Tuesday, February 03, 2004
Dick Cheney--The Man Behind the Curtain
So I'm trying to be pretty fair-minded here, but doesn't it almost always come back to Dick Cheney and his minions?!
The mockingly self-described "Man Behind the Curtain" can chuckle all he wants, because he knows just how true that description is. But in case you need a reminder here's a fine article by Jonathan Landay and his colleagues at the Washington Bureau of Knight Ridder.
Among the topics reintroduced to us in this piece is the extent to which the Office of the Vice President created a direct back channel of its own intelligence, mostly from Iraqi dissidents who were dying to get a US dog into this fight no matter what. Cheney and his aides, including personal assistant, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby began to systematically downgrade the importance of intel from branches such as CIA and State Dept. that it thought were riddled with inertia and arabists in favor of their own 'more pure' information.
Scooter himself pushed Colin Powell up until minutes before his now somewhat-tarnished speech to the UN in February 2003 to add intel from their own personal sources to his presentation. Powell discarded much of the most unproven or brashest allegations, but what's important is the context in which this whole decision-making process was being assessed.
And it all leads to the person who had been obsessed with Iraq for many years, that Man Behind the Curtain.
Where's Toto when you need him?
So I'm trying to be pretty fair-minded here, but doesn't it almost always come back to Dick Cheney and his minions?!
The mockingly self-described "Man Behind the Curtain" can chuckle all he wants, because he knows just how true that description is. But in case you need a reminder here's a fine article by Jonathan Landay and his colleagues at the Washington Bureau of Knight Ridder.
Among the topics reintroduced to us in this piece is the extent to which the Office of the Vice President created a direct back channel of its own intelligence, mostly from Iraqi dissidents who were dying to get a US dog into this fight no matter what. Cheney and his aides, including personal assistant, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby began to systematically downgrade the importance of intel from branches such as CIA and State Dept. that it thought were riddled with inertia and arabists in favor of their own 'more pure' information.
Scooter himself pushed Colin Powell up until minutes before his now somewhat-tarnished speech to the UN in February 2003 to add intel from their own personal sources to his presentation. Powell discarded much of the most unproven or brashest allegations, but what's important is the context in which this whole decision-making process was being assessed.
And it all leads to the person who had been obsessed with Iraq for many years, that Man Behind the Curtain.
Where's Toto when you need him?
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