“Had Bush read the intelligence community’s report [issued in October 2002], he would have seen his administration’s case for invasion stood on its head. The intelligence officials concluded that Saddam was unlikely to use any weapons of mass destruction against the United States or give them to terrorists – unless the United States invaded Iraq and tried to overthrow his regime. The intelligence community did not believe, as the president claimed, that the Iraqi regime was an ally of al Qaeda, and it correctly foresaw any attempt to establish democracy in a post-Saddam Iraq as a hard, messy slog.”
Hmmmm. So why, Paul, did your boss, Richard Tenet, tell President Bush that the case for the invasion of Iraq was a “slam dunk,” a statement that was, supposedly, too over the top even for George?
Regarding 9/11 itself, Pilar says it “was by definition a tactical intelligence failure. But though intelligence officials missed the attack, they didn’t miss the threat.” To back this up, he supplies convincing evidence of the incoming Bush Administration’s total lack of interest in the terrorist threat. But what about Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, two known terrorists whose arrival in Los Angeles was detected by the CIA, but whose presence in the U.S. was kept secret from both the FBI and the State Department, despite the fact that both men were on the department’s “terrorist watch” list? Both of these men would be on the plane that crashed into the Pentagon on 9/11. If the CIA was so worried about the terrorist threat, why didn’t they supply information about terrorists to organizations who could do something about it?
In the months and years following 9/11, there were leaks galore coming out of the CIA, but it wasn’t about what the CIA or the Bush Administration had gotten wrong. It was all about Hillary Clinton: “She made us hire women!”
Pilar’s basic pitch is that the ideology invariably trumps intelligence—political wiseguys who know everything about how to hustle votes stateside but nothing about the world outside make all the decisions while innocent, far-seeing intelligence analysts can do naught but grind their teeth in silent rage. But one thing the CIA is not is innocent. The CIA is constantly ratting out others, several years, or decades, after the fact, when the “inside” information can do no good, but is not nearly so good when it comes to telling the truth about itself. It would be nice if Mr. Pilar had the moral and intellectual courage to point a finger at the agency from time to time.