Profiting from access to CIA and military intelligence

The President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board is the scene of the latest acts of Bush cronyism. From Salon.com: Top-secret cronies Bush has stacked his foreign advisory board with his Texas business pals, who stand to profit from access to CIA and military intelligence. By Robert Bryce Nov. 17, 2005 | No discussion of cronyism in the Bush administration would be complete without talking about PFIAB, short for the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. George W. Bush's latest appointments to the PFIAB, which advises the president on how various intelligence agencies are performing, represent a who's who of the Halliburton-Texas Rangers-oil business crony club that made Bush into a millionaire and helped propel him into the White House. Created in 1956 by President Dwight Eisenhower, the PFIAB is designed -- according to the White House press release -- to give the president "objective, expert advice." In an ideal world, the PFIAB members would analyze the intelligence they get and give the president their unvarnished opinions about the relative merits of the different agencies and the work they are doing. PFIAB members are granted access to America's most secret secrets, known as SCI, for Sensitive Compartmented Information. Members of PFIAB have security clearances that are among the highest in the U.S. government. They have access to intelligence that is unavailable to most members of Congress. They are privy to intelligence from the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, the military intelligence agencies and others. In 2001, Bush appointed him [Scowcroft] to chair the PFIAB. But Scowcroft, who was national security advisor under two presidents, George H.W. Bush and Gerald Ford, has been openly critical of Bush's decision to invade Iraq. "I don't think in any reasonable time frame the objective of democratizing the Middle East can be successful," Scowcroft recently told the New Yorker. "If you can do it, fine, but I don't think you can, and in the process of trying to do it you can make the Middle East a lot worse." That kind of independent thinking led Bush to dismiss Scowcroft from the chairmanship of the PFIAB about a year ago. If you have not read the interview in the New Yorker Magazine with Scowcroft it is online at BREAKING RANKS by Jeffery Goldberg. With Scowcroft out, Bush's cronies are in. Last month, the White House announced that Dallas oil billionaire Ray Hunt, one of Bush's biggest financial backers, was reappointed to the PFIAB. So was Cincinnati financier William DeWitt Jr., who has backed Bush in all of his business deals going back to 1984, when DeWitt's company, Spectrum 7, bailed out the faltering entity known as Bush Oil Co. The new appointee of note to the PFIAB is former Commerce Secretary Donald Evans, a Bush confidant since his days in Midland, Texas. Read More at: Salon - Top-secret cronies