'How Bush Rules’

[seemslikeadream]

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/24/books/chapters/0924-1st-blum.html?ref=books

By SIDNEY BLUMENTHAL
Published: September 24, 2006
The Intelligence Wars NOVEMBER 1, 2003


In Baghdad, the Bush Administration acts as though it is astonished by the postwar carnage. Its feigned shock is a consequence of Washington's intelligence wars. In fact, not only was it warned of the coming struggle and its nature-ignoring a $5 million State Department report titled The Future of Iraq-but Bush himself signed another document in which that predictive information is contained.

According to the congressional resolution authorizing the use of military force in Iraq, the administration is required to submit to the Congress reports of postwar planning every sixty days. This report, bearing Bush's signature and dated April 14, declares: "We are especially concerned that the remnants of the Saddam Hussein regime will continue to use Iraqi civilian populations as a shield for its regular and irregular combat forces or may attack the Iraqi population in an effort to undermine Coalition goals." The report goes on: "Coalition planners have prepared for these contingencies, and have designed the military campaign to minimize civilian casualties and damage to civilian infrastructure."

Yet, on August 25, as the violence in postwar Iraq flared, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld claimed that this possibility was not foreseen: "Now was-did we-was it possible to anticipate that the battles would take place south of Baghdad and that then there would be a collapse up north, and there would be very little killing and capturing of those folks, because they blended into the countryside and they're still fighting their war?"

"We read their reports," a Senate source told me. "Too bad they don't read their own reports."

In advance of the war, Bush (to be precise, Dick Cheney, the de facto prime minister to the distant monarch) viewed the CIA, the State Department, and other intelligence agencies not simply as uncooperative but even disloyal, as their analysts continued to sift through information to try to determine what exactly might be true. This process is the essence of their professionalism and mission. Yet their strict insistence on the empirical was a threat to the ideological, the facts an imminent danger to the doctrine. So those facts had to be suppressed, and the individuals creating contrary evidence had to be marginalized, intimidated, or discredited. Twice, in the run-up to the war, Vice President Cheney steered his motorcade to the George H. W. Bush Center for Intelligence in Langley, Virginia, where he personally tried to coerce CIA desk-level analysts to fit their work to specifications.

[me b zola]

1. There goes Blumenthal, telling the truth again...

Having already decided on its course in Iraq, the Bush administration demanded the fabrication of evidence to substantiate an imminent threat. Then, fulfilling the teleology of the Bush doctrine, preemptive action could be taken. Policy a priori dictated intelligence ‡ la carte.