All throughout the sorrowfully over-extended reign of George W. Bush, we've witnessed, quite acutely, how things work. If you are loyal to the Neocon cabal, you are promoted, rewarded (and given group hugs, I'm sure). If you don't cooperate, your very career will be compromised. To use a baseball analogy a la Gen. Michael Hayden,
if you don't "play ball" you'll be "dumped to the minors."
This policy has been implemented so often as to warrant another diary to catalog them all, so I'll leave that to someone with a tougher stomach. What we will center on in this diary are the endangered careers of CIA agents, and the intentions (or not) of the Bush Administration to fess up about Iran.
And the connection between the two.
David Ignatius wrote an article a few weeks ago that lays down the scene at the CIA:
Though [Porter] Goss long ago served as a CIA case officer, he arrived from Capitol Hill with a phalanx of conservative aides, soon dubbed the "Gosslings," who viewed the agency as a liberal, leak-prone opponent of conservative causes. That image is mostly nonsense -- many of the people forced out by the Gosslings were ex-military officers who would be tempted to shoot Democrats on sight, and most veterans cheered Goss's effort to stop press leaks. Goss's attacks on senior officers were reckless, and they peeled away a generation of senior CIA managers. Sadly, the Bush White House mostly applauded his jihad on what they viewed as CIA naysayers.
An example of the political frictions that harmed the agency involved CIA reporting from Iraq. From late 2003 on, the agency was warning about the rise of the Iraqi insurgency and the failings of the administration's political strategy. In 2004 the CIA station chief in Baghdad was sending warnings every 60 days, in special messages known as "AARDWOLF" cables, about the deteriorating situation. This candid and largely correct reporting is said to have angered White House officials, who complained that the Baghdad chief was defeatist and not a team player [Ed. Note: Hayden would be proud]. At the end of his tour, he was punished with a poor assignment.
Now, this isn't only about "disloyalty" among the ranks of the CIA. It is also, if not mostly, about the deep paranoia that festers within the Bush cabal. While Rove has almost certainly been using information gathered through warrantless NSA spying against Bush's political enemies, he's also been ferreting out Democrats in many Government agencies.
As Sean-Paul Kelley writes in The Agonist:
As the insurgency worsened and the Bush administration fumbled for answers, the consequences to those who provided honest intelligence reporting became more obvious. In 2004, case officers stationed in Baghdad told their colleagues that they were frequently ordered to revise intelligence reports that were considered 'negative' about Iraq. And in late 2004, when a new CIA station chief--the successor to the officer pulled in December 2003 (also pulled for telling the truth ~spk)--wrote another aardwolf reporting on the deadly conditions in Iraq, his political allegiances were quickly questioned by the White House, CIA officials later learned. After his aardwolf circulated in Washington, then--U.S. Ambassador John Negroponte heard from an official at the National Security Council. The NSC wanted to know whether the CIA officer was a Republican or Democrat.
It gets better.........er........worse. In this May 18 article in Harpers Magazine online, Ken Silverstein talks at length about
"Fairy Tales" - The (lack of) intelligence underpinning Bush's Iraq policy
A number of current and former intelligence officials have told me that the administration's war on internal dissent has crippled the CIA's ability to provide realistic assessments from Iraq. "The system of reporting is shut down," said one person familiar with the situation. "You can't write anything honest, only fairy tales."
The New York Times and others have reported that in 2003, the CIA station chief in Baghdad authored several special field reports that offered extremely negative assessments of the situation on the ground in Iraq--assessments that later proved to be accurate. The field reports, known as "Aardwolfs," were angrily rejected by the White House. Their author -- who I'm told was a highly regarded agency veteran named Gerry Meyer -- was soon pushed out of the CIA, in part because his reporting angered the 'See No Evil' crowd within the Bush administration. "He was a good guy," one recently retired CIA official said of Meyer, "well-wired in Baghdad, and he wrote a good report. But any time this administration gets bad news, they say the critics are assholes and defeatists, and off we go down the same path with more pressure on the accelerator."
In 2004 Meyer was replaced with a new CIA station chief in Baghdad, who that year filed six Aardwolfs, which, sources told me, were collectively as pessimistic about the situation in Iraq as the ones sent by his predecessor. The station chief finished his assignment in December 2004; he was not fired, but according to one source is now "a pariah within the system." Three other former intelligence officials gave me virtually identical accounts, with one saying the ex-station chief was "treated like shit" and "farmed out."(I was given the former station chief's name and current position, but I am not publishing the information because he is still employed by the CIA.)
As has been the case with other people deemed to be insufficiently loyal, the White House went fishing for dirt on the two station chiefs, including information on their political affiliations. "I spent 30 years at the CIA," said one former official, "and no one was ever interested in knowing whether I was a Republican or a Democrat. That changed with this administration. Now you have loyalty tests."
The fate of those two station chiefs had a predictable effect. In 2005, I'm told, the Baghdad station chief filed but a single Aardwolf. The report, which one person told me was widely derided within the CIA as "a joke," asserted that the United States was winning the war despite all evidence to the contrary. It was garbage, but garbage that the Bush administration wanted to hear; at the end of his tour, that Station Chief was given a plum assignment. "This is a time of war," said one former intelligence official. "Every day American kids are getting killed over there. We need steady, focused reporting [from Baghdad] but no one is willing to speak out since they know they'll get shot down."
"The CIA's ability to speak honestly is gone," concluded the official, "which is extraordinarily dangerous to our country."
Do your country a favor and read the entire article.
And now my pure conjecture on what is happening at present in regards to two current events. One being the request of a fresh NIE on Iraq by Minority Leader Reid's group
Five Democrats, headed by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada, wrote to Bush requesting a new National Intelligence Estimate, or NIE, while the United States is involved in an international diplomatic effort to get Iran to curb its nuclear ambitions.
The Democrats want an NIE, the intelligence community's most authoritative written judgment, to address several points including Iran's nuclear program and its military and defense capabilities.
The other being the impending confirmation of Air Force General Michael Hayden as the new CIA chief. (from the same Yahoo News article)
But Hayden, whose nomination is expected to win the Senate Intelligence Committee's endorsement next Tuesday, said Iran intelligence was being compiled on a broader basis and would follow new guidelines that emphasize dissenting views and grade the confidence behind specific intelligence claims.
"I think it's unfair to compare what it is we believe we know about Iran with what it is we prove to know or not know about Iraq," Hayden said at his Senate confirmation hearing.
Let's also keep in mind that
The Bush administration produced an NIE on Iran about a year ago. That document extended the U.S. estimate of Iran's likely development of nuclear arms to 2015 from early in the next decade.
Now, I assume that an NIE would be prepared by, or at least signed off by General Hayden (should he be confirmed).
And to recap, we have
1. An administration which is well-known for trashing reports (and reporters) from Iraq, that it does not agree with.
2. A brand new CIA chief who has been hand-picked by said administration (along with a hand-picked United States Director of National Intelligence).
3. And this new CIA chief swears up and down that he will "emphasize dissenting views."
Could it be that Bush was afraid that the much-hated Goss would not be able to keep the lid on a "bad news" aardwolf or NIE concerning Iraq, and so he felt he had to get his very special pal Hayden in right quick?
Not to mention it being an exceptional leap in faith that Bush will get a sudden case of the "Truth about Iran", when he STILL CAN'T STOMACH THE TRUTH ABOUT IRAQ.
Additionally, if we can't even get a trustworthy aardwolf out of Iraq, then why on earth should we trust an NIE? Just because Bush's other sycophant John Negroponte signs off on it?
This is the sound of my head exploding. Because the scene is obviously being set for Act II of Bush's play, "Chaos In the Middle-East For God Knows What Good Reason"
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