CAUGHT!

They've been Fitzed.

[merbex]

5. Eisenhower knew what he was talking about when he warned

this nation about the dangers of "A military -industrial complex"

Did he know Rumsfeld and Cheney personally do you think?

[tanyev]

6. Cheney and Rumsfeld were practicing continuity of government

back in the 80s.

The Armageddon Plan
by James Mann

At least once a year during the 1980s Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld vanished. Cheney was working diligently on Capitol Hill, as a congressman rising through the ranks of the Republican leadership. Rumsfeld, who had served as Gerald Ford's Secretary of Defense, was a hard-driving business executive in the Chicago area—where, as the head of G. D. Searle & Co., he dedicated time and energy to the success of such commercial products as Nutra-Sweet, Equal, and Metamucil. Yet for periods of three or four days at a time no one in Congress knew where Cheney was, nor could anyone at Searle locate Rumsfeld. Even their wives were in the dark; they were handed only a mysterious Washington phone number to use in case of emergency.

After leaving their day jobs Cheney and Rumsfeld usually made their way to Andrews Air Force Base, outside Washington. From there, in the middle of the night, each man—joined by a team of forty to sixty federal officials and one member of Ronald Reagan's Cabinet—slipped away to some remote location in the United States, such as a disused military base or an underground bunker. A convoy of lead-lined trucks carrying sophisticated communications equipment and other gear would head to each of the locations.
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0318-14.htm

[Roland99]

10. Starting a war-business in their garage?

Most guys get together and drink some beer and talk about football, not world domination.

[peacetalksforall]

7. Combine with this thread?

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=132&topic_id=2182638&mesg_id=2182838

[sadiesworld]

8. .

[Davis_X_Machina]

9. Axiomatic in the...

...criminal justice community is that criminals just don't change an M.O. They're not that nimble.

[MADem]

11. They go back a long, long way together....

And Cheney just bought a mansion up the road from Rummy, in MD...