FIRST, LEVEL COUNTER-ACCUSATIONS AND ADMIT NOTHING
When you open the papers and find the GOP"s former director of the CIA making a shocking political statement in a piece decrying political statements, you know it is going to be a hot day in Washington:
The days of fortress America are gone. We are the world's superpower. We can sit on our hands or we can become engaged to improve global human conditions. The bottom line is that we cannot succeed unless we have good intelligence.
AS already has this megalomania covered, in ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality." Nothing like a prolonged, unfunded, violent nation-building effort to get the GOP's CIA riled up, I guess ...?
The interpretive lines here are not left-right. They are between the right and the far-right. And Cheney made a decision that no one was going to "do more" than him. **
HOW THE CONSPIRACY-TO-TORTURE MANIPULATED THE CONGRESS
If you are given a briefing, in which Committee council is excluded, with a summary that says in bold, 'Everything is totally, TOTALLY legal' and this is needed as much as apple pie, what would you do? Do you think Nancy Pelosi has the history of torture techniques at her fingertips?
Here is what I want to know.
Where are the dissenting sections of this briefing?
To rely on secrecy to cover up screw-ups, as Goss appears to do, is such a horrible ruse. Really, we ought to tear down the CIA, to the last stone, and rebuild it.
In a typical intelligence service estimate (and hopefully briefing), one sees (or seeks) risk assessments, not policy pronouncements. One ought to get and be given a sense for where the intelligence could be wrong, what opinions might be shaky and which are not.So, who briefed Congress on the misgivings of all those who thought this program was just not the Queen's purse? Who alerted Congressmen that there might be risks to this program and enumerated what they would be? Or, was this presented as another of Tenet's "slam dunks"?
To rely on secrecy to cover up screw-ups and worse, as Goss appears to do, is such a horrible ruse. Really, we ought to tear down the CIA, to the last stone, and rebuild it. Secrecy does not exist for those purposes, nor should it.
**Accordingly, the political struggle, if there is one, is not just to re-assert a rule-of-law, but to finally take decisive steps to rid ourselves of the poor conceptualizations from the horrid Bush-era that continue to put our nation at risk.
For an example of what we need, see how Zakaria did so admirably in making this transition in the wake of the bombing of the Taj, at first using the crutch-language of the Bush years, then quickly getting past it!
