"The CIA Ate My Homework"!

[leftchick]

This is a great article at Tompaine.com AND it is Linked to the front page of Google News right now!

http://www.tompaine.com/feature2.cfm/ID/9884


Can President Bush, Vice President Cheney and the Pentagon neoconservatives get away with blaming the Central Intelligence Agency for the mess in Iraq?

They’re trying.

In the year and half before the war began in March, Cheney and the neocons constantly disparaged the CIA for underestimating the threat posed by Iraq. In public and in private, they lambasted the agency for overcautiousness. Behind the scenes, they pressured analysts—not to mention George Tenet, the CIA director, whose spine seems made of soft clay—to find more, more, more evidence of Iraq’s WMD and of Iraq’s (nonexistent) connections to Al Qaeda. They created a mini-intelligence unit inside the Pentagon, staffed by neoconservative ideologues such as Abram Shulsky and David Wurmser, to scour mounds of intelligence tidbits and extract incriminating evidence to prove what wasn’t provable. They treated Ahmed Chalabi of the Iraqi National Congress as a virtual Oracle of Delphi, giving credence to the lying defectors and bogus intelligence he produced, even as the CIA warned that Chalabi was a fraud. They gave credence to the cockeyed theories of Laurie Mylroie, who believed not only that Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9/11 but that he was the mastermind behind Tim McVeigh’s Oklahoma City bombing, too. And, disregarding CIA warnings, they convinced Bush to say that Iraq was secretly trying to buy uranium for A-bombs in West Africa, even though the documents they cited were forged.