I ran across a very interesting quote this morning in an article from Village Voice. George H. W. Bush was quoted from March of 2005 regarding the issue of faulty intelligence:
"It burns me up to see the agency under fire."
Recent criticism, Bush said, reminded him of the 1970s, when Congress "unleashed a bunch of untutored little jerks out there" to investigate the CIA's involvement in domestic spying, assassinations, and other illegal activities, and subsequently passed laws to prevent abuses.
What role could Bush Sr., former head of the CIA who happens to be very well acquainted with the Rumsfeld/Cheney gang, be playing in the current binge of spying being exposed this fall?
I find it interesting that the abuses revealed during the 1970s, including
COINTELPRO which placed operatives into anti-war groups, among others, to conduct surveillance, are very similar to some of the allegations being made today--spying on domestic organizations without warrants, basically.
It's also interesting that veterans of the CIA who've been around long enough to see this neocon group of Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz etc. be in power, go away for awhile, and then come back, describe their reaction to the return as
"The crazies are back!"
Obviously since Bush was head of the CIA, he knows how it works. Is it reasonable to postulate that he's advised Cheney on how to interact with the CIA to get the desired results? We know that Cheney put pressure on the CIA during the buildup to Iraq, and that the CIA was not used to things working that way:
this is not unusual, this is unprecedented. The Vice President of the United States never during those 27 years came out to the CIA headquarters for a working visit. Not even George Bush the first came out under those circumstances.
"George Bush the first" was VP for 8 years, and even he did not make visits to the CIA to press for the analysis to come to a specific conclusion. Maybe he had enough contacts that all he needed to do was make a phone call, after all we believed for awhile that Grenada was some Communist threat.
Anyway, either way, it's pretty striking that Bush is out there to this day (at least as of March) with his hide chapped because people are suggesting the CIA provided bad intelligence. Either he's frustrated that the internal workings are subject to being overseen again, or he's frustrated that WH pressure resulted in a poor showing.