Old Hands at Manipulating Intelligence
Team B's conclusion that the CIA was indeed soft on the Soviets was leaked to sympathetic journalists and generated public support for a new round of military spending, particularly on missiles. Team B's conclusions turned out, years later, to be false.None of this is news to readers of Josh Marshall or Sy Hersh, but the article does an excellent job of fitting the current atrocity into a pattern of intelligence manipulation by the same basic group:
"In retrospect, and with the Team B report and records now largely declassified, it is possible to see that virtually all of Team B's criticisms ... proved to be wrong," Raymond Garthoff, a former U.S. ambassador to Bulgaria, wrote in a paper for the CIA's Center for the Study of Intelligence three years ago. "On several important specific points it wrongly criticized and 'corrected' the official estimates, always in the direction of enlarging the impression of danger and threat." [emphasis added]
The path to Plame's outing also led through Baghdad, this time via Iraqi exile Ahmed Chalabi, who had been abandoned by the CIA in the late 1990s as too troublesome, unreliable and corrupt.Read the whole thing--it's worth it.
Among Chalabi's key supporters were Rumsfeld, Cheney and Wolfowitz. When the three came back into power in January 2001, the CIA and State Department still refused to back Chalabi.
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Over at the Pentagon, however, Rumsfeld was reprising Team B by creating his own intelligence shop. The Chalabi organization's alarmist reports on Hussein's nuclear weapons, which later proved to be false, bypassed the CIA and went directly to the White House.
[cross-posted at If I Ran the Zoo]
Tom - Doesn't the CIA or the intelligence community do this kind of alternative assesment and analysis? Team B or whatever you call the folks taking the other side makes sense within the intelligence community but is dangerous done separately.
More and more I think that people have just a few new or novel ideas in their careers. They just keep dragging them out time and time again regardless of whther they are relevant or even worked the first time. Those are my most cynical days.
October 26, 2005 8:50 PM | Reply | Permalink
irishkg--I'm no expert, but that's my understanding as well. And the people doing it in that capacity are presumably professionals, not ideological hacks.
Some people, definitely. These people, to be more specific. Knowing that Cheney, Rumsfeld, et al. are playing out the same little game they played 30 years ago adds a kind of grotesque humor to the whole thing.October 27, 2005 8:41 AM | Reply | Permalink
Tom - we come back to competence again.
If they are going to spend the time to do alternatives/Team B then get some experts or for fresh views some non-experts who have no axe to grind. Ideologues need not apply, if I were chief for the day!
FYI - if you are interested in some informed and interesting views on the political in US foreign affairs suggest you check out the commentaries of "sapere aude" on the Foreign Affairs table (probably page 2 by now). I have read him for a bit on WashNote/Steve Clemons and he's good. Plus as ex-military and a thinker he gives a different perspective. I'm selfish. Since he's a new contributor and I want to keep reading his stuff then I want him to get responses so he'll keep writing.
October 27, 2005 9:42 AM | Reply | Permalink
Thanks for the tip--I'll check out his stuff.
October 27, 2005 12:10 PM | Reply | Permalink
Jeff Stein is the last person in the world to complain about manipulating intelligence. Stein is the co-author of "Saddam's Bombmaker", a memoir by Khidhir Hamza, a former employee in Saddam's nuclear program In the book, Hamza claimed that "Saddam is undoubtedly on the precipice of nuclear power." Even before 2003, most experts (even those who were convinced that Saddam had biological and chemical weapons) believed that Hamza was a serial liar and exaggerator. There's a good article about Hamza by the right-wing World Net Daily.
Right after the 9/11 attacks, Stein wrote an op-ed entitled "Don't dismiss Saddam Hussein's ability to strike poisonous blows against the U.S". Relying upon Hamza's memoir, Stein wrote of "the natural synergy between Saddam and bin Laden" and warned that, "One of the ways Saddam and bin Laden could work together is in organizing an attack against the United States using chemical or biological weapons."
October 29, 2005 3:59 PM | Reply | Permalink