CIA sticking it to the administration, 2004

Because I think it's an important story, and because I see no shame in latching onto Powerline's coattails in order to update the reporting, here's more on the bureaucratic war within the executive branch of the US government:

Pillar's "management team" at the CIA, where he was employed as the national intelligence officer on the Near East/South Asia desk, approved the appearance. According to Novak, the ground rules for the speech were based on the "Lindley Rule," which holds that the speaker, his audience and the event are not to be disclosed, "but the substance of what he said can be reported." That substance, apparently, was a harsh assessment of the Bush administration's handling of Iraq.

Think about that: A senior, unelected CIA official--Paul Pillar--was given agency approval to anonymously attack Bush administration policies less than two months before the November 2, 2004, presidential election. That Pillar was among the most strident of these frequent critics--usually in off-the-record speeches to gatherings of foreign policy experts and business leaders--was well known to his colleagues in the intelligence community and to Bush administration policymakers. His was not an isolated case; CIA officials routinely trashed Bush administration policy decisions, often with official approval, in the months leading up to the Iraq War and again before the election. Pillar, who had complained to a CIA spokesman that someone had violated the ground rules by providing his name to Novak, simply got caught.

(Daily Standard)

So, the CIA set up background press conferences ("not for attribution"stuff) so that CIA officers could criticize the policies of their bosses in the Bush administration. That is a jaw-dropper of a story, but I haven't seen the mainstream media pick up on it at all. Even though they were no doubt present at the press conferences where it was being done.

Or most of them (except for the one who identified Paul Pillar's role) thought that secret was worth keeping.

To make the link to the most obvious parallell, Joe Wilson wrote his now-infamous New York Times op-ed piece, "What I didn't Find in Africa," with the permission of the CIA. You can't ordinarily just go on a clandestine CIA mission and later write a public story about it because you feel like it.
***

The CIA has issued an official statement regarding Rowan Scarborough's book about the bureaucratic war ("Sabotage").
Powerline sees it as a classic non-denial denial.

Pillar pilloried by Powerline

I noted Paul R. Pillar's nonsensical attack on the administration here.

Powerline blog has an excellent entry that continues to shed light on the bogus arguments the man is airing from within the executive branch of government--additional evidence of a war on the administration waged from within the structures of that branch.

The key observation is Pillar's claim that Bush did not rely on the National Intelligence Estimate in making the decision to go to war against Iraq, implying that collected intelligence did not inform the decision.

That implication seems entirely specious in light of the intelligence briefings to which the president is privy, and in light of the correspondence between the NIE and the reasons the president offered for waging war on Hussein's regime.

"Sublovious Poll": President Bush caused a dramatic increase in the number of Americans who believe that Iraq was involved in the 9-11 attacks.

I've had the poll up for maybe nine months.

As of May 14, 2007, the poll had fifteen responses.

13 strongly agreed with the statement.
1 didn't know (neutral)
1 strongly disagreed.

The poll is not scientific by any means, but I'd at least hazard a guess that my tradition of blog-hopping the blogs of the Loony Left (that's not all you liberal bloggers, but too many by percentage) draws some attention; they trail back here to see what right-wing nutcase is invading their space.

In short, there's no support for the view that Bush caused any increase in the belief that Iraq or Saddam Hussein were involved in the 9-11 attacks. Those in the reality-based community who strongly agreed with the statement based their belief on a fantasy.

The legend started with a poorly-written account in the Christian Science Monitor. Noam Chomsky picked up on the bad information in that story (probably helped along by left-wing networking--there's a tendency for snippets of information like that to get sent around on listserves and the like). I contacted Dr. Chomsky regarding this issue and he wrote that he could not recall the source of the poll he referenced.
I identified the poll I think he relied on, but he said it didn't look familiar.

Of two questions I asked him, he ignored the second, which was whether or not he continued to believe that the Bush administration had been responsible for increasing the percentage of Americans who thought Iraq was responsible for 9-11.

Here's what Chomsky had been saying, BTW:

The drumbeat for war began in September 2002, and the government-media propaganda campaign achieved a spectacular success. Very quickly, the majority of the population came to believe that Iraq posed an imminent threat to US security, even that Iraq was involved in 9-11 (up from 3% after 9-11) and was planning new attacks.

And here's one I hadn't seen before. Paul Pillar also piled on with some disinformation:

In a poll taken the first week after 9/11, 57 percent of Americans surveyed identified Usama bin Laden as the one most likely responsible for the attacks. Fourteen percent did not know or did not answer, and no other response received more than four percent. Only three percent named Iraq or Saddam Hussein as the leading suspect. In a poll in August 2002--after months of a rhetorical drumbeat in which "Iraq," "war on terrorism," and 9/11 had repeatedly been blended together in words and thus in people's minds--53 percent of respondents said they believed that Saddam Hussein had been "personally involved" in the 9/11 attacks. In a poll in August 2003, after another year in which Iraq and 9/11 were linked in pro-war rhetoric but not in any new evidence, 69 percent of Americans believed Saddam Hussein had a role in the attacks.
Terrorism and U.S. Foreign Policy, by Paul R. Pillar

The above material comes from Pillar's introduction to his work.
Google allows a more comprehensive search of Pillar's introduction than the link I provided above.


1) Note that Pillar references the Wirthlin Worldwide poll for his 3% figure, the same figure used by Chomsky.
2) Note that Pillar compares percentages for different measurements as though the comparison is legitimate. Is it?

• a) The Wirthlin poll was an open-ended question. That means it wasn't multiple choice, but the equivalent of fill-in-the-blank.
  
• b) The Wirthlin poll had a follow-up question where respondents were to name their second choice for "most responsible," Saddam Hussein drew 27%. Does Pillar mention it? No, he doesn't. The follow-up question was also open-ended, by the way.
• c) So next Pillar cited the 53 percent poll, where Hussein is named as "personally involved." A person could be third, fourth, fifth, or sixth most responsible and still be "personally involved." These percentages cannot be fairly compared.
• d) Pillar next cites the 69 percent poll, and the goalposts have moved again. This time, the poll measured those who, Pillar says "believed Saddam Hussein had a role in the attacks."
• e) Not only is the 69 percent poll another seismic shift for the goalposts, Pillar accepts the worst piece of reporting in the story. Milbank and Deane do lead off with the misleading summary that Pillar repeats. However, the story goes on to say "Sixty-nine percent of Americans said they thought it at least likely that Hussein was involved in the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, according to the latest Washington Post poll." "[A]t least likely" turns into an apparently unqualified belief.
  
• In the same story Milbank and Deane reported (safely near the end where many readers never end up) "On Sept. 13, 2001, a Time/CNN poll found that 78 percent suspected Hussein's involvement -- even though the administration had not made a connection. The belief remained consistent even as evidence to the contrary emerged." Another highly significant figure simply ignored by Pillar.

The Wirthlin poll, constructed as it is, may be perfectly consistent with the Time/CNN poll showing 78 percent suspecting Hussein's involvement.
Pillar and Chomsky should know better than to base an argument on this type of statistical malpractice. Chomsky, unfortunately, has a reputation for careless handling of the facts.

Pillar, as a person with a significant role with the CIA, simply reveals how partisanship has roots in the executive branch of government. A non-partisan should not make this mistake. Correction: nobody should make this mistake. A non-partisan wouldn't be expected to make a mistake like this.

There is no reasonable evidence of an increase in the belief that Hussein was responsible for 9/11, much less any evidence that the Bush administration was responsible for the mythical increase.
Thirteen out of fifteen poll respondents were fooled.

I'll keep the poll open, and place a link to this entry nearby. Let's see if the percentages change a bit.

Oh, and one final nail in the coffin:

The American public’s apparently widespread belief that Saddam Hussein was responsible for the 9/11 terror at- tacks was no feat of misdirection by the Bush administration. Instead, the Bush administration inherited and played into a favorable climate of public opinion, which may have greatly facilitated itstask of building public support for war against Iraq. The mistaken belief that Saddam Hussein was responsible for the 9/11 attacks was already widespread among Americans long before President Bush began publicly linking Saddam Hussein with the War on Terrorism. In- deed, nearly seven months before the 9/11 attacks, an Opinion Dynamics poll in late February of 2001 found that 73% of Americans said it was very or somewhat likely that “Saddam Hussein will organize terrorist attacks on United States [sic] targets to retaliate for the air strikes” that had recently beenconducted in Iraq by American and British air forces.
("When Osama Became Saddam" --Altaus, Largio)

See page five of the .pdf file.