Vincent Cannistraro

* i've just re-read a fascinating article by julian borger in the Guardian, 6 months before the iraq invasion - it totally debunks most of the nonsense in the war lies and Feith's OSP:

""Basically, cooked information is working its way into high-level pronouncements and there's a lot of unhappiness about it in intelligence, especially among analysts at the CIA," said Vincent Cannistraro... Mr Cannistraro said the flow of intelligence to the top levels of the administration had been deliberately skewed by hawks at the Pentagon."

That's why we were pulling our hair out at the time. we knew, and we knew that they knew. grrrr.

* wapo had something similar a couple of weeks later. They quote Cannistraro saying much the same thing, and then he says something that i didnt know/had forgotten:

""They are politicizing intelligence, no question about it," said Vincent M. Cannistraro, a former CIA counterterrorism chief. "And they are undertaking a campaign to get George Tenet [the director of central intelligence] fired because they can't get him to say what they want on Iraq.""

it was only 6(?) weeks later than Tenet reportedly made his "SlamDunk" statement. that must have been a helluva woodshedding.

* incidentally:

""The [INC's] intelligence isn't reliable at all," Vincent Cannistraro, a former senior CIA official and counter-terrorism expert, said before the war. "Much of it is propaganda. Much of it is telling the Defense Department what they want to hear. And much of it is used to support Chalabi's own presidential ambitions. They make no distinction between intelligence and propaganda, using alleged informants and defectors who say what Chalabi wants them to say, [creating] cooked information that goes right into presidential and vice-presidential speeches.""

Cannistraro was explaining, in 2002, how the 'message' gets spread from the DoD to BKSH and back into presidential speeches.

Sibel points to Feith in her case, and she says that her case and plamegate are inextricably linked. Feith's OSP was also in constant communication with BKSH in managing the INC nonsense. Meanwhile, the DoD is giving the INC (which should probably read BKSH) $100 million which no doubt gets slushed back through the GOP campaign funds and astroturf groups around the country.