Can I get a “Well…duh!”?

Chicago Tribune | Former CIA official says Bush misled country to war

WASHINGTON — The former CIA official charged with managing the U.S. government’s secret intelligence assessments on Iraq says the Bush administration chose war first and then misleadingly used raw data to assemble a public case for its decision to invade.

Paul Pillar, who was the CIA’s national intelligence officer for the Middle East and South Asia from 2000 to 2005, said the Bush administration also played on the nation’s fears in the wake of the 2001 terrorist attacks, falsely linking Al Qaeda to Saddam Hussein’s regime even though intelligence agencies had not produced a single analysis supporting “the notion of an alliance” between the two.

All right. Is this not what a lot of people have been screaming about for years? The evidence for this has been piling up for a while. How many more bombshells does it take to burst the bubble of anti-reality that surrounds the current occupant of the White House? The wheels keep coming off, but the damn juggernaut keeps rolling! It’s like a zombie that you just can’ t kill.

For instance: 30 years ago, same debate about government wiretaps:

George H.W. Bush, then director of the
CIA, wanted to ensure “no unnecessary diminution of collection of important foreign intelligence” occurred under the proposal to require judges to approve terror wiretaps, according to a March 1976 memorandum he wrote to the Justice Department.

Bush also complained that some major communications companies were unwilling to install government wiretaps without a judge’s approval. Such a refusal “seriously affects the capabilities of the intelligence community,” he wrote.

In another document, Jack Marsh, a White House adviser, outlined options for Ford over the wiretap legislation. Marsh alerted Ford to objections by then-CIA Director Bush, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and White House national security adviser Brent Scowcroft.

Some experts weren’t surprised the cast of characters in this national debate remained largely unchanged over 30 years.

“People don’t change their stripes,” said Kenneth C. Bass, a former senior Justice Department lawyer who oversaw such wiretap requests during the Carter administration.

Then as now, Seymour Hersh was making things difficult for the establishment:

Notes from a 1975 meeting between then-White House chief of staff
Dick Cheney, Attorney General Edward Levi and others cite the “problem” of a New York Times article by Seymour Hersh about U.S. submarines spying inside Soviet waters. Participants considered a formal
FBI investigation of Hersh and the Times and searching Hersh’s apartment “to go after (his) papers,” the document said.

“I was surprised,” Hersh said in a telephone interview Friday. “I was surprised that they didn’t know I had a house and a mortgage.”

Heh. He’s still making trouble for them – first Abu Ghraib, and now dark hints about secret ops in the Iranian desert. And if you live near Boise, you might need to hear him speak.

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