Seymour Hersh’s fascinating New Yorker analysis of ‘the uranium lie’ and its relationship to disarray in the US intelligence establishment; it is far worse than someone just telling a lie. Hersh is one of those journalists whose grasp of the breadth and subtlety of national security issues, and his wealth of (mostly anonymous) sources, gives him a unique take on many of the important stories of the day. I wonder why few listen.
Hersh outlines the dismal and unprecedented state of the relationship between the US intelligence establishment and the Bush administration. In order to hear what it wants to hear, the Bush administration has essentially totally dismantled and bypassed the painstaking machinery for assessing raw intelligence data — its plausibility, accuracy and implications — before it gets passed on to government officials. This happens at the State Dept. too but has found its greatest fruition at Defense, where Rumsfeld has essentially built a parallel intelligence bureaucracy and bypasses CIA channels readily. CIA briefing officers, in the past the conduits of ‘vetted’ intelligence information to the administration, are either ignored and excluded or browbeaten into providing their consumers with pleasing information. CIA personnel are enraged at the administration and at CIA higher-ups who fail to support them and prevent the utter disenfranchisement of their enterprise. George Tenet, reeling from the effort of covering the CIA’s (and his own) tail for not predicting the Sept. 11 attacks, is in no position to play hardball with the administration and protect the integrity of his employees.
Against this backdrop, Hersh has gotten an incredible ‘scoop’ (if we are to believe it). CIA sources say that a group of ex-CIA officers, disgruntled at this state of affairs, created and leaked to an Italian journalist a set of false contracts, bills of lading, etc., to support the already-discredited story about Iraq having sought to buy yellowcake from Niger. They knew that in the current climate the evidence would be passed on to the US government and work its way up uncritical channels without being substantiated. They hoped the falsity of the story would come back to bite whomever had given it credence; reportedly, they had not realized it would work its way all the way up to the State of the Union address, though… Ah, revenge is sweet, if it brings down an administration.
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