posted on October 12, 2003 09:14:05 PM new
October 11 / 13, 2003
Screw You Right Back
CIA FU!
By BEN TRIPP
I may be terribly old-fashioned--I still wear a waistcoat and spats- but I've always lived by the simple dictum "don't dick with the Central Intelligence Agency". This is the agency, let us recall, that parts the hemispheres of people's brains with a spatula in the course of ordinary conversation. It's the same organization that has overthrown several dozen governments, assassinated countless persons, and hunted down Robert Redford in '3 Days of the Condor'. The CIA is a collection of the baddest cats this world has ever seen, and while I do not share in its ideals or goals (although they did help to keep the price of bananas down by overthrowing the government of Guatemala, so props for that) I do extend to the CIA my very greatest respect. It doesn't need my admiration; it is a vile machine. But you don't mess with the CIA, any more than you would mess with a Kodiak bear at the helm of an M1-Abrams tank. Thus it came as something of a shock to discover the Bush administration thought it could, with impunity, invent a bunch of phony intelligence ('hooey' in CIA-speak), get caught, and blame it on the CIA.
Let it be noted that the word 'intelligence' is used here in the sense of 'information'. All other senses of the word would be sorely malapropulent. We have in the CIA an agency that blows some 3-4 billion dollars per year (people used to think that was a lot of money) and yet can't provide us with the kind of geopolitical data you could get from a subscription to Tiger Beat magazine. The core intelligence upon which the late unpleasantness in Iraq was purportedly based was of such poor quality one suspects it was excerpted from the government section of the Baghdad Yellow Pages-- a copy stolen from a pay phone with half the pages torn out and the remainder obliterated by dog whiz. So this wretched CIA-generated intelligence, which would have earned a pretty low grade in the context of a 6th grade special-ed social studies report, was of little real value to the current administration's case for war. But rather than ask the CIA to improve its data-gathering efforts in the region, for instance by watching the news on television, the Bush administration decided to just go ahead and make things up. They turned out to be no better at it than the CIA.
The administration made up official-sounding numbers: 500 tons of sarin gas, 38,000 liters of botulinum (more than twice the amount accepted in school lunch programs), 25,000 liters of anthrax, and a quart jug of spider juice. They probably felt like these numbers were safe enough: nobody knows how much a liter is. Colin Powell could be seen before the United Nations waving around a vial of white powder, presumably a sample gotten from either the CIA or Marion Berry; it looked like he meant what he said. They made up exact numbers of warheads and delivery systems and boxes of thumb tacks to be strewn in America's streets. They even gave us a timeline: we had 45 minutes from green light to deployment on all these nasty items in the Iraqi arsenal. We're talking about specific numbers. All of them completely and utterly made up. Which leads us to Niger's uranium, or rather, doesn't.
Because when someone in the media accidentally picked up the story about some ambassador guy who went to some African country that can you believe it is called Niger to find out if they sold yellowcake uranium, which until this time everybody assumed was a type of flower you could get out of the Burpee's catalogue, and this ambassador guy's negative report got buried and the president instead said Iraq was practically choked with the stuff during his State of the Onion speech well, you can imagine. The whole thing blew up, tempest, teapot, and all. Eventually George Tenet, head of the CIA and therefore an individual you do not want to cross, was ordered to throw himself on his sword and admit it was the CIA's fault that the fissile materials claims got into the speech. Which in fact it was not. But Tenet being a Bush yes-man, he did the requisite auto-transfixion and exonerated the White House from blame. But he didn't forget this. Noooo. And then the story, which appeared to have blown itself out, was rekindled. Because the Bush gang don't know when to quit. So one of them got revenge on this ambassador guy, who looks just like my chiropractor but I'm pretty sure it's not him, by outing his wife's big secret, which was--wait for it-that she's a CIA operative!
Can I get an 'oops', people? Here we have an agency that was publicly cornholed not long ere, and all of a sudden one of its covert operatives---working the anti-terrorism beat, no less-has been exposed by the Executive Branch in a fit of petulance that would have made Caligula blush. Not only has she been exposed, but the front company she worked with, and anybody who showed up at the annual picnic, and her entire list of pen pals. It's safe to assume there are people in foreign countries who are dead because of this. If not dead, at least they've had to disguise themselves as llamas and flee the territory on their hands and knees. If that isn't tweaking the bull on the bag, I don't know what is. And Tenet agrees with me on this point- not just because we're lovers, either. He has initiated proceedings.
When the CIA initiates proceedings, entire nations collapse in flames. Economies deflate like whoopee cushions. Powerful men are found dead in alleys with their heads encased in cheese wax. It might be said that the CIA has an extremely low hubris threshold. As it now stands, the president (after only a few months of doing nothing) has ordered his people to cooperate with his other people in finding the source of this leak in the scandal now known rather lamely as 'Intimigate' (I prefer 'What, her?-gate' myself). This erstwhile investigation will not satisfy the CIA, methinks. Even Bush's own man at the CIA won't be satisfied with this, especially seeing as he's the one who took the fall last time. Whether or not a special prosecutor is appointed to oversee the investigation, there's a pissed-off CIA stomping around town at the moment with a 55-gallon drum (that's 208.45 liters) of whupass. Let us recap:
Bush's people, and I use the word 'people' loosely, decided to make the CIA take the fall for the one canard out of several thousand that a slumbering nation happened to catch on its way into the swamps of the Mesopotamian desert in the name of anti-terrorism. This canard also happened to be one of the few that the CIA specifically suggested Bush not espouse as an excuse for his little camping trip to hell, so we have a painful insult/injury compound already, vis-à-vis the CIA. Shortly thereafter, same Bush people, in a moment of good-natured backstabbing retribution, exposed one of the CIA's own assets, and by extension all the other assets to which she can be connected by a reasonably bright foreign intelligence agency with access to a telephone. I'm just guessing here, but it seems to me that an agency willing to overthrow the government of Guatemala in the name of banana imports ought to have no problem saying "screw you right back" to a bunch of venal, inbred frat boys blundering their way through their last terms in public office.
You don't play dirty tricks on the folks who invented them. Expect events in the next few months to get very interesting as political revelations start to occur at the most embarrassing moments, policy notions don't get properly cooked intelligence to back them up, and personal secrets float into public view for no apparent reason, drifting down the cloaca publicum to the delight of scandal-mongers everywhere. The CIA has officially been dicked with. They might even start parting people's brains again, although probably not the president's. They don't make spatulas that small.
Ben Tripp is a screenwriter and cartoonist. Ben also has a lot of outrageously priced crap for sale here. If his writing starts to grate on your nerves, buy some and maybe he'll flee to Mexico. If all else fails, he can be reached at: [email protected]
posted on October 12, 2003 09:16:44 PM new
Open warfare:
Bush vs. the intelligence community
By Ivan Eland
October 11, 2003—At a time when the Bush administration is under renewed criticism from Congress for flawed intelligence collection on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs and Iraq's alleged links to al Qaeda, it faces withering fire from perhaps a more formidable foe: it's own intelligence agencies. As a result, a political firestorm is on the horizon that could ultimately flare out of control.
It has been an open secret that U.S. intelligence agencies felt pressured by the Bush administration to exaggerate the threat of Iraqi WMD and find alleged links between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein's regime. But that latent anger has recently gone public in leaks of a Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) report questioning the credibility of intelligence provided by the administration's closest allies in Iraq. It also surfaced in the disclosure that the CIA has notified the Justice Department that a criminal statute apparently was violated when someone allegedly divulged the identity of a CIA covert agent to the media. That someone was likely a senior administration official or two. With a now openly hostile intelligence community, those embarrassing revelations may be only the first of many to come.
To protect the lives of covert intelligence agents in the field, it is illegal to disclose their identities. Passed during the Reagan administration, the law was originally targeted at a private organization that was relying entirely on publicly available information to "out" the covert agents. Whoever thought that the statute might eventually be used to criminally prosecute senior administration officials? For an administration that often subtly questions the patriotism of its critics, the outing of former Ambassador Joseph Wilson's wife—as alleged revenge for his first-hand criticism of the Bush administration's inflation of the Iraqi nuclear threat—smacks of a double standard. Even by the standards of the knock-down, drag-out brawling common to the nation's capital, that retribution was hitting below the belt.
And it's not very prudent either. Putting the lives of intelligence agents in danger is the quickest way to create a vendetta in the mind of the kings of covert operations. The depth of animosity in the intelligence community is exemplified by the CIA's notification to the Justice Department that the law apparently had been violated. CIA Director George Tenet, a former Clinton appointee who was allowed to keep his job when the Bush administration took office, had been heretofore compliant with administration pressure on the intelligence community to come up with the "right answers" on Iraq. Tenet has now either finally decided to fight back or, more likely, is under so much pressure inside the community that he has no choice. Unless the Justice Department can find some plausible excuse to quash a criminal investigation, the political fallout from that scandal could be intense.
Another indication that the intelligence agencies are not happy is the leaking of an internal DIA report questioning the credibility of defectors supposedly expert in Iraq's WMD programs. Those defectors were provided by the administration's strongest allies in Iraq, Ahmad Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress. The DIA noted that the defectors invented or exaggerated their credentials and provided very little useful information on Iraqi WMD.
Even the congressional criticism of the Bush administration's handling of intelligence on Iraqi WMD programs and Hussein's alleged links with al Qaeda at least partly mirrors the intelligence community's ire. The House Intelligence Committee, usually not very critical of the intelligence community, is led by Representative Porter Goss, a Republican and former CIA agent. The leaders of the committee, Goss and Democrat Jane Harman, recently noted that there were "too many uncertainties" in the outdated and inadequate intelligence that the Bush administration used to justify the war. They further concluded: "The intelligence available to the U.S. on Iraq's possession of W.M.D. and its programs and capabilities relating to such weapons after 1998, and its links to Al Qaeda, was fragmentary and sporadic." That's a nice way of saying that the Bush administration based its invasion of Iraq on only the scant new intelligence gathered after international weapons inspectors left five years ago.
Despite official pledges of cooperation, will the politicos at the White House return fire for the leaked DIA report or the CIA's notification of apparent criminal violation? They should think twice before doing so. By outing an intelligence agent and by bringing undue pressure on the intelligence community to come up with an excessively threatening picture of pre-war Iraq, the administration is already in enough trouble with the keepers of the secrets. It may already be too late for the administration to avoid other embarrassing revelations by its own spooks. But unwisely escalating the bitter feud with a foe that holds most of the cards certainly can't help the administration's fortunes.
Ivan Eland is Senior Fellow and Director of the Center on Peace & Liberty at The Independent Institute in Oakland, CA., and author of the book, Putting ﾓDefenseﾔ Back into U.S. Defense Policy
posted on October 13, 2003 12:09:53 PM new
Yes the wrong guys to piss.
Kennedy did so and who knows how much that had to do with his end.
I can see a CIA guy in a bar in the Phillipines.
Hey Wally - my cousins are going to off Bush when he's here next week. Thought you'd want to know. Is that worth a beer mate?
You obviously have mistaken me for someone who gives a #*!@ Jack. Buy ya a beer if you shut up and stop bothering me.
