Haven't posted today because I needed to harvest a crop of ripe data, and I've also been mulling over this article by Seymour Hersh, in The New Yorker. It's rather painful to read given might be my somewhat optimistic interpretation of Bush's decision method on the Iraq War. I'll have a great deal more to say, but the bare bones of the case are these:
1. Bush had every right to choose to follow a different decision method than that traditionally employed by the CIA. And he also had a right to expect the CIA to give him their full support in implementing that method.
2. There was simply no way the CIA was in any condition to provide the intelligence to the Bush Administration that they required, in order to implement their method. And it's fairly clear that there were some pretty good reasons besides that as to why the Bush people might not trust the CIA to predigest information for them.
3. Having said that, the Bush people did a really awful job of vetting intelligence, at the very least. It's a bit like someone who decides they need to amputate their own arm in an extreme situation, but then fails to apply a tourniquet. At most they deliberately misled, or lied.
4. If the Niger story was, indeed, cooked up by disgruntled CIA employees it is a far greater offense than anything the Administration did. Think about it. These people deliberately misled a sitting elected national Executive about a matter of vital national security. They righteously hang people for that sort of thing. And the fact that people in the CIA (according to some reports) were mirthful about the situation is the sign of an organizational dysfunction that surely must require the sort of overhaul that was wrought on the DOD in the three decades following Vietnam.
I intend to get down on all fours with this article, once the current project is done. More later.
Posted by Demosophist at October 27, 2003 11:38 PM | TrackBack