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.”
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?”
Hold on to your hat. The plot is about to thicken.
Behind the scenes, the single most important reason for the Valerie Plame/Joe Wilson farce is that CIA Director Porter Goss has finally started to clean house at Langley. Goss's long-overdue shake-up is clearly backed by the White House, the top levels of the Pentagon and State Department, and the new National Director of Intelligence, John Negroponte.
Judging by Director Goss's remarks at his Senate confirmation hearings, those whose jobs are most in danger include the CIA "experts" in WMD proliferation – Valerie Plame's outfit – who completely failed to anticipate the Indian and Pakistani nukes, and just couldn't figure out what was going on with Iraqi WMDs. Valerie Plame's bosses are facing the axe for decades of failures.
And it's about time, because Iran is within sight of its first nukes. You don't suppose that has anything to do with the Plame/Wilson publicity stunt, do you?
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 media hype about 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.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,215397,00.html
WALLACE: ... but the question is, why didn't you do more, connect the dots and put them out of business?
CLINTON: OK, let's talk about it. Now, I will answer all those things on the merits, but first I want to talk about the context in which this arises.
I'm being asked this on the FOX network. ABC just had a right- wing conservative run in their little "Pathway to 9/11," falsely claiming it was based on the 9/11 Commission report, with three things asserted against me directly contradicted by the 9/11 Commission report.
And I think it's very interesting that all the conservative Republicans, who now say I didn't do enough, claimed that I was too obsessed with bin Laden. All of President Bush's *neo-cons* thought I was too obsessed with bin Laden. They had no meetings on bin Laden for nine months after I left office. All the right-wingers who now say I didn't do enough said I did too much — same people.
They were all trying to get me to withdraw from Somalia in 1993 the next day after we were involved in "Black Hawk down," and I refused to do it and stayed six months and had an orderly transfer to the United Nations.
OK, now let's look at all the criticisms: Black Hawk down, Somalia. There is not a living soul in the world who thought that Usama bin Laden had anything to do with Black Hawk down or was paying any attention to it or even knew Al Qaeda was a growing concern in October of '93.
I do not remember the Clintons ever blaming the neocons during his administration, and certainly nothing was mentioned about them during Clintons urging US to get ready to war with Saddam, sending out the FEAR of Saddam's sack of sugar comparison of anthrax by his front people (Cohen and Albright).