Plame and the Police State
Leaving speculation on the Fizgerald indictments aside, it's useful to remember just had badly the White House has screwed up the CIA, well prior to the outing of Valerie Plame. The WaPo has an article tracing the problems in the Tenet to Goss transition. It's an odd piece focusing on Goss that fails to offer any analysis on the causes of the dissent in the ranks- it merely offers a sort of ho-hum laundry list of occurences that caused the virtual destruction of a formerly functioning intelligence agency .
It takes them a page and a half to even mention John "Death Squad" Negroponte, and then only in passing so let me give you my layman's view. Long standing Director Tenet had a pretty good agency going, the trouble is they didn't deliver the goods when it came to "fixing" the intelligence around the WMDs and other justifications for invading Iraq. This made the WHIGs and our Misleader in Chief rather unhappy. The agency insisted on delivering real world intelligence instead of kool-ade laced propaganda to facilitate the long planned invasion. Bush wanted to capitalize on 9/11 and they weren't coooperating. The administration and it's lackeys began to complain about the agency's performance.
As the WMD story began to publicly unravel, the Bush loyalists in the GOP reversed direction and blamed the failure on the agents who caved under White House pressure and delivered the "fixed" intel. Ironically Goss was one of them. When Tenet was made the sacrificial goat, and the agency's status was downgraded to an mere underling of Negroponte, Goss stepped in with his WHIG team and forced a showdown. Many of the best and brightest (and one assumes the most honest) senior officers have since left.
What we are left is an agency whose foreign assets have been compromised to the point of ineffectiveness. This is why we haven't been able to stop or even infiltrate Al Qaeda in the last four years. The director no longer even has access to the president directly. All concerns must be vetted through the chief thug Negroponte.
Meanwhile, domestic intel forces have been beefed up under the premise of homeland security to encompass the largest invasion of American privacy since J. Edgar Hoover was "watching" over us. With Negroponte's black-ops artists functioning under the added "protection" of the Patriot Act - that would be protecting them, not us - and the current push to make the military "first responders" to everything from an imaginary pandemic to the next hurricane, and answerable only to the president, our freedom has never been in more danger. Not from terrorists but from our own government.
It takes them a page and a half to even mention John "Death Squad" Negroponte, and then only in passing so let me give you my layman's view. Long standing Director Tenet had a pretty good agency going, the trouble is they didn't deliver the goods when it came to "fixing" the intelligence around the WMDs and other justifications for invading Iraq. This made the WHIGs and our Misleader in Chief rather unhappy. The agency insisted on delivering real world intelligence instead of kool-ade laced propaganda to facilitate the long planned invasion. Bush wanted to capitalize on 9/11 and they weren't coooperating. The administration and it's lackeys began to complain about the agency's performance.
As the WMD story began to publicly unravel, the Bush loyalists in the GOP reversed direction and blamed the failure on the agents who caved under White House pressure and delivered the "fixed" intel. Ironically Goss was one of them. When Tenet was made the sacrificial goat, and the agency's status was downgraded to an mere underling of Negroponte, Goss stepped in with his WHIG team and forced a showdown. Many of the best and brightest (and one assumes the most honest) senior officers have since left.
What we are left is an agency whose foreign assets have been compromised to the point of ineffectiveness. This is why we haven't been able to stop or even infiltrate Al Qaeda in the last four years. The director no longer even has access to the president directly. All concerns must be vetted through the chief thug Negroponte.
Meanwhile, domestic intel forces have been beefed up under the premise of homeland security to encompass the largest invasion of American privacy since J. Edgar Hoover was "watching" over us. With Negroponte's black-ops artists functioning under the added "protection" of the Patriot Act - that would be protecting them, not us - and the current push to make the military "first responders" to everything from an imaginary pandemic to the next hurricane, and answerable only to the president, our freedom has never been in more danger. Not from terrorists but from our own government.
posted by Libby Spencer at 4:02 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home