More Trouble for the White House

From TBOGG:

The tangled web starts to unravel

Jake Tapper writes about the lies that took us into war over at Salon (it’s Salon Premium). Here is an interesting taste:

Korb also suggests that this affair could seriously affect the ability of the U.S. government to function efficiently. “What this administration has done to military and intelligence professionals in government is disgraceful,” he says, citing Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric Shinseki, who was publicly rebuffed by Wolfowitz and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld after predicting — correctly, it now seems — that it would take “several hundred thousand troops to keep the peace in postwar Iraq.” Korb also cites the formation earlier this year of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, a group of a few dozen former intelligence officials from Army Intelligence, CIA, FBI, Defense and State Departments, to protest what they saw as a misuse of intelligence for the purposes of building a case for war. “This will also have long-term ramifications,” Korb says.

On the VIPS steering committee sits 27-year CIA veteran Ray McGovern, one of President Ronald Reagan’s intelligence briefers from 1981-85, who still has many contacts within several intelligence agencies. McGovern tells Salon that he believes the Bush administration’s pressure on and manipulation of intelligence agencies was “worse than the Gulf of Tonkin,” when President Lyndon Johnson falsified information in order to secure authorization to escalate the Vietnam War. At least back then it was done “in his quick, manipulative way,” McGovern says. “This was so premeditated.”

McGovern, who opposes the war in Iraq, says “the intelligence just wasn’t there, so in such a case the president who wants to pursue this war and his advisors will either manufacture it or cook whatever is there to the recipe they want to pursue.”

Korb and McGovern are just two such voices in a chorus of seemingly credible, if mostly anonymous, critics. On Thursday, a senior CIA official told the Washington Post that Cheney and his staff “sent signals, intended or otherwise, that a certain output was desired from here.” There was the story about Powell, first reported by U.S. News & World Report, preparing for his testimony before the United Nations in February and so exasperated with dubious information provided to him that he threw the documents in the air and declared, “I’m not reading this. This is bullshit.” There’s the Time magazine story reporting that an Army intelligence officer said Defense Secretary Donald “Rumsfeld was deeply, almost pathologically distorting the intelligence.” On Thursday, the Wall Street Journal quoted a State Department intelligence official who said of the pre-war WMD information that “much of it wasn’t very solid, and the fragmentary information sometimes produced fierce internal disagreements about its meaning.” Then there was the individual from the Defense Intelligence Agency who told the New York Times that “the American people were manipulated.”

With the Administration line now looking to blame the “intelligence” that they received for misleading lying to the public, it looks like the intelligence community is going to bite back.