Posted on 11/30/2005 2:32:19 AM PST by Laverne
THE CIA'S WAR against the Bush administration is one of the great untold stories of the past three years. It is, perhaps, the agency's most successful covert action of recent times. The CIA has used its budget to fund criticism of the administration by former Democratic officeholders. The agency allowed an employee, Michael Scheuer, to publish and promote a book containing classified information, as long as, in Scheuer's words, "the book was being used to bash the president." However, the agency's preferred weapon has been the leak. In one leak after another, generally to the New York Times or the Washington Post, CIA officials have sought to undermine America's foreign policy. Usually this is done by leaking reports or memos critical of administration policies or skeptical of their prospects. Through it all, our principal news outlets, which share the agency's agenda and profit from its torrent of leaks, have maintained a discreet silence about what should be a major scandal.
Recent events indicate that the CIA might even be willing to compromise the effectiveness of its own covert operations, if by doing so it can damage the Bush administration. The story began last May, when the New York Times outed an undercover CIA operation by identifying private companies that operated airlines for the agency. The Times fingered Aero Contractors Ltd., Pegasus Technologies, and Tepper Aviation as CIA-controlled entities. It described their aircraft and charted the routes they fly. Most significantly, the Times revealed one
of the most secret uses to which these airlines were put:
When the Central Intelligence Agency wants to grab a suspected member of Al Qaeda overseas and deliver him to interrogators in another country, an Aero Contractors plane often does the job.
The Times went on to trace specific flights by the airlines it unmasked, which corresponded to the capture of key al Qaeda leaders:
Flight logs show a C.I.A. plane left Dulles within 48 hours of the capture of several Al Qaeda leaders, flying to airports near the place of arrest. They included Abu Zubaida, a close aide to Osama bin Laden, captured on March 28, 2002; Ramzi bin al-Shibh, who helped plan 9/11 from Hamburg, Germany, on Sept. 10, 2002; Abd al-Rahim al-Nashri, the Qaeda operational chief in the Persian Gulf region, on Nov. 8, 2002; and Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the architect of 9/11, on March 1, 2003.
A jet also arrived in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, from Dulles on May 31, 2003, after the killing in Saudi Arabia of Yusuf Bin-Salih al-Ayiri, a propagandist and former close associate of Mr. bin Laden, and the capture of Mr. Ayiri's deputy, Abdullah al-Shabrani.
Flight records sometimes lend support to otherwise unsubstantiated reports. Omar Deghayes, a Libyan-born prisoner in the American detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, has said through his lawyer that four Libyan intelligence service officers appeared in September in an interrogation cell.
Aviation records cannot corroborate his claim that the men questioned him and threatened his life. But they do show that a Gulfstream V registered to one of the C.I.A. shell companies flew from Tripoli, Libya, to Guantánamo on Sept. 8, the day before Mr. Deghayes reported first meeting the Libyan agents. The plane stopped in Jamaica and at Dulles before returning to the Johnston County Airport, flight records show.
The Times reported that its sources included "interviews with former C.I.A. officers and pilots." It seems difficult to believe that the information conveyed in those interviews was unclassified. But if the agency made any objection to the Times's disclosure, it has not been publicly recorded. And the agency's flood of leaks to the Times continued.
The other shoe dropped on November 2, when the Washington Post revealed, in a front-page story, the destinations to which many terrorists were transported by the CIA's formerly-secret airlines--a covert network of detention centers in Europe and Thailand:
The CIA has been hiding and interrogating some of its most important al Qaeda captives at a Soviet-era compound in Eastern Europe, according to U.S. and foreign officials familiar with the arrangement.
The secret facility is part of a covert prison system set up by the CIA nearly four years ago that at various times has included sites in eight countries, including Thailand, Afghanistan and several democracies in Eastern Europe, as well as a small center at the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba, according to current and former intelligence officials and diplomats from three continents.
The Post's story caused a sensation, as the "current and former intelligence officials" who leaked the classified information to the newspaper must have expected it would. The leakers evidently included officials from the highest levels of the CIA; the Post noted that the facilities' existence and location "are known to only a handful of officials in the United States and, usually, only to the president and a few
top intelligence officers in each host country." Further, the paper said that it "is not publishing the names of the Eastern European countries involved in the covert program, at the request of senior U.S. officials." So this top-secret leak was apparently not a rogue operation. On the contrary, it appears to have been consistent with the agency's longstanding campaign against the Bush administration, which plainly has been sanctioned (if not perpetrated) by officials at the agency's highest levels.
Both the Post and the leaking officials knew that publication of the secret-prisons leak would damage American interests:
[T]he CIA has not even acknowledged the existence of its black sites. To do so, say officials familiar with the program, could open the U.S. government to legal challenges, particularly in foreign courts, and increase the risk of political condemnation at home and abroad.
The damage foreseen by CIA leakers quickly came to pass. Anti-American elements in a number of European countries demanded investigations into the use of their countries' airports and air space by civilian airlines that are known or suspected CIA fronts. In Spain, the foreign minister testified before a parliamentary committee that no laws were broken in what allegedly were CIA-linked civilian landings in Majorca. But that site will be closed to the agency in the future:
[H]e said the government would immediately step up checks on civilian aircraft that flew over or stopped in Spanish territory to make sure they were civilian flights. If necessary, the government would implement more exhaustive checks inside aircraft, he said.
Similar outcries and investigations occurred in the Canary Islands, Portugal, Norway, and Sweden.
The twin leaks to the Times and the Post have severely impaired the agency's ability to carry out renditions, transport prisoners, and maintain secret detention facilities. It is striking that top-level CIA officials are evidently willing to do serious damage to their own agency's capabilities and operations for the sake of harming the Bush administration and impeding administration policies with which they disagree.
The CIA is an agency in crisis. Perhaps, though, there is a ray of hope: the agency has referred the secret-prison leak to the Post to the Justice Department for investigation and possible criminal prosecution. It is a bitter irony that until now, the only one out of dozens of CIA-related leaks known to have resulted in a criminal investigation was the Valerie Plame disclosure, which was trivial in security terms, but unique in that it helped, rather than hurt, the Bush administration.
John Hinderaker is a contributing writer to THE DAILY STANDARD and a contributor to the blog Power Line.
The one part of the CIA the administration has control over is the top leadership. Obviously the administration dropped the ball here.
"John Hinderaker is a contributing writer to THE DAILY STANDARD and a contributor to the blog Power Line."
Columnist Confirms CIA Plot
By Cliff Kincaid | November 29, 2005
Let us translate this statement. Hoagland is saying that the CIA lied about the Wilson affair and used it to undermine the Bush Administration, and that the Bush Administration was no match for the liars at the CIA.
In a November 3 column in the Washington Post, Jim Hoagland confirmed that the Joseph Wilson affair was a CIA plot against President Bush. Writing his column in the form of a letter to the President, Hoagland wrote that "The hidden management of the criminal justice process and the news media practiced by spooks in Wilson-Rove-Libbygate is nothing short of brilliant. So you were right to fear the agency."
Think about that statement to the President—"you were right to fear the agency."
Here we have a columnist for a major paper saying that the CIA has been acting independently of the elected President of the U.S., and that Bush had reason to fear it. He said the CIA had engaged in "hidden management of the criminal justice system and the news media." In effect, he is saying that the CIA is pulling the strings behind the scenes, and that reporters following the Wilson/Plame storyline are CIA puppets. He went on to say that the CIA also "triggered the investigation" into the CIA leak about Valerie Wilson by itself leaking. That is, the CIA leaked to the press the fact that it had requested an investigation.
Hoagland also declared, "One lesson available in this story is that amateurs are no match for the CIA in disinformation campaigns. The spies are far better at operating in the shadows than you politicians will ever be. They have a license to dissemble."
Let us translate this statement. Hoagland is saying that the CIA lied about the Wilson affair and used it to undermine the Bush Administration, and that the Bush Administration was no match for the liars at the CIA.
So how does Hoagland propose to deal with a malicious intelligence agency? He began his column by saying, "Wouldn't a letter to the editor have sufficed?," as if a letter would have been sufficient to rebut Joseph Wilson's article in the New York Times disputing the Iraq-uranium link. Getting more serious further down into his column, Hoagland suggested that the administration could have taken on the CIA's poor intelligence on Iraq by citing "an independent stream of intelligence" from the British and others. He admits this would have generated "problems and counterattacks" from "the opposition leakers" but that "would have been better for you than aides taking it on themselves to plant stealthy suggestions of nepotism at the CIA."
Hoagland's column was an eye-opener. Here was a major columnist acknowledging a CIA covert operation against Bush using lies and disinformation. But rather than express outrage at this, or call for Congress to investigate a rogue intelligence agency, Hoagland's idea is for a different White House public relations strategy.
You've got to be kidding me.
In a column in the Wall Street Journal, appearing on the same day, Victoria Toensing said the Wilson affair was so sordid that the Congress had a duty to investigate. Toensing is a former chief counsel for the Senate Intelligence Committee and former deputy assistant attorney general in the Reagan administration.
Analyzing the Wilson affair and the CIA role in sparking the investigation, Toensing said that "The CIA conduct in this matter is either a brilliant covert action against the White House or inept intelligence tradecraft." The latter was a reference to the fact that Valerie Wilson could not possibly have been a true undercover CIA operative, and if it was the CIA position that she was, then the agency's methods for concealing its agents are laughable or incompetent.
Valerie's Wilson's cover was a joke. But we still lean toward the CIA covert-operation theory. And that is why a congressional investigation is needed. Do Congressional conservatives have the courage to take on the CIA?
http://www.aim.org/media_monitor_print/4191_0_2_0/
BFL
Porter Goss is doing a good job of cleaning out these traitors. The problem is that this is a true "Augean stable" in terms of job to be done.
The problem is that this is a true "Augean stable" in terms of job to be done.Yes, I'm sure the Great Traitor Clinton did a thorough job appointing as many anti-Americans, communists and Islamophiles as he possibly could in the 8 long years of his disastrous cigar-poked, and semen-stained rule.
It's more the attrition of good [patriotic] employees of the CIA during the 8 years of Clinton, who chose not to stay employed there. so just as with most union executives, the personnel who approve of leftist perspectives are much more likely to stay in the system and to reach the management levels of appointment.
There is very little farm team of conservative [patriotic] CIA folks.
Contolling the head cockroaches won't keep the 15 billion other cockroaches at bay...
The CIA, like almost all government agencies, has becomecorrupt and political from top to bottom. It would take a massive purge to get it clean.
Over the next three years, cleaning up the mess at CIA should be one of the top priorities of President Bush. These guys can't get anything right, except defending their little power structures.
It will take more than a "serious purge" I fear - IMO it will take the creation of a new agency, with hand-picked top staff and a loyal rank and file.
The CIA has become an independent foreign-policy making group, and as was said earlier, a few loyalists at the top cannot stop the spread of insidious leaking and disinformation coming from the disloyal ranks.
This is a story that needs to be told again and again until it gains recognition.
Yes it does. But of course, our old media will ignore this important story. It would certainly be nice if old Fitzy would address this aspect of the Plame Game, but alas, I do not think he will.
It's more the attrition of good [patriotic] employees of the CIA during the 8 years of Clinton, who chose not to stay employed there. so just as with most union executives, the personnel who approve of leftist perspectives are much more likely to stay in the system and to reach the management levels of appointment. There is very little farm team of conservative [patriotic] CIA folks.This is another reason for voting Republican, even if the Republicans aren't always as conservative as we would like them to be. When it comes to government agencies like the CIA, it will take a minimum of 16 years of a Republican in the WH to undo the damage of 8 years of the Clinton-Traitor.
Is there a reference to what Goss has actually done? I have seen nothing and at a certain point one has to become skeptical as to his effectiveness given the frequency and magnitude of these leaks.
It's interesting that Hoagland doesn't seem to believe that the truth is any defense.
Words fail bump
I hear cocaine was found in agent's underwear. Do you suppose Tom Sneddon will launch an investigation into he CIA?
Probably not nor do the Democrats. Prosecutor Fitzgerald needs to be brought before a congressional committee or before a Justice Department ‘tribunal’ for his part in this rouse. Is Harry Reid culpable in the CIA leaks? Hopefully, Porter Goss will not be bound by Politically Correct nonsense and will expose those who are/were complicit in the CIA’s disinformation program…recent remarks from the Senate Minority Leader would lead one to believe Reid either is culpable or has been duped.
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