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The CIA and the President
Some people might be fooled by the way the Administration has attempted to shift the blame for the missing-WMD debacle to the intelligence community. In that regard, this passage, discussing Kennedy and the CIA's efforts to kill Castro, is instructive:
- If we press the question it is not in order to judge Kennedy but because it tells us two things about the CIA, true about other intelligence services as well, which are fundamental to understanding the agency's role in American politics.
The first is that the CIA works for the president. The second is that the CIA attempts to keep its covert actions secret. When they become known, effort is made to ensure they cannot be attributed to the United States. When the United States is obviously the author, the CIA protects the president by taking the blame. This is what is meant by "plausible deniability." But the concept has a flaw. When the CIA has really done something awful on its own, the responding fury of the office of the president is unmistakable and unrestrained. But when the agency is only falling on its sword in time-honored fashion, then the president's men treat the alleged excess with great gentleness, in the manner of McNamara saying with the sweet candor of a boy next to an empty cookie jar, "I just can't understand how it could have happened."
Thomas Powers, Intelligence Wars at 54-55.
Let's just say that what we are seeing lately from the Bushies is something less than unmistakable and unrestrained fury.
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“It was fortunate that so few men acted according to moral principle, because it was so easy to get principles wrong, and a determined person acting on mistaken principles could really do some damage." - Larissa MacFarquhar
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