About book A Pretext For War: 9/11, Iraq, And The Abuse Of America's Intelligence Agencies (2005)
The first part of this book tells how the American intelligence agencies failed to prevent 9/11; I was already familiar with the story from other books including Bamford's The Shadow Factory. They deemed infiltrating Al-Qaeda too difficult, which would have come as a surprise to John Walker Lindh and Richard Reid. The second part tells about their role in launching the Iraq War. An anonymous CIA official tells that they were ordered, "If Bush wants to go to war, it's your job to give him a reason to do so." So they did; Colin Powell's United Nations speech consisted of assertions obtained from two sources: neoconservatives with ties to Israel and Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress; the CIA presented these assertions to the Secretary of State as facts. The intelligence agencies failed to successfully spy on Iraq but the NSA did eavesdrop on the UN diplomats from the Security Council member nations like Cameroon that were undecided on whether or not to vote for the war; they were then bribed into voting with the U.S. and Britain.
A very interesting book. Spookdom is Bamford’s turf. He has written about the NSA (Body of Secrets, a very good look at that agency) and the world of spying. He presents mucho specificity in support of the fact that the Iraq was had little or nothing to do with the rationales for war presented by the administration. He talks about the establishment of politically oriented entities within the Pentagon, State Department and Ariel Sharon’s government to foster conflict. There is much here on the staffing challenges facing the intelligence community (although there is little on the details of how those budgets were cut) There is a fair bit of detail on how analysts were pressured to fulfill the administration’s fantasies re Iraqi WMD and connections to Osama. Pretty good stuff. I was particularly impressed with his discussion of how intelligence is shared among countries, and what factors are at play in such sharing. It is also notable that the Qana massacre is one of the sources of Osama rage.
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This book makes me very sad because if it really is true what this book is telling us then we have caused the deaths of thousands of service men and thousands of Iraqi civilians because of the personal vendetta of president Bush.This book details the lies and deceptions that the Bush administration pushed on us pre-Iraq war to convince the country that we should go to war with Iraq. So thorough was the deception that congress bought into it. Since then the whole thing has been shown to be a fabrication. Study after study has come up with nothing to substantiate the lies.
—Tim Painter
