Greenwald: 'We Should be Extremely Skeptical' Of CIA Report, 'They're Wrong All The Time'

"We should be extremely skeptical of it for multiple reasons," Greenwald said.

First, he said, it is a "second-hand report from somebody whose identity is being shielded, describing what the CIA supposedly concluded, laundering that through The Washington Post. These are assertions that are being made completely unaccompanied by any evidence whatsoever, let alone evidence that we can touch and rationally review."

Further, he said, CIA agents "are programmed in a lot of cases to disseminate misinformation and political actors. We ought to be highly skeptical."

[...]"When Mitt Romney ran against Barack Obama, the Democrats mocked Romney mercilessly for depicting Russia as the No. 1 geopolitical threat," Greenwald said. "They released a video saying Mitt Romney was stuck in the Cold War; he doesn't understand the 21st century. Obama in the debate said the 1980s want their foreign policy back to think Russia is this great threat."

Now, Greenwald said, they believe "Vladimir Putin lurks behind every American problem."

Such suggestions not only create a toxic environment domestically, but could cause unintentional confrontation with a country "that can do a lot of damage."

...we have found a number of instances of coverage that was not as rigorous as it should have been. In some cases, information that was controversial then, and seems questionable now, was insufficiently qualified or allowed to stand unchallenged. Looking back, we wish we had been more aggressive in re-examining the claims as new evidence emerged -- or failed to emerge.

The problematic articles varied in authorship and subject matter, but many shared a common feature. They depended at least in part on information from a circle of Iraqi informants, defectors and exiles bent on ''regime change'' in Iraq, people whose credibility has come under increasing public debate in recent weeks. (The most prominent of the anti-Saddam campaigners, Ahmad Chalabi, has been named as an occasional source in Times articles since at least 1991, and has introduced reporters to other exiles. He became a favorite of hard-liners within the Bush administration and a paid broker of information from Iraqi exiles, until his payments were cut off last week.) Complicating matters for journalists, the accounts of these exiles were often eagerly confirmed by United States officials convinced of the need to intervene in Iraq. Administration officials now acknowledge that they sometimes fell for misinformation from these exile sources. So did many news organizations -- in particular, this one.