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By Dan Baum
$17.16
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By Chris Abani
$14.20
$19
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From Crooks and Liars
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Truthdig salutes Rep. Peter Hoekstra, the Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, who rapped Bush in a letter for not briefing Congress on various intelligence-gathering programs. Check out a video of Hoekstra publicly defending the letter on Fox News: “It is not optional for this president ... or people in the executive community not to keep the intelligence committees fully informed of what they are doing.”
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Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-Mich.), chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, sent a “sharply worded letter” to Bush warning him that he may have violated the law by keeping Congress in the dark on several unnamed intelligence programs, and that Bush risked losing GOP support on national security matters.
All of a sudden, it’s not just predictable GOP’ers like Arlen Specter who are rattling the saber on Bush’s excessive secrecy. Hoekstra was, until now, a hard-core Bushie. Seems there’s just so much alienation your friends will take before they lash out at you in public. Make no mistake: Bush values loyalty above everything else. That Hoekstra was willing to publicly cross the president says A LOT.
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From PBS
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The CIA’s former top man in the Middle East and South Asia says in a PBS interview that Americans shouldn’t be persuaded by official reports that prewar intelligence on Iraq wasn’t politicized; twisting the arms of analysts may not have been official policy but it happened nonetheless.
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A former Dept. of Defense staffer says that the U.S., in building megabases in Iraq, has all but given up on policing the country, and will send its troops out only to quell large riots. “The overarching U.S. strategy is to avoid the kind of big eruptions that get media attention.”
Posted on May 26, 2006
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It was the worst intelligence failure since Pearl Harbor, but all we get is a measly “no sir, I wasn’t comfortable” from the would-be CIA chief about the White House’s trumping up of intelligence to sell the Iraq war.
Yeah, that ought to about heal all our nation’s wounds….
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Gen. Michael Hayden bemoaned the “endless picking apart” of CIA operations in the news media during today’s confirmation hearing on his nomination to head the intelligence agency.
If the architect of the NSA domestic wiretapping program gets this promotion, it will be like a Jon Stewart joke gone horribly wrong.
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From CBS News
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The CIA’s former top covert official in Europe tells “60 Minutes” the White House turned a blind eye to evidence that Saddam Hussein did not have WMDs: “The idea of going after Iraq was U.S. policy. It was going to happen one way or the other.” Watch it.
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The CIA officer reportedly fired for leaking classified intelligence information is Mary O. McCarthy, who until 2001 was senior director for intelligence programs at the National Security Council.
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Democrats and Republicans don’t agree on a lot these days, but they do agree that the U.S.’ new spy chief, John Negroponte, is “creating just another blanket of bureaucracy, muffling rather than clarifying the dangers lurking in the world,” according to the N.Y. Times.
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By Robert Scheer — “A once swaggering president, who so convincingly wielded a bullhorn and modeled a flight suit, now has assumed the pretzel pose of a supplicant attempting to cajole our old enemy in Tehran into dropping its nuclear ambitions while simultaneously initiating talks with Iran aimed at bailing us out in Iraq.”
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The New York Times editorial page writes that “even a president cannot wave a wand and announce that an intelligence report is declassified.” Also, check out how Editor & Publisher handily took down the Washington Post editorial board’s defense of the leak.
Posted on Apr 16, 2006
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We know: “Duh!” right? Well, here’s what’s new: The author of this article, using newly surfaced Libby testimony, all but accuses Cheney of outing Valerie Plame as a CIA agent—which has been widely suspected but never confirmed. The National Journal’s Murray Waas (the country’s leading news-breaker on this story) has the scoop.
Posted on Apr 14, 2006
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By Molly Ivins — “Personally, I think this is a really good time not to keep up. The more you try, the less sense it makes.”
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Bush claimed that two small trailers found after the invasion of Iraq vindicated his claim of banned WMDs—but intelligence officials had already concluded that the trailers were bogus.
The Washington Post has the scoop.
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By Robert Scheer — Colin Powell told me that he and his department’s top experts never believed that Iraq posed an imminent nuclear threat, but that the president followed the misleading advice of Vice President Dick Cheney and the CIA in making the claim.
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Patrick Fitzgerald writes in a legal briefing, “It is hard to conceive of what evidence there could be that would disprove the existence of White House efforts to ‘punish Wilson.’ ”
Also, Bush formally admits to declassifying the intelligence later leaked by Libby to reporters.
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Former intelligence officer and United Nations weapons inspector Scott Ritter cuts through a recent L.A. Times story which claimed that “Iran could manufacture enough highly enriched uranium to build a bomb within three years.” He provides a rather technical, but extremely convincing, argument for why it is unlikely that Iran could pose a nuclear threat anytime soon. (video: h/t Crooks and Liars)
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By Andy Borowitz — The celebrated satirist quotes Bush as saying that his kitchen staffer was “slow to act” in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina: “Basically, he was just in the kitchen baking the whole time.”
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Now that 48,000 boxes of Arabic-language Iraqi documents captured in Iraq have hit the web, armchair analysts have their work cut out for them.
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The pretense has been shattered. The U.S. is explicitly accusing Iran of supplying money and training to anti-U.S. fighters in Iraq.
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From nndb.com
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Think Progress puts together an in-depth cheat sheet on all the ways Roberts has shrunk from his responsibilities as chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.
Posted on Mar 9, 2006
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Senate Republicans shut down a Democratic-led proposal to investigate Bush’s eavesdropping program. Instead, a White House-approved seven-member panel will oversee the effort.
White House-approved? You gotta be kidding.
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Foreign Affairs magazine (not to be confused with US Weekly) publishes a devastating essay by a former senior Middle East intel officer.
“Intelligence was misused publicly to justify decisions already made ... and the intelligence community’s own work was politicized.”
Also in the mag, a think-tank guru writes that Washington should stop mistaking Iraq for Vietnam and start seeing it for what it really is.
(via The PeaceMajority Report)
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We learned last week that the Coast Guard had warned of terrorist infiltration of the UAE, the country angling to take over control of major U.S. ports. The White House assured us that those warnings had been addressed. Now Sens. Collins and Lieberman are charging in a sharply worded letter that the warnings were never addressed.
How many more lies will emerge from the murky depths of this port-deal fiasco?
Posted on Mar 3, 2006
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Bush never let the nation in on the fact that the Energy and State departments had given him reports that cast major doubts on Saddam’s WMD capacity and his willingness to attack the U.S. The National Journal has this major exclusive.
It has become undeniable that Bush & Co. never had any intention of allowing America to properly weigh all the evidence available on Saddam’s prewar capabilities and intentions. (Hat tip: Brad Blog)
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The Coast Guard warned weeks ago that it couldn’t be sure that the UAE wasn’t supporting terrorists. The disclosure came during Monday’s hearings about the Arab country’s attempts to take over control of major U.S. ports. Check out the unclassified Coast Guard document.
Wanna know why 64% of people disapprove of this deal? Consider how much time and energy Bush & Co. have spent scaring the American public with “what if” scenarios about Arab threats (see: Saddam).
Posted on Feb 27, 2006
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Remember that Orwellian-sounding data-mining program that was supposed to have been shut down two years ago? Turns out it’s alive and functioning—just under a different name. The National Journal has the blockbuster scoop.
Posted on Feb 27, 2006
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An all-out White House lobbying campaign has dramatically slowed an investigation into Bush’s spying program and may eventually kill it.
The White House may have botched Cheney’s response to the hunting incident, but the administration sure hasn’t lost its touch when it comes to leaning on moderate Republicans (and even Democrats) to rally around the president. Call your senators—especially Olympia Snowe of Maine—and urge them not to cave in to political pressure.
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The former CIA official who coordinated America’s intelligence in the Middle East accused the Bush administration of misusing prewar intelligence to hype the Iraq threat. | story
This is a big deal: it’s the same unnerving story we heard firsthand from Richard Clarke when he left the White House.
Posted on Feb 11, 2006
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America’s former top spy for the Middle East accuses the White House of “cherry-picking information” to justify a decision it had already made to go to war. | story
Who wants to bet on how long it will take the CIA to start swift-boating this guy?
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Rep. Heather Wilson (R-N.M.) breaks with the White House and calls for a full congressional inquiry into Bush’s spy program. | story
The dam hasn’t just cracked—it’s gushing.
Posted on Feb 8, 2006
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Newly released documents from the Ford administration show that it, too, tried to eavesdrop without warrants. | story
And in an “apple doesn’t fall far from the tree” moment, then-CIA Director George H.W. Bush “complained that some major communications companies were unwilling to install government wiretaps without a judge’s approval,” according to the article.
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Walter Pincus, one of the best-informed national security reporters in the country, offers a video critique of the Senate appearance of the nation’s new spy chief. | video
Posted on Feb 3, 2006
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In at least two instances, American forces have seized wives of insurgents as a means of “leverage.” | story
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By Jon Wiener — Bush rolled out an old canard about Bin Laden and the media rolled over. An inside look at the sticking power of a falsehood.
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For over two decades, the couple allegedly passed on secrets about U.S. officials, FBI agents and anti-Castro groups. | story
Posted on Jan 9, 2006
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Investigators name the country as a conduit for weapons equipment. | more
Posted on Jan 5, 2006
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Judges will question Dept. of Justice, others, on legality of warrantless wiretaps | more
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The more we learn of the Bush administration’s pervasive outsourcing of torture, the more sensible it seems as a policy. Evidently, our intelligence people, tainted as they are by the squeamish morality of Western civilization, are just not fully up to the task of getting prisoners to tell us what the administration wants us to hear.
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