THE STOVEPIPE http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?031027fa_fact
<< The point is not that the President and his senior aides were consciously lying. What was taking place was much more systematicâand potentially just as troublesome. Kenneth Pollack, a former National Security Council expert on Iraq, whose book âThe Threatening Stormâ generally supported the use of force to remove Saddam Hussein, told me that what the Bush people did was âdismantle the existing filtering process that for fifty years had been preventing the policymakers from getting bad information. They created stovepipes to get the information they wanted directly to the top leadership. Their position is that the professional bureaucracy is deliberately and maliciously keeping information from them.
âThey always had information to back up their public claims, but it was often very bad information,â Pollack continued. âThey were forcing the intelligence community to defend its good information and good analysis so aggressively that the intelligence analysts didnât have the time or the energy to go after the bad information.â
The Administration eventually got its way, a former C.I.A. official said. âThe analysts at the C.I.A. were beaten down defending their assessments. And they blame George Tenetââthe C.I.A. directorââfor not protecting them. Iâve never seen a government like this.â>>
-- Doug _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
