How Cheney Squeezed the CIA
Comments by the Parodist
Dick Cheney appears to be in real trouble. He’s been caught finagling again. This time it’s not California’s energy scam—but there is a similar pattern—once again he displays a propensity to create sleight of hand illusions in order to convince others of the merits of his point of view. (You can read about his part in creating both the illusion of an energy shortage as well as the actual California energy crisis at the Yurica Report.com “Fraud Traced to the White House.”) This time the veep used his skills to create the illusion that the U.S. was in imminent danger of a nuclear attack from Saddam Hussein.
It’s fascinating to realize that the whole California crisis was conceived as the first in a series of dominoes. Dick Cheney would use California to push through his vision of a new national energy policy, which would include war against Iraq for oil. Saddam Hussein and Iraq were described in reports as the all-star villains who threatened America’s oil security. The idea was to claim that Saddam Hussein was causing the California energy crisis. Unfortunately Enron began to collapse and Governor Gray Davis was sending hounds out who smelled the fraud and began to pursue it. The governor was beginning to catch on. But what he couldn’t have known was that Dick Cheney was grinning behind the scenes at California’s discomfiture. When it looked like the media might trace the fraud to the White House, the Bush administration had to switch gears to Plan B: the invasion of Iraq.
Cheney has had a lot of practice in the psychology of manipulation. He had to have concrete reports that appeared to back his claims about Iraq’s threat to the safety of the U.S. Similar reports were produced in conjunction with the California Energy scam, but now he needed reports to convince congress and the nation to go to war.
In the legal profession it’s called autoptic evidence. It’s really no evidence at all. But Dick Cheney (perhaps with Karl Rove’s encouragement) is a master at it. It’s also called “real evidence.” In the courtroom it goes like this: a farmer accuses a neighbor of stealing his horse, then his lawyer brings the horse into the court room just as the farmer says, “If you don’t believe me, there’s the very horse.” There’s something about the human mind that when we see a concrete object (or report) we believe everything else that’s being said about it. So in law, the rules of evidence prohibit the introduction of autoptic evidence. In short, you can’t wave the report or the horse around!
But the veep needed a horse. He had to wave something around. So in an astonishing break with tradition, Dick Cheney and his chief of staff, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, began making “multiple” visits to the CIA, this on top of Cheney’s regular briefings by the CIA. Dick Cheney had to manipulate, pressure, and push folks, in this instance, CIA specialists into writing the kind of intelligence reports he wanted to see.
He’s got his comeuppance now. It seems veteran CIA agents are demanding Cheney’s resignation. They’ve gone as far as writing an open memo to the president, stating their reasons and recommendations. We know that some analysts told the Washington Post (June 4, 2003) that Cheney and Libby pressured them to make assessments that fit with the Bush administration’s policy objectives. We know for a fact that the CIA reports “underwent a dramatic transformation from 2001 to 2002 after reporting essentially the same data for many years,” according to an article by Joseph Cirincione and Dipali Mukhopadhyay of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. There was virtually nothing in the data itself to account for the change that was so dramatic the authors called the new tone “alarmist.” In other words, the information was being stroked and coaxed and emphasized—manipulated.
Subtle changes were made, like bringing Iraq’s nuclear history and inspections from the bottom of the list to number one. According to the authors, the first half of 2001 came the first mention that “Baghdad may be attempting to acquiring materials that could aid in reconstituting its nuclear weapons program.” After September 11, the sentence changed to “is attempting to acquire materials.”
By 2002 the intelligence report said: “Iraq is working to reconstitute its nuclear program.”
Pressuring an agency of the federal government is not a good thing to be doing. Richard Nixon misused the CIA and was about to be impeached for it. As John Dean wrote recently, “To put it bluntly, if Bush has taken Congress and the nation into war based on bogus information, he is cooked. Manipulation or deliberate misuse of national security intelligence data, if proven, could be ‘a high crime’ under the Constitution’s impeachment clause.” Dean said it is also a violation of federal criminal law, “including the broad federal anti-conspiracy statute, which renders it a felony to defraud the United States or any agency thereof in any manner or for any purpose.”
