Spies for Obama
It seems the CIA favors Obama over McCain.
This is not surprising in light of the horrific damage the Bush Administration has done to the Agency (outing Valerie Plame, making sure the Phase II report on intelligence failures leading up to the Iraq war was delayed long enough for the public imagination to associate the notorious 16 words more with CIA failure than with the fantasies of Feith and co., and then foisting the grossly unpopular Porter Goss on the Agency for a year and a half, which resulted in the resignations of some of the most seasoned operatives, and an infamous scandal.)
"Normally, at least a while back, and certainly in the 1990s, during the Clinton administration, people around the CIA would tend to vote Republican," says a recent covert agency retiree, asking not to be identified because he still consults with the spy agency.
"But I think that's changed, probably because of Iraq and Afghanistan," he said.
After years of derision and insults from neoconservatives who coalesced in the Bush administration, old hands say, they're getting their revenge.
The link contains this jewel about Duke Cunningham:
"It was obvious that he was living way above his means on a Washington yacht called the Duke-Stir where, in his pyjamas, he would entertain women with champagne."
Those "Duke-Stir" pyjamas belong in the Smithsonian!
October 25, 2008 12:06 PM | Reply | Permalink
I was very disappointed when they tore down the Watergate Hotel.
It could have become the most interesting, and educational, museum in Washington.
October 25, 2008 1:02 PM | Reply | Permalink
correction: I see it's only closed for renovations, and is on the U.S. National Register of Historic Places.
If there was ever a place that deserved to be on that list, it's this one.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watergate_hotel
October 25, 2008 1:13 PM | Reply | Permalink
Hear, hear. Broaden its focus to all unsavory US gov't activities and it'll be more heartbreaking than the excellent (but achingly devastating) Holocaust museum.
October 25, 2008 3:03 PM | Reply | Permalink
You mean the Holocaust museum memorializing the Holocaust in WW II Europe, not the Holocaust museum momorializing the genicode against the AmerIndian?
October 25, 2008 8:57 PM | Reply | Permalink
The latter would fall under the providence of the one hypothesized, so yes, I meant the WW2 one. :)
October 25, 2008 10:04 PM | Reply | Permalink
Most spooks would most probably rather see their agency leave behind the stain and the stench of the human rights violations of torture and waterboarding.
October 25, 2008 1:31 PM | Reply | Permalink
Besides the crank Woolsey, the other spook mentioned as a McCain supporter is Duane Clarridge, convicted of perjury in the Iran-contra scandal, and pardoned by George H.W. Bush in 1992.
I highly recommend this article, about a conference on the ethics of spycraft, which Clarridge did NOT attend:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/28/politics/28ethics.html
Nothing could say more about the moral bankruptcy of the McCain camp than the caliber of spies that back him.
October 25, 2008 2:20 PM | Reply | Permalink
I noticed this item in the link:
"Ms. Mahle, now a foreign policy consultant, was scheduled to speak Saturday on the practice of rendition, in which terrorism suspects are seized abroad and delivered either to trial in the United States or to imprisonment in other countries.
But in a required security review, the C.I.A. refused to clear about one-fourth of her proposed 23-page text, Ms. Mahle said Friday. She said the deletions "gutted" the paper and made it impossible to deliver."
Wouldn't it be lovely if the mission of the CIA was changed to "informing the public" instead of "supplying whatever bullshit the President wants to hear."
October 25, 2008 4:31 PM | Reply | Permalink
Very likely the text was"classified" just because the CIA, as an arm of the Executive, felt like making substantive discussions of its policies impossible.
Mahle's ethics paper was a threat to a way of life, a culture in which torture just becomes another thing that happens. Just another thing that's "classified."
They keep things secret just as a way of making people feel powerless. Gellman, in his book 'Angler,' said that the energy meeting Cheney had with execs was kept secret and its log books destroyed, not because embarrassing or illegal activity was conducted there, but simply as a means of telling the public it had no business knowing what the VP did with his time.(Well, destroying the log books WAS illegal. But it was his way of showing he was above the law.)
If an ordinary business meeting can be kept secret, for no reason at all, it is that much easier to hide the things you truly want hidden. People become used to knowing little, and it makes it that much easier for them to justify their own actions. You make your enemies complicit in your own crimes, and your friends- should know as little as possible.
October 25, 2008 5:32 PM | Reply | Permalink
The best part about redactions/censoring of gov't documents is that it's a totally arbitrary process that has far less to do with the information being requested than who's doing the editing and which agency it's from. I've read numerous accounts of journalists requesting the same document from Agency Y and Agency Z and receiving two totally separate sets of censoring -- often with so little overlap that combining the two rendered a complete translation.
October 26, 2008 4:37 PM | Reply | Permalink
Valerie Plame Wilson's memoir, "Fair game," achieves a similarly absurd effect.
The author wasn't cleared to say many things that were in the public record, simply because she was in the employ of the CIA when they happened. I mean simple things like who was in charge of the CIA at the time she joined it. Obviously no State Secret, but it was redacted from the text- so journalist Laura Rozen provided these simple details in an epilogue.
October 26, 2008 5:05 PM | Reply | Permalink
You make your enemies complicit in your own crimes, . . . .
_____
There is the defense of inducement. Congress voted to authorize the use of force -- but only as a last resort, and after returning to the UN, which Bushit agreed to then ignored -- based upon the intelligence it was given. Certainly it was the same intelligence the Bushit criminal enterprise had; but it wasn't ALL the intelligence that enterprise had.
Thus Congress was induced to vote for an authorization based upon deceit by the Executive which should not have happened, therefore could not be anticipated or suspected.
October 25, 2008 9:04 PM | Reply | Permalink
The lies Bush fed Congress are only one aspect of his Administrations's criminality.
For instance, the clever way Cheney/Libby/whomever leaked Valerie Plame's name to a number of Admin officials whom Cheney considered enemies, such as Richard Armitage, without disclosing that she was covert. This was certainly a clever way of making Armitage 'complicit' in the scandal, although he subsequently was not found guilty of criminal charges because he had blabbed her name unknowingly.
Or consider the way Armitage's boss Powell was used. It was very clever of Cheney to set Powell up like that. The State Dept. was neutralized at the same time that it was used to accomplish what only it could accomplish, at the time.
October 26, 2008 1:34 AM | Reply | Permalink
'Complicity' may be too strong a word- but on the other hand, I am at a loss to say what a better term might be.
What I mean is something like this:
"while certainly half the scandal is that the Justice Department...let eight U.S. attorneys go, seemingly for no reason—we seem to have forgotten that even without the mass firings, this law had been changed in the sneakiest way imaginable....Whether Specter actually knew that O'Neill was carrying water for Karl Rove and turned a blind eye, or whether he was duped by O'Neill may never be known. But either way, it seems to me that Specter's office has done terrible damage to the very notion of independent and co-equal branches of government in this affair, and has yet to be called to account for it. Given that respect and esteem for co-equal independent branches of government is one of the senator's sacred cows, it's doubly ironic that no one has questioned him on this."
http://www.slate.com/id/2161260
Even now, Specter is railing against what he has caled Bush's "dictatorial" assumption of powers. But we have learned to expect nothing from him in the way of action- why is this? It only damages Specter's own credibility every time he opens his mouth.
It is not hard to extrapolate Specter's plight to that of the Democrats in Congress as a whole.
October 26, 2008 2:00 AM | Reply | Permalink
Yet another gem from your link about Specter:
Apparently his (former) chief counsel O'Neill could add anything to pending legislation that popped into his pointy little neo-con head, including a clause in the re-authorization of the "Patriot" Act that made it a lot easier for Bush to replace US Attorneys.
"Now, it's not necessarily outrageous that Sen. Specter didn't know what his subordinate slipped into the legislation. The Patriot Reauthorization was a long and hotly debated bill. While one might hope that the committee chairman would have read the legislation, you can understand that he might skip a clause or two in the melee. But this was not some minor technical amendment."
October 26, 2008 10:29 AM | Reply | Permalink
Putting a neocon 'ghost' in Specter's office- you can't say that no one in the Administration has a sense of humor.
October 26, 2008 11:47 AM | Reply | Permalink