|
It's such an obvious question, it answers itself: if the CIA was a bunch of nervous nellies, then they would have been the ones running willy-nilly to Congress, the Administration and anyone else who would listen to start a war to rid us of this present/gathering/imminent/ho-hum threat to our very existence. They did no such thing.
The facts are obvious: their estimates were so lukewarm that Cheney had to go to Langley and personally strongarm the spooks. Even this wasn't enough: the Administration had to create a special agency within the civilian appointees in the Pentagon. At each step, Tenet tried to take out language about nuclear weapons. At each step, there were many dissenters on just about every point of threat: people openly questioned the remote drones, the blanket usage of "long range missiles" to cloak the reality that the longest could only go 112 miles, the conflation of "aiding terrorists" to suggest aiding terrorists against the U.S. and many other issues. David Kay and the Republicans have repeatedly shrugged and shirked responsibility by saying that "everyone got it wrong", when many people got it right.
The CIA was dragged kicking and screaming to give "proper" information to the Administration, and even then couldn't bring its collective self to gin it up enough. The obvious seed-crystal for this abomination was the Administration itself. At every turn, they lied, distorted and deflected. Nobody came running to them; they started this. Paul O'Neill says that getting Hussein was a big topic at his first cabinet meeting in January of '01. Rand Beers quit the NSA because he said that all the Administration wanted to do was find justifications to do what they'd long since determined to do. Richard Clarke says precisely the same, specifically saying that they wanted to pin 9-11 on Hussein.
For this to have been the CIA's fault, they would have had to be the ones starting the frenzy and feeding the fire; they did neither, and indeed, did the opposite.
The very idea that it was any entity other than the Administration simply doesn't hold water. There's no brilliance needed to see this; it's simple and makes obvious sense. "They tried to kill my Dad."
|