The Discerning Texan

We've previously noted the new book Sabotage by Rowan Scarborough. Scarborough's book explores the CIA's efforts to undermine the Bush administration. It is a subject that we have written about here frequently over the past several years. John explored the subject in the Standard column "Leaking at all costs," as I did in "Three years of the Condor."

Scarborough states his thesis clearly in the introduction of the book, begining on page 1 with his discussion of a May 2006 letter by Rep. Pete Hoekstra to President Bush. In the letter Hoekstra states that "a strong and well-positioned group within the agency undermined the administration and its policies." Scarborough illustrates his thesis with numerous episodes involving CIA officers. Many of these episodes have previously been reported, such as the disclosure of the Washington Post's CIA secret prisons that John discusses in his Standard column. Scarborough notes that fired CIA employee Mary McCarthy was apparently a key source for that story.

Scarborough also discusses the opposition of former CIA Near East and South Asia national intelligence officer Paul Pillar to Bush administration foreign policy. Scarborough does not discuss the undisputed September 2004 incident reported by Robert Novak involving Pillar's remarks at a private dinner in California. Steve Hayes summarized the incident for the Standard:

Pillar's "management team" at the CIA, where he was employed as the national intelligence officer on the Near East/South Asia desk, approved [Pillar's] appearance. According to Novak, the ground rules for the speech were based on the "Lindley Rule," which holds that the speaker, his audience and the event are not to be disclosed, "but the substance of what he said can be reported." That substance, apparently, was a harsh assessment of the Bush administration's handling of Iraq.

Think about that: A senior, unelected CIA official--Paul Pillar--was given agency approval to anonymously attack Bush administration policies less than two months before the November 2, 2004, presidential election. That Pillar was among the most strident of these frequent critics--usually in off-the-record speeches to gatherings of foreign policy experts and business leaders--was well known to his colleagues in the intelligence community and to Bush administration policymakers. His was not an isolated case; CIA officials routinely trashed Bush administration policy decisions, often with official approval, in the months leading up to the Iraq War and again before the election. Pillar, who had complained to a CIA spokesman that someone had violated the ground rules by providing his name to Novak, simply got caught.

Labels: CIA Sabotage, Democrat Sabotage, Intelligence War against Bush Admin, The Left

Labels: CIA Sabotage, Intelligence War against Bush Admin, Plame

For years, Rowan Scarborough has distinguished himself through his coverage of military affairs, first for the Washington Times and now for the Examiner. This week, the Examiner is publishing excerpts from Scarborough's new book Sabotage, which tells the story of the CIA's war against President Bush.

In the first installment, Scarborough describes the CIA's war with the Defense Department, which began shortly after 9/11 when DoD (through veteran analyst Michael Maloof) asked the CIA to provide intelligence reports about al Qaeda's links to other terrorist organizations and sponsors of terrorism. According to Scarborough, the CIA flatly refused to provide this material.

Only after Paul Wolfowitz intervened did the CIA disgorge its reports. When DoD used them to produce a 150-slide briefing on contacts among al Qaeda, Iraq and Iran, the CIA (in Scarborough's telling) went ballistic. Soon, Democratic lawmakers like Carl Levin began charging that Douglas Feith (Defense Secretary Rumsfeld's top civilian advisor) had set up an illegal organization. According to Scarborough, "Levin, using the friendly Washington Post and New York Times, launched a campaign against a 'rogue' intelligence cell inside the Defense Department."

Labels: CIA Sabotage, Intelligence War against Bush Admin

Labels: CIA Sabotage, Intelligence War against Bush Admin, Libby, Media Bias, Patrick Fitzgerald, Plame, Travesty of Justice

Labels: CIA Sabotage, Intelligence War against Bush Admin, Libby, Media Bias, Plame, Travesty of Justice

Labels: CIA Sabotage, Intelligence War against Bush Admin, Libby, Media Bias, Plame, Travesty of Justice

Labels: CIA Sabotage, Intelligence War against Bush Admin, Libby, Media Bias, Media War

Labels: CIA Sabotage, Intelligence War against Bush Admin, Iran, Media Bias, Media War, Nuclear

Labels: CIA Sabotage, Intelligence War against Bush Admin, Iran

Labels: CIA Sabotage, Intelligence War against Bush Admin, Iran, Media Bias, Media War

Labels: CIA Sabotage, Intelligence, Intelligence War against Bush Admin

Labels: CIA Sabotage, Democrat Sabotage, Intelligence War against Bush Admin, Plame

Scooter Libby is a convicted perjurer because the United States Department of Justice grossly abused its power and because politics short-circuited all the safeguards that are supposed to prevent such abuses. This is one of the most appalling perversions of a civilized judicial system since France sent Alfred Dreyfus to Devil's Island because the ruling elite didn't like Jews.

If the appellate and executive review processes fail as badly as the investigative and trial processes did in Libby's case, Libby will go to a federal penitentiary because Democrats don't like Republicans. There is enough shame in this outcome to go around.

Patrick Fitzgerald is a disgrace both to the legal profession and to the human race. His partisan allies, such as Senator Chuck Schumer and certain nameless bureaucrats at the CIA, are beneath contempt. The jury was unfit for its task, because it was apparently both prejudiced and intellectually incapable of noticing that the prosecution had no case. The trial judge lacked either the wit to see a gross miscarriage of justice unfolding before his eyes or the courage to stop it. But ultimate responsibility for Fitzgerald's outrageous misconduct lies with his boss.

Labels: CIA Sabotage, Intelligence War against Bush Admin, Libby, Plame

Labels: CIA Sabotage, Intelligence War against Bush Admin, Plame

Labels: CIA Sabotage, Intelligence War against Bush Admin, Iran

Labels: CIA Sabotage, Intelligence War against Bush Admin, Judicial, Libby, Plame

Labels: CIA Sabotage, Intelligence War against Bush Admin, Judicial, Libby

Labels: Bush Administration, CIA Sabotage, Democrat Sabotage, Judicial, Libby, Media Bias, Media War

Labels: Bush Administration, CIA Sabotage, Libby, Media Bias

Bob Baer , a longtime CIA case officer in the Middle East, had a similar experience. He had lost close friends in the bombing of the American Embassy in Beirut in the early eighties, and every time he tried to find out who had killed them, he ran into a stone wall. He was constantly told that we just did not know. But he persisted, just as Scott Johnson did, and he too arrived at the truth: the bombing of the Embassy had been an act of war by the Iranian regime, using Palestinian terrorists to carry out the actual suicide mission. He too found that “we” had known about it all along, but the truth had been suppressed for two decades.

Why? Because those who controlled the information didn’t want the top policy maker—Ronald Reagan—to know it, since they “knew” he would not let it pass, and they didn’t want trouble with Iran.

I, too, had a similar experience. I helped organize meetings in Rome in December, 2001, with Pentagon Iran experts and knowledgeable Iranians. They provided information about Iranian killers in Afghanistan, whose mission was to kill American soldiers. The information was accurate, and the would-be killers did not accomplish their mission (I hope they were killed, but I am not privy to that information). Shortly thereafter, Secretary of State Powell and his deputy, Richard Armitage, with the agreement of Director of Central Intelligence Tenet, demanded that all such contacts be terminated. Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld gave orders that no Pentagon employee speak to “Iranians” (which prompted one Iranian-American official to ask if conversations with parents were included in the order).

Why? Because they did not want trouble with Iran, and they “knew” that if President Bush had that information, he would not let it pass.

We have now had further examples of this sort of lie. We now know that top American officials have known all along that Iran has been waging war on us in Iraq, but this information has been suppressed.

Why? Because they, too did not want trouble with Iran. Military leaders did not want a two-front war (even though it should have been obvious, even before the onset of Operation Iraqi Freedom, that we were engaged in a regional war, whatever our wishes were), and the spooks and diplomats convinced themselves that we could cut a deal with the mullahs.

Lots of lying, as you see, but the biggest lie of all is the lie the liars told themselves: the monstrous lie that we can arrive at peace with our enemies without first defeating them.

I am told that we have discovered truly explosive information about the Iranian role in Iraq in the recent raids in Baghdad and Irbil, the raids that led to the arrest of high officers in the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps. I believe we are all entitled to that information. To be sure, some of it may be “actionable intelligence,” which must be kept secret—even from the New York Times—until we have acted on it. But the American people are entitled to know the big picture, which is the one some of us have been painting for many years: Iran is waging war on us, killing our soldiers, slaughtering Iraqis, enabling Hizbollah in Lebanon, empowering Hamas and Islamic Jihad in their war against Israel.

The American people cannot properly judge our performance in this war unless they know its true dimensions. The president must provide us with that basic truth.

Labels: CIA Sabotage, Intelligence, Intelligence War against Bush Admin, President Bush, State Department Sabotage, US Politics