This piece started out as yet another analysis of the Administration's handling of the Hunting Accident. It turned into much, much more!

I would be inclined to leave Cheney to the mercy of Jon Stewart and Jay Leno if it weren't for other signs that this administration has jumped the tracks. What worries me most is the administration's misuse of intelligence information to advance its political agenda. For a country at war, this is truly dangerous.

The most recent example of politicized intelligence was President Bush's statement on Feb. 9 that the United States had "derailed" a 2002 plot to fly a plane into the U.S. Bank Tower in Los Angeles. Bush spoke about four al Qaeda plotters who had planned to use shoe bombs to blow open the cockpit door. But a foreign official with detailed knowledge of the intelligence scoffed at Bush's account, saying that the information obtained from Khalid Sheik Mohammed and an Indonesian operative known as Hambali was not an operational plan so much as an aspiration to destroy the tallest building on the West Coast. When I asked a former high-level U.S. intelligence official about Bush's comment, he agreed that Bush had overstated the intelligence.

Perhaps the most outrageous example of misusing intelligence has been the administration's attempt to undercut Paul Pillar and other former CIA officials who tried to warn about the dangers ahead in Iraq. I'm not talking about the agency's botched job on weapons of mass destruction but about its warnings that postwar Iraq would be chaotic and dangerous. Pillar said so privately before the war, and he helped draft an August 2004 national intelligence estimate warning, correctly, that the situation in Iraq was deteriorating and heading for "tenuous stability" at best.

Bush was unhappy at this naysaying, just as he has grumbled about pessimistic reports from the CIA station in Baghdad. When Pillar made similar warnings about Iraq at a private dinner in September 2004, the White House went ballistic -- seeing Pillar as part of a CIA conspiracy to undermine the president's policies. Soon after, Bush installed a former Republican congressman, Porter Goss, who began a purge at the agency that has driven out a generation of senior managers. Pillar and many, many others have retired, leaving the nation without some of its best intelligence officers when we need them most.

Bush and Cheney are in the bunker. That's the only way I can make sense of their actions. They are steaming in a broth of daily intelligence reports that highlight the grim terrorist threats facing America. They have sworn blood oaths that they will defend the United States from its adversaries -- no matter what . They have blown past the usual rules and restraints into territory where few presidents have ventured -- a region where the president conducts warrantless wiretaps against Americans in violation of a federal statute, where he authorizes harsh interrogation methods that amount to torture.

When critics question the legality of the administration's actions, Bush and Cheney assert the commander in chief's power under Article II of the Constitution. When Congress passes a law forbidding torture, the White House appends a signing statement insisting that Article II -- the power of the commander in chief -- trumps everything else. When the administration's Republican friends suggest amending the wiretapping law to make its program legal, the administration refuses. Let's say it plainly: This is the arrogance of power, and it has gone too far in the Bush White House.

What is perhaps the most frustrating about criticizing this administration, is the overwhelming amount of things to criticize... So much so that it becomes mind numbing. It is no surprise that the American Public just can't get their mind arround the malfeasance and corruption of the Administration. There is just so much that it must appear to most, impossible for an Administration to be so innept/corrupt/morally bankrupt.... fill in the blanks... The fact that a President who was elected to protect us, is so effective at taking apart the apparatus designed to do so, would be ironic if not so scary...

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.grupo-utopia.com/blog/mt/mt-tb.cgi/1522