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| Home Front: Politix |
| Yet more dribbles from Risen's book |
| 2006-01-05 |
| Was he joking or was the President tacitly giving the go-ahead to torture al-Qaeda leaders? âWho authorized putting him on pain medication?â U.S. President George W. Bush reportedly said to George Tenet, then the director of the Central Intelligence Agency who had just informed his boss that captured and badly wounded al-Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah was too drugged to answer his interrogators coherently, according to an uncorroborated account to be published today. That enigmatic exchange between Mr. Bush and Mr. Tenet â the CIA chief who famously said finding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq would be a âslam dunkâ â appears in State of War, a searing indictment of the CIA and the Bush administration's secret operations. Author James Risen, the New York Times national security correspondent, suggests the President may have been signalling that rough handling was fine with him. âIt is possible that this was just one more piece of jocular banter between two plain-speaking men, according to the source who recounted this incident,â Mr. Risen writes. âBut it is also possible that the comment meant something more. Was the President of the United States secretly encouraging the director of Central Intelligence to order the harsh treatment of a prisoner? If so, this episode offers the most direct link between Bush and the harsh treatment of prisoners by both the CIA and the U.S. military. If Bush made the comment in order to push the CIA to get tough with Abu Zubaydah, he was doing so indirectly, without the paper trail that would have come from a written presidential authorization.â Like most of the most damning indictments in Mr. Risen's book, to be published Thursday, the account comes from anonymous sources. Mr. Risen defends his reliance on them, saying âall reporters know that the very best stories â the most important, the most sensitive â rely on them.â His own reporting, notably the bombshell revelation last month that Mr. Bush had ordered clandestine eavesdropping on U.S. citizens and residents without bothering to seek court orders, has already rocked the administration. The President has both confirmed the substance of the domestic eavesdropping story and defended it as legal and vital for national security. âNo one disputes that we should be listening to terroristsâ Mr. Risen said yesterday. The issue, is whether the President has circumvented the law to order electronic surveillance not on a handful of al-Qaeda suspects but hundreds, perhaps thousands, of U.S. residents. The CIA has counter-attacked the book, accusing Mr. Risen of disclosing details of ongoing intelligence operations. âSetting aside whether what he wrote is accurate or inaccurate, it demonstrates an unfathomable and sad disregard for U.S. national security and those who take life-threatening risks to ensure it,â the CIA said in an e-mailed statement when asked for comment. âReaders deserve to know that every chapter of State of War contains serious inaccuracies,â it added, without saying what they are. In the murky and clandestine world of spying, Mr. Risen sources may be driven by noble motives; dismayed at what has become of the once-proud CIA under the Bush administration. But they may also be engaged in deliberate disinformation campaigns. State of War chronicles both stunning incompetence by the CIA and portrays the Bush administration as driven by neoconservatives determined not to let facts get in the way of an ideological war aims. âThe CIA has been so deeply politicized by the Bush administration that its credibility has vanished,â Mr. Risen writes. The CIA has also been transformed from a spying operation to something far larger and more ominous, a hybrid that even CIA staff question, Mr. Risen said. âDo you want a large paramilitary operation in your intelligence community along with secret detention facilities at a time when your basic intelligence gathering capabilities are in question,â he asked. Among the more recent and egregious CIA blunders, according to Mr. Risen, was the outing of the agency's entire list of spies inside Iran because their handler at headquarters in Virginia mistakenly sent a mass e-mail disclosing their identities to Tehran âThis espionage disaster left the CIA virtually blind in Iran, unable to provide any significant intelligence on one of the most critical issues facing the United States â whether Tehran was about to go nuclear,â Mr. Risen writes. Even if the CIA knew, it might no longer be believed. âWill the American people trust what the CIA says about other countries and WMD [weapons of mass destruction] after Iraq,â Mr. Risen asked. âHow much can you trust what they say after they were so adamant that there was WMD and now we know there wasn't and we went to war on that issue,â Mr. Risen added in the interview. âIt doesn't get much worse than that.â |
| Posted by:Dan Darling |
| #2 SPOD - I now think of the NYT as the intelligence arm of Al Quada. |
| Posted by: DMFD 2006-01-05 15:18 |
| #1 I'll go one better. I don't trust the CIA or Risen. I sure as hell don't trust a press willing to print our most vital secrets in a time of war. Reporters and The MSM are trators. Trators must pay. |
| Posted by: Sock Puppet O´ Doom 2006-01-05 00:24 |