"Why U.S. Intelligence Failed" by Robert Parry

[JHB]

Why U.S. Intelligence Failed
By Robert Parry
October 22, 2003

In Tom Clancy’s political thriller “Sum of All Fears,” the United States and Russia are being pushed to the brink of nuclear war by neo-Nazi terrorists who have detonated a nuclear explosion in Baltimore and want the Americans to blame the Russians.

CIA analysts have pieced together the real story but can’t get it to the president. “The president is basing his decisions on some really bad information,” analyst Jack Ryan (Ben Affleck) pleads to a U.S. general. “My orders are to get the right information to the people who make the decisions.”

Though a bit corny, Ryan’s dialogue captures the credo of professional intelligence analysts. Solid information, they believe, must be the foundation for sound decisions, especially when lives and the national security are at stake. The battle over that principle is the real back story to the recent dispute over Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction. It is a story of how the CIA’s vaunted analytical division has been corrupted – or “politicized” – by conservative ideologues over the past quarter century.

Some key officials in George W. Bush’s administration – from Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz to Vice President Dick Cheney – have long been part of this trend toward seeing intelligence as an ideological weapon, rather than a way to inform a full debate. Other figures in Bush’s circle of advisers, including his father, the former president and CIA director, have played perhaps even more central roles in this transformation.
--- http://www.consortiumnews.com/Print/102203.html -----

[glitch]

1. highly recommended reading

not just this article but everything at http://www.consortiumnews.com
The Parry reporters know their stuff and write well. They are journalists.

edited to add: did you read the article he linked to?
http://www.thebulletin.org/issues/1993/a93/a93Teamb.html

it ends with:
"The present danger is not that we are failing prudently to waste a few billion dollars and to keep up with Ivanovich in a meaningless but benign nuclear arms competition. The danger is that we are being convinced by our hawks to launch into a new and qualitative spiral in the nuclear arms accumulation, to reject the on-going mild, even somewhat inadequate, attempts to find a roughly equitable ceiling at which to call a halt. . . .

"The present danger is not to realize that the Committee is the Present Danger."

[JHB]

3. Yes, I've read it.

The neocons are political soothsayers and fortune tellers who "failed their way to the top" for 30 years.

[zbdent]

2. subtitled "The making of the pResident 2001-2004"

n/t

[RichM]

4. The usual great stuff from Robert Parry. Long, but well worth it.

Read it & appreciate what a real journalist can do. // This piece describes how CIA analysts have been systematically corrupted over the last 25 years, ever since GWH Bush was director of the Agency. It isn't just the overt farce we see today, where the analysts just tell the White House what it wants to hear. No, the situation is even worse than that. That's what's been going on for decades, already.