The Great War of Our Time: The CIA'S Fight against Terrorism from Al Qa'ida to ISIS
2015; United States Army War College; Volume: 45; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
0031-1723
Autores Tópico(s)Intelligence, Security, War Strategy
ResumoThe Great War of Our Time: The CIA'S Fight Against Terrorism from al Qa'ida to ISIS By Michael Morell New York, NY: Twelve, 2015 362 pages $28.00 [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Michael Morell has written an important memoir of his 33 years in the CIA with a special emphasis on events occurring after the 9/11 strike. He was in a number of key positions during this time frame and had already assumed the plum job of CIA briefer to President George W Bush in December 2000. The remainder of his career (including later positions as associate deputy director and the head of the CIA's main analytic arm, the directorate of intelligence) was often focused on the struggle against terrorist organizations. Later, he rose to the rank of Deputy Director and twice to Acting Director before retiring in 2013. Unsurprisingly, Morell's book conveys a pro-CIA viewpoint on such controversial topics as the Iraq War, Enhanced Interrogation Techniques (EITs), drone warfare, the bin Laden raid, the Benghazi controversy, the Snowden affair, and a variety of other issues. A central focus of the book is the CIA's struggle against al-Qa'ida and its subordinate offshoot organizations such as the powerful Yemen-based al-Qa'ida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). Morell does not criticize President Bush's decision to invade Iraq and states that the president, thought [the war] was necessary to protect the American people. (78) He also states the CIA provided the president with wrong information on the issue of Iraqi chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons, and this flawed intelligence helped Bush decide to invade Iraq. Morell maintains the CIA's conclusions on Iraqi issues immediately prior to the war were one of the most important intelligence failures in the history of the agency and even uses his book to issue a public apology to former Secretary of State Colin Powell for misleading him. Such statements seem like a huge admission of failure, but they are also offered to rebut the even more serious criticism of being bullied into endorsing politicized intelligence when placed under massive political pressure to do so. Morell admits such pressure did exist on issues related to Iraq and it was severe. According to Morell, Vice President Dick Cheney's staff was relentlessly pushing for hardline reports that could be used to justify a war with Iraq. Morell further states the degree of amateur intelligence analysis being conducted by political appointees during this time frame was unprecedented in his career. He mentions that Cheney's Chief of Staff, I. Lewis Scooter Libby literally yelled at one CIA official over an intelligence document in which CIA analysts refused to endorse his favored hardline conclusions. In Morell's account, the person experiencing Libby's anger behaved like a hero and stated he would resign before withdrawing the offending report. In a similar incident, Morell recounts how another senior Cheney aide attempted to impose a great deal of unreliable information on CIA experts in a further attempt to improve the case for In response to this pressure, Morell claims CIA analysts always acted with integrity and won every battle over the contents of their reports. One hopes that is the whole story, although it would seem wickedly difficult for these people to avoid at least a certain level of self-censorship when faced with what former Bush Press Secretary Scott McClellan called our campaign to sell the war. (1) In an especially controversial section of the book, Morell provides a strong defense of the Bush Administration's detention and intensified interrogation policies, the latter of which were designated with the innocuous name Enhanced Interrogation Techniques (EITs). He had hoped that EITs would be allowed to continue under President Obama, but the new president banned them on his second full day in office. Additionally, although Morell likes and respects his former boss, CIA Director Leon Panetta, he was unhappy when Panetta stated that waterboarding was torture, a statement Morell saw as confrontational with the CIA old guard. …
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