“The old guard of the CIA, threatened and beleaguered as they haven’t been since the disclosure of ‘the family jewels’ by the Rockefeller Commission in 1975, is striking back.”
When Bush turned to the intelligence agencies to produce “evidence” to support his NeoCon plan to invade Iraq, they ponied up. To them, that’s what you do when you work in the executive branch and the executive gives an order. Of course, much of the Intelligence community’s behaviour was formed in the days when the buck stopped at the desk in the Oval Office. Those days are gone.
Perhaps the administration should have taken a lesson from Captain Thurman in Pearl Harbor (portrayed by Dan Aykroyd) when he says, to president Roosevelt, “my job is to gather and interpret material. Making difficult decisions based on incomplete information from my limited decoding ability is your job, sir.” Instead, Bush has blamed the intelligence community for his failures in Iraq and prior to 9/11, and his administration hasn’t been making friends in Defense, either.
…Rumsfeld and his band of neo-con warriors — Wolfowitz, Feith, et al — and their titanic struggle to remake the Pentagon into a lean, mean fighting machine.
They struck at the entrenched enemy, but failed to kill it. And now the enraged, wounded beast has turned its wrath on the New Age Defense crew.
It won’t be pretty. The least of it is that Bush will lose as a result.
bookofjoe makes it even more clear in a followup:
The reason Kerry will win is that the CIA and the Pentagon are going to steal the election for him. Not because they necessarily agree with his politics and plans; rather, because he will leave them alone.
An earlier post set the groundwork, and outlined the picture bookofjoe has been detailing:
Michael V. Kostiw, staff director of the terrorism subcommittee of the House intelligence committee chaired by Goss, was slated for CIA executive director, the third-ranking position in agency.
Won’t be happening.
It seems that back in 1981, when he was a CIA case officer with 10 years of experience, Kostiw was arrested and charged with shoplifting a $2.13 package of bacon from a supermarket in Langley, Virginia, near the CIA.
Michael Kostiw withdrew from CIA consideration the day the story broke.