CIA Director Resigns

After over three years on the job under Bush, that's a hard stance to take.

xpost

Sadly, I think Gear OTM here.

I so, so, so look forward to Bush leaving office (preferably in a torrent of scandal and controversy, but I'll take 'merely voted out by an overwhelming majority' as well).

Tenet Resigns

I have no inside sources on why George Tenet just resigned as director of the Central Intelligence Agency. But I can think of three reasons for which he ought to have resigned.

First, it was announced on Wednesday that President George W. Bush had retained counsel with regard to the Plame investigation. Last summer someone in the White House or close to it leaked to the press that Valerie Plame was a secret operative for the CIA, specializing in countering proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.

This leak aimed at punishing her husband, former ambassador Joe Wilson, for having gone public about his mission to Niger in spring of 2002, in which he disproved the story that Iraq tried to buy yellowcake uranium from that country. Despite Wilson's report to the CIA, requested by VP Dick Cheney, and against Tenet's strong advice, Bush put the allegation into his 2003 State of the Union address.

Tenet should have resigned when Bush insisted on trumpeting an Iraqi nuclear weapons program at a time when Tenet was denying there was any such thing. (Tenet did think Iraq had chemical and biological programs, about which he was wrong). The nuclear claim helped convince the country to go to war. It was false. Tenet knew it was false. He told Bush that. Bush either knew it was false and said it anyway, or he disbelieved Tenet. Either thing should have produced Tenet's resignation.

That Bush retained counsel suggests that he intends to continue to cover for the slime who outed Plame, thereby endangering the lives of dozens of key contacts in the Third World who had been seen hanging out with her over the years when she had a cover as an energy consultant. Bush can produce the perpetrator if he wants, but has decided not to.

So Tenet should resign over that.

Then, someone leaked to Ahmad Chalabi sensitive details of the CIA's cryptography operations against Iran. The leaker is probably a neocon with Defense Department links. Bush could also produce this person if he wanted to. He has not.

So Tenet should resign over Bush's shocking disregard for national security.

Note that Plame's portfolio was fighting the spread of weapons of mass destruction. Someone in Bush's circle set that effort back years by outing her. And note that having broken Iran's code, the US was in a better position to monitor any Iranian efforts to develop WMD. Now that capability has been lost.

With all this brouhaha about fighting weapons of mass destruction proliferation, the Bush administration has actually set back those efforts horribly, for the purposes of petty political gain. It took us to war in Iraq on a WMD pretext. But that turns out to have been a scam on someone's part, and we are much less safe now than before.

Operations Shakti and Mahavishnu to begin immediately.

Only if there's any reality to this story. As currently told, it has some holes. It's possible, for instance, that the US did not have the capability stated in these stories. Alternatvely, it's also possibly simple disinformation, a story that casts the impression Iran has
been able to secure it's electronic signals or been given an opportunity to do so, when in fact, it has not.

Either of these explanations could use the current story as cover with the added benefit of piling on Chalabi.

For example, if you or I were running a secure communications operation that we suspected might be compromised by a technologically greatly superior foe, we might choose to regularly pass bogus control transmissions to see if the foe acted upon them. Not pass one when someone conveniently told use we were being snooped upon, as is said to be the case in the Chalabi story.

Also, recall, that only a week to ten days ago, Iraqi intelligence was attributed in some stories to have been so clever as to run disinformation on Iraq through Chalabi or others to the Bush administration, abetting the war. In this, they were said to be quite clever, according to news pieces.

Now, this week, we read that Iraqi intell communications were totally compromised by US technical collection means. This implies the opposite of the news which circulated previously. It shows an intell operation that perhaps is not so clever and which was having its mail read. If -this- is true, it would seem to indicate that NSA would have known Iranian secrets, making it much less likely that nation could run a successful intell disinformation campaign.

So which is it? Or none of the above, something quite different?

Perhaps it is not even important that US intelligence had broken whatever ciphering code Iranian intelligence was using. Maybe its means lie elsewhere, for example, in interception of communications -before- they are encrypted.

There's lots of possibilities.

Good eye, Dan. I did mean "Iranian."

And Naughty By Nature played!

I was just kidding when I wrote that.. but then that's his official line right now.. but it still translates to me as, "enough of this shit - I'm going home."

However, do pay attention to the precise wording of one of his statements in his resignation speech - "This is the most difficult decision I have ever had to make. And while Washington and the media will put many different faces on the decision it was a personal decision and had only one basis in fact: the well-being of my wonderful family. Nothing more and nothing less." (emphasis added). Could they have threatened his family? We know they were willing to blow an agent's cover, exposing her to risk. (I didn't come up with this myself, but don't remember to whom it should be attributed) I don't buy this, really, but it's worth considering.

Here's a different take on the Gore factor.

Shortly after the "surprise" Tenet-Pavitt resignations, current and former senior members of the U.S. intelligence community and the Justice Department told journalist Wayne Madsen, a former Naval intelligence officer, that they were directly connected to the criminal investigation of a 2003 White House leak that openly exposed Valerie Plame as an undercover CIA officer. What received less attention was that the leak also destroyed a long-term CIA proprietary intelligence gathering operation which, as we will see, was of immense importance to US strategic interests at a critical moment.

The leak was a vindictive retaliation for statements, reports and actions taken by Plame's husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, which had deeply embarrassed the Bush administration and exposed it to possible charges for impeachable offenses, including lying to the American people about an alleged (and totally unfounded) nuclear threat posed by Iraq's Saddam Hussein. Conservative columnist Robert Novak, the beneficiary of the leak, immediately published it on July 14, 2003 and Valerie Plame's career (at least the covert part) instantly ended. The actual damage caused by that leak has never been fully appreciated.

Wilson deeply embarrassed almost every senior member of the Bush junta by proving to the world that they were consciously lying about one of their most important justifications for invading Iraq: namely, their claim to have had certain knowledge, based on "good and reliable" intelligence, that Hussein was on the brink of deploying a nuclear weapon, possibly inside the United States. It was eventually disclosed that the "intelligence" possessed by the administration was a set of poorly forged documents on letterhead from the government of Niger, which described attempts by Iraq to purchase yellowcake uranium for a nuclear weapons program.

It has since been established by Scott Ritter and others that Iraq's nuclear weapons program had been dead in the water and non-functioning since the first Iraq war.

Wilson was secretly dispatched in February 2002, on instructions from Dick Cheney to the CIA, to go to Niger and look for anything that might support the material in the documents. They had already been dismissed as forgeries by the International Atomic Energy Agency, the CIA, and apparently everyone else who had seen them. The CIA cautioned the administration, more than once, against using them. Shortly thereafter, Wilson returned and gave his report stating clearly that the allegations were pure bunk and unsupportable.

In spite of this, unaware of the booby traps laid all around them, the entire power core of the Bush administration jumped on the Niger documents as on a battle horse and charged off into in a massive public relations blitz. Bush, Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld, Powell, Wolfowitz and others - to varying degrees - insisted, testified, and swore that they knew, and had reliable, credible and verified intelligence that Saddam was about to deploy an actual nuclear device built from the Niger yellowcake.

It was full court media press and they successfully scared the pants off of most Americans who believed that Saddam was going to nuke them any second.

I've long believed that there's a schism between BushCo and the career intelligence establishment and I find myself in the bizarre position of rooting for the CIA.

The U.S. is now waging three wars, says intelligence expert Thomas Powers. One is in Iraq. The second is in Afghanistan. And the third is in Washington - an all-out war between the White House and the nation's own intelligence agencies.

Powers, the author of "Intelligence Wars: American Secret History From Hitler to Al Qaeda," charges that the Bush administration is responsible for what is perhaps the greatest disaster in the history of U.S. intelligence. From failing to anticipate 9/11 to pressuring the CIA to produce bogus justifications for war, from abusing Iraqi prisoners to misrepresenting the nature of Iraqi insurgents, the Bush White House, the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies they corrupted, coerced or ignored have made extraordinarily grave errors which could threaten our national security for years. By manipulating intelligence and punishing dissent while pursuing an extreme foreign-policy agenda, Bush leaders have set spy against U.S. spy and deeply damaged America's intelligence capabilities.

"It's a catastrophe beyond belief. Going into Afghanistan was inevitable, and in my opinion the right thing to do. But everything since then has been a horrible mistake," Powers says. "The CIA is politicized to an extreme. It's under the control of the White House. Tenet is leaving in the middle of an unresolved political crisis - what really amounts to a constitutional crisis."

The bitterest dispute, though not the only one, is between the CIA and the Pentagon, whose own secret intelligence unit, the Office of Special Plans, aggressively promoted the war on Iraq. While departing CIA Director George Tenet played along with the Bush administration - a fact which Powers says reveals the urgent need for a truly independent intelligence chief - much of the agency is enraged at the Pentagon, which put intense pressure on it to produce reports tailored to the policy goals of the Bush White House. The simmering tensions between the Pentagon, with its troika of Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Feith, and rank and file CIA personnel boiled over in July 2003, when the White House trashed the career of veteran CIA operative Valerie Plame by leaking her identity. The move was a crude retaliation against Plame's husband, former U.S. ambassador Joseph Wilson, who had exposed the Bush administration's specious claim that Saddam had sought "yellowcake" from Africa to build a nuclear bomb.

The struggle between the CIA and the Defense Department reached a bizarre climax a few weeks ago when Ahmed Chalabi's office was very publicly ransacked by officers working under the command of the CIA; the Iraqi exile leader was later accused of leaking vital information to Iran, among other allegations. The abrupt fall from grace of the man hand-picked by neoconservative policymakers to lead post-Saddam Iraq, says Powers, lays bare the brutal turf war between the two sides.

"It reveals an extraordinary level of bitter combat between the CIA and the Pentagon. It's astonishing that the CIA actually oversaw a team of people who broke into Chalabi's headquarters - which was paid for by the Pentagon - and ransacked the place. The CIA single-handedly destroyed him."

It's strange...but it's what I'd be doing too.

bump

the pic is legit funny, but it's strictly for your bros

also, how could armstrong not show up at this point

did he send the photo just to her? i kinda would be surprised if he didn't send it too like 20 people and/or post it to his facebook like "oh man this is hilarious, they all have to see this!"

did he send the photo just to her?

he sent it to a bunch of people

Emily Mortimer will receive it in Season Four opener of The Newsroom.

lol

Where's Waldo?

http://i.imgur.com/S3CKD.jpg

lol wut

http://www.foxnews.com/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUNDh1MD33M

Some fun stuff:

http://www.tampabay.com/news/military/jill-and-scott-kelley-cultivated-politicians-as-well-as-generals/1261848

Also this week, the Daily Telegraph of London, citing an unnamed Republican source, said Khawam once dated former Gov. Charlie Crist.

Reached by phone, Crist said: "Consider the source."

lol I <3 Crist

non denial denial

Ha you know this is totally gonna be a L&O SVU episode or Trapped in the Closet chapter

At least three Lifetime TV movies from this

And five porn films.

One of which will be ALL IN-TERCOURSE.

Ha you know this is totally gonna be a L&O SVU episode or Trapped in the Closet chapter

It's too much even for SVU writers

http://assets.nydailynews.com/polopoly_fs/1.1203132.1353077158!/img/httpImage/image.jpg_gen/derivatives/landscape_635/kelley-kiss-1116.jpg

High definition video cameras allow for unlimited editorial control of reality

I just noticed the other other woman's name was Jill Kelley

http://s3-ec.buzzfed.com/static/enhanced/webdr02/2012/11/13/16/enhanced-buzz-16551-1352842406-6.jpg

I missed this weird tidbit. Last week her driver's license was found in Rock Creek park.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/crime-scene/post/paula-broadwells-drivers-license-found-in-area-park/2012/11/13/62d4f264-2de7-11e2-beb2-4b4cf5087636_blog.html

We were on it

oh shit, I should have tried misspelling "driver's license" when I control-f'd it. My bad.

It's still a weird tidbit, tho

it definitely feels like a chekhov's gun that will come up later in the story's twist ending

i recall rock creek park in fall
how u tore ur dress, with petraeus

Doing it in the park
Doing it after dark, oh, yeah
Rock Creek Park, oh, yeah
Rock Creek Park

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jan/07/john-brennan-dishonesty-cia-director-nomination

I can't muster the proper revulsion because it's been ever thus for the Obama administration's counterterrorism policies since 2008. Better to channel energy into hounding my Democratic legislators into saving Social Security and Medicare from cuts.

man what happened to the sexy revelations

and of course Brennan is the "uncontroversial" pick

Don't forget to link to Glenn Greenwald's pro-Hagel column, Morbius.

dunno if it's pro-Hagel so much as an expression of befuddlement over the criticism

It seemed pretty sympathetic, although I read it quickly; he does support the nomination, though.

Morbs is not doing politics here in '13 aside from the odd link offered w/out comment.

;_;

http://crookedtimber.org/2013/07/04/petraeusgate-anatomy-of-a-scandal/

Can't find the link but thought I read on the Digby blog that some folks are accusing Petraeus of fingering General Cartwright as the source of the leak on the cyber-attack against Iran's nuclear program.

"Fingering"? I wish people would be more discreet in reporting these things.

i've read that also, have been somewhat surprised that story hasn't been bigger news though maybe i haven't been paying attention (very possible, have been swamped w/ work). skeptical also that 'gig at cuny' represents a move 'up' from director of the cia and four star general. was ike being promoted when he went from the army to columbia and then demoted when he went from columbia to the white house? anyhow schools throwing money at a non-academic big name to drop by and lend some prestige or more accurately celebrity to their school isn't anything new though it's certainly ridiculous and esp so now w/ austerity. i guess anyone shocked and outraged by this should thank god college athletics aren't a big deal in the northeast.

I watched part of The Spymasters last night (got a free 30-day showtime subscription just to watch it!) and in spite of visually being a pallid grey rainbow of old white men, it's enlightening to see just how dramatically the landscape has changed. Esp on the same day a leading Republican presidential candidate suggests that we institutionalize bigotry toward anyone who believes in Islam. This place is a mess!

I want to see that. It looks pretty provocative.

Didn't see it but heard the directors on Fresh Air, pretty fascinating, would watch.

It's not a great doc by filmmaking standards (they are not Errol Morris, there is too much dramatic music) but they ask tough questions and it's enlightening to see the faces of Tenet, Petraeus, Cofer Black (remember him?) etc as they answer the questions.

Cofer Black was either really sweaty or had salty tear marks visible on his right cheek. Intense!

With the major caveat that I know nothing of the author (a Substack lefty foreign policy guy with a small following):

The Moral Guidance Department, a branch of the Yemeni Armed Forces of the revolutionary Houthi government of Yemen published last week a number of secret documents and phone calls from the former regime of longtime president Ali Abdullah Saleh.

Two phone calls between former president Saleh and the former director of the CIA George Tenet were released. A Yemeni government official has confirmed to me that the calls took place in 2001.

In the calls, the former CIA director can be heard pressuring Saleh to release a detained individual involved in the bombing attacks on USS Cole in October of 2000, which left 17 dead and 37 injured.

In the call, Tenet is asked by Saleh’s translator about the name of the individual in question.

“I don’t want to give his name over the phone,” Tenet tells him.

Saleh notes that the FBI team tasked with the USS Cole investigation had already arrived in Sana’a, and asks Tenet if the FBI personnel could meet with him to discuss the matter. Tenet refuses, saying “this is my person, this is my problem, this is my issue... The man must be released.”

“I’ve talked to everybody in my government; I told them that I was going to make this call,” Tenet says.

(...)

Major General Abdul Qadir al-Shami, the deputy-head of the Yemeni Security and Intelligence Service, confirmed to Houthi media that the person in question was dual American-Yemeni citizen imam Anwar Al-Awlaki, a top leader of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), who was killed in Yemen in 2011 by a CIA drone strike.

https://realalexrubi.substack.com/p/leaked-cia-pressured-yemen-to-release

It's not a great doc by filmmaking standards (they are not Errol Morris, there is too much dramatic music) but they ask tough questions and it's enlightening to see the faces of Tenet, Petraeus, Cofer Black (remember him?) etc as they answer the questions.

― La Lechuza (La Lechera), Tuesday, December 8, 2015 9:02 AM (five years ago)

I watched this a few months ago ... it was good in the ways you said. I think Leon's performance really showed that he sincerely ethically struggled while in the job, whereas a number of the other dudes just seemed super cold. ... which is probably required by the job, a certain degree of sociopathy.