Now it stands to reason that the CIA isn't going to be the President's rubber stamp any longer after what they did to one of their agents.

quote:
CIA Report Says U.S. Losing Popular Support in Iraq

Wed Nov 12, 5:04 PM ET Reuters


By Will Dunham

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A CIA report concludes that ordinary Iraqis increasingly are siding with the insurgency amid doubts about the U.S. ability to stamp it out, officials said on Wednesday, while the U.S. administrator in Iraq said it was hard to figure out where the Iraqi public stands.


Word of the report came as President Bush (news - web sites)'s national security team held urgent meetings at the White House with Paul Bremer, the U.S. civil administrator in Iraq, aimed at accelerating the transfer of power to Iraqis.


The CIA's classified field assessment concluded that many Iraqis are losing faith in American efforts in Iraq amid the U.S. failure to crush an increasingly bold resistance, said U.S. officials, speaking on condition of anonymity.


The report, warning of possible failure for Bush's efforts to establish Iraq as a democracy if the situation is not fixed, said aggressive U.S. counter-insurgency measures were leaving many Iraqis disillusioned and pushing them to support the insurgency, one U.S. official said.


Amid continuing violence, at least 17 Italians and nine Iraqis died on Wednesday when a suicide bomber wrecked an Italian military base in the town of Nassiriya, while in Baghdad, U.S. forces killed two people in a counter-insurgency strike called "Operation Iron Hammer."


The report, disclosed earlier by the Philadelphia Inquirer, noted that no member of the U.S.-appointed Iraqi Governing Council nor any other Iraqi politician had shown an ability to lead the nation following the U.S.-led invasion in March that chased President Saddam Hussein (news - web sites) from power, the official said.


But the official refused to fault Iraqi politicians for keeping a low profile amid a mounting insurgency.


"If they've got the smarts to be the future leader of the country, then they've got the smarts not to paint themselves as a target (for assassination), and to see how real is this American commitment to Iraq," the official said.


IRAQI DISILLUSIONMENT


Asked about Iraqi disillusionment toward the U.S. presence, Bremer told reporters, "I think the situation with the Iraqi public is, frankly, not easy to quantify."


"We've looked at polls. We've talked to people. We make our own assessments," Bremer said at the White House after meeting with Bush, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and others. "Obviously, the terrorists are trying to encourage the Iraqi people to believe that the United States is not going to stay the course."


Bremer said, "I don't think that that's going to work. I don't think the Iraqis are going to be intimidated. We're certainly not going to be intimidated."


Bremer expressed confidence that as U.S. forces "prosecute this low-intensity conflict" and as American authorities give Iraqis political responsibilities "we'll find that the Iraqi people support that."


"We are in a war of perceptions," added a senior defense official, saying the insurgency hopes to influence public opinion in Iraq, America and other countries with troops in Iraq,


"Militarily, this resistance cannot match the U.S. forces. But if they can attack the will of the people and if they can pose the question of why we are involved, that's what they will seek to do."


Another defense official said some tactics used by the U.S. military -- such as aggressive raids aimed at weeding out insurgents -- may be counter-productive.


"There's a difference between how many hearts and souls you're going to win or supporters you're going to get by kicking in doors as opposed to knocking on the doors and asking for cooperation," the official said.
Please tell me the CIA is nothing but a bunch of lying "liberals" and "Sadaam Lovers" and the President's rosy assesments are still something besides utter B.S. It's sadly apparent that we're losing the p.r. war. Now if this was NATO's or the U.N.'s mission rather than the American's, I think perceptions of the Iraqi council being puppets of the American's would be dispeled.

I also added some commentary on Jessica Lynch's interview from the other night in the post above, right before Dave's.

quote:
'No President has lied so baldly and so often and so demonstrably'

By Andrew Gumbel
09 November 2003


"The intelligence process is a bit like virginity," says Ray McGovern, who worked as a CIA analyst for 27 years. "Once you prostitute it, it's never the same. Your credibility never recovers.

"Watching what has happened with Iraq over the past several months has been like watching your daughter being raped."

Such is an indication of the extraordinary depth of feeling within the US intelligence community as the Bush administration's basis for the war in Iraq - the weapons of mass destruction, the dark hint of links between Saddam Hussein and al-Qa'ida - has been shown to have been built on air.

Mr McGovern worked near the very top of his profession, giving direct advice to Henry Kissinger during the Nixon era and preparing the President's daily security brief for Ronald Reagan. Now he is co-founder of a group of former CIA employees called Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, or Vips for short.

What the Bush White House has done, he believes, is far worse than the false premise that dragged the United States into the Vietnam War - a reported second attack on a US destroyer in the Gulf of Tonkin which later turned out not to have taken place. "The Gulf of Tonkin was a spur-of-the-moment thing, and Lyndon Johnson seized on that. That's very different from the very calculated, 18-month, orchestrated, incredibly cynical campaign of lies that we've seen to justify a war. This is an order of magnitude different. It's so blatant."

Mr McGovern accuses Mr Bush of an extraordinary act of chutzpah - taking advantage of his authority as President of the United States to make people believe there must be something to his insistent allegations that Iraq possessed potentially devastating weaponry.

"Many of us felt there had to be something there ... If this had been another country, one would have written a convincing analysis that this guy is lying through his teeth, that there are no weapons in Iraq. But people thought, the President can't say he knows something if he doesn't. That was persuasive, in a way.

"Now we know that no other President of the United States has ever lied so baldly and so often and so demonstrably ... The presumption now has to be that he's lying any time that he's saying anything."

It will, Mr McGovern believes, take a change of president and a change of CIA director to even begin to repair the damage done by what he sees as an overt politicisation of the intelligence business. But even that may not be enough.

"Unless what has happened in the past year and a half is recognised as a scandal, in which the CIA has been badly abused, then there's no hope," he said. "I pin my hopes mostly on the press these days. Turns out, surprise surprise, that even the US press doesn't like to be lied to."