Tyler Drumheller in Der Speigel:

DRUMHELLER: Every responsible chief in the CIA knows that the more covert the action, the greater the need for a clear policy and a defined target. I once had to brief Condoleezza Rice on a rendition operation, and her chief concern was not whether it was the right thing to do, but what the president would think about it. I would have expected a big meeting, a debate about whether to proceed with the plan, a couple of hours of consideration of the pros and cons. We should have been talking about the value of the target, whether the threat he presented warranted such a potentially controversial intervention. This is no way to run a covert policy. If the White House wants to take extraordinary measures to win, it can't just let things go through without any discussion about their value and morality.

Ah yes. working toward Der Fuhrer. When chaos is the plan, and the plan is working, you don't need, or want, orders or a chain of command. You just do whatever you imagine Dear Leader might want--which is all communicated by nods and winks, or over Rush Limbaugh on Armed Forces radio, for the sake of plausible deniability.

And, oh yeah, the intelligence and facts were fixed around the policy:

DRUMHELLER: I had assured my German friends that [Curveball's material] wouldn't be in the speech. I really thought that I had put it to bed. I had warned the CIA deputy John McLaughlin that this case could be fabricated. The night before the speech, then CIA director George Tenet called me at home. I said: "Hey Boss, be careful with that German report. It's supposed to be taken out. There are a lot of problems with that." He said: "Yeah, yeah. Right. Dont worry about that."

SPIEGEL: But it turned out to be the centerpiece in Powell's presentation -- and nobody had told him about the doubts.

DRUMHELLER: I turned on the TV in my office, and there it was. So the first thing I thought, having worked in the government all my life, was that we probably gave Powell the wrong speech. We checked our files and found out that they had just ignored it.

SPIEGEL: So the White House just ignored the fact that the whole story might have been untrue?

DRUMHELLER: The policy was set. The war in Iraq was coming and they were looking for intelligence to fit into the policy.

These are bad people. All the anti-Democrats are bad people. Because look at what they enabled, still support, and still try to evade any accountability for.

NOTE Der Spiegel link from Glenn Greenwald.