I know it’s “old” news, but no one on television has bothered before now to put all the puzzle pieces together regarding the Cheney cabal in the White House. Tuesday night at 9:00 pm (times may vary so check your local schedule) PBS’s Frontline will air The Dark Side an expose of Cheney and Rumfeld’s battles with the CIA over the intelligence for the Iraq invasion.

Here’s a few excerpts from Frontline’s press release about Tuesday’s program:

In The Dark Side, airing June 20, 2006, at 9 P.M. on PBS (check local listings), FRONTLINE tells the story of the vice president’s role as the chief architect of the war on terror and his battle with Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet for control of the “dark side.” Drawing on more than 40 interviews and thousands of documents, the film provides a step-by-step examination of what happened inside the councils of war.

More below the fold . . .

“You have this wiring diagram that we all know of about national security, but now there’s a new line on it. There’s a line from the vice president directly to the secretary of defense, and it’s as though there’s a private line, private communication between those two,” former National Security Council staffer Richard Clarke tells FRONTLINE.

In the initial stages of the war on terror, Tenet’s CIA was rising to prominence as the lead agency in the Afghanistan war. But when Tenet insisted in his personal meetings with the president that there was no connection between Al Qaeda and Iraq, Cheney and Rumsfeld initiated a secret program to re-examine the evidence and marginalize the agency and Tenet. Through interviews with DoD staffers who sifted through mountains of raw intelligence, FRONTLINE tells the story of how questionable intelligence was “stovepiped” to the vice president and presented to the public.

From stories of Nigerian yellowcake to claims that 9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta had met with Iraqi agents in Prague, The Dark Side dissects the now-familiar assertions that led the nation to war. The film also examines how that stovepiped intelligence was used by the vice president in unprecedented visits to the CIA, where he questioned mid-level analysts on their conclusions. CIA officers who were there at the time say the message was clear: Cheney wanted evidence that Iraq was a threat.

At the center of the administration’s case for war was a classified October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate that found evidence of an Iraqi weapons of mass destruction program. But Paul Pillar, one of the report’s principal authors, now admits to FRONTLINE that the NIE was written quickly in a highly politicized environment, one in which the decision to go to war had already been made. Pillar also reveals that he regrets participating in writing a subsequent public white paper on Iraqi WMD. “What was the purpose of it? The purpose was to strengthen the case for going to war with the American public. Is it proper for the intelligence community to publish papers for that purpose? I don’t think so, and I regret having had a role in it,” Pillar says.

When was the last time you had former CIA officials going on camera to publicly state that a sitting Vice President whom they had served under deliberately abused and misused our nation’s intelligence apparatus in order to foment a war? If you guessed NEVER before in our country’s history, you guessed right. Never, until now that is. But then we’ve known for some time that Cheney and Company are engaged in war against the CIA, a war in which Valerie Wilson was only one of many casualties:

For the first time, FRONTLINE tells of George Tenet’s personal struggle in the runup to the Iraq war through the accounts of his closest advisers.

“He, I think, asked himself whether or not he wanted to continue on that road and to be part of it. And I think there was a lot of agonizing that George went through about what would be in the best interest of the country and national interest, or whether or not he would stay in that position and continue along a course that I think he had misgivings about,” says John O. Brennan, former deputy executive director of the CIA.

Tenet chose to stay, but after the failure to find Iraqi WMD, the tension between the agency and Cheney’s allies grew to the point that some in the administration believed the CIA had launched a covert war to undermine the president. The film shows how in response, Cheney’s office waged a campaign to distance itself from the prewar intelligence the vice president had helped to cultivate. Under pressure, Tenet resigned. Cheney’s chief of staff, Scooter Libby, would later admit to leaking key sections of the NIE — authorized, he says, by Cheney. Libby also stated that the vice president told him that President Bush had declassified the material. Insiders tell FRONTLINE that the leak was part of the battle between the vice president and the CIA.

Many will rightly point out that, of the people interviewed by Frontline, many served as aides for George Tenet or (as in the case of Richard Clarke) worked closely with him. Do these former officials have an axe to grind? Sure, but then, don’t most victims of abuse want justice for what their abusers did to them? That these men, close mouthed intelligence professionals, are speaking out at all is unprecedented, and tells us all we really need to know about how dangerous and reckless they view the actions of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and the rest of the neoconservatives who have so perverted our foreign policy and, in the process, systematically purged our intelligence services of anyone with views that oppose their own.