No one seems to be writing opinion pieces quite the way I would, so I decided to do it myself.

The name? Taverns are places where one goes to discuss the interesting events and things in the world, so this is my tavern.

I will offer my views on politics, economics, and whatever else strikes my fancy.
I will occasionally publish the entire article from another journal for purposes of causing discussion.

 

Rumsfields' Tame Intelligence Operation in Trouble over Failure to find WMDs.

The Observer reports that Rumsfields' new Intelligence operation, The Cabal (set up in the Office of Special Plans and reporting to him), may be to blame for the utter failure to find WMDs in Iraq.

In the brave new world of post-11 September America, this tight group of analysts deep in the heart of the Pentagon has been the driving force behind the war in Iraq. Numbering no more than a dozen, The Cabal is part of the Office of Special Plans, a new intelligence agency which has taken on the CIA and won. Where the CIA dithered over Iraq, the OSP pressed on. Where the CIA doubted, the OSP was firm. It fought a battle royal over Iraq and George Bush came down on its side.

The OSP is the brainchild of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who set it up after the 2001 terrorist attacks. It was tasked with going over old ground on Iraq and showing that the CIA had overlooked the threat posed. But its rise has caused massive ructions in the normally secretive world of intelligence gathering.

They argued a forceful case for war against Saddam before his weapons programmes came to fruition. More moderate voices in the CIA and DIA were drowned out. The result has been a flurry of leaks to the US press. One CIA official described The Cabal's members as 'crazed', on a 'mission from God'. But for the moment The Cabal and Rumsfeld's Pentagon have won and Powell's doveish State Department has lost. Tensions between the two are now in the open.

'Rumsfeld set up his own intelligence agency because he didn't like the intelligence he was getting,' said Larry Korb, director of national security studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. 'He doesn't like Powell's approach, a typical diplomat, too cautious.'

Former CIA officials are caustic about the OSP. Unreliable and politically motivated, they say it has undermined decades of work by the CIA's trained spies and ignored the truth when it has contradicted its world view.

'Their methods are vicious,' said Vince Cannistraro, former CIA chief of counter-terrorism. 'The politicisation of intelligence is pandemic, and deliberate disinformation is being promoted. They choose the worst-case scenario on everything and so much of the information is fallacious.' But Cannistraro is retired. His attacks will not bother The Cabal, firmly 'in the loop' of Washington's movers and shakers. Yet, even among them, continued failure to find any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq is a growing fear. The fallout from the war could bring them down.

I don't really blame the Cabal primarily. The fact is, the right-wingers currently in charge of our government have an ideology which they apply to all facts and events. Facts which conflict with the ideology are clearly wrong, so they are ignored. Their problem has been that the State Department, CIA and DIA have not been willing to discard information merely because it inconveniently does not tell Rumsfield and Bush what they want to hear. That is why Rumsfield had to set up the Cabal. And that is why the Cabal is failing.

You would think that 70 years of Soviet Communism would have shown the American right-wingers that when ideology is used to override facts, the programs attempted are much more likely to fail.

Addendum:
Harold Meyerson of the Washington Post provided this editorial Tuesday, May 13, 2003; Page A19. "The neos knew with existential certitude that the weapons were there. ... And that was the problem with the CIA and DIA: They were a bunch of vulgar empiricists. What the Bush administration wanted, it turns out, was faith-based intelligence. Thus the operation in the Office of Special Plans, headed by neocon Abram Shulsky, was born. Shulsky's shop didn't have agents in the field; indeed, it had just a handful of analysts. But what set them apart from the intelligence agencies was that they relied heavily on information from the Iraqi National Congress (INC) -- an organization of Iraqi exiles whose raison d'etre was to promote the overthrow of Hussein. As both Hersh and Dreyfuss document, a lot of the INC's information on weapons programs and other matters was considered patently absurd by veteran intelligence analysts. But that was the information that served as the basis of the administration's case for war."

The INC is the exile organization headed by Ahmed Chalabi (BBC News), the man Secretary of Defense Rumsfield is pushing to lead the Iraqi government and who the Department of State and CIA both detest. Among other things, he was a banker in Jordan until they tried to arrest him for criminal activity and he escaped the country. More about that later.


posted by Richard at 12:10 AM