“State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration." By James Risen. Free Press 2006.

James Risen offers a devastating account of how the Bush administration ignored and corrupted our national intelligence agencies to promote his preconceived notions leading to war in Iraq in 2003.

The readable new book is tragically relevant this month, as President Bush tours the nation promoting his “Plan for Victory” and the White House issued a new “National Security Strategy” suggesting new attacks on other nations such as Iran.

What the Bush administration has brought us, Risen writes, is a new domestic spying program that threatens domestic civil liberties, a narcotics-addicted state in Afghanistan and increasing chaos in Iraq.

Last summer, “it was already painfully obvious to almost all Americans that the Iraq mission was failing.”

After the 9/11 attacks, some critics pointed to the Central Intelligence Agency for failing to provide accurate information to protect our national security.

Those criticizing the CIA and demanding its “reform” are missing the main point, Risen argues. What needs to be “reformed” are top government leaders who ignore the truth.

The problem is not with experienced intelligence operatives working around the world. The problem is with top CIA leaders who pass along only that information they believe the White House wants to hear.

Risen, who covers national security issues for The New York Times, documents how effectively CIA field operatives have gathered accurate information in recent years only to be ignored by their superiors.

“Many CIA officials — from rank-and-file analysts to senior managers — knew before the war that they lacked sufficient evidence to make the case for the existence of Iraq’s weapons programs.”

Their insights never made it to the White House, the State Department or the Pentagon — in part because the White House made it clear it was not interested in information questioning conclusions already reached.

CIA Director George Tenet and his senior staff focused not on gathering accurate information, but on providing reports backing the Bush administration’s agenda.

And Tenet’s hierarchy was so “fearful of creating a rift with the White House that they created a climate within the CIA in which warnings that the available evidence on Iraqi WMD was weak were either ignored or censored.”

Tenet’s position solidified when the White House shunted aside people like Richard A. Clarke, a widely respected top security adviser to four presidents.

Clarke, author of “Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror,” recently published “The Scorpion’s Gate,” a novel set in the future as the U.S. prepares to launch another, even more expansive, war in the Middle East.

“It doesn’t matter what the facts are, Henry, we need to invade!” one character says near the novel’s end. “We just use the big lie. It’s worked before.”

Hustlers and fabricators

The results are tragically clear — symbolized by the speech Secretary of State Colin Powell gave to the United Nations about the existence of WMDs on Feb. 6, 2003, less than six weeks before the United States invaded Iraq.

Powell provided information and photographs to prove Iraq had WMDs.

“The poisonous climate in the U.S. intelligence community during the prewar period was perfect for hustlers and fabricators,” Risen writes.

Powell received critical information for his speech, third-hand through German intelligence, from an Iraqi exile known as “Curveball.”

Days before the speech, Tyler Drumheller, a top CIA operative in Europe, told Powell and top agency officials that Curveball was a fraud. They ignored Drumheller.

“By the time American troops were ready to invade Iraq in March 2003, it was too late for anyone to consider the truth,” Risen writes.

Top White House officials continued to promote policies based on questionable and fraudulent sources, again and again.

In early 2004, the following year, David Kay, the CIA’s chief WMD hunter in Iraq, publicly broke with CIA leaders and publicly said Iraq had no such weapons.

No one in the White House listened.

Ahmed Chalabi, a longtime exile who headed the Iraqi National Congress, worked with the CIA in the early 1990s until the agency found him to be an unreliable source of information. The Bush White House embraced Chalabi.

CIA agents who challenge false statements by their superiors are routinely ignored, re-assigned to different posts or pressured to leave.

Intelligence information showed that, by 2002, Iraq’s nuclear program had been dead for more than a decade. The U.S. had destroyed Iraq’s nuclear program, perhaps unknowingly, during the Persian Gulf War in 1991.

During the months when Bush was planning to invade Iraq, the CIA recruited 30 knowledgeable witnesses who said Iraq had no WMDs. CIA operatives could find no witnesses stating Iraq had them.

“The reports from family members of Iraqi scientists were buried in the bowels of the CIA and were never released for distribution to the State Department, Pentagon or the White House,” Risen writes.

“The CIA had obtained hard evidence that Saddam Hussein had abandoned his efforts to obtain weapons of mass destruction — and the agency chose not to share that information with the president of the United Sates, who was about to send American troops to fight and die in Iraq.”

Pentagon as center of gravity

The current Bush administration is “the first presidency in modern history in which the Pentagon served as the overwhelming center of gravity for U.S. foreign policy.”

After Bush took office, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld quickly began molding his own spy agency inside the Pentagon to counter the influence of the CIA and other intelligence groups

Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, a neoconservative ideologue who now heads the World Bank, routinely attacked the CIA.

Historically, independent intelligence agencies in the United States have functioned as a critical, civilian-based, curb on military power.

Today, U.S. policy is flawed and adrift.

After the initial “victory” in Iraq, it became obvious that the U.S. had no real post-invasion plans to rebuild the country.

Internal Iraqi social conflict increased when the U.S. demolished the old Iraqi army and purged Baath Party members from the government, depriving the country of many of its most skilled and experienced leaders.

Top White House officials, Risen adds, ignored other key developments in the Middle East.

“President Bush and his administration have displayed a remarkable lack of interest in aggressively examining the connections between Osama bin Laden, al Qaeda and the Saudi power elite,” Risen writes.

As the “newly-liberated” Afghanistan moved off the front pages of world news, that fragmented nation quickly returned to massive drug production.

By 2004, Afghanistan was providing 87 percent of the world’s opium supply, which generated $7 billion worth of heroin. Some of that money, Risen notes, funds insurgent organizations.

In his speeches last week, Bush stated he has no plans to leave Iraq before his term ends in January 2009, bequeathing that conflict to the next president.

Analysts from all political perspectives grow more worried about how the nation can reverse the foreign and domestic impacts of the Bush presidency.

“One of the most lasting and damaging legacies of the Bush administration,” Risen warns, is “the militarization of American intelligence.”

© 2006 The Charleston Gazette

###