Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : GOPwinger Lies/Distortions/Omissions/Perversions of Truth -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: PartyTime who wrote (5747)	3/9/2004 5:39:47 PM
From: Thomas M.	Respond to of 173976

The GOP lie that came back to haunt this country: <<< ... It began in 1976, when CIA Director George Bush established a new intelligence analysis unit called "Team B." Championed by top White House officials Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, the Bush unit was packed with hardcore ideologues -- including Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle -- bent on "proving" a predetermined conclusion: that regular CIA assessments of the Soviet Union were "too soft," ignoring the "imminent threat" of Soviet aggression and the Kremlin's ever-increasing political and economic might. At every turn, the B-teamers cooked and distorted intelligence data to fit their agenda. Scare stories were regularly leaked to credulous journalists to whip up public fear; legislators were plied with "top-secret" briefings to win Congressional support for massive increases in military spending. During the Reagan-Bush years, the B-Teamers and their acolytes spread throughout the corridors of power, where they launched covert operations and proxy wars around the world, always citing "credible evidence" of "imminent threats" -- such as Ronald Reagan's famous warning that tiny Nicaragua, then besieged by a U.S.-backed terrorist army, could invade the sacred American heartland of Texas "in a matter of hours." As it turned out, even the "softest" CIA assessments vastly underestimated the weakness and instability of the Soviet regime. Team B's wildly inflated perversions of reality were exposed as perhaps the most incompetent, ignorant -- and costly -- intelligence failures in American history. For in addition to the lives and money wasted fighting phantom threats "to America's very survival," the now thoroughly B-Teamed CIA armed and funded a horde of Islamic extremists in Afghanistan, schooling them in "asymmetric warfare" and terrorist operations. No doubt the B-Teamer's ideologically blinded "intelligence" told them that the Western-hating jihadists would never turn this training against their American paymasters ... >>> counterpunch.org