"The agency is being purged on instructions from the White House. Goss was given instructions to get rid of those soft leakers and liberal Democrats. The CIA is looked on by the White House as a hotbed of liberals and people who have been obstructing the president's agenda."
- Former CIA Official, New York Newsday, 11/14/04
Agents in the CIA are being forced off the job - not for failures in pre-war or pre 9/11 intelligence, but for leaking information to the public about the truth in Iraq.
During the campaign, members of the agency attempted to persuade us that the White House was being less than candid about the situation in Iraq, by leaking a National Intelligence Estimate that the Bush Klan has had since July. The Estimate showed that the best case scenario in Iraq was chaos, the worst case was civil war.
[neato factoids below the fold]
Now, Porter Goss, the White House lap dog who refused to investigate pre-war intelligence lapses as the Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, has been instructed to clean house and remove anyone disloyal to the President. And yesterday, smelling blood in the water, the New York Times columnist David Brooks proved himself a modern day Joseph Goebbels, pining for earlier times when the "ground at Langley would be laid waste and salted, and there would be heads on spikes."
Excuse me?
As this bloodletting continues, it is important to note the following:
- THE CIA HQ IS NAMED THE GEORGE BUSH CIA BUILDING
- The CIA has been under the control of one George Bush or another for 16 out of the past 24 years.
- Saddam got his first weapons of mass destruction from George Bush Sr. - who armed Iraq in the hopes that Iran and Iraq would destroy each other (yeah, that worked out well).
- Osama bin Laden got his start-up capital and ongoing support during the 1980s from George Bush Sr.
- In one of his first briefings with President Bush Jr., in February of 2001, CIA Director George Tenet repeated the Clinton Administration's warnings that terrorism, and specifically bin Laden, were the biggest threats facing the United States.
- Bush chose to focus instead on Iraq, and intelligence that he knew Tenet had from the Iraqi National Congress and Ahmed Chalabi. Tenet warned Bush that Chalabi was a liar and criminal and could not be trusted. [New Yorker, 6/7/04]
- In the build up to the war in Iraq, Tenet and the CIA got all of their orders from George Bush and Dick Cheney. Countless times, when the CIA's estimates were equivocal on Iraq's weapons programs, agents were instructed to go back to the drawing board until their information agreed with that of Dick Cheney's Office of Special Plans (and Silly Walks).
Again, those agents ousted by Goss and Bush are NOT being punished for being bad at their jobs. Instead, the President is completing his Junta - filling the spook house with loyalists, whether they have experience or not.
The agents at in the George Bush Building were not disloyal to the President; they were attempting to preserve the Republic - using their knowledge and the press to somehow get the truth to the American people. Privately, CIA operatives say they are scared as hell of this administration - telling friends and former agents that Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld are engaged in a dangerous and ill-planned scheme of world domination, based on their personal ideology.
In this light, their actions are anything but disloyal - they are the definition of courageous and patriotic.
On Friday, CIA Deputy Director and agency #2, John McLaughlin, announced he will be stepping down. Tomorrow, Stephen R. Kappes, deputy director of clandestine services, the CIA's most powerful division, will also resign. They join a growing pool of ex-CIA agents who are now private citizens, and who know where the bodies of the Bush administration are buried.
These agents have often been silenced by threats from the White House. Worse, when they have spoken out, they have been all-but ignored by the mainstream press - NPR doesn't count as mainstream press.
Those who have connections to these ex-spies, are encouraging them to step forward and tell the truth: That Bush et al were told - well before the invasion - that there were no WMDs in Iraq; and that the administration was warned - by the CIA and the FBI - about an imminent al Qaeda attack, before 9/11.
Our job (we citizen journalists) is to look out for these whistleblower stories when they emerge, and broadcast them to the world and the media as loudly as we can. We CANNOT afford the CIA to be silent at this critical time in our history, and we CANNOT let these agents to be ignored if they speak out. Bush wants us to believe those he casts out are both incompetent and disloyal. Once again, he is lying.
"Sunshine is the best disinfectant".
[Louis Brandeis]
