Porter Goss Named to Ethics Panel? Unbelievable

This is a terrible decision:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) on Thursday announced joint appointments to a landmark ethics review board that for the first time will allow private citizens to review allegations against members.

Still, four out of six members of the board for the newly created Office of Congressional Ethics (OCE) will be former members of Congress, including former CIA Director Porter Goss (R-Fla.), who will serve as co-chairman.

It must mean that no one remembers the extremely unethical behavior of Mr. Goss, nor his association with Kyle Foggo, Brent Wilkes, and all of those hookers. What's next? Is Duke Cunningham going to be let out of prison so he can come back and be the new Inspector General for the Department of Defense? What an abysmal choice. A disgrace on a par with picking the fox to count the chickens each night inside of the henhouse with the lights off.

Speaker Pelosi, you should have fought this and you should be ashamed to have your name associated with putting such a disgraceful man on an ethics review board. Goss has no ability to judge ethics or advise any government agency on how to conduct itself.

--WS

Dusty Can't Catch a Break

This is more of an update on the ongoing saga of bribery and hookers that swept Randy "Duke" Cunningham out of power and ensnared officials from the CIA in a sordid case of indiscretion and corruption, all of it linked to Brent Wilkes.Next time, perhaps these guys should call Paul Wolfowitz and ask him how it went for him when he lined up a great job for his gal pal:

[A] new indictment against Kyle "Dusty" Foggo, a former No. 3 official at the spy agency and a onetime senior CIA ethics officer, alleges that he pressured CIA managers into hiring the woman after she was turned down for a position in the CIA's general counsel office. He also allegedly made false statements about her qualifications, the indictment states.

Foggo, the CIA's executive director from 2004 to 2006, specifically told agency officials he had a "special interest" in seeing the woman hired, and he later berated them when they initially rejected her application. "When the ExDir has a special interest, you had better take notice," Foggo told the general counsel's staff, according to an indictment filed late Tuesday by the U.S. attorney's office in Alexandria.

Federal prosecutors say Foggo's alleged intervention on behalf of the woman was but one of a series of successful efforts by him to manipulate the intelligence agency, many of which went undetected for a time by its spies. Foggo managed to win jobs, money and other favors for friends and business partners while concealing the nature of his relationships from the agency, Justice Department officials allege in court documents.

Foggo, hired to the No. 3 position by then-CIA Director Porter Goss, faces charges of fraud, conspiracy and conflict of interest stemming mostly from alleged favors he performed for California businessman Brent R. Wilkes, a childhood friend and prominent GOP fundraiser.

You have to wonder if Foggo's girlfriend knew about the hookers:

In addition, federal law enforcement sources said the probe continues into "outstanding issues" in the Cunningham bribery case and that Foggo is part of those issues.

After reports surfaced last week alleging Wilkes provided Cunningham with limousines and prostitutes at two Washington hotels, Foggo said he had attended poker parties thrown by Wilkes there.

In a statement issued by the CIA, Foggo said he never saw anything "untoward" at the games, and he said any allegation to the contrary would be "false, outrageous and irresponsible."

"If he attended occasional card games with friends over the years, Mr. Foggo insists they were that and nothing more," the spokeswoman said.

The FBI is investigating allegations that Wilkes contracted with a Virginia company, Shirlington Limousine and Transportation Inc., to procure prostitutes for Cunningham and deliver them to the hotels.

Through his attorneys, Chris Baker, CEO of the company, denied wrongdoing.

Shirlington holds a $21.2 million contract to provide shuttle buses and other transportation for the Department of Homeland Security. Baker has a criminal record that includes two felony convictions and a number of misdemeanors.

And now you know why the "DC Madam" is dead. But you already knew that all of these things were connected, right?

The leak-wars have begun

Let the bloodletting commence.

Last week, some of the wind went out of the sails of the neocon chickenhawks who have been chomping at the bit for a war with Iran. By weeks end, we learned that the CIA had destroyed tapes that probably showed CIA agents committing war crimes.

So you know what that means...time to leak something damning about Democrats. Whadya got? Anything?

Today, on page A01 of the Washington Post, the headline screams Hill Briefed on Waterboarding in 2002 and we learn that in September of 2002, four members of Congress met clandestinely to receive a "virtual tour" of the program being developed by the CIA to extract information from terrorism suspects captured by the U.S., including the "harsh techniques" that had been devised to punish all captives, be they guilty or innocent make prisoners talk. The Post article makes it clear in the first few words that Nancy Pelosi was included in that group. You have to read on a bit (okay, five paragraphs) to find the names of thethen-majority Republicans who were briefed (Porter Goss, Pat Roberts).

Among the techniques described, said two officials present, was waterboarding, a practice that years later would be condemned as torture by Democrats and some Republicans on Capitol Hill. But on that day, no objections were raised. Instead, at least two lawmakers in the room asked the CIA to push harder, two U.S. officials said. (Wanna bet that Roberts and Goss were the ones asking that question? The article quite conveniently doesn't say.)

"The briefer was specifically asked if the methods were tough enough," said a U.S. official who witnessed the exchange.

[Snip]

"Among those being briefed, there was a pretty full understanding of what the CIA was doing," said Goss, who chaired the House intelligence committee from 1997 to 2004 and then served as CIA director from 2004 to 2006. "And the reaction in the room was not just approval, but encouragement."

That front-page article is the Wurlitzer at it's smarmy best - without saying it outright, it paints Democrats as hypocrites for protesting about waterboarding now. "Why wasn't a mighty howl set up then?" is the implication.

Well, being in possession of critical thinking skills, I do believe that I can take a stab at sorting through this unholy mess, without giving anyone any passes.

First off, anyone in a position to see that information is bound by stringent secrecy rules. They sign an additional oath beyond their oath of office. Just because someone has a security clearance does not mean that anyone who has one can know anything. It is always based on "need to know." Anyone poking around and asking questions that they have no demonstrable "need to know" will find themselves neck-deep in a pile of trouble in short order. When only four people in the congress are briefed on something, and two have expressed enthusiasm for the program, it is not difficult to determine who is leaking, and bring some heavy-duty charges against them. And rightly so.

And now - lets look at this pragmatically. Do you remember September 2002? I do. For a solid year, the administration had whipped up the frenzy and fear and hatred, and kept picking at the scab of grief over the loss of life in the largest, most heinous act of mass murder ever perpetrated.

What, exactly would you have had the Democrats do?

Acquiesce just enough to keep their seats?

Or stand on principle?

Utilitarianism, or Deontology?

Mill, or Kant?

Again, I'm not giving any passes, I'm just trying on their shoes.

Would you like to let your imagination off the leash and think about where we might (probably would) have gone in 2002 / 2004 if the Congressional Democrats in congress hadn't all triangulated and acquiesced at least a little bit and hung on to their seats so we could take a majority in 2006?

Sometimes, what gets referred to as triangulation, might be better described as "giving the fucker enough rope to hang himself."

I'm pissed off at Pelosi and hope her tenure as Speaker comes to a quick end. She has been a bitter disappointment, and the job does not suit her. But if the choice is Pelosi or Hastert, hell gimme Nancy. In fact, I'll take two, they're small.

That said - I still think we should at least think about stepping back, closing our eyes and taking a deep breath then looking at the big picture.

And when I do that, I see a year of "he said/she said" fingerpointing as everyone tries to cover their political asses.

Stock up on Maalox now.

It's enough to piss off Pollyanna herself!

On the day that House and Senate negotiators reached agreement on legislation that will codify in law the prohibition of waterboarding and other harsh interrogation torture methods when interrogating suspected terrorists; CIA director Michael Hayden came clean and admitted that the CIA had destroyed video evidence of "harsh interrogation techniques" employed in the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah (yet another top lieutenant of ObL - but aren't they all?) and another unnamed suspected high-ranking al Qa'eda member. (Zubaydah is one of three suspects who has been identified as having been waterboarded. Waterboarding, in case you have been under a rock for the last two years, is not just a "dunk in the water" as that bastard Cheney so glibly put it. It is controlled drowning.)

From the Washington Post:

All the tapes were destroyed in November 2005 on the order of Jose A. Rodriguez Jr., then the CIA's director of clandestine operations, officials said. The destruction came after the Justice Department had told a federal judge in the case of al-Qaeda operative Zacarias Moussaoui that the CIA did not possess videotapes of a specific set of interrogations sought by his attorneys. A CIA spokesman said yesterday that the request would not have covered the destroyed tapes.

The tapes also were not provided to the Sept. 11 commission, the independent panel that investigated the 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, which demanded a wide array of material and relied heavily on classified interrogation transcripts in piecing together its narrative of events.

The legislation hammered out on Thursday will, in essence, make the Army Field Manual the last word on acceptable interrogation methods.

It also sets up a battle-royal between congress and the candy-assed, draft-dodgin' coward, Chimpy McWarPorn.

Of course, he is threatening to bravely veto the bill.

The spin coming off the decision to destroy the tapes is almost enough to create it's own gravitational field. The spooks doing the torturing are identifiable, and would be criminally liable. Period.

The spin is that the tapes present a security risk. "Beyond their lack of intelligence value -- as the interrogation sessions had already been exhaustively detailed in written channels -- and the absence of any legal or internal reason to keep them, the tapes posed a security risk," Hayden said. "Were they ever to leak, they would permit identification of your CIA colleagues who had served in the program, exposing them to and their families to retaliation from al-Qaeda and it sympathizers."

This, children, is what is known in the common vernacular as a bullshit story.

The CIA is in the business of keeping secrets, and of protecting their employees and the families of their employees (well, unless you are Valerie Plame Wilson, then you are Fair Game, but I digress.) They could most certainly secure a couple of videos. What they were scared of was the long arm of the law as the earth erodes beneath the feet of the feckless, and the fifth horseman (Accountability) appeared on the horizon. The tapes were destroyed because they likely contained evidence that could land former GOP congressman and CIA chief Porter Goss in the slammer, and Donald Rumsfeld might be in the next cell.

I am left with but one thought as I mark off another day of life under the inept, corrupt and floundering Bush regime...thank god these bastards are incompetent to their very core. You only think we are screwed now - If they had the savvy to pull off a two-car parade, then we would really know from screwed.