Over at
firedoglake, a commenter asked an excellent question:
Does anyone know why Cheney wanted to destroy the intelligence community? Forget about 9/11 - he's been gunning for the CIA et al since day one.
Well, it so happens that I think the answer to this question leads us close to the whole deal, so I made a contribution lengthy enough that it seemed like a diary. Herewith my crossing of an event horizon:
There's a rich backstory to this, concerning so-called 'Team B' exercises from the 1970s. These were parallel intelligence efforts that came to be very much like the Iraq War Stovepipe. At various points in time some of the same people were involved.
Korb at Center for American Progress provides an overview, and the companion piece by
Alterman is also useful. (
) A few points of note:
- The first Team B was probably created by G.H.W. Bush in 1976, when he was CIA director. The objective was to provide for outside, competitive analysis of the Agency's recent NIE on the Soviet Union, at a time when hardliners were pressing Pres. Ford to abandon the Nixon-Kissinger detente policy. The hardliners thought that the NIE underestimated the Soviet threat. In fact, later evaluation showed that the CIA had been overestimating the threat, so that the even-more-beefed-up assessments that came from Team B were wild exaggerations.
- The failures of Team B 'analysis' were not apparent for years; in the interim, forecast failures were explained away by the contemporary version of Saddam's well-hidden wmd caches. Therefore, because the papers they published conformed to the tastes of certain ideologues, both they and their outsider methodology, I believe, became popular during the 1980s. To quote Korb on the 1976 episode:
Although the Team B report contained little factual data, it was enthusiastically received by conservative groups such as the Committee on the Present Danger, whose members included Ronald Reagan, and the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board.
- Then we come to this example of Team B 'methodology' at its finest, in the G.H.W. Bush administration:
In the first Bush administration, the CIA claimed that Soviet spending on weapons started declining in 1988 and that the number of Soviet strategic launchers was staying the same or declining. Then Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney argued publicly that the Soviet Union's efforts to modernize its strategic nuclear weapons were "robust and continuous."[7] Moreover, Cheney asserted that there was "absolutely no evidence" that Gorbachev's ascension had altered Soviet strategic planning.
- When the Team B folks were out of power, during the Clinton years, they discovered how useful their methodology was in harassing an incumbent:
When an NIE in the mid-1990s concluded that it would be at least 15 years before a rogue nation could threaten the U.S. with an intercontinental ballistic missile, it undercut the hardliners' case for deploying a national missile defense system. House Speaker Newt Gingrich did not like this assessment, so the Republicans demanded Congress set up a commission headed by Donald Rumsfeld to assess the threat. As Washington Times reporter Rowan Scarborough noted, the "nine-member commission was tilted in Rumsfeld's favor."[9] Not surprisingly, it concluded that once again the intelligence community was wrong. In its view, "the threat to the U.S. posed by these emerging capabilities is broader, more mature, and evolving more rapidly than has been reported in estimates and reports by the intelligence community."[10]
[All footnote numbers are Korb's, but the emphasis is mine.]
So as Korb goes on to imply, the intelligence community was softened up by a lot of battering of this type even well before the second Bush administration.
In my opinion, this backchanneling, uncontrolled Team B methodology is the most pernicious effect of the present regime in the White House, aside from the perniciousness of many of its actual policies. The process (ha! I almost capitalized Process) of it is not that of a distributed analysis meant to converge on some truths, or even of a competitive debate. It is the 'process' of spamster, or of a wiseguy standing up in a meeting with a bullhorn.
Incidentally, I've formed the conjecture that the reason the ... Administration got their socks on heel up about Joseph Wilson's column is that they feared any mention of Cheney in connection with prewar intel analysis would lead, not to the exposure of lies---hell, what is that to these folks, they just keep repeating the same ones anyway---but to the exposure of the extent of the Team B, and the power that was given to these people to use without accountability. Recall the precise nature of Fleischer's fumbling at the first press gaggle after Wilson's column: completely unbidden and in disregard of the actual question he was asked, Fleischer told everyone all about how Cheney did not request, was not informed of, never knew about Wilson's mission. It was the fact that Cheney's name was out there in the chain of command that I think got them all over the Wilsons in the end.
(
) Here are two more articles that put Team B into to context of the present unpleasantness:
The Selling of the Iraq War: The First Casualty and
Hyping Terror for Fun, Profit---and Power