Proletariat Blog

At this point we should be asking ourselves why we need a spy agency that leaks like a drunken sailor. (My apologies to Naval personnel.)

I realize that irony never takes a day off, but does the fact that as soon as the President signed a ‘secret’ approval to mount a ‘covert’ operation against Iran that the CIA sent out press releases and called news organizations to broadcast that fact– does that make anyone question the ‘intelligence’ of this agency?

The CIA has received secret presidential approval to mount a covert “black” operation to destabilize the Iranian government, current and former officials in the intelligence community tell the Blotter on ABCNews.com. ~blogs.abcnews.com

The CIA has been completely compromised. It is more than useless. It seems to be actively undermining national security and engaging in partisan politics. When we look at the CIA’s record in the last seven years we see incompetence, intransigence, and downright insubordination bordering on subversive treason.

This is apparently a spy agency that has decided that it’s operations now include influencing domestic politics ‘for the greater good’ and has begun to act as a covert agency of the Democratic party rather than of the United States. It is now a political agency and as such should be stripped of it’s civil service status and gutted immediately, if not sooner.

Case in point: Valerie Plame.

I cannot think of a more perfect example of CIA incompetence (or of domestic covert political operations) than Valerie Plame and Joseph Wilson’s self-inflicted tragedy. The evidence of a political agenda is undeniable. Valerie Plame ‘selected’ her husband to ‘investigate’ (i.e. discredit) administration claims regarding Iraq seeking nuclear materials. Conflict of interest on multiple levels.

Here we have a perfect example of selective outrage about leaks. Valerie Plame essentially outed herself. The left has proclaimed that leaking covert information is tantamount to treason and Karl Rove and Dick Cheney should be frog-marched out of the white house in handcuffs. And yet leaking the existence of entire secret operations before they have even begun probably deserves a medal. Something is fishy here.

While Valerie Plame and Joseph Wilson are obvious liberal partisans there are also several other examples of CIA officials coming forward to attack the Bush Administration who have even more leftist leanings.

Larry Johnson and Ray McGovern have both used their credentials as former CIA ‘analysts’ to give weight to their partisan (and leftist) attacks on the Bush Administration and conservatives in general. I am left to wonder just how many leftist moles are burrowed into that organization. Has it been completely compromised?

So what is going on at the CIA? Well, if Ray can be believed at all this statement might be an indication of both what kind of people fill this organization and what kind of political game they’ve decided to play with intelligence ‘for the greater good’.

He continued by speaking about former President Lyndon B. Johnson waging war in Vietnam. McGovern said one of his fellow agents, Sam Adams, researched Vietnam’s army size and uncovered about 500,000 fighting against the U.S. Army.

McGovern said the Army, in a secret memo, told Adams the press would have a field day with those numbers. However, Army generals told Adams to report the number of people in the Vietnamese army at about 200,000.

McGovern said both he and Adams deeply regretted not giving that memo to the press because many lives, both American and Vietnamese, could have been saved. ~collegian.psu.edu

Leaks in the service of the beliefs of partisan agents and analysts save lives? Ray McGovern seems to have inadvertantly explained the rationale for the CIA’s current policy of leaking damaging information in order to impact domestic politics.

Ray seems to say that speaking ‘truth’ in order to correct a ‘wrong’ is so important that it’s worth breaking the law. Let me point out that the ‘leak’ about Valerie Plame was also true. She did send her husband on a mission to discredit the Administration. This is valuable and proper information needed to put Wilson’s bizzare accusations into context.

Larry Johnson himself explains the concept of how the CIA uses covert action and how it relates to influencing domestic politics, only he accuses avowed/known politicians, doing their job as politicians, i.e. engaging in politics, of somehow using covert techniques.

AMY GOODMAN: Larry Johnson, before the indictment came down, you accused Vice President Cheney, the Bush administration, of engaging in a covert action against the American people. Explain.

LARRY JOHNSON: Yeah. It has the hallmarks. Covert action is – in the past, the C.I.A. has used it overseas as a way to shape public opinion. Usually in my – the experiences I have had, it has been used – we used the truth. In other words, you didn’t have to go out and manufacture lies in order to deceive people. You would focus upon, you know – there were efforts to get the vote out in Greece and in other places to get the focus on some communist subversion, to use old-style Cold War language. In this case, when we look back at the case of how the facts were fixed around the intelligence leading up to the war, it is classic covert action. In other words, this government deliberately deceived its own people. ~democracynow.org

There’s a difference between politicians arguing their case and the CIA selectively using intelligence to game the system. We expect the CIA to wage an information war in order to give the United States and advantage in war etc, but we do not expect it to do so domestically and in such a political manner.

What we may have is a rogue liberal agency.

The CIA’s Counterterrorist Center has spent more than $15 million in the past three years funding studies, reports and conferences produced by former Democratic administration officials and other critics of the Bush administration.
The latest effort was a $300,000 grant by the CIA to the Atlantic Council for a study co-authored by Richard A. Clarke, the former counterterrorism official who wrote a best seller accusing the Bush administration of failing in the war on terrorism by invading Iraq.

…Bush administration officials say the CIA’s funding of counterterrorism studies and conferences through the center, known as the CTC, raises questions about whether the agency is violating its charter by getting involved in activities that influence U.S. policy.

The funding also raised questions among administration and congressional officials involved in intelligence activities about whether the CIA selectively funds counterterrorism studies and conferences at liberal or Democratic-oriented research organizations, while shunning activities at Republican-oriented, conservative centers.

An investigation by The Washington Times of the CIA’s funding of think tanks shows that the CTC’s academic outreach program has not funded any studies or conferences at conservative organizations. ~washtimes.com

The following is very revealing when we consider that the CIA cannot as of yet produce any solid info about Valerie Plame’s ‘covert’ status.

A CIA spokesman said Miss Mitchell was unavailable for comment.

The spokesman initially suggested that Miss Mitchell was an undercover agent, but changed that characterization when told that Miss Mitchell identified herself publicly at conferences and within international organizations as a CIA analyst. ~washtimes.com