Fights between WH and CIA

Secret Competition between PMCs and CIA continues...?

The White House war with the CIA

Salon -November 8

Author Thomas Powers, an expert on U.S. spy agencies, wonders who will take the rap for 9/11 and the "horrific, calamitous" mistake in Iraq.

By Mark Follman

Nov. 8, 2003  |  While the nation's attention is focused on the slow-motion deterioration of Iraq, the White House for months has been at war on the home front -- clashing repeatedly with the CIA in a rare series of public disagreements. They've fought over intelligence that seemed to predict the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

They've fought over whether Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. They've fought over a seemingly vindictive White House leak that identified an undercover CIA agent.

According to Thomas Powers, a widely respected authority on the nation's spy business, that conflict has put the CIA -- and U.S. national security -- in peril.

"I think the agency is in terrible shape because of this," Powers told Salon in an interview. "It appears now that the CIA is actually incapable of operating in a hostile environment. It's afraid."

Powers is the author of "Intelligence Wars: American Secret History From Hitler to Al Qaeda." He says that the CIA, facing a demoralized rank and file and a lack of resources, is being effectively hamstrung by the Bush administration and compromised in its job of protecting national security. A big part of the danger is that U.S. intelligence, in the hands of an administration that views foreign policy through its own self-serving lens, has lost not just its autonomy, but essential assets.

With the administration's focus shifting to the invasion earlier this year, crucial intelligence resources needed to battle al-Qaida around the globe -- as well as those now needed to secure and stabilize Iraq -- have been squandered. "We have practically nobody who can speak the language [in Iraq]," Powers says. "We're running the country with teenagers carrying machine guns."

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printed from Fights between WH and CIA on 2004-06-03 09:06:35