The CIA Empire Strikes Back

I have just finished watching PBS Frontline's "The Dark Side," a rather compelling but one-sided view of the battle to control intelligence between Vice President Cheney and the Central Intelligence Agency before the runup for Operation Iraqi Freedom. Essentially, it's an hour and a half of grievances from former CIA officials who don't add anything new to the War on Terror narrative. Does Richard Clarke add anything new? Frontline takes its obligatory crack at the Vice President but in the end it's the CIA that proves itself incomeptent. This episode is the CIA's latest chapter in covering its ass.

Sam Allis of the Globe thinks otherwise.

"The Dark Side" is, in a sense, CIA payback for its treatment. The program is dominated by legions of former CIA officers, some of whom left over the agency's treatment by the White House, and they detail what they view as Cheney's efforts to find the intelligence to fit the war he wanted against Saddam. Virtually no one, in contrast, appears from the Cheney-Rumsfeld camp to defend the two men's actions.

Perhaps because they couldn't get a fair shake. But here one reason to consider that despite an absence, Cheney comes across as far more knowledgeable about bureacratic infighting and how to survive. Watching Frontline I often thought of how the trial lawyer would have reacted. As he proved himself in the 2004 VP debates, John Edwards is way out of his league.

More from Dan Froomkin at the Washington Post.

Meanwhile, the Post's TV Critic Paul Farhi takes a swipe at Frontline's overly dramatic stenorian style, a trait I've found perennially irritating in an otherwise superb program

All that material [in "The Darks Side"} is strong enough without the addition of
an irritating "production value" -- "Frontline's" use of music, particularly bass notes, to underscore something the filmmakers apparently want viewers to think is sinister or foreboding. That is both irritating and gratuitous, considering that the subject itself -- orchestrating a war -- is plenty foreboding enough.