The yes man and the thug

[dogday]

In his disturbing new book, Times reporter James Risen reveals how George Tenet's gutless surrender to war-obsessed Donald Rumsfeld led to the total breakdown of U.S. intelligence.
By Farhad Manjoo

Jan. 10, 2006 | Marketing copy is always suspect, so when journalist James Risen's new book "State of War" arrived accompanied by a press release containing the phrase "tip of the iceberg," I began to worry. "Tip of the iceberg" is a lemonade-from-lemons construction, an attempt by the publisher to allay concerns that the book's biggest scoops have already been widely aired. After all, several weeks ago the New York Times, where Risen covers national security issues, published much of what you'll read in the book's second chapter, which reveals that President Bush authorized a program to eavesdrop on Americans without warrants. Since then, Bush has acknowledged the existence of the wiretapping plan, and Risen and Times colleague Eric Lichtblau have uncovered a great deal more about the program that goes beyond what's in "State of War," including the fact that federal judges and senior members of Bush's own Justice Department have balked at it. After all this new news, it's natural to wonder whether "State of War," which made it to stores just last week, might already be stale on the shelf, a blockbuster-to-be that's now just bust.

Yet it turns out that far from an empty bit of P.R. puffery, "tip of the iceberg" may be the perfect phrase to describe Risen's compelling, disturbing, if ultimately somewhat unfulfilling, volume. In sketching the recent history of the American intelligence apparatus, Risen serves up scooplet after astonishing scooplet of our spy agencies' mistakes and misdeeds. There's much more here than illegal wiretapping; indeed, the wiretapping story is even a bit out of place in "State of War," a one-off chapter on the National Security Agency in a volume mostly about the CIA. (The book's subtitle is "The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration.")

Most of Risen's bombshell disclosures have to do with that agency, including new details on the CIA's interrogation practices and its stable of secret prisons. In addition, we learn that in the months before the United States invaded Iraq, the CIA obtained and then ignored specific intelligence pointing to the absence of weapons of mass destruction under Saddam Hussein, and that, as the famous Downing Street memo noted, the CIA was essentially fixing data around what it knew to be an inevitable war. In what may be the book's most sensational claim, Risen writes that as part of a bizarre, almost unbelievably ill-conceived attempt to disrupt the Iranian nuclear program, the agency recently provided the Iranian government with highly sensitive technical designs for making part of a nuclear bomb -- and then lost track of what the Iranians did with the blueprints.

http://fairuse.1accesshost.com/news2/salon78.html

[dusmcj]

1. neocon thugs took DC establishment by surprise

The neocons represent an ideological insurgency which approached taking federal power as an adversarial scenario where they were going to infiltrate and disrupt the federal establishment. Their abettors were the money grubbing pigs like Cheney surrounding Bush, and the man himself, who had no more vision than his father, but bought himself some from PNAC's ideology shop. Squishy comfortable Beltway players either found common cause with neocon vermin, usually based on greed, or were overrun by their no-quarter tactics. This is the history of the WMD intelligence stovepiping, and of the other demolition runs by the usual suspects against federal establishment they hate. Seeking to replace government by social coercion, they cast the best outcome of thousands of years of human struggle and cultural evolution, namely civil government, as a contempt-worthy degeneration which should be dumped in the trash. In its stead, they propose an anomic free-for-all based on crude survival mechanics, where Natural Law equates to power trumping principle, and you're only allowed to be Confident and a Leader if you're the last man standing. The DC establishment, as a (maybe sloppy) representative of normal civilization, was not prepared for this barbarian and animalistic onslaught.

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.