Posted on 10/25/2005 4:21:39 AM PDT by Jim Robinson
I don't think you can blame Bush here. Like at State, the CIA anti-Bush bureaucrats are probably civil servants, not political appointees, well entrenched in their jobs. Even if Bush had had time before 9/11 to pinpoint them, he couldn't have done much about them.
Dems have spent the last 5 years convincing themselves that Republicans are so evil, it justifies breaking any rules of civility if one can bring them down. Dems inside State/CIA were likely drinking from the same cup. ANYTHING GOES if it harms Bush and his warmongering agenda...and keeps the focus off why the CIA missed 9/11.
I agree that the Senate should investigate...and hire Joe DiGeneva as counsel to the investigating committee!
"the U.S. has PC'd itself into virtual and ultimate impotence, and its own laws become its own worst enemy"
One example is the military investigating (and punishing) allegations of mistreatment of detainees. The law requires them to fight with tied hands, to clean up the mess when they don't, and then another law requires them to release details of alleged misconduct to the ACLU, inflaming hatred against the US and weakening support for the war. The combination of laws makes the Army fight against itself.
Absolutely. DeGenova's article and this one are uncovering the REAL intelligence problem. CIA has long been selectively leaking information harmful to the administration. Just look at the months leading up to the election, i.e., the missing explosives in Iraq... no doubt in my mind that this was nothing short of an orchestrated coup, with the old media ala NY Times, playing it for all it was worth. Give Porter Goss credit, he is trying to change things. Also listen to Curt Weldon, the Pa. Congressman. The CIA is full of old guard 'untouchables'...or so they think.
Yeah, civil servants are the bane of leadership since time immemorial. My thought is that an incoming leader should, first thing, put the fear of Almighty God into EVERYONE under him. Anyone not toeing the line ought to be too busy keeping his head low to activly oppose it.
Bush, as head of the government that these 'servants' work for should be able to do that to some extent. If the bureacracy has grown too large for that tactic then God help us.
"Prior to and during WW2 there was a famous "prize-winning" columnist,.."
Walter Duranty, maybe?
While I would love to see that, I don't know how an administration fights back against anonymous leaks. Especially one which had an event like 9/11 just a few months after taking office. After that, battle lines were drawn and secret agendas were sprouting all over the agency. Just look at how Able Danger is being treated in the media. Even the supposedly independent Sept. 11 panel was compromised...to the point that a former Nat'l Security Advisor was caught sneaking classified docs out of the Archives.
No, I'm afraid the media's treatment of the Plame affair is strengthening the Agency's grip on foreign policy. Who will dare take them on in future if WH figures are indicted? Scary stuff.
--I believe you are thinking of I.F Stone--IIRC, he was exposed by the Venona intercepts--
If the dems really try to push this "culture of corruption" down the throats of the American people through the elections of 2006 and 2008, the last thing the American people are going to want to do is elect the wife of an impeached president. This will backfire.
It seems that the CIA, especially due to the Clinton years has become a den of partisan anti-Bush democRATS. When Bush was elected he should have cleaned house both in the CIA and State Department. His, "just can't we get along" attitude has backfired on him.
Thanks for this post. I have long felt the CIA was out-of-control, and I would welcome an investigation into their actions....especially in this Wilson affair. I have a feeling the investigation would lead to The NYT being an accomplice! I have no qualms about asking my Congressmen to seek an investigation into questionable activities of the CIA.
Jacqueline, (Joe's his second wife), was a French diplomat and may have provided the connections for Wilson to see the forged documents that were supplied by the French through the Italians. In other words it is possible that Wilson knew that the docs were forged because he was privy to the information that French wanted to discredit the British info on Saddam shopping for yellowcake and that Wilson's objective was the same. The French just happen to manage the yellowcake production in Niger.
IOW, he didn't lie in his first statement...he saw the documents. It has been reported that she was a "cultural counselor" for the French Embassy, which some say is code for she was doing undercover work.
And Fedora has contributed this:
French intelligence soon began a campaign to discredit the US case for war against Iraq. In 1999, French intelligence had begun investigating the security of uranium supplies in Niger, where uranium production was controlled by a consortium led by the French mining company COGEMA, a division of the French state-owned nuclear energy firm AREVA. At that time, Italian businessman Rocco Martino provided French intelligence with genuine documents revealing that Iraq was planning to expand trade with Niger. French intelligence took an interest in the documents and asked Martino to provide more information. In 2000 he used a contact in the Niger embassy in Rome to provide French intelligence with documents purporting that Iraq had purchased uranium from Niger. These documents were later exposed as forgeries;
< snip >
Since it is now also known that French intelligence was trying to push Martino’s forgeries on US and British intelligence, as simultaneously the Democratic National Committee was planning to discredit President Bush’s Iraq policy by accusing his administration of manufacturing evidence against Hussein’s regime, heightened suspicion is cast on Wilson’s use of the Niger investigation to discredit the Bush administration’s case for war.
What Wilson Didn’t Say About Africa
And the CIA coup theory has been floated before:
Why did DCI George Tenet suddenly resign on June 3rd, only to be followed a day later by James Pavitt, the CIA's Deputy Director of Operations (DDO)?
The real reasons, contrary to the saturation spin being put out by major news outlets, have nothing to do with Tenet's role as taking the fall for alleged 9/11 and Iraqi intelligence “failures” before the upcoming presidential election.
Both resignations, perhaps soon to be followed by resignations from Colin Powell and his deputy Richard Armitage, are about the imminent and extremely messy demise of George W. Bush and his Neocon administration in a coup d'etat being executed by the Central Intelligence Agency. The coup, in the planning for at least two years, has apparently become an urgent priority as a number of deepening crises threaten a global meltdown. Shortly after the “surprise” Tenet-Pavitt resignations, current and former senior members of the U.S. intelligence community and the Justice Department told journalist Wayne Madsen, a former Naval intelligence officer, that they were directly connected to the criminal investigation of a 2003 White House leak that openly exposed Valerie Plame as an undercover CIA officer.
Seymour Hersh dropped a major bombshell that went virtually unnoticed, 54 paragraphs deep into an October 27, 2003 story for the New Yorker titled “The Stovepipe.”
“Who produced the fake Niger papers? There is nothing approaching a consensus on this question within the intelligence community. There has been published speculation about the intelligence services of several different countries. One theory, favored by some journalists in Rome, is that [the Italian intelligence service] Sismi produced the false documents and passed them to Panorama for publication.Source“Another explanation was provided by a former senior C.I.A. officer. He had begun talking to me about the Niger papers in March, when I first wrote about the forgery, and said, 'Somebody deliberately let something false get in there.'
He became more forthcoming in subsequent months, eventually saying that a small group of disgruntled retired C.I.A. clandestine operators had banded together in the late summer of last year and drafted the fraudulent documents themselves.”
Okay...there is much misinformation in the article which has now been disproven, as Rove/Bush/Cheney did not leak Plame's name, but what about the basic premise that this whole thing was a coup set up by the CIA? That would explain the shakeup at the CIA. You will notice that Powell's name is in there too, and he did resign in that time frame, just as they said. They are now trying to hang that memo around Bush's neck.
Yes, I have my tin foil hat securely on, LOL!
From some more reliable sources:
If Joe diGenova is right, and I suspect he is, the federal investigation into the disclosure of the identity of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame should never have happened.
“My views are stronger than ever,” the former U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia said Monday when asked about the white-hot controversy that has sent a New York Times reporter to jail, changed the rules of investigative journalism and now threatens to envelop the White House in a major crisis. “This investigation never should have started because it’s apparent that no crime was ever committed.” “The only way an investigation can begin is if the agency swears — swears — that it took every conceivable step to protect this person’s identity.”
For example, the CIA had to answer 11 specific questions about what steps it took to protect the identity of a covert agent. But diGenova questions whether some of the information the CIA provided the Justice Department on those 11 questions “was materially false.”
In addition, he pointed out that the CIA paid for Wilson’s trip, didn’t ask him to sign a confidentiality agreement, didn’t object to his writing the op-ed article in the Times and allowed him to conduct TV interviews and to appear in a photo with his wife in Vanity Fair, he noted.
“The CIA isn’t stupid,” he said. “They wanted this story out. I’m raising the question: Did the CIA mislead Fitzgerald?”
The farcical Plame/Wilson assault on Karl Rove is a shot across the bow of the White House. The spook bureaucracy is fighting for its perks, hand-in-hand with the Democrats and the media. This is exactly the same iron triangle that destroyed Richard Nixon. [My comment: Hence all the sudden recent media hype about comparing this to Watergate]
Valerie Plame's CIA bosses took care not to ask Mr. Wilson to sign a confidentiality agreement, routine in such cases, almost as if they wanted him to make a public fuss. They were not surprised, one might think, when Mr. Wilson promptly took his story to New York Times Op-Ed Editor Gail Collins, one of the great Bush-haters of all time.
The farcical "outing" of Valerie Plame therefore raises a genuinely frightening monster from the swamp: A subversive alliance between the intelligence bureaucracy, the Democratic Party and the media. The common thread among all the characters in this low-brow comedy is hatred of President Bush and American power. Joe Wilson's eyebrows go ballistic when he talks about the White House. Just watch him sometime.
It was a publicity stunt from the get-go. Wilson's "confidential trip" to Niger gave him the superficial credentials to publish his "expose" in the Times. He'd gone there, talked to the top officials face to face, and by gum, they told him it was all a lie! Not even Gail Collins could possibly believe this banana sauce, but Wilson's charges provided a useful stick with which to beat the White House.
Another explanation was provided by a former senior C.I.A. officer. He had begun talking to me about the Niger papers in March, when I first wrote about the forgery, and said, “Somebody deliberately let something false get in there.” He became more forthcoming in subsequent months, eventually saying that a small group of disgruntled retired C.I.A. clandestine operators had banded together in the late summer of last year and drafted the fraudulent documents themselves.
“The agency guys were so pissed at Cheney,” the former officer said. “They said, ‘O.K, we’re going to put the bite on these guys.’ ” My source said that he was first told of the fabrication late last year, at one of the many holiday gatherings in the Washington area of past and present C.I.A. officials. “Everyone was bragging about it—‘Here’s what we did. It was cool, cool, cool.’ ” These retirees, he said, had superb contacts among current officers in the agency and were informed in detail of the sismi intelligence.
“They thought that, with this crowd, it was the only way to go—to nail these guys who were not practicing good tradecraft and vetting intelligence,” my source said. “They thought it’d be bought at lower levels—a big bluff.” The thinking, he said, was that the documents would be endorsed by Iraq hawks at the top of the Bush Administration, who would be unable to resist flaunting them at a press conference or an interagency government meeting. They would then look foolish when intelligence officials pointed out that they were obvious fakes. But the tactic backfired, he said, when the papers won widespread acceptance within the Administration. “It got out of control.”
Like all large institutions, C.I.A. headquarters, in Langley, Virginia, is full of water-cooler gossip, and a retired clandestine officer told me this summer that the story about a former operations officer faking the documents is making the rounds. “What’s telling,” he added, “is that the story, whether it’s true or not, is believed”—an extraordinary commentary on the level of mistrust, bitterness, and demoralization within the C.I.A. under the Bush Administration. (William Harlow, the C.I.A. spokesman, said that the agency had no more evidence that former members of the C.I.A. had forged the documents “than we have that they were forged by Mr. Hersh.”)
The F.B.I. has been investigating the forgery at the request of the Senate Intelligence Committee. A senior F.B.I. official told me that the possibility that the documents were falsified by someone inside the American intelligence community had not been ruled out. “This story could go several directions,” he said. “We haven’t gotten anything solid, and we’ve looked.” He said that the F.B.I. agents assigned to the case are putting a great deal of effort into the investigation. But “somebody’s hiding something, and they’re hiding it pretty well.”
Bump!
In our government we have so many intelligence and counterintelligence agencies that I doubt two percent of our high ranking military and two percent of our legislators are even permitted to know the full purpose of each agency. Many of these agencies aren't known to anyone outside of government. Name changes occur regularly to add to the confusion.
Bringing these men and women into Washington DC for a summit meeting/investigation would require that three states be evacuated or locked down. Ninety five percent of the staffers and legislators wouldn't be permitted to even be aware that a final report even existed. Of the remaining five percent I doubt if a full one percent would be permitted to view the full final report.
So what you would be left with is maybe fifteen people to make all the decisions.
To think that any of you as private civilians have any idea just what is happening right now in Worthington DC is way too much for me comprehend.
Today disinformation is floating in Washington DC like sand particles in a 100 year old dust storm. If we knew of every time there was an error, intentional or unintentional within the National Security Agency alone we would be demanding that 50,000 people be jailed for life.
We know that we didn't get the full truth on the Kennedy assassination, Flight #800, the Oklahoma bombing, Waco or 911. What makes any of you think we are going to get the full truth on this matter?
The national media releases what it is told to and very little else. That has been our system of public information previously and will continue that way until we bring in a totally new government. Nobody is looking to do that because during the change we would be so open to foreign attack that would would be as defenseless as newborn infants.
Congressional investigations are never held unless the final report is known before the first words of testimony are spoken so stop ranting for full investigations. They don't happen, never have happened and aren't going to happen in the future.
We have lived with the crumbs of information that are given to us and that is the way it will continue be. Calm your appetite because if you knew the full truth you wouldn't like it.
Hey, great list! Thanks for the memories!
Plotting against the White House may be a little too strong. Covering up their own ineptitude is probably more accurate.
No one here quite that naive; despite wishful-thinking postings. . .
Would like to see at least a few 'demrat heads on a stick' so to speak. . .and even that, I know. . .is too much to ask; despite just how deserving these people are.
But seems worthwhile to 'call attention' to just these issues re CIA; rattle a few cages. . .or just a rolling of a few boulders down the hill as the Demrats continue their 'posse ride' to get Bush.
That said. . .maybe it would be better time spent if I took up rug hooking. . .
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