A couple days back, Salon ran a very interesting interview with intelligence historian and author, Thomas Powers. Powers is the author of the newly released Intelligence Wars: American Secret History from Hitler to al-Qaeda, and a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books. Powers describes in the interview the Bush administration conducting a virtual coup against US government agencies, particularly the intelligence community, in its efforts to mobilize the US to invade Iraq.

Salon: It seems like there has almost never been direct acknowledgement by the White House of any policy problems.

Powers: Yes, but they've done something else which troubles me more than anything. They correctly read how the various institutions of our government could be used to stage a kind of temporary coup on a single issue: Whether or not to go to war with Iraq.

President Bush used the intelligence system as a blunt instrument, and they forced Congress to go along -- the Congress was in an almost impossible position. When the president uses the maximum power of his own office and says, "I am soberly telling you that this is necessary for the safety of the country," you gotta listen to the guy. At least once.

Worth clicking through to read the whole thing. Powers' book is being released at the same time as James Bamford's A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse of America's Intelligence Agencies, described below, which sounds to offer a very similar analysis.

Posted by Laura at June 15, 2004 01:48 PM