A Movement in Denial

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Mark Steyn identifies the curious twists of ideology that have resulted in an alignment of the far left with the CIA, and makes a serious point about the dangerous incompetence of US intelligence services: A movement in denial.

Almost every European intelligence service reckoned Saddam was trying to buy uranium in Africa. The only folks who didn’t think so were the CIA.

Let’s weigh their comparative interest in the story. The Financial Times revealed last week that one Continental intelligence agency had a uranium-smuggling operation involving Iraq under surveillance for three years.

In return, the only primary investigation initiated by the most powerful nation on Earth was to send a narcissistic kook from a Saudi-funded think tank on vacation for a week to sip mint tea with government stooges. He didn’t even bother filing a written report and the “Bush spurned my advice” column he wrote for the Times reads like a bad travelogue: “Through the haze, I could see camel caravans crossing the Niger River.” After that, the great narcissist somehow managed to make himself the center of the story: But hey, enough about Saddam’s nuclear ambitions; let’s talk about me.

A few weeks before September 11, 2001, Reuel Marc Gerecht wrote a timely piece in the Atlantic Monthly on the woeful state of U.S counterterrorism intelligence in a CIA neutered by politically correct bureaucracy. Mr. Gerecht’s many memorable quotes included this line from a young CIA man reflecting on an agency used to desk-bound life in Virginia:

“Operations that include diarrhea as a way of life don’t happen.”

That’s Niger in a nutshell: Diarrhea Central. Who would want to be stationed there when they could be back at Langley monitoring the world’s e-mail in an air-conditioned office?

But Niger is a 99.5 percent Sunni Muslim country with the world’s second-highest birthrate and a load of uranium. It’s exactly the sort of place an intelligence agency in the war on terror ought to keep an eye on. And that doesn’t mean sending Mint Tea Boy to write it up for the travel section.

That’s the issue here: CIA folks are tourists in the heart of darkness. This spring, the ever-complacent George Tenet told the September 11 Commission another half-decade would be needed to rebuild the clandestine service. So three years after September 11 the CIA says it needs another five years.

Imagine if Franklin Roosevelt had turned to Mr. Tenet to start up the OSS, the CIA’s wartime predecessor. In 1942, he would have told the president it would be up and running by 1950.

President Bush didn’t lie. He was right, and the CIA was wrong. That doesn’t mean they lied either. Intelligence is never 100 percent. You make a judgment, and in this instance the judgments of the British and Europeans were right, and the judgment of the principal intelligence agency of the world’s hyperpower was wrong. That should be a cause of great concern — for all Americans.

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Last updated: 2023-04-04 11:11 am PDT
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