Bad Blood Exists Between White House, CIA

Yahoo ^ | 10/29/05 | AP

[advance_copy]

Washington (AP) - Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff is learning one Washington lesson the hard way: Don't do battle with people who run covert operations for a living. The bad blood between the White House and CIA has been known for some time. But the 22-page indictment Friday of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby displays - in black and white - just how nasty relations had become between senior White House officials and the nation's spy chiefs.

[snip]

...former CIA official Lee Strickland, who was responsible for all disclosure activities at the CIA as chief of its information review group, said he can't recall a time in his 30 years at the agency when there was so much tension with the White House.

He said the situation highlights problems with the politicization of intelligence. "You want to keep the politics separate from the intelligence," he said.

[PeskyOne]

Has anyone here ever considered that there's an innocent and logical explanation for how Wilson was chosen?

Let's turn that question around, "Have you ever considered there was not an innocent nor logical explanation for Wilson being chosen? Joe and Valerie were not supportive of this president nor of his Iraqi policies. CIA missions are supposed to be confidential...did it ever occur to you to ask why Joseph Wilson, not only didn't keep it confidential; he wrote an op-ed piece for the NYT about the mission and WMD's that the Senate declared was full of lies. Therefore, Joe Wilson has been thoroughly discredited, and I can't imagine anyone not asking why he was sent, and why he has been allowed to espouse his lies etc. IMO, he and Valerie should be the ones indicted for deliberately conspiring to bring down a presidency with fraudulent documents and lies meant to destroy the presidency of George W. Bush.

Have you asked yourself why, if her life as a covert agent was in such danger, she opted to reveal her covert agent status to a MARRIED man during a 'heavy make out session' on their 3rd or 4th date? I don't believe she knew him that well, in that short of time, to know that he could or could not be trusted. I wonder if she told anyone else her status after a few dates that got 'hot and heavy'?

Some of us have certainly wondered what the explanation was for sending Wilson on this mission. I didn't find a 'logical or innocent' reason, but rather a sinister reason, and that's why his op-ed piece was full of lies!

[p23185]

Some of us have certainly wondered what the explanation was for sending Wilson on this mission. I didn't find a 'logical or innocent' reason, but rather a sinister reason, and that's why his op-ed piece was full of lies!

And I cannot understand why Fitzgerald wouldn't have brought Wilson into the investigation - after all it was to find out about the leak! Maybe he was called into GJ and we don't know about it. Wouldn't Fitzgerald have found Wilson lying just like Libby?

[eleni121]

Fact: The CIA failed time and again to save US lives when attacked by Muslim terrorists.

Fact: CIA agents are coming out of the woodwork blaming the very people trying to fix the situation there.

Conclusion: CIA needs a complete overhaul meaning that senior agents should be terminated and new blood brought in. At the very minimum Ms Plame should be fired immediately as I consider her to be a threat to this nation given her rogue husband's actions.

[eleni121]

I agree. The Prez went overboard with the compassion theme. Compassion does not work in the real world...just in church maybe.

He should have fired every single one of the Clinton hires the day of his inauguration.

[Extremely Extreme Extremist]

Amazing how even this gets turned into an excuse for a Bush bash.

I didn't see any bashing. What I read was the naked truth.

[popdonnelly]

"is anyone at DOJ even investigating that?"

They should be. Put the FBI on it, at the very least.

[popdonnelly]

"The only way she's a victim is if she sent Joe Joe over to do a real investigation and didn't know what he was really doing."

Sending a former diplomat over to chat with government officials at the pool, as Wilson describes it, is hardly a real investigation. How long would it take for people to figure out who he is and why he is there? This is your first-rate CIA at work.

[Extremely Extreme Extremist]

Post #50 well said.

What led to the CIA's ruin is that they don't hire "dirty" people anymore. It's too politically correct and there's a lot of straight-arrow there, if you know what I mean.

Intelligence is a dirty business. The CIA needs to go back to the good old "bad" days when they took risks.

[Protect the Bill of Rights]

papa Bush was the CIA director

"Senior" White House Offical? That would be a hoot.

[Extremely Extreme Extremist]

Great rant. The one thing the Left is afraid of is mobilized conservatives. We were ready to drop bombs if Bush would've appointed a real conservative constructionist like Luttig or JRB to SCOTUS. When Bush appointed Miers it was like taking a cold shower.

I just wish Bush was blunt more and give more fire-and-brimstone speeches. Possibly the only time when he took the Rats head-on was his speech to the Urban League a couple of years ago and he openly questioned Democrats' committment to blacks

[YaYa123]

I really, really like your # 102!

Besides your wisdom, we need to remember "players" need the company of other players. It fuels their ego, and adds to their power, allure. Example. We loathe Vernon Jordan, who facilitated many of Clinton's questionable acts. Vernon Jordan = the ultimate player. While Clinton was in power, Jordan set up job interviews for Monica Lewinsky. Right now, he's smoozing with Republicans in Knoxville, some kind of hobnobbing with the Howard Bakers.

Washington lawyers, lobbyists, and MSM journalists pass around politicians like condiments at a picnic.


Once you get to the top, you smooze, do favors for, gossip, party, come to the aid of, and become "best friends" with others at the top. You're in the club! They are worthy, which makes you feel worthy, and that's much more important than core beliefs, if you even have any, after you get to the top. George and Laura Bush have survived 5 years without becoming overt "players". Unlike the Clintons, the Bushes weren't impressed with Sally Quinn's Washington, or Hollywood, or New York. They don't play the game, another reason why they are so hated.

[ClaireSolt]

I know I have been retired a few years, but I cannot believe the world has changed to the point where a girl at the CIA can bring down a powerful man with impeccable credentials by saying he talked about her. The world doesn't work that way. Something else is going on here.

[Protect the Bill of Rights]

New keyboard needed, aisle 13!
Hilarious!

[ClaireSolt]

Oh, I disagree regarding Linda Tripp. I think the reason no one would hire her is that she was disloyal. If she couldn't stand the Clinton's, she should have resigned, not stay and consider that she knew better than they.

[sgtyork]

Don't forget how he smoked Goerlick at the 911 commission hearings. He wasn't afraid to play his cards.

[Cicero]

They don't play the game, another reason why they are so hated.

Exactly. And I don't think it overestimates their pettiness to say that the Washington press corps really, really misses all those Hollywood star-studded parties with free ord'oeuvres and booze that clinton used to throw. With W. and Laura in the White House, enjoying quiet evenings with a few friends, self-important, fashionable correspondents are finding things really bo-o-o-ring.

[sgtyork]

Strange, Clinton sumarily fired every Federal Prosecutor in a single day.

And tried to push a massive medical care bill on the public without public input. And see where that got them. The republicans took both houses. Kennedy is still sore at Bill&Hillary for that. Bush learned from that, particularly knowing that he would face a much more hostile press.
...........................
But he didn't have the kind of effective legal sniping that Bush has encountered on many issues. I'm thinking Janet Reno and investigations like Chinese getting weaponry..

A good housecleaning has a way of giving an organization focus and a reason to address its failures.

[shield]

Don't forget how he smoked Goerlick at the 911 commission hearings. He wasn't afraid to play his cards.

Thanks for reminding me...Ashcroft did, he ate her up then spit her out. He didn't give her one inch. LOL...I loved it...I wish he was still our AG...however, boy did he ever get the ball rolling in sooo many areas that today their still being cleaned up and out. ;o)

[anglian]

"but surely the source of Mr Wilson's knowledge regarding the fake Niger documents should be investigated." Miller has become the most-criticized journalist of the war. The New Republic accused her of having "painted a grave picture of Saddam's WMD capabilities--a picture that has, so far, not been borne out." She has been charged with "compromised reporting" in the pages of Editor & Publisher. Slate has called her a purveyor of "misinformation."
****Miller's reporting began to stir resentment last September, when she and fellow Times reporter Michael R. Gordon wrote that the Bush administration believed Iraq had "embarked on a worldwide hunt for materials to make an atomic bomb." They wrote that Iraq had tried to import thousands of aluminum tubes, which U.S. officials believed "were intended as components of centrifuges to enrich uranium." On September 8, the Miller/Gordon story about the aluminum tubes appeared on page one of the New York Times. The information was attributed to unnamed administration sources.
****Greg Thielmann, who retired last year as head of the State Department's Office of Strategic Proliferation and Military Affairs, has said he was angered to hear the administration's public claims about the tubes, because "the most knowledgeable experts in the U.S. government believed that this was not the kind of aluminum that the Iraqis would have been seeking to use in centrifuges for uranium enrichment."
***** October 25, 2005
Lawrence Wilkerson in Los Angeles Times:
"In fact, I’ll just cite one more thing. The French came in in the middle of my deliberations at the CIA and said, we have just spun aluminum tubes, and by god, we did it to this RPM, et cetera, et cetera, and it was all, you know, proof positive that the aluminum tubes were not for mortar casings or artillery casings, they were for centrifuges". Otherwise, why would you have such exquisite instruments? We were wrong.

****In June 2000, during President Clinton's last year in office, France was the only one of 107 countries to refuse to sign a U.S. initiative aimed at encouraging democracy around the world. A year earlier, State Department spokesman James Rubin complained, "We do find it puzzling and passing strange that France would spend so much energy and focus so much attention on the danger to them of a strong United States rather than the dangers that we and France together face from countries like Iraq." The French oppose the United States, quite simply, for what it is—the most powerful country on earth.

[Southack]

"The CIA is institutionally hostile to Bush. That needn't have been so. The State department is institutionally hostile to Bush. That needn't have been so. The Attorney general's office and the FBI are institutionally hostile to Bush. The government is run by these people. It is not run by President Bush."

No.

Of course the CIA is hostile to President Bush, but you can't just fire the 2,000 top Leftists overnight. You've got to do what GWB has been doing which is to create a new intel agency on the one hand while purging the CIA on the other...knowing that GWB is going to come under fire from those thousands of career spook Leftists and that it will take extreme courage and patience to beat them.

They don't run the government. They do influence it. If they actually ran the government behind the scenes, Governor Bush would have never won in 2000.

Same goes for the State Department on an almost as serious scale.

The Attorney General's Office is the one area where President Bush could have been more brash, but that would have been a temporary fix...what the Bush Administration is doing inside the AG's Office will lessen the long-term bias against us...that's preferable to a short-term-only fix even if we have to suffer more in the meantime.

As for the FBI, I'd rate it as biased against us, but not openly hostile...certainly not at the level of the State Department and CIA. It's the one area of government more suited for liberals, anyway, if such a thing is possible.