The Sooner the Hayden Era Ends, the Better

Of course, the man who presided over the debacle of 9/11, the fallout over waterboarding, and the explosion of private contractors probably isn't the right guy for the job--and the sooner the Michael Hayden era ends, the better. He should never again be put in charge of any agency or any aspect of US intelligence.

Soon after accepting the post of CIA director two years ago, Michael V. Hayden set an unusual goal for his scandal-beset agency: virtual invisibility.

"CIA needs to get out of the news as source or subject," he said in an internal memo to his staff in 2006.

Two years later, that goal is far from met, as Hayden has tacitly acknowledged. In a retirement ceremony last month marking the end of his military career, the Air Force general stressed the need for the agency to "stay in the shadows" while ignoring what he called the "sometimes shrill and uninformed voices of criticism."

The comment reflected the difficulties that Hayden's CIA faces in trying to turn the corner on six years of controversy at the same time that it attempts sweeping internal changes. While the agency's leadership has sought a return to normal and has launched initiatives intended to improve ties with lawmakers and foreign allies, it finds itself in the cross hairs of a Congress determined to force a reckoning over the agency's past intelligence failures and its conduct in the fight against terrorism.

The quickest way for CIA to get out of the newspapers is for CIA to stop breaking the law, stop letting contractors do their dirty work, and for Hayden and his management style to depart. The next President needs to appoint someone who will reduce the contractor workforce, emphasize professionalism over politics, and get us back into the business of Human Intelligence (HUMINT) and get us out of the business of torturing people.

--WS

From the department of fixed facts

This is a whistleblower whose story needs a good look-see, since we know that what he is charging has already been perpetrated against us to trump up one war. A former CIA operative is coming in from the cold and, through an attorney, since he is forbidden from revealing his identity by the agency. (Cheney will decide when to release his name and tell Bob Novak.)

filed a motion in federal court late Friday asking the government to declassify legal documents describing what he says was a deliberate suppression of findings on Iran that were contrary to agency views at the time.

The former operative alleged in a 2004 lawsuit that the CIA fired him after he repeatedly clashed with senior managers over his attempts to file reports that challenged the conventional wisdom about weapons of mass destruction in the Middle East. Key details of his claim have not been made public because they describe events the CIA deems secret.

You have no idea how deeply it pains me, and on what level, that we live in an era not of rogue agents, but a rogue agency.


Roy Krieger, the attorney representing the former undercover operative, asserts that the NIE on Iran's nuclear capabilities that was released last winter undermined the agency's case for censoring his lawsuit. "On five occasions he was ordered to either falsify his reporting on WMD in the Near East, or not to file his reports at all," Krieger said in an interview.

The former officer charges in court filings and statements through his attorney, that his 22 year career was destroyed when he raised questions about the nuclear programs of Iraq and Iran. The officer in question is a native of the Middle East, fluent in both Farsi and Arabic, and had engaged in undercover work in the Persian Gulf region, where he successfully recruited an informant with access to sensitive information about Iran's nuclear program.

The informant provided secret evidence that Tehran had halted its research into designing and building a nuclear weapon. Yet, when the operative sought to file reports on the findings, his attempts were "thwarted by CIA employees," according to court papers. Later he was told to "remove himself from any further handling" of the informant, the documents say.

In the months after the conflict, the operative became the target of two internal investigations, one of them alleging an improper sexual relationship with a female informant, and the other alleging financial improprieties. Krieger said his client cooperated with investigators in both cases and the allegations of wrongdoing were never substantiated. Krieger contends in court documents that the investigations were a "pretext to discredit."

Krieger maintains that his client is being further punished by the agency's decision prohibiting him from fully regaining his identity. "He is not even allowed to attend court hearings about his own case," Krieger said.

The agency issued the standard denials, that they don't fix facts, blah blah blah blah blah...and there was a time I would have taken their word for it. But that time is long past.

In fact, it is high time that the Intelligence committees of both chambers get together behind closed doors in a joint session with this fellow and have a little chat, under oath.

It's just been one giant dick-measuring contest, from the very first day

The Senate Intelligence Committee today released the final two sections of the Phase II report on prewar intelligence, and I just want to say...I feel physically ill and personally betrayed.

What emerges is a picture of different areas of the government, all ultimately charged with a sacred duty to the American people, abdicating that responsibility. The Rumsfeld Pentagon was a petty, vindictive place and comes under harsh scrutiny in the report.

Additionally, the Committee issued a report on the Intelligence Activities Relating to Iraq conducted by the Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group and the Office of Special Plans within the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy. The report found that the clandestine meetings between Pentagon officials and Iranians in Rome and Paris were inappropriate and mishandled from beginning to end. Deputy National Security Advisor Steve Hadley and Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz failed to keep the Intelligence Community and the State Department appropriately informed about the meetings. The involvement of Manucher Ghobanifer and Michael Ledeen in the meetings was inappropriate. Potentially important information collected during the meetings was withheld from intelligence agencies by Pentagon officials. Finally, senior Defense Department officials cut short internal investigations of the meetings and failed to implement the recommendations of their own counterintelligence experts.

In plain English: The Pentagon withheld intelligence from the CIA and DIA, because to Rummy it was all just one big pissing contest and he was going to get his war.

It is all so wrong on so many levels. I can not believe that we haven't arrested and tried some of these war criminals. The one thing that they all, every last one, have in common is an almost sociopathic depraved indifference to others.

The Iraqis who would suffer and die, the American soldiers who would be lost or broken, none of them crossed the minds of any of these fuckers.

And by the way - We have known this all along. The Senate report merely puts in the public record what a hundred intel-savvy left-leaning blogs - this one included - have been saying all along.

We have known all along.

And so did Pat Roberts. He was in a position to do something all along, when he was the Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, but he was blinded by ideology and he did nothing. He withheld the information, at great harm to national security. Where I come from, we call that obstruction, and we have laws against it.

Jim Slattery has a chance of taking Roberts Senate seat. To do that, he needs to seize on this issue and beat Roberts' bald, addled pate bloody with it. Roberts' tenure as committee chairman is deplorable and it has the potential to sink him if Slattery will play hardball with the old prick. I spent a lot of my adult life among Kansans. Some of my best friends are Kansans (honest!) And they are pissed at Roberts right now. They will vote for Slattery if he gives them a reason.

Give them a reason, Jim. Please.

The President Throws US Intel Agencies Under the Bus

[updated some of my rambling and my less-than-clear indignation]
Starting off another incredible week of mind-bogglingly frightening developments and insane incidents, here is what amounts to a stunning revelation, one the media seems to have paid absolutely no heed as they stampede themselves through another round of meaningless primary races and celebrity news:

Bothersome Intel on Iran
By Michael Hirsh | NEWSWEEK
Jan 21, 2008 Issue

In public, President Bush has been careful to reassure Israel and other allies that he still sees Iran as a threat, while not disavowing his administration's recent National Intelligence Estimate. That NIE, made public Dec. 3, embarrassed the administration by concluding that Tehran had halted its weapons program in 2003, which seemed to undermine years of bellicose rhetoric from Bush and other senior officials about Iran's nuclear ambitions.

But in private conversations with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert last week, the president all but disowned the document, said a senior administration official who accompanied Bush on his six-nation trip to the Mideast.

"He told the Israelis that he can't control what the intelligence community says, but that [the NIE's] conclusions don't reflect his own views" about Iran's nuclear-weapons program, said the official, who would discuss intelligence matters only on the condition of anonymity.

Yes--the President of the United States has "his own views" and those views are NOT informed by the work of the intelligence services that work for this country. That's "work for this country" and "not specifically to reinforce his policy choices and preferences."

Yeah, yeah--Cheney runs things. Cheney has his fingerprints all over this statement and this leak. We get that.

Why is this not page 1, and on every network, and screaming at you from all sides? How is it that the President of the United States of America can go to a foreign country and tell the leader of that country that the collective judgement and estimate of the massive intelligence community means nothing to him? When is he going to come out and tell the American people that the 43.5 billion dollars spent in 2007 by this country to defend itself might as well have been pissed away down the drain?

What are we paying for? Why bother to even have an intelligence community? He's just going to put on his Carnac hat and make the wrong guesses and not get any laughs, right?



How would you like to be a career intelligence professional, and know that your President went overseas and sat down with some other leader and, in a chummy sort of way, basically said that the work you've done to protect America is a joke and a fraud and that he knows more than you do?

Here are the reasons why this matters--the President hasn't fired the DNI or the head of any of the agencies that matter. He hasn't fired any of the people who aren't telling him what he wants to hear. But he holds the work of those people in obvious low regard. Why else would they "leak" that Bush told Olmert that he has his own ideas about what Iran is doing to develop nuclear weapons? Every one of these people is an appointee of his own choice. He nominated these people. He could fire all of them in one fell swoop. He is, ultimately, responsible for everything they oversee. And what they now know is this--he doesn't care what the people who work for them have to say about a critical issue. He'll just dismiss it and do whatever the hell he wants.

That's NOT a great way to go about things in a Democracy. Just wanted to mention that.

What country is this? Where do we live? What nation is this, again? I simply have no idea anymore.

The incredible hubris of a man who thinks he knows more than the tens of thousands of people who have spent their lives defending this country is astonishing. Isn't there someone close to him that can remind him that he has no viable track record for getting anything right? Someone to speak truth to power? Someone who can show him, at least in theory, "a DVD of what is going on in New Orleans", only tailored to show him why the US intel community downgraded the threat from Iran?

Why didn't someone, decades ago, basically sit down and explain to this man that his inability to get anything right means he doesn't get to dismiss the opinions, findings and research of tens of thousands of people who have a better track record than he does? Not a great track record, but significantly better. At least they have subjected themselves to criticism, review, and reorganization.

Apparently, the man who got it wrong about virtually everything knows more than the people who are there to figure these things out. So why bother funding them next year? We might as well spend the money erecting a monument to the fabulous insight and intellect of a President who will leave office at record low approval ratings, record high number of scandals and disasters yet to be sorted out, and with more hubris than any mad dictator who has ever lived. I mean, really. Does reality figure into any of this anymore?

So this is the way we start the week--with this leaked tidbit that throws our intelligence agencies under a bus. And that's what it really was--a leak. That leak places this country in serious jeopardy.

Calling All Wingnuts

Just a random thought...

IF the National Intelligence Estimate done on Iran, which basically says that they abandoned their nuclear weapons program in 2003 and don't pose the kind of threat that has been talked about repeatedly by the Bush Administration, is flawed and "political" and "wrong"

THEN it stands to reason...

We should NOT allow the intelligence agencies to have access to United States telecommunications traffic, NOR CAN WE trust that the warrantless wiretaps that they have done have done anything to protect America since 9/11

AND THAT

they are incompetent, can't do their jobs, can't protect American citizens from harm and we should therefore expect that the Congress should oversee their efforts, refuse to fund them if they cannot get their act together, and change their fundamental makeup.

And, ALSO, we should expect that, in the wake of this NIE, that DNI McConnell, DCI Hayden, and all the heads of the various intelligence agencies should thus resign immediately so that NEW BLOOD can be brought into these organizations in order to

PROTECT AMERICA.

Am I missing something, or is there a disconnect? The people who need to trample our privacy rights sure fucked up when they failed to reinforce a prejudice about Iran, didn't they?

You knew this already...

...unless you have been in total isolation for the last five years; but now it’s official, because the Washington Post says so.

There was no connection between the regime of Saddam Hussein and the terrorist network al Qaeda. The report by Inspector General Thomas Gimble was released the same day that vice-president Dick Cheney appeared on the Rush Limbaugh’s right-wing talk radio show reiterating the repeatedly-debunked false claim of a connection yet again. He still insists that Saddam Hussein and Zarqawi were bedfellows, despite all evidence to the contrary.

"This is al-Qaeda operating in Iraq," Cheney told Limbaugh's listeners about Zarqawi, who he said had "led the charge for Iraq." Cheney cited the alleged history to illustrate his argument that withdrawing U.S. forces from Iraq would "play right into the hands of al-Qaeda."

Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.), who requested the report's declassification, said in a written statement that the complete text demonstrates more fully why the inspector general concluded that a key Pentagon office -- run by then-Undersecretary of Defense Douglas J. Feith -- had inappropriately written intelligence assessments before the March 2003 invasion alleging connections between al-Qaeda and Iraq that the U.S. intelligence consensus disputed. (emphasis added)

In September of 2002, Feith’s office in the Pentagon produced a piece of fiction that asserted the relationship between al Qaeda and the Hussein regime was both “mature” and “symbiotic” distinguished by common interests and cooperation in multiple areas, including financing, logistics and training.

The briefing, a copy of which was declassified and released yesterday by Levin, goes so far as to state that "Fragmentary reporting points to possible Iraqi involvement not only in 9/11 but also in previous al Qaida attacks." That idea was dismissed in 2004 by a presidential commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks, noting that "no credible evidence" existed to support it.

When a senior intelligence analyst working for the government's counterterrorism task force obtained an early account of the conclusions by Feith's office -- titled "Iraq and al-Qaida: Making the Case" -- the analyst prepared a detailed rebuttal calling it of "no intelligence value" and taking issue with 15 of 26 key conclusions, the report states. The analyst's rebuttal was shared with intelligence officers on the Joint Chiefs of Staff, but evidently not with others.

Zarqawi was a terrorist, he did have a couple of loose associations with al Qaeda, and he did take refuge in Iraq; but Saddam Hussein pursued him and attempted to arrest him, finding him a threat to Iraqi interests. Zarqawi only completely allied himself with the terrorist network al Qaeda in early 2004, fully nine months after the invasion and overthrow of Saddam Hussein.