PLACING BLAME….Via Tim Dunlop comes this stunner from Newsday:
At the behest of Congress, a handful of CIA analysts are investigating whether the agency and its sister organizations buckled under administration pressure and produced exaggerated estimates to policy-makers about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction or its alleged links to al-Qaida.
But these officials will not be able to review the performance of a small office inside the Pentagon that critics claim routinely distorted the CIA’s intelligence to support a policy to invade Iraq: the Office of Special Plans and Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs.
Is this unbelievable or what? It’s the Office of Special Plans that everyone thinks cooked the reports.
Is Congress really going to let the Bush administration get away with making the CIA the scapegoat for this? Apparently so: Republican Senator John Warner is in charge of the Senate investigating committee, and as Newsday says:
But, this source said, Warner may not be inclined to press the Pentagon for its information. “The question is how much of a [Bush administration] loyalist he really is,” he said.
It’s hard to believe, but I’m actually starting to feel sorry for the CIA these days.
UPDATE: Here is my post about the OSP from last month, and here is Seymour Hersh’s New Yorker story about the whole CIA-OSP shootout. It’s a must read if you want to know what this is all about.
