I suppose nothing that the Bush Crime Family did should surprise me.
But you would think that after Watergate and the revelations about Nixon's enemies list that no one would try to use official resources to try to dig up damaging personal information about a critic.
But a story on the NY Times website tonight quotes a former CIA official saying that's exactly what was ordered with regard to Professor Juan Cole, whose Informed Comment website has been an invaluable source of insight and analysis on Iraq and other Middle Eastern topics.
Glenn L. Carle, a former Central Intelligence Agency officer who was a top counterterrorism official during the administration of President George W. Bush, said the White House at least twice asked intelligence officials to gather sensitive information on Juan Cole, a University of Michigan professor who writes an influential blog that criticized the war.
In an interview, Mr. Carle said his supervisor at the National Intelligence Council told him in 2005 that White House officials wanted “to get” Professor Cole, and made clear that he wanted Mr. Carle to collect information about him, an effort Mr. Carle rebuffed. Months later, Mr. Carle said, he confronted a C.I.A. official after learning of another attempt to collect information about Professor Cole. Mr. Carle said he contended at the time that such actions would have been unlawful.
This absolutely calls for an investigation since statutes are rather clear that trying to dig up dirt on a political enemy is prohibited.
The story also indicates that this was not an instance of Carle trying to sell his book.
Mr. Carle, who retired in 2007, has not previously disclosed his allegations. He did so only after he was approached by The New York Times, which learned of the episode elsewhere. While Mr. Carle, 54, has written a book to be published next month about his role in the interrogation of a terrorism suspect, it does not include his allegations about the White House’s requests concerning the Michigan professor.
“I couldn’t believe this was happening,” Mr. Carle said. “People were accepting it, like you had to be part of the team.”
UPDATE: Here is Cole's post about the story from his blog today:
It seems to me clear that the Bush White House was upset by my blogging of the Iraq War, in which I was using Arabic and other primary sources, and which contradicted the propaganda efforts of the administration attempting to make the enterprise look like a wild shining success.
Carle’s revelations come as a visceral shock. You had thought that with all the shennanigans of the CIA against anti-Vietnam war protesters and then Nixon’s use of the agency against critics like Daniel Ellsberg, that the Company and successive White Houses would have learned that the agency had no business spying on American citizens.