The author, James Risen attempts to write a fair and accurate account of the secret history of the C.I.A. and the Bush Administration. He succeeds admirably.
He acknowledges that President Clinton had little interest in the intelligence services, which had already begun to stagnate after the end of the cold war. Not realizing that danger doesn't go away, it only changes shape, the CIA had no assets embedded in the middle east to get the valuable intelligence it required. Most of the regimes maintained control that was so tight it would have taken years for someone to successfully infiltrate any regime.
Then there was bad management and bad decisions. Clinton appointed a director who made it clear he had no interest in the job. Senior CIA personnel left the agency and their experience at the door of retirement. Although a new director named Tenant restored morale, he was not able to provide the leadership the agency needed. He also allowed ingratiating junior analysts to bypass their immediate supervisors to deliver the information that he wanted to hear e.g. that aluminum tubes were used for WMD production.
Tenent also steered clear of information that he knew would not please his bosses. This included the Iraqi-American woman the CIA coaxed into returning home to elicit information from her brother who was working on nuclear development. He told his sister that Americans inadvertantly blasted the facility in the first Gulf War, and that the project was dead in the water. When the Iraqi-American doctor returned with her brother's information, the information was given short shrift.
C.I.A. officers who told the painful truth about the deteriorating conditions in Iraq found themselves defending their careers or being harangued into retirement. The administration was already heavily invested in a series of bad decsions, and as usual bad decision-making goes, they continued with it because they had spent too much time and money defending it.
Enter Don Rumsfeld, the arrogant and smug Defense Secretary whom Risen makes clear was determined to do things his way, and you have the CIA turned on its head. Rumsfeld was determined to make the Defense Intelligence Agency the premier intelligence organization. Rumsfeld implemented his plans even when the administration told him to do otherwise. He simply ignored his boss. But who is responsible for Rumsfeld being, pardon the expression, a loose cannon?
Enter George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. Risen makes it clear through his numerous shadowy sources that Cheney and senior White House officials made policy decisions without the knowledge of the President of the United States. This afforded the president deniability for decisions ranging from officially sanctioned torture, wire taps on American citizens, increased heroin prodution in Afghanistan, ad infinitum.
So we end up with a president who fills the role of godfather protected by his vice president and consigilieri, and no one is responsible or accountable for haphazard and cherry-picked intelligence. Risen at least has the guts to put the acountability where it belongs. After all, the president has to take responsibility for something.
One day we will be called to account for invading a sovereign nation that did not threaten us, defining torture as just short of organ failure, sanctioning water board torture, and practicing it with a barbarity we would only expect from our enemies, wiretapping our own citizens in clear violation of the law, and for gaining the enmity of the world.
Let's hope our president takes a better look under the couch before he jokes about not being able to find WMD's somewhere else.
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