Friday, February 10, 2006

Katrina vanden Heuvel: Our "Downing Street Memo"?. For those who had any doubts that the Bush Administration manipulated intelligence to take us into a disastrous, unprovoked and unnecessary war, Walter Pincus's front page story in Friday's Washington Post is must reading. Pincus's fine reporting in the months preceding the invasion exposed the divisions about the war within the intelligence community, and its anger about how information was being politicized. But his stories were almost always buried in the Post's inside pages. Today's story, in my view, is the equivalent of America's Downing Street Memo. Paul R. Pillar, the former CIA official who coordinated US intelligence on the Middle East until last year now publicly accuses the Bush White House of "cherrypicking" intelligence on Iraq to justify its decision to go to war. "Intelligence," Pillar asserts, " was misused publicly to justify decision already made..." This is an eerie echo of the famous words from the Downing Street Memo--in which Britain's MI-6 Director Richard Dearlove told British Prime Minister Tony Blair that " the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. " As Pincus notes, this is the first time that such a senior intelligence officer "has so directly and publicly condemned" Bush & Co's handling of intelligence. Pillar's critique is also one of "the most severe indictments of White House actions by a former Bush official since Richard C. Clarke , a former National Security council staff member, went public with his criticism of the administration's handling of the September 11, 2001, attacks." [The Huffington Post | Full Blog Feed] 6:47:55 PM    comment []

Robert Schlesinger: If it's the end, it's their own undoing. Arianna thinks that the revelation that "Scooter" Libby got the word from higher up to leak classified information could be the tipping point. And she may be right. If it so it will be their own undoing. Take today's bad news buffet: - On the hill, "Brownie'" spilled like a New Orleans levee. Left hung out to dry by the administration, he left them all wet. - In the pages of a prominent foreign policy journal a former top CIA official becomes the latest insider to confirm what many of us already suspected: "That official intelligence was not relied on in making even the most significant national security decisions, that intelligence was misused publicly to justify decisions already made, that damaging ill will developed between [Bush] policymakers and intelligence officers, and that the intelligence community's own work was politicized," according to Paul Pillar, a 30-year CIA vet and the agency's leading counter-terrorism intelligence analyst. - And a slew of Jack Abramoff emails are suddenly on the Internet, describing a much chummier relationship than the White House had led us to believe. - And of course the biggie -- the Libby testimony that Cheney and "other White House superiors" authorized him to release classified information. (Libby's mistake was trying to do it on the QT. He should have just had the information declassified first and then gotten Bush to announce it in a speech.) These tidbits each have two things in common: None is surprising and all are self-inflicted wounds. [The Huffington Post | Full Blog Feed] 6:33:08 PM    comment []

© Copyright 2006 Patricia Thurston.