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Paul Pillar Speaks, Again The latest CIA attack on the Bush administration is nothing new. by Stephen F. Hayes 02/10/2006 4:15:00 PM IN A BREATHLESS front-page, above-the-fold article in today's Washington Post, Walter Pincus reports that a former senior CIA official named Paul Pillar accuses the Bush administration of "misusing" intelligence to take the country to war in Iraq. According to the Post account, Pillar uses a forthcoming article in Foreign Affairs to claim that the Bush administration "politicized" the intelligence on Iraq. Bush administration policymakers did this subtly, Pillar says, by repeatedly asking the CIA questions about Iraq, its...

...The post had been vacant for six months. Senate Democrats, under the "leadership" of Joe Biden and Chris Dodd, have prolonged and thwarted every attempt to hold a vote on Mr. Bolton.... No wild accusation was ever proved, other than that he sought the removal of two intelligence analysts for incompetence and insubordination. Notably, both the 9/11 Commission and Robb-Silberman Commission said policy makers have a responsibility to question and challenge intelligence analysts. Senators Biden and Dodd ostentatiously demanded that the Administration let them see confidential intelligence intercepts relating to Mr. Bolton's testimony on Syrian weapons of mass destruction. These...

...[M]ore than 10 days after the bipartisan Robb-Silberman Commission debunked a major piece of the media's Iraq war narrative -- that Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress played a major role in the bad intelligence on Saddam's WMDs -- almost none of the outlets that sold the story have seen fit to correct the record or explain their reporting. An honorable exception is NBC's Tim Russert, who in any case appears to have been guilty of nothing more that believing what he read in places like the Los Angeles Times and Newsweek. On Sunday's edition of "Meet the Press," Mr. Russert...

In 1987, after he was exonerated of corruption charges, former Secretary of Labor Raymond Donovan issued the classic plea of the wronged man: "Which office do I go to get my reputation back?" Whichever office it is, Ahmad Chalabi may want to apply there as well. The leader of the Iraqi National Congress has been the most unfairly maligned man on the planet in recent years. If you believe what you read, Chalabi is a con man, a crook and, depending on which day of the week it is, either an American or Iranian stooge. The most damning charge is...

...Crowning all of this will be the office of the National Intelligence Director. In theory, the job of the NID... will... oversee and coordinate the work of the CIA, FBI, NSA and DIA. In practice, it probably means one of the following two things: 1) NID becomes another layer of the permanent Washington bureaucracy.... Eventually it is co-opted by one of them, probably the CIA, which provides the NID with most of his personnel. Or (2) NID becomes another layer of the permanent Washington bureaucracy. The office accretes staff and influence. It interposes itself between the President and his intelligence-gatherers....