Investigating the Intelligence Failures

by Mary

Posted by Mary
As Bush has now launched his independent investigation into the intelligence failures, I thought it might be good to provide some in-depth background readings so you can judge the quality of the investigation as it proceeds.

One of the first things to recognize is that the problem of faulty intelligence did not start with Bush's administration and unless there is a real investigation and uprooting of the invasive and noxious subversion of truth caused by politicizing the data, we will continue to have failures, even catastrophic failures, of intelligence that will likely doom our country and our future. Although it did not start with them, Bush and the right wing have made things immeasurably worse.

Bush and his backers have a serious problem with reality and seem unable to even consider that their "truth" is grounded in a badly defective belief system. Even today, when confronted with the glaring truth that Saddam was not an imminent threat, that he did not have a weapons program that was capable of harming the US, that Iraq is not a simple country that would gladly submit to US rule, Bushco continue to state baldly that they made the right decision to go to war. But how can they say they made the right decision? What was that decision based on? And how can they think that their next decisions will be any better? This attitude is precisely the problem with Bushco - they know the "truth" (perhaps they have a direct line to God?) and nothing will dissuade them from their beliefs despite all evidence to the contrary. Bush doesn't even need to see or hear the evidence since his gut tells him the truth.

Now on to the reading list....

Robert Parry's Why U.S. Intelligence Failed (10/22/2003) is an excellent primer on the subject and shows that the serious problem of politicizing the intelligence started back in the days of Watergate. Parry shows how the conservatives started to hammer the non-political analytical branch as being soft on communism in order to change the debate and power structure to support their causes. George HW Bush was the first CIA chief to actively support subverting the intelligence product by allowing poorly vetted reports and rumors to be used by policy makers as they considered policy choices. Needless to say, the reports put out by Team B (the rump intelligence team) always came up with the worst-case scenarios which required a harder line and more money for defense. Once Reagan won the White House, the prominence of Team B greatly increased, and the CIA agents who didn't go along found their careers sidetracked and even ended.

George Tenet also got his start in the early 1990s when he worked as the key staff member on Sen. David Boren (D-OK) to help get Robert Gates (William Casey's deputy director for intelligence under Reagan) confirmed as GHW Bush's CIA director. Tenet has since then proved to be a canny player in the intelligence game, and more than capable of holding his own in the bureaucratic dogfight that characterizes the battleground for intelligence today.

Today we know that much of the bad intelligence used to create the worst-case scenario for why we needed to invade Iraq was from the Iraqi exiles. Where did they get their evidence (if they weren't just making it up) and why was it so bad? Some of it came from Poland and other countries that were the targets of the US-England disinformation program Scott Ritter talked about last month. This is a continuation of the type of problems that come from the gullible who only see the evidence they want to see when reading the evidence. As Parry said, during the 80's one of the objections the professional agents had to the intelligence product of Team B was because they would find reports based on the disinformation that had been planted in the foreign press by the CIA.

The CIA analysts, however, knew the charges were bogus partly because they were based on "black" or false propaganda that the CIA's operations division had been planting in the European media.

Unfortunately, I don't suspect that Bush's "independent" investigators will look into the real problems with bad intelligence, but if they did, they could start by retracing the trail blazed by Parry.

Michael Massing has an extensive piece in the February New York Review of Books that provides some background and fills in some more pieces about how badly the press acted during the leadup to the war. As he shows, there was a great deal of evidence that questioned the intelligence used to justify the war before the first bombs dropped. The American public was badly served by the administration and officials who twisted the intelligence to create their worst-case scenario to justify their war and the media which for the most part played lapdog to the Bush administration, despite the information and contrary stories that questioned the Bush story.

Robert Dreyfess and Jason Vest have a blockbuster of a story in this month's Mother Jones called The Lie Factory. It is quite clear as you read this story that the neocons were not just delusional, but were actively involved in distorting the intelligence. The article has a sidebar link to the organizational connections of the factory starting with Cheney that you should check out too.

And if you haven't read Seymore Hersh's definitive analysis of the bad intelligence problems, you owe it to yourself to read his October article in the New Yorker: The Stovepipe.

And thanks to Charles K, here is another excellent article from May 2002 that shows how Bush's gut isn't too effective at determining what is a real threat to the US.

Director of Central Intelligence George J. Tenet had been "nearly frantic" with concern since June 22, according to one frequent interlocutor, and a written intelligence summary for national security adviser Condoleezza Rice said on June 28: "It is highly likely that a significant al Qaeda attack is in the near future, within several weeks." By late summer, one senior political appointee said, Tenet had "repeated this so often that people got tired of hearing it."

As we recently heard from Paul O'Neill, from the time he got into office Bush's gut told him the real problem was Saddam, and he was going to get him even if it took ignoring his CIA chief to do so.

Now that we know what to look for, our role in this drama is to make sure the media and our elected officials know we expect a real investigation.