Yet Another Error in the CIA Briefing List
At what point are people going to start asking whether the errors in the CIA briefing list are by design, and not just the result of carelessness? Because with the news that the list shows a staffer who had already left the Senate attending a 2004 briefing brings us up to errors the CIA has conceded on seven different briefings–though they’re also trying to claim that listing then-Director Goss as attending a 2005 briefing was not an error. (h/t Mary)
The CIA chart states that a Senate staffer, Chris Mellon, attended a briefing on July 15, 2004. However, Mellon told The Associated Press that he left the Senate in April 2004 and did not attend the briefing.
On Wednesday, CIA spokesman George Little said the CIA has reviewed its record and agrees that Mellon was erroneously listed as having attended the 2004 briefing.
And note, this is again a case of the CIA claiming a Democrat or Democratic staffer got briefed when he didn’t.
At this point, I’m really torn about which would be worse–to learn this was all intentional, an attempt to claim CIA had support from Dems for their torture program when they didn’t–or to learn that the CIA is really this incompetent.
Somebody (hint, hint) ought to send CIA Director Panetta a detailed report on all the proven “errors” and “misstatements” of this log.
And then in closing suggest he find some better fookin’ help! *g*
yeah, right
just email the Director of CIA
if I did something like that, within a week I really would be wearing tinfoil
an you wouldn’t want to knock on my front door either …
LOL!
I wouldn’t put it past EW. She’s already admitted harassing the CIA by phone. *g*
A post on incompetence v. intent. Thank you EW : )
Wouldn’t you like to have been at that “review”?
Marcy! How many cups of coffee have you had today!? One for every post should have you wired! Dang Girl!
Tangentially… what’s up with the competence of the loyal opposition? It looks like the Pelosi/CIA flap is going to blow over before the OPR report comes out. Really, what’s up with that?
have you ever seen the movie “Ruby”, with Danny Aeillo ???
there is a scene after the assasination where he tells his FBI handler:
and I didn’t expect much from the CIA before I saw that flik
maybe they’re tryin to fool the Saudis and the Chinese into thinking they really are incompetent
an it was Montana, not Wyoming
Marcie’s wearing me out. Next week I start my bar review class, but I’m sure it’ll be easier than trying to keep up with EW.
There are people who actually come to my office 4-5 x per day to ask me what Marci’s been up to. You are doing this country proud.
Big thanks!
Panetta will say something like, well, gee, when Negroponte left DNI, all we could find was these scraps of paper…
Bob in HI
EW, I’m trying to catch up on multiple threads and I just saw this comment from Sara over on Scrapple and Pelosi. Since she appears to have stumbled across a Jan 2002 torture memo from Addington approved by Gonzales as described in Shenon’s book (really go see her comment for this to make any sense), I wanted to make sure you saw it after your flurry of posts this evening…
Good catch! I’d left that thread to catch up with the others, and had missed it. Thanks for bring attention to it up thread.
Bob in HI
It is scary that the agency charged with providing the nation with accurate intelligence about foreign countries can’t seem to even provide accurate intelligence about official meetings in our own capital. I mean, it’s not like it’s a cafe in Prague, right?
But what can you expect from the people who brought you the “slam-dunk” on WMD in Iraq?
This is like the perfect bait-ball feeding frenzy for all those kool kidz in the Beltway reportage biz: go down the list, make a phone call or two, and — BINGO! Hard to believe this will be the last of these reports; and, of course, classic regurgitated mealwormburger for the next cycle or three.
“On the March 8, 2005, briefing, we were true to the records,” Little said. “Although Mr. Goss was CIA director at that time, the underlying records list him as chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. There’s a record of an earlier briefing that lists Rep. (Pete) Hoekstra as chairman.”
The “underlying records”? WTF?*
*presuming it hasn’t been copyrighted
Oh, now I get it; “underlying records” means ‘hey, we got a coupla other places right, so we’re not complete wankers here’.
Where did you find that?
Never mind, found it here.
I think it means, “Well, gee we had this old roster of people in the House, and it sez right there that Porter Goss was chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, and gosh, we didn’t have an updated copy handy.”
Bob in HI
They could have checked Wikipedia on that.
LOL! So the people compiling the records at the time didn’t even know that Goss was their own Director? This is just getting ridiculous. It’s almost as if Panetta (or someone in the Agency) knew that this list and the records would be filled with errors and that would discredit them…leading to an investigation? After all, Panetta said it would be up to Congress to assess the summaries reliability.
hey,
it doesn’t have to be “either/or”.
the cia has a long history of being both:
– incompetent, over and over again
and
– deceitful, over and over again.
no hard “either/or” choice is necessary; no anguish need be experienced over having to make a choice.
of course, most cia personnel just do their jobs and those jobs are clerical, administrative, or analytical.
the real problem at the cia is the administrative structure of the cia and the way that structure tends to elevate bureaucratic sleeze-balls and moral cowards to positions of great power within the agency – same as any other bureaucracy, but, alas, with greatly heightened protection from the public ever knowing what actually happened – unlike, say, doj, or enron.
the solution is simple:
dissolve the cia entirely and reconstitute it with a different and highly supervised, from the outside, administrative structure.
now that’s a plan….but the shadow OutsideIA will be quickly put in place by the Cheneites and a reign of organized crime will be initiated
Panetta’s disclaimer is sounding more and more like a plea to Congress to help him clean up the CIA. Regardless of whether it is incompetence or maliciousness, something is in need of serious repair — and Panetta likely knew it before he handed over the list.
The more this unfolds, the more it looks like maliciousness to me. If so, someone got greedy, and tried to make it look like too many Dems got briefed.
Heh, not sure this is an “either/or” situation, if you know what I mean.
Backbearings, backbearings . . .
We’re catching lots of places where the CIA claims people were briefed that weren’t. What about the reverse? Are there places on the list where we would expect to see certain people briefed who aren’t there? Six members of the gang of eight, for instance, with no indication that the others were briefed later?
Marcy caught at least one example of this, with the appropriations people being briefed while the intelligence committee people were not. Any other examples?
I put something at the end of the Issa thread from John Prados’ account, showing that briefings on Iraq-related intel before the vote to authorize military force had a similarly haphazard feel. Even if someone at CIA or one of the super boards wanted to keep conscientious note of who was talking to whom about what, I suspect that in the six weeks between Sept. 1 and the vote it would have been quite difficult.
You could read Prados’ analysis of Executive-Congress interaction during that period as indicating malice, though not necessarily emanating [only] from inside CIA. He says more than once that, even as objections to the rush to war were rising both here in the U.S. and abroad, it was only around the end of summer 2002 that it finally dawned on the administration that they couldn’t just get what they wanted by issuing a series of decrees. It then goes without saying, especially given what we know about the folks in question, that they did not enter the cycle of briefings with a good attitude. Something of the same is sure to be true of briefings concerning torture and other aspects of detainee policy, which they would have thought should be subsumed under unitary commander-in-chief hokum.
Al-Qaeda suspect to face first-ever Gitmo prisoner civilian trial in NY
“Tanzanian Ahmed Ghailani, captured by U.S. officials in 2004 and tranferred to the Cuban facility two years later, will be sent to New York for trial, according to the AP.”
http://rawstory.com/blog/2009/…..ian-court/
Had the same sentiment last week in your Graham post. However, upon reflection, I’m betting on intentional, so that we can nail the intentional for taking us to war.
Then there was the third question. Are these “intentional” mistakes intentional breadcrumbs from within the agency in hopes of nailing Team B?
Could the list be made by the same agency that found that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction prior to our invasion of Iraq in 2003? When will inquiring minds actually have the legal right to know…?