PBS'S FRONTLINE PRESENTS THE DARK SIDE

From the Frontline website:

"A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies," Cheney told Americans just after 9/11. He warned the public that the government would have to operate on the "dark side."

In "The Dark Side," FRONTLINE tells the story of the vice president's role as the chief architect of the war on terror, and his battle with Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet for control of the "dark side." Drawing on more than 40 interviews and thousands of documents, the film provides a step-by-step examination of what happened inside the councils of war.

Early in the Bush administration, Cheney placed a group of allies throughout the government who advocated a robust and pre-emptive foreign policy, especially regarding Iraq. But a potential obstacle was Tenet, a holdover from the Clinton administration who had survived the transition by bypassing Cheney and creating a personal bond with the president.

After the attacks on 9/11, Cheney seized the initiative and pushed for expanding presidential power, transforming America's intelligence agencies and bringing the war on terror to Iraq. Cheney's primary ally in this effort was Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

"You have this wiring diagram that we all know of about national security, but now there's a new line on it. There's a line from the vice president directly to the secretary of defense, and it's as though there's a private line, private communication between those two," former National Security Council staffer Richard Clarke tells FRONTLINE.

Click here for the rest, and to watch the entire documentary.

Even though much of this was known at the time of the invasion or shortly thereafter, it is well worth it to go over this nightmarish tale once again. Frontline does an incredible job of taking numerous disparate pieces of information and weaving them together into a coherent and compelling narrative: that there were no WMDs found in Iraq was clearly not an "intelligence failure." Rather, at the behest of Cheney and Rumsfeld, decades old procedures and standards regarding the analysis of intelligence data were utterly ignored. That is, even though the conventional wisdom inside both the agency and the White House before the invasion was that Saddam had WMDs, the CIA was totally unable, again and again, to verify such a belief; what few tidbits of existing intelligence suggesting the possibility of Iraqi WMDs were massaged, manipulated, and grossly exaggerated to create a bogus case for invasion. CIA chief George Tenet, fearing for his job, was caught in the crossfire. Knowing that the case for invasion was slim to none, but also knowing that war policy detractors were being purged from the administration, Tenet sided with the devil, and told the seemingly clueless President that what intelligence they had constituted a "slam dunk," a careerist lie. Ultimately, when no WMDs were found, Tenet became the scapegoat, and was purged anyway. Meanwhile, the real bad guys are still running the show, and the CIA, now restaffed with White House loyalists, is greatly diminished in influence.

A chilling tale, I know. Go check it out.

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