As a follow-up to BooMan’s “Rant on Nigergate,” read all of Pat Lang’s “Niger Mischief” — just posted at No Quarter (and BrendaStewart has also diaried this). This snippet should pique your interest:
Any casual observer of the present scene in that poor country must see that two years after the intervention Iraq has become a major theater of the War on Terror. Was it before the invasion? I think not and my conclusion is based on an understanding of the methods that Arab governments traditionally use in dealing with armed foreign political actors, namely that they try to placate those they can and try to destroy those they can’t. …
This leads to a need to “review the bidding” on what happened along the road to war. To that end, and from a certain self-serving desire to be read, I comment to the reader my article “Drinking the Koolaid,” published in Middle East Policy a couple of years ago. … CONT. BELOW:
A major TV news magazine hired me last year to help them look for those who knew the truth in this matter [the Niger documents]. They succeeded. A national wire service did the same thing without my help and has the result. The same is true of two other national news publications.
It is very clear now that this ducument was forged by a couple of the shadowy ex-government characters who dwell in the environs of Washington and was planted in Italy on the basis of the personal contacts of one of them with the intention of influencing the debate over Iraq in this country. How do I know that? Well, I just do in the way that intelligence officers learn things. Good sources, multiple sources, first person accounts, probabilities, that is how one learns things. Could I swear to it in court? No. Intelligence conclusions are not things that can be sworn to in court.
Nevertheless, one must ask why the newsmedia are sitting on this story. The answer seems simple. “Carrots and Sticks, carrots and sticks.” Work it out.
Lang didn’t link his “Drinking the Koolaid” article, so I looked it up: “Drinking the Koolaid,” published in Summer 2004. From that article:
What does drinking the Kool-Aid mean today? It signifies that the person in question has given up personal integrity and has succumbed to the prevailing group-think that typifies policymaking today. This person has become “part of the problem, not part of the solution.”
What was the “problem”? The sincerely held beliefs of a small group of people who think they are the “bearers” of a uniquely correct view of the world, sought to dominate the foreign policy of the United States in the Bush 43 administration, and succeeded in doing so through a practice of excluding all who disagreed with them. Those they could not drive from government they bullied and undermined until they, too, had drunk from the vat.
What was the result? The war in Iraq. It is not anything like over yet, and the body count is still mounting. As of March 2004, there were 554 American soldiers dead, several thousand wounded, and more than 15,000 Iraqis dead (the Pentagon is not publicizing the number). The recent PBS special on Frontline concerning Iraq mentioned that senior military officers had said of General Franks, “He had drunk the Kool-Aid.” Many intelligence officers have told the author that they too drank the Kool-Aid and as a result consider themselves to be among the “walking dead,” waiting only for retirement and praying for an early release that will allow them to go away and try to forget their dishonor and the damage they have done to the intelligence services and therefore to the republic.
What we have now is a highly corrupted system of intelligence and policymaking, one twisted to serve specific group goals, ends and beliefs held to the point of religious faith. Is this different from the situation in previous administrations? Yes. The intelligence community (the information collection and analysis functions, not “James Bond” covert action, which should properly be in other parts of the government) is assigned the task of describing reality. The policy staffs and politicals in the government have the task of creating a new reality, more to their taste. Nevertheless, it is “understood” by the government professionals, as opposed to the zealots, that a certain restraint must be observed by the policy crowd in dealing with the intelligence people. Without objective facts, decisions are based on subjective drivel. Wars result from such drivel. We are in the midst of one at present.
The signs of impending disaster were clear from the beginning of this administration. Insiders knew it all along. Statements made by the Bush administration often seem to convey the message that Iraq only became a focus of attention after the terrorist attacks on 9/11. The evidence points in another direction.
[…..]
Instead of including such veterans in the planning process, the Bush team opted for amateurs brought in from outside the Executive Branch who tended to share the views of many of President Bush’s earliest foreign-policy advisors and mentors. Because of this hiring bias, the American people got a Middle East planning process dominated by “insider” discourse among longtime colleagues and old friends …
… There seemed to be a general feeling among the newcomers that professional intelligence people somehow just did not “get it.” To add to the discomfort, the new Bush team began to do some odd things.
INFORMATION COLLECTION
Early in the Bush 43 administration, actions began that clearly reflected a predisposition to place regime change in Iraq at the top of the foreign-policy agenda. Sometime in January 2001, the Iraqi National Congress (INC), the opposition group headed by Ahmed Chalabi, began receiving U.S. State Department funds for an effort called the “Information-Collection Program.” Under the Clinton administration, some money had been given to Iraqi exiles for what might be called agit-prop activities against Saddam’s government, but the INC (Chalabi) had not been taken very seriously. They had a bad reputation for spending money freely with very little to show for it. The CIA had concluded that Chalabi and his INC colleagues were not to be trusted with taxpayers’ money. Nevertheless, Chalabi had longstanding ties to a group of well-established anti-Saddam American activists who were installed by the Bush administration as leading figures of the politically appointed civilian bureaucracy in the Pentagon and in the Office of the Vice President.
Those ties paid off. The Information-Collection Program, launched in the early months of the Bush administration, was aimed at providing funds to the INC for recruiting defectors from Saddam’s military and secret police, and making them available to American intelligence. …
[The article goes on for some length. Students of this war are familiar with this article. It is worth reading again today in its entirety.]
From his bio: Col. W. Patrick Lang is a retired senior officer of U.S. Military Intelligence and U.S. Army Special Forces. He was the first Professor of the Arabic Language at West Point. In the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) he was the “Defense Intelligence Officer for the Middle East, South Asia and Terrorism.” He is an analyst consultant for many television and radio broadcasts, among them the Jim Lehrer “Newshour.”
Emphases mine.
Susan, you did a much better job at posting this than I did. Thanks. It just seems to be turning and turning…that big wheel of deceit.
OH GOD! I’m sorry! I didn’t know you had posted this :(:(
Well, i’ll leave it up just because I did go and find his Middle East Policy article link and excerpt…. keep yours up too. I’ll link to yours.
Hey Girlfriend, it is of no consequence to me. I just wanted to alert you to the fact it is already out there to be read. I do like your way of diarying much better than mine…:o)..Hugs…
In reading more of the food for thought out in cyberland today, I learned that there was a lot of info given to Powell during the African trip, on Wilson, early on before all this bru ha ha ever started. Knowing now that had the scoop on him long before he published in the NYT is rant.
They knew what he would find and in going back and retracing where all this information came out for Powell, I remembered who worked there. Besides in some article, I read where someone talked to Mr. Ford, who has now come out against Bolton. I think I smell a rat to some degree here…and could someone please tell me if this is about the paper work the senate was asking for from the WH???? Interesting to say the least. MMMMMMMMM?????? Inquistive minds want to know.
I just wrote over at Kos that I’m sitting on the edge of my seat and just threw my popcorn in the air!
“Nevertheless, one must ask why the newsmedia are sitting on this story. The answer seems simple. “Carrots and Sticks, carrots and sticks.” Work it out.”
No, Pat! TELL US! (Maybe the Boo will figure it out.)
If the shadowy ex-government types are this era’s E. Howard Hunts, and this trail leads back to the White House… the carrots are the usual, money, access and power. The sticks are the lack of the same with a Rather twist of the knife. Conspiracy anyone?
Interesting also, since the Niger docs were third rate forgeries. Another from the ex-spook play book? Perhaps they built in their own get-out-of-jail free card this time.
I have wondered where these fake documents came from since we first heard about them. My first guess was Chalabi and Iran. I’ve been frusterated that our media hasn’t seemed interested in finding out because its clear that whoever forged them did so precisly to promote war with Iraq. Is the writer here saying that there are some media who did look into it, but haven’t reported?
I still haven’t figured out the fake documents yet. These forgeries were intended to be discovered as forgeries. And we’re not talking fonts here. Intelligence fighting back? Leaving breadcrumbs? What? That doesn’t make sense with the carrot and the stick.
The carrot and stick, access vs. getting Rathered or Newsweeked? HELP!
It’s so friggin’ weird. I mean Cheney asks the CIA to check on the yellow cake rumors (we know this from Wilson). Then the documents turn out to be forgeries– cooked by someone in Washington. WTF? (banging head against wall).
is making a big mistake in allowing this to go on and on. If you make an enemy of intelligence officers, they can really make your life miserable.
They can leak damaging information. If they’re retired, they can go on TV and make a very compelling case against you. And they can ratfuck you as well as anyone, if they care to.
This war has been simmering below the surface for a long time, and the decision to re-smear Plame and Wilson is obviously not being received well by the intelligence community.
It’s to our great advantage that bush’s arrogance means he can’t admit publicly that someone so close to him is a jackass much less a traitor. Of course it’s also his own towering arrogance combined with his tiny brain that led him to think he could screw over the CIA, cause he’s the President, dammit.
I mentioned this before on some other diary that if bush was smart(yeah right) he’d have publicly said he was relieving Rove of duties until this was straightened out-while of course continuing with Rove privately. This would have no doubt got the press off his ass or at least the press would be sidetracked and be patting themselves on the back for their tenacity in following through on the Rove story.
It’s now gone beyond that fix and it’s all due to bushco’s own stupidity, thank god, in how they handled this whole matter.
Many of us thought that when the Cheney/Bush gang pinned the blame for their own misinformation on “bad intel” from the CIA that the CIA would, in the end, find a way to retaliate. Even the fact that Tenet “fell on his sword”, only to be rewarded with the (now meaningless) Presidential Medal of Freedom, didn’t change this view. Even the appointment of partisan gasbag and intel incompetent Bush loyalist Porter Goss to the position of DCI didn’t change our view. Nor did Goss’s “purge” of responsible, fact-based analysts and operatives lead us to doubt that somehow, the CIA would retaliate for being accused of the failures that should have been rightly attributed to Cheney and his neocon cabal.
Even given the complicity of the MSM in kowtowing to regime demands, even given their own internal propensity for negligence and lack of diligence in news reporting, I think the impetus the intel community will apply to this affair will help keep this stink going. As cowardly as the MSM editors might be, when there’s blood in the water even they can’t stop their reporters from going after it, and I have the feeling the CIA has lots and lots of “chum” to throw into the waters.