Bush and the Right love to say how they were mislead by the CIA about WMD’s prior to the war. They were not. They are lying. They knew prior to going in that the weapons weren’t there as every one of the sites they said they “knew” had WMD’s had already been inspected and turned up nothing. As well, large parts of the intelligence community had told them the same thing. They ignored them.
Recently, Bush has been ignoring another National Intelligence Estimate warning of Civil War in Iraq and has referred to it as “just guessing”.
But guess what else it turns out they ignored? From a Tom Tomorrow item on a story in yesterday’s NY Times:
Well, whaddya know:
The estimate came in two classified reports prepared for President Bush in January 2003 by the National Intelligence Council, an independent group that advises the director of central intelligence. The assessments predicted that an American-led invasion of Iraq would increase support for political Islam and would result in a deeply divided Iraqi society prone to violent internal conflict.
One of the reports also warned of a possible insurgency against the new Iraqi government or American-led forces, saying that rogue elements from Saddam Hussein’s government could work with existing terrorist groups or act independently to wage guerrilla warfare, the officials said. The assessments also said a war would increase sympathy across the Islamic world for some terrorist objectives, at least in the short run, the officials said.
All right, so maybe someone could have seen it coming. And in fact did.
Can we stop blaming the CIA now and start blaming the folks who deserve the blame?! Including the guy with whom the buck is supposed to stop?
Tomorrow adds one more thought:
Indeed they do. And according to NBC news tonight, the schools which have been rehabilitated at great expense to the American taxpayer are mostly being run by–yes, you guessed it–hardline Islamic fundamentalists.
Listen to the thunder.
Is the CIA completely independant from the government?
Brad,
we have known for quite some time that the CIA is not to blame for this. ALL of the investigations made it quite clear that when speaking of intel reports in public, this Administration excised anything that could be viewed as unfavorable to its ambitions. Not only this but BEFORE the invasion, when the inspectors were visiting all the sites supplied by the various intel agencies, the Administration gave no one the time to re-think the new data before plunging int this disaster.
Yup, John. Though the NYTimes report is notable in that it *also* shows that Bush was told about what would happen in the aftermath and he *still* failed plan for it. Chosing to call it a "miscalculation" instead that nobody could have forseen. Chalk that now up as another proven lie.
Ooops…Sorry Mrs. J! Meant to answer your question. No, it’s not independent. Though it’s kinda, sorta supposed to be. The Director of the CIA is appointed to terms that can straddle Administrations. Clinton’s CIA director stayed on during Bush, for example (until he became the only person to resign over all of the various failures).
The new Director, Porter Goss, is a hardline Bush Republican who, incidentally, chaired the committee that was supposed to be overseeing the CIA from the House of Reps., but to his shame, he failed to do anything to actually provide proper oversight during all of the CIA’s extensive "failures".