Former CIA agent: Bush Made Intelligence Problems Worse

[tekisui]

Source: The Raw Story

A former CIA field officer says the Bush administration's reforms of the intelligence community have made it more difficult to prevent terrorist operations.

Speaking to MSNBC's Keith Olbermann, Jack Rice, now an on-air personality at Air America radio, said the creation of the National Counterterrorism Center and the office of the Director of National Intelligence in the years after the 9/11 attacks means that information is being shuffled around too many different offices and agencies.

"The problem with that is sometimes you may not get the context of that information," Rice said. "So they only get pieces of it. When you break this up into so many moving parts -- and there are already incredible numbers of moving parts -- you sort of misunderstand how the entire process works. So now they're having to cobble it back together, and try to come up with an answer, and they're still failing at that."

more: http://rawstory.com/2010/01/cia-agent-bush-made-problems-worse/

[Love Bug]

1. Yet another observation for the "no shit, Sherlock" file

[Turbineguy]

2. I thought that was the whole point.

To be able to instill fear based on false information and no coordinated system or agencies to refute it.

[indepat]

5. By George, could it be you're on to something?

:P

[jmowreader]

7. No. "Fear" wasn't Bush's prime motivator.

The Intelligence Community prior to 2000 was very simple to understand: the Central Intelligence Agency was at the top of the heap, and the Director of Central Intelligence was the nation's intelligence chief. Below CIA were many agencies. They did their thing and reported to CIA, who puts the Big Picture together and presents it to our nation's most important leaders. (We all know the CIA is a bunch of bloodthirsty murdering scumbags, but the BMS business is just part of what they do. They also take information from all the other agencies, combine it with "open source" information from the press, and produce a single opinion on every subject the US needs to know about.) This has room for improvement but, overall, it worked pretty well.

Then we got Dubya Bush in power and things changed: he wanted answers the Intelligence Community couldn't give him, such as "Saddam and Osama are working together" or "Saddam Hussein caused 9/11." (If you read the history of 9/11 closely enough, you'll see that as soon as the fire was out in the Pentagon Donald Rumsfeld went to the military's intelligence apparatus and told them to find some way to tie 9/11 to Saddam Hussein. This is ANOTHER reason why they had to get Shrub the hell out of DC--they probably knew he would have nuked Iraq that day if he was in town.) It was then Bush decided the National Intelligence System was irreparably broken and he had to install the director of national intelligence and the other officers he put in.

Basically, Bush "fixed" the intelligence system not because it didn't work, but because it did.

[shawcomm]

3. I can imagine it...

Anywhere Bush goes is a net loss of intelligence.

[Dappleganger]

4. K&R

[NightWatcher]

6. K and R, that's why and when I left ('02)

[Blue Owl]

8. Suck on that, Rudy Ghouliani

n/t