I think my mind is capable of being changed, and though you may not believe it, I have actually listened to Scheuer and Pillar quite carefully on NPR and Charilie Rose when they have been interviewed.
What will not persuade me is arguments that say: see, here are the noble CIA truth-tellers giving the real scoop about how they were bullied by the big bad Bush administration, which is often the subtext of the presentation of their arguments. The political motivation of administration officials are taken for granted while the political motivations of the CIA are presumed to be non-existent. That I won't buy for a minute.
Three things have been clear since the start of the Bush administration, so clear that it's hard for anyone of whatever political background to deny them: 1) the CIA are ferociously bureaucratic infighters who know Washington better than any administration, 2) that the CIA, while ostensibly not being policy makers, have in fact some settled policy objectives deeply at odds with the Bush administration, which colored the intelligence product they were producing and 2) the intelligence product that the CIA has been producing has been crappy since before the end of the Cold War.
The CIA missed the fall of the USSR. They missed Saddam's quite mature nuclear program in 1991. They had no idea of Libya's nuclear program. They believed that Saddam had WMDs in 2003 (in their defense, so did British, French and German intelligence agencies), but had this cockamamie theory that secular Saddam would never ally himself with Islamist Al Qaeda. This was stupid even before 2003, since Saddam quite openly spent the last years of his reign building grandiose mosques, portraying himself as a pious Muslim, and supporting Islamist terrorists. It was beyond stupid after 2003, when the Baathists and Al Qaeda emerged joined at the hip in the Sunni insurgency in Iraq. Is it any wonder that the DoD lost faith in the product, and formed their own intelligence branch?
Since 2004, when the CIA allowed Scheuer to publish a book bashing Bush in the middle of a Presidential campaign, the nature of the CIA campaign to discredit the Bush administration and make sure that the CIA winds up smelling of roses when all is said and done, has come out into the open.
So I really need some neutral third party to adjudicate between the Bush administration and the CIA to try to figure out what happened. Every time this has happened so far, such as the Senate Intelligence Report, they report that there was no overt 'twisting' or 'cherry-picking'. Nothing in fact, that could not be much more simply explained by the differing ideological stances of the CIA and most of the Bush administration. |
