Our Intelligence Apparatus - - The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

Some years back cartoonist Walt Kelly's character Pogo announced "we have met the enemy and he is us." Kelly's particular focus at the time was the environment, but he could have been talking just as well about today's political juggernaut as factions thrash about trying to justify positions based on partisan wish fulfillment rather than fact.

For Nancy Pelosi haters, now is the perfect moment to scapegoat her over intelligence matters, especially for saying she wasn't properly informed by the CIA about the use of interrogation techniques, including waterboarding. Her legion of enemies on the right say she should step down although that demand seems strangely out of sync in the context of the torture debate since it was neither her policy nor within her purview to openly challenge the administration's secret intelligence data after 9/11.

But, beyond the matter of whether or not waterboarding, intense or 'mild', qualified as torture, clearly other interrogation methods caused serious physical injury and threatened the lives of subjects, conditions defined as torture by Bush attorneys. Somehow, though, the death thing doesn't fit what most people think of as torture since trying to extract information from a prisoner post mortem is pretty much an exercise in futility. Oh well...

For those who offer uncritical support of our intelligence apparatus it should be noted that some of the CIA's Machiavellian schemes were about furthering political goals, not protecting the country from imminent foreign threats. The CIA-supported overthrow of Chile's democratically elected leader, Salvador Allende during the Nixon presidency comes to mind. The ensuing upheaval is depicted in the movie Missing starring Sissy Spacek and Jack Lemmon - - the true story of an American journalist in Chile who was arrested and executed for knowing too much about US involvement in the coup. In its concern about leftist influences in South America our government helped destabilize Chile and along came infamous dictator Augusto Pinochet, no leftist he. What a relief.

The point is there are serious questions about what we the people and our representatives are told and through what filter information passes. Before invading Iraq, the Bush administration relied on sources that reinforced its agenda. Thus it turned to Ahmed Chalibi who had been out of the country for many years and to a man known as "Curveball" whose name alone should have given them pause. Had they not been so anxious to depose Saddam Hussein and occupy Iraq, the Bush people might have heeded some of the warnings that were issuing from other more reliable sources.

Most disturbing of all is that early on, waterboarding is believed to have been used in an attempt to force Iraqi prisoners to say there was an Al Qaeda-Hussein connection, in order to verify claims the Bush administration had made about their rationale for attacking Iraq. And so, despite the fact that they believed Abu Zubaydah, for example, had already provided whatever credible information he had, interrogators were told, presumably by Cheney's 'alternate intelligence agency,' to waterboard him ( 83 times in fact) to see if they could get him to agree there was an Iraq-Al Qaeda link.

It doesn't dishonor the work of diligent intelligence operatives in the CIA network to point out that our government has at times manipulated intelligence to make political points. President Bush was told by the agency not to include the questionable contention that nuclear materials were finding their way to Iraq in his State-of-the-Union speech, but he included it anyway. Later he would cite unreliable intelligence to explain the absence of WMD and the lack of evidence indicating an Iraqi nuclear program.

In any case, he presented CIA Director George Tenet, Iraqi administrator Paul Bremer and General Tommy Franks with Medals of Freedom. In Tenet's case, either he didn't have a clue or Bush chose not to take his advice. And Bremer couldn't have done a worse job for the people of Iraq or for our position there, and he had no good explanation for the disappearance of millions of dollars other than to say he had to do things in a hurry. As for crediting Franks with having "won two wars" what wars was Bush talking about?

We have been our own worst enemy, blinded for too long by a mixture of fear and complacency and badly served by leaders who stage-managed intelligence instead of interpreting it. Going forward we mustn't be bullied into believing that Cheney and the rest were motivated by national-security concerns rather than personal agendas. Had their intentions been pure, or their conclusions intellectually sound they wouldn't have had to invent reasons for digging a deep hole for us in the Middle East.