My Apologies to CNN

I was finally able to watch Dead Wrong - Inside an Intelligence Meltdown that CNN aired last night. I assumed last week that CNN would probably chicken out, would probably not look into the Bush Administration's manipulations of intelligence in the run-up to the Iraq War, and would probably lay the blame solely on George Tenet and his CIA.

Sure, Tenet took a pretty big hit in the documentary, but overall I thought CNN did a (dare I say) fair and balanced job in covering the issue. I was pleasantly surprised when the events that led to the drafting of the Downing Street Memo (as well as the memo itself) were covered early in the program. The fact that Cheney was putting pressure on CIA analysts was also mentioned (Cheney declined to be interviewed for the show), as was the fact that there has yet to be a real investigation as to whether the Bush Administration manipulated intel.

The main thrust of the documentary was that in 2002, it became clear to everyone in the intelligence community that Bush was going to invade Iraq. What happened next is that intelligence was "cherry-picked" in order to formulate worst case scenarios, and skepticism was never encouraged. Tenet, meanwhile, developed too close of a relationship with the policy-makers -- he personally briefed Bush every morning, and for the most part had no problem telling him what he wanted to hear. One analyst stated, "the White House didn't go to the CIA and say, 'Tell me the truth' -- it said, 'give me ammunition."' Unreliable sources were therefore relied upon in order to satisfy Bush, whom Tenet called "the first customer."

One thing that really jumped out from the presentation was the extent to which Colin Powell was misled on these issues. An e-mail from a CIA analyst questioning the credibility of a source known as "Curveball" was not shown to Powell prior to his now-infamous speech to the U.N. Security Council, and Powell relied heavily on this source during the speech, particularly on the issue of mobile biological weapons labs. In a response to this particular e-mail, the analyst's superior admitted the problem with Curveball, but wrote, "this war is going to happen regardless -- the powers that be probably aren't terribly interested in whether Curveball knows what he is talking about."

Although the documentary didn't launch a blatant attack on the Bush Administration, it nonetheless made Bush and his people look like a bunch of warmongering idiots who were determined to invade Iraq regardless of what the intelligence was showing. Obviously, making these people look like warmongering idiots was not a hard thing to do given the subject matter, but it was astounding to see all the choice pre-war assertions from Condi, Cheney, Powell, and Bush ("mushroom clouds," "uranium from Africa," etc.) shown one after another on the screen, all of them turning out to be dead wrong.

Maybe I'm being too obvious here, but it seems pretty clear from CNN's presentation that Bush and Tenet were in cahoots on the whole plan to fool Congress and the American people into backing a war against Iraq, and that Tenet agreed at some point during this whole unfortunate process to take the fall for Bush if everything went sideways. Maybe they thought that WMD would turn up after the invasion, even though they knew the pre-war intel was weak regarding the existence of these weapons.

What Bush promised Tenet in return is unclear. A Medal of Freedom was probably part of the deal. Perhaps Bush also agreed not to fire Tenet as long as he agreed to eventually resign (prior to the 2004 election, of course) and to keep his mouth shut thereafter (he currently declines all interviews on this subject). It is clear that some kind of understanding was reached between Bush and Tenet. America's credibility turned out to be a big loser in that deal, as have the families of the 1868 American soldiers who have died so far due to BushCo's fraud.