- I may be terribly old-fashioned--I still wear a waistcoat
and spats- but I've always lived by the simple dictum "don't dick
with the Central Intelligence Agency". This is the agency, let us
recall, that parts the hemispheres of people's brains with a spatula in
the course of ordinary conversation. It's the same organization that has
overthrown several dozen governments, assassinated countless persons, and
hunted down Robert Redford in '3 Days of the Condor'. The CIA is a collection
of the baddest cats this world has ever seen, and while I do not share
in its ideals or goals (although they did help to keep the price of bananas
down by overthrowing the government of Guatemala, so props for that) I
do extend to the CIA my very greatest respect. It doesn't need my admiration;
it is a vile machine. But you don't mess with the CIA, any more than you
would mess with a Kodiak bear at the helm of an M1-Abrams tank. Thus it
came as something of a shock to discover the Bush administration thought
it could, with impunity, invent a bunch of phony intelligence ('hooey'
in CIA-speak), get caught, and blame it on the CIA.
-
- Let it be noted that the word 'intelligence' is used
here in the sense of 'information'. All other senses of the word would
be sorely malapropulent. We have in the CIA an agency that blows some 3-4
billion dollars per year (people used to think that was a lot of money)
and yet can't provide us with the kind of geopolitical data you could get
from a subscription to Tiger Beat magazine. The core intelligence upon
which the late unpleasantness in Iraq was purportedly based was of such
poor quality one suspects it was excerpted from the government section
of the Baghdad Yellow Pages-- a copy stolen from a pay phone with half
the pages torn out and the remainder obliterated by dog whiz. So this wretched
CIA-generated intelligence, which would have earned a pretty low grade
in the context of a 6th grade special-ed social studies report, was of
little real value to the current administration's case for war. But rather
than ask the CIA to improve its data-gathering efforts in the region, for
instance by watching the news on television, the Bush administration decided
to just go ahead and make things up. They turned out to be no better at
it than the CIA.
-
- The administration made up official-sounding numbers:
500 tons of sarin gas, 38,000 liters of botulinum (more than twice the
amount accepted in school lunch programs), 25,000 liters of anthrax, and
a quart jug of spider juice. They probably felt like these numbers were
safe enough: nobody knows how much a liter is. Colin Powell could be seen
before the United Nations waving around a vial of white powder, presumably
a sample gotten from either the CIA or Marion Berry; it looked like he
meant what he said. They made up exact numbers of warheads and delivery
systems and boxes of thumb tacks to be strewn in America's streets. They
even gave us a timeline: we had 45 minutes from green light to deployment
on all these nasty items in the Iraqi arsenal. We're talking about specific
numbers. All of them completely and utterly made up. Which leads us to
Niger's uranium, or rather, doesn't.
-
- Because when someone in the media accidentally picked
up the story about some ambassador guy who went to some African country
that can you believe it is called Niger to find out if they sold yellowcake
uranium, which until this time everybody assumed was a type of flower you
could get out of the Burpee's catalogue, and this ambassador guy's negative
report got buried and the president instead said Iraq was practically choked
with the stuff during his State of the Onion speech well, you can imagine.
The whole thing blew up, tempest, teapot, and all. Eventually George Tenet,
head of the CIA and therefore an individual you do not want to cross, was
ordered to throw himself on his sword and admit it was the CIA's fault
that the fissile materials claims got into the speech. Which in fact it
was not. But Tenet being a Bush yes-man, he did the requisite auto-transfixion
and exonerated the White House from blame. But he didn't forget this. Noooo.
And then the story, which appeared to have blown itself out, was rekindled.
Because the Bush gang don't know when to quit. So one of them got revenge
on this ambassador guy, who looks just like my chiropractor but I'm pretty
sure it's not him, by outing his wife's big secret, which was--wait for
it-that she's a CIA operative!
-
- Can I get an 'oops', people? Here we have an agency that
was publicly corn-holed not long ere, and all of a sudden one of its covert
operatives---working the anti-terrorism beat, no less-has been exposed
by the Executive Branch in a fit of petulance that would have made Caligula
blush. Not only has she been exposed, but the front company she worked
with, and anybody who showed up at the annual picnic, and her entire list
of pen pals. It's safe to assume there are people in foreign countries
who are dead because of this. If not dead, at least they've had to disguise
themselves as llamas and flee the territory on their hands and knees. If
that isn't tweaking the bull on the bag, I don't know what is. And Tenet
agrees with me on this point- not just because we're lovers, either. He
has initiated proceedings.
-
- When the CIA initiates proceedings, entire nations collapse
in flames. Economies deflate like whoopee cushions. Powerful men are found
dead in alleys with their heads encased in cheese wax. It might be said
that the CIA has an extremely low hubris threshold. As it now stands, the
president (after only a few months of doing nothing) has ordered his people
to cooperate with his other people in finding the source of this leak in
the scandal now known rather lamely as 'Intimigate' (I prefer 'What, her?-gate'
myself). This erstwhile investigation will not satisfy the CIA, methinks.
Even Bush's own man at the CIA won't be satisfied with this, especially
seeing as he's the one who took the fall last time. Whether or not a special
prosecutor is appointed to oversee the investigation, there's a pissed-off
CIA stomping around town at the moment with a 55-gallon drum (that's 208.45
liters) of whupass. Let us recap:
-
- Bush's people, and I use the word 'people' loosely, decided
to make the CIA take the fall for the one canard out of several thousand
that a slumbering nation happened to catch on its way into the swamps of
the Mesopotamian desert in the name of anti-terrorism. This canard also
happened to be one of the few that the CIA specifically suggested Bush
not espouse as an excuse for his little camping trip to hell, so we have
a painful insult/injury compound already, vis-à-vis the CIA. Shortly
thereafter, same Bush people, in a moment of good-natured backstabbing
retribution, exposed one of the CIA's own assets, and by extension all
the other assets to which she can be connected by a reasonably bright foreign
intelligence agency with access to a telephone. I'm just guessing here,
but it seems to me that an agency willing to overthrow the government of
Guatemala in the name of banana imports ought to have no problem saying
"screw you right back" to a bunch of venal, inbred frat boys
blundering their way through their last terms in public office.
-
- You don't play dirty tricks on the folks who invented
them. Expect events in the next few months to get very interesting as political
revelations start to occur at the most embarrassing moments, policy notions
don't get properly cooked intelligence to back them up, and personal secrets
float into public view for no apparent reason, drifting down the cloaca
publicum to the delight of scandal-mongers everywhere. The CIA has officially
been dicked with. They might even start parting people's brains again,
although probably not the president's. They don't make spatulas that small.
-
- Ben Tripp is a screenwriter and cartoonist. Ben also
has a lot of outrageously priced crap for sale here. If his writing starts
to grate on your nerves, buy some and maybe he'll flee to Mexico. If all
else fails, he can be reached at: credel@earthlink.net
-
- http://www.counterpunch.org/tripp10112003.html
|
