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Politics : I Will Continue to Continue, to Pretend.... -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sully- who wrote (6395)	11/20/2004 6:16:09 PM
From: Sully-	Respond to of 35834

Porter's House CIA Director Porter Goss takes charge. by Stephen F. Hayes - Stephen F. Hayes is a staff writer at The Weekly Standard. ON FRIDAY, November 5, 2004, Patrick Murray had a blunt warning for a top career official in the CIA's clandestine service: No more leaks. Murray, who has a reputation as a no-nonsense manager, had come to the agency from Capitol Hill as a top aide to Porter Goss, the former chairman of the House Select Committee on Intelligence who took over as CIA director in late September. For months leading up to the election, elements within the CIA had leaked information damaging to the reelection prospects of George W. Bush. Some of the leaks were authorized, some were not. Michael Scheuer, head of the CIA's bin Laden unit from 1996 to 1999 who recently quit the agency in order to be free to criticize the intelligence community, said that CIA higher-ups had given him permission to speak to the media anonymously to "bash the president." Authorized or not, the result of the steady flow of leaks was the same. Bush was portrayed as incompetent and his policies disastrous. CIA-friendly reporters, eager to keep their sources happy, stuck to the agency line. One significant leak landed on the front page of the New York Times on September 16, 2004. Prospects for success in Iraq, the CIA assessed, ranged from bleak to grim. The story and its timing coincided nicely with the Kerry campaign's effort to paint postwar Iraq as Vietnam-in-the-desert. Then in October, less than two weeks after Goss was confirmed, "past and current agency officials" sabotaged Goss's pick to be CIA executive director, in what Bush administration figures considered a brushback pitch. Those agency officials revealed to Washington Post reporter Walter Pincus that Michael Kostiw, a respected former CIA official and immediate past staff director of the House terrorism subcommittee, had been arrested for shoplifting in 1981 and subsequently resigned from the CIA. "He is one of the brightest minds in the intelligence community," a senior Bush administration national security official told me months before Goss was nominated. Kostiw withdrew from consideration for the CIA job one day after the leak. So it's no wonder that Goss was upset about leaks. Murray had told the associate deputy director of counterterrorism that the new agency leadership would not tolerate media leaks. This person reported the conversation to Michael Sulick, associate deputy CIA director for operations. Sulick, in turn, alerted his boss, Stephen Kappes, deputy CIA director for operations, and a meeting between Sulick, Kappes, Murray, and Goss was hastily arranged. Goss participated in most of the tense meeting. After he left, however, according to a source familiar with the confrontation, Murray reiterated the warning about leaks. Sulick took the advice as a threat and, calling Murray "a Hill puke," threw a stack of papers in his direction. The following day, Goss summoned Kappes to discuss the altercation. Goss told Kappes that such behavior is unacceptable at his CIA and ordered Kappes to reassign Sulick to a post outside of the building. Goss suggested making Sulick the CIA station chief in New York City. Kappes refused to reassign Sulick and told Goss that he would resign if Sulick were removed from his post. Goss told Kappes to resign, and Kappes told Goss he intended to take the matter to the White House. On Saturday, November 13, 2004, the escalating dispute over leaking was leaked to the Washington Post. That story and a follow-up the next day made clear that this was a narrative with good guys and bad guys. The top advisers Goss had brought with him from the Hill, according to the Post, were "disgruntled" former CIA officials "widely known" for their "abrasive management style" and for criticizing the agency. One had left the CIA after an undistinguished intelligence career and another is known for being "highly partisan." On the other side, though, were disinterested civil servants: an unnamed "highly respected case officer" and Kappes, "whose accomplishments include persuading Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi to renounce weapons of mass destruction this year." (Some might point out that the capture of Saddam Hussein, which preceded Gaddafi's renunciation by five days, and the Iraq war were also, well, persuasive.) White House officials refused to discuss the conversations involving Goss and Kappes. The result was clear enough. Both Kappes and Sulick resigned on Monday morning. On Wednesday the 17th, the New York Times ran a front-page story about an internal memo that Goss had sent agency employees. The headline and lede set the tone. "New CIA Chief Tells Workers to Back Administration Policies," were the words atop an article that began: "Porter J. Goss, the new intelligence chief, has told Central Intelligence Agency employees that their job is to 'support the administration and its policies in our work,' a copy of an internal memorandum shows." Conventional wisdom was already firm: Goss and his cronies, embittered CIA failures all, were out to exact political revenge. John Roberts, anchoring CBS Evening News, wondered aloud, "What went wrong?" A Boston Globe editorial claimed the Goss "purge" was likely the "settling of partisan scores rather than an effort to introduce genuine accountability." Let's entertain an alternative scenario: that after several years of painful and very public intelligence failures by the CIA, the new director and his team hope to make changes that will protect Americans; that Goss will draw on his decade as a CIA operative in Latin America, the Caribbean, and Europe and his seven years as chairman of the House Select Committee on Intelligence to ameliorate a deteriorating situation that he watched from the front row; that perhaps it is the CIA officials who leaked against Bush who have a political agenda or interests to protect. It was possible to take in most press accounts over the last week and never encounter those possibilities. It would appear that reporters who cover the intelligence community--particularly beat reporters from the Washington Post, the New York Times, Newsday, and Knight Ridder newspapers--often simply regurgitate storylines presented to them by the most political current and former CIA officials. Democratic elected officials furrow their brows about the partisan Republicans. And so we arrive at yet another bizarre moment in the often perplexing political sociology of Washington: The political left and its friends in the establishment press are in a full embrace of the most illiberal and secretive component of the U.S. government. A CIA spokesperson criticized the Times account of the memo, charging that Goss's words were "taken out of context." In fact, much of the rest of his statement conveyed the opposite point. "CIA is, of course, a part of the Executive Branch primarily as a capabilities component. We do not make policy, though we do inform those who make it. We avoid political involvement, especially political partisanship" (emphasis in the original). The partisanship will continue. And so will the harsh, even personal, criticism of Goss and his team. The leaks against the new CIA leadership started even before they had begun to reform the place. But changes are coming. "In the days and weeks ahead of us," Goss wrote, "I will announce a series of changes--some involving procedures, organization, senior personnel, and areas of focus for our action." These changes are long overdue. And though you wouldn't know it from recent media coverage, many CIA officials support them. Goss is starting with the Directorate of Operations, the branch of the CIA responsible for clandestine collection of foreign intelligence. It's a good place to begin. In all of the studies and commissions and debates about terrorists and rogue regimes and threats, we have learned one thing that should be the backdrop for every discussion of intelligence reform: The CIA failed to penetrate the senior-most levels of the former Iraqi regime or of al Qaeda. Former CIA director George Tenet has admitted this. The clandestine service exists to penetrate our enemies and collect their secrets. Some armchair spooks pretend this is easy. It's not. But gaps in our knowledge are gaps in our security. Tenet told the 9/11 Commission it would take five years to revamp the clandestine services. Faster, please.

To: Sully- who wrote (6395)	11/22/2004 12:33:36 PM
From: Sully-	Respond to of 35834

OOPS! reason.com

To: Sully- who wrote (6395)	11/22/2004 2:26:50 PM
From: Sully-	Respond to of 35834

Journalists and the CIA bomb out American Thinker The CIA and its coterie of leak-recipient journalists have seriously damaged the public’s understanding of the terror dangers we face. Now that the public’s attention finally has turned to the threat of Iran’s nuclear weapons capabilities, it is vital that everyone understand how a clever misdirection of focus has seriously understated the ability of the mullahs to produce atomic weapons. Since Porter Goss embarked on the much-needed shake-up of the CIA, we’ve been treated to agency leaks to the legacy media from the proverbial “unnamed sources” in an attempt to persuade the American people that Goss will single handedly render the agency useless in supporting the War on Terror. Naturally, the reporters and their sources fail to account for the CIA’s decades-long incompetence in the counter-terror role. But incompetence or lack of vigilance is only part of the problem. Columnist Robert Novak relays a brutally honest assessment from Senator John McCain: "…with CIA leaks intended to harm the re-election campaign of the president of the United States, it is not only dysfunctional but a rogue organization." Calling the CIA a rogue organization is fully justified given their recent campaign to covertly and overtly oppose the President’s policies, and given that there were also a few who seemingly subverted our efforts in the search for WMD in Iraq. But now, with the focus on Iran and its nuclear program, the real issue is: what is the true state of the mullahs’ WMD production capabilities? In other words, while the CIA has been busy playing a dangerous information warfare game against its own Commander-in-Chief, how can we be sure of their technical and tactical assessment of the Iranian nuclear threat? An example is Dafna Linzer’s report in the Washington Post that questions the reliability of information on Iran’s nuclear program which Colin Powell had shared with reporters on Wednesday. There is a disconcerting theme that runs through this article and other questionably sourced reports. They always discuss the development of a nuclear warhead that is the most technically advanced: the implosion type. In the WaPo article, Linzer says, If the information on Iran were confirmed, it would mean the Islamic republic is further along than previously known in developing a nuclear weapon and the means to deliver it. The documents included a specific warhead design based on implosion [emphasis mine] and adjustments aimed at outfitting the warhead on existing Iranian missile systems. Another example is the reporting concerning “missing” high-explosives supposedly looted from Al Qaqaa. We were told that the composition of these explosives were such that they could be used to trigger a nuclear weapon. Implosion weapons were frequently mentioned in these press accounts because they require a precision triggering mechanism with very high-quality explosives. All but ignored in these articles is that any nation or terrorist organization wanting to quickly build a nuclear bomb would reasonably opt for the more simple design called the “gun” type. The singular focus on the implosion-type weapon from the press is puzzling because the greater complexity of the design would logically deter any fledging nuclear power. Both types of bombs require that two sub-critical masses of special nuclear material (SNM) be brought together quickly to form a super-critical mass to start the chain reaction. However, the implosion design produces greater yield and the SNM is used more efficiently. Originally, the Manhattan Project scientists devised the implosion method where a spherical sub-critical mass of Uranium-235 or Plutonium-239 is compressed by the detonation of high explosives arrayed around the sphere (called lenses). When the high explosive is detonated, an inwardly directed implosion wave is produced, which compresses the fissionable material to achieve super-criticality. The gun type, however, does not require precise three dimensional triggering, nor does it need the absolute highest quality of explosives (although the higher the quality, the better). This type of weapon is simply a tubular device in which high explosive is used to blow one sub-critical piece of SNM from one end of the tube into another sub-critical piece at the opposite end of the tube. This was the design used in the “Little Boy” bomb dropped on Hiroshima in August of 1945. American scientists were so convinced of the simplicity and dependability of the design that they didn’t even bother to test it before it was loaded on the Enola Gay. It is critical to distinguish the different types of designs when analyzing potential nuclear capabilities of rogue regimes. If weapon-grade plutonium were used in a gun-assembly design, neutrons released from spontaneous fission would start the nuclear chain reaction too soon, resulting in a "fizzle" of greatly reduced yield. Therefore, implosion weapons can use either plutonium or uranium, but the gun type can use only uranium. The current flap over Iran’s last minute surge to produce large quantities of Uranium Hexafluoride for production into SNM before the November 22 “freeze” deadline is significant because Iranian scientists have given themselves the option of creating either type of weapon. But, just because Iraq previously attempted to build an implosion-type bomb using uranium does not mean Iran or any other terror state would develop a weapon using this more complex design.* If the legacy media’s obsession with implosion-type weapons is a reflection of their CIA sources, it means intelligence estimates of Iran’s ability to produce a working nuclear weapon may be seriously flawed. Would the mullahs and terror chiefs be overly concerned about weapon efficiency and maximizing yield, or would they want a simple, almost foolproof design that is nevertheless able to kill tens of thousands of people? The answer is self-evident. The Axis of Evil nations are experts at delaying and deceiving the EU, the UN, and the IAEA inspectors. The problem is that time may be running out quicker than we think. * North Korea decided to go the more difficult route and developed implosion-type weapons using Plutonium-239. The “Fat Man” bomb dropped on Nagasaki used only about six kilograms of plutonium to produce a yield of 21-23 kilotons. Keep in mind that a nuclear reactor at Yongbyon, NK that can produce about six kilograms plutonium per year, began operating in 1986! Douglas Hanson is our military affairs correspondent

To: Sully- who wrote (6395)	11/24/2004 11:45:44 AM
From: Sully-	Respond to of 35834

Time to Gossify the Government By James K. Glassman Published 11/24/2004 Porter Goss, the new CIA director, is cleaning house. It's about time. The next step is to apply his strategy -- call it Gossification -- to the rest of the federal bureaucracy. Goss, an ex-CIA agent, had been chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, and he knew that the agency was a nest not merely of spies but of devious opponents of President Bush who were working to undermine him because they preferred to run their own foreign policy. According to a recent column by Robert Novak, Goss got the green light from the president and from Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. "With leaks intended to harm the re-election campaign of the president of the United States," McCain said of the CIA, "it is not only dysfunctional but a rogue organization. ... It has to be cleaned out." Goss removed the head of clandestine operations. The No. 2 CIA official resigned, along with four other senior officials. The new director issued a memorandum, stating, "I also intend to clarify beyond doubt the rules of the road. We support the administration and its policies in our work. As agency employees we do not identify with, support or champion opposition to the administration or its policies." The memo brought yelps of protest from experienced CIA leakers and their friends in the press. But Goss was right. In fact, it's time for the president to apply Gossification to other anti-Bush strongholds, notably the State Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission. With the election of Bush to a second term, Republicans will hold the White House for 20 of 28 years; the Senate, 16 years; the House, 12 years straight. But this sea change has had little effect on the executive branch itself. There are just 3,000 political appointees, compared with a civil service of 1.8 million workers, "many of whom," writes the Washington Post's Dana Milbank, "are impossible to fire." Presidential nominees take an average of eight months to be approved by Congress. Worse, many, if not most, career civil servants at middle and upper levels resist implementing policies they don't like and do their best to shape their own. Such bureaucrats often lean left -- because federal jobs attract people who believe in a missionary government and because Democrats controlled Washington almost continuously for a half-century. But the White House seems finally to be making bureaucratic transformation a top priority. The next target has to be State. My brief experience on an advisory board examining public diplomacy revealed foreign service officers seething with contempt for Bush, whom they consider an uncultured, unilateralist dolt. One of the first tasks of the newly nominated secretary, Condoleezza Rice, must be to lay down the law, Goss-style, at State. For help, I hope she'll take John Bolton as deputy. Bolton, now an undersecretary, is the architect of the Proliferation Security Initiative, which the Wall Street Journal said "has arguably been Colin Powell's most important achievement at State." Bolton, who was earlier my colleague at the American Enterprise Institute, has served in the executive branch for 16 years, and he's a brilliant bureaucratic navigator. If anyone can Gossify the ossified State Department, it's Bolton. Indeed, the White House should put someone like Bolton in the No. 2 post of every department and key agency, with explicit responsibility for rooting out administration opponents and gaining control of policy. How to do that when bureaucrats have the equivalent of academic tenure? Make their lives miserable, transfer them or re-educate them. But don't leave them in place. Particularly in need of transformation are the Labor Department, which is practically a union local; Justice; Treasury; Education; the Food and Drug Administration; the Environmental Protection Agency; and the SEC. In the past, activist Republican secretaries have gathered a coterie of like-minded political appointees and, hunkering down, tried to run hostile departments on their own. But Bush's sweeping second-term policy proposals preclude a Fort Apache approach. The attitude of many top bureaucrats can be summed up thus: "This is 'my' agency. The politicals are only renting a room for a while. I can ignore them and subvert them. Eventually, they will leave, and I'll still be here doing the real policymaking." Such careerists won't be tamed easily. But the work needs to begin, and Porter Goss has shown the way. Other "rogue organizations," in McCain's felicitous phrase, are crying out for the same treatment. Copyright © 2004 Tech Central Station - www.techcentralstation.com

To: Sully- who wrote (6395)	12/7/2004 4:40:05 PM
From: Sully-	Respond to of 35834

More Doom And Gloom From Langley Captain Ed The New York Times rehashes some old news on Iraq in today's edition, as they report on a CIA cable that gives a pessimistic prognosis for Iraq. The cable acknowledges the progress made by the Coalition to some extent but predicts a long and rocky road ahead -- as if that should be news to anyone: <<<< The cable, sent late last month as the officer ended a yearlong tour, presented a bleak assessment on matters of politics, economics and security, the officials said. They said its basic conclusions had been echoed in briefings presented by a senior C.I.A. official who recently visited Iraq. The officials described the two assessments as having been "mixed," saying that they did describe Iraq as having made important progress, particularly in terms of its political process, and credited Iraqis with being resilient. But over all, the officials described the station chief's cable in particular as an unvarnished assessment of the difficulties ahead in Iraq. They said it warned that the security situation was likely to get worse, including more violence and sectarian clashes, unless there were marked improvements soon on the part of the Iraqi government, in terms of its ability to assert authority and to build the economy. Together, the appraisals, which follow several other such warnings from officials in Washington and in the field, were much more pessimistic than the public picture being offered by the Bush administration before the elections scheduled for Iraq next month, the officials said. The cable was sent to C.I.A. headquarters after American forces completed what military commanders have described as a significant victory, with the retaking of Falluja, a principal base of the Iraqi insurgency, in mid-November. >>>> First, one has to wonder about the characterization of "much more pessimistic"; no one in the Bush Administration has said anything except that the violence in Iraq would only get worse the closer we come to their election. The "insurgents" know that a freely-elected legislature will have much more credibility than the interim government developed in concert between the Anglo-American Coalition and leading Iraqi citizens. The terrorists intend on broadening their campaign of intimidation and provocation in hopes of either keeping Iraqis away from the polls and scared off of security jobs, or touching off an interdenominational civil war -- or all of the above. Bush and his team have repeatedly said as much, which is the main reason that the Coalition shifted strategies to a much more aggressive military approach in Samarra, Fallujah, and elsewhere. Somehow the New York Times, which purports to be a newspaper, must have missed all of these speeches by George Bush where he promised nothing but a tough slog. Stamping out terrorism isn't the same as liberating Grenada from a bunch of third-rate Cuban patrols, and the Administration has never suggested it was. The Times uses the tried-and-true strategy of erecting a strawman -- the supposed "easy victory" promise -- and then knocking it down. On one point, however, the Times concedes that their editorial board may have been misinformed, at the least, when they warned that new CIA chief Porter Goss wanted nothing but yes-men: <<<< In recent months, some Republicans, including Senator John McCain of Arizona, have accused the agency of seeking to undermine President Bush by disclosing intelligence reports whose conclusions contradict the administration or its policies. But senior intelligence officials including John E. McLaughlin, the departing deputy director of central intelligence, have disputed those assertions. One government official said the new assessments might suggest that Porter J. Goss, the new director of central intelligence, was willing to listen to views different from those publicly expressed by the administration. >>>> In fact, what Goss wants to do is to keep CIA cables out of the political spotlight. These leaks intend on embarrassing the administration into changing policies, and the CIA operatives who shovel these out to eager news organizations like the Gray Lady use their supposedly non-partisan positions to wield potent political power. Having a political CIA should worry everyone, whether one disagrees with George Bush or agrees with him. What's more, the leaks only give one perspective on the situation in Iraq, because the rest of the data remains classified, and for good reason -- we have troops on the ground there who bear the brunt of any adverse reaction from the data. Does the rest of the data bear out what this cable says? Maybe, and maybe even probably, since no one with half a brain expected anything less from Iraq or the terrorists in Southwest Asia who desperately cling to the hope of gaining the upper hand there. But word from the boots on the ground, written in e-mails home to family and friends and in numerous milblogs, show that the majority of Iraq has progressed nicely. The press manages to miss that story pretty regularly as well. I'm sure the Times patted itself on the back for this important scoop, but those of us who have remained informed and kept our ears open already knew this would remain a tough fight until the end. Don't expect that the terrorists will go away so that free Iraqis can elect a democracy in peace. However, just as in Afghanistan, you can expect that the elections will take place regardless and the Iraqis will create the democracy they need and want, and that example will serve notice to the kleptocracies of Southwest Asia. captainsquartersblog.com

To: Sully- who wrote (6395)	9/26/2005 6:14:20 PM
From: Sully-	Respond to of 35834

CIA Chief Goss Gets Good Grades Peter Brookes townhall.com September 26, 2005 The only good thing about taking over an organization that's hit rock bottom is that the only direction to go is up. This thought may have crossed CIA Director Porter Goss' mind as he looked back over his first year in office at Langley this past weekend. The plucky Goss is fervently trying to reinvigorate the embattled CIA, stung by monumental intelligence failures in recent years. But in contrast to the public bellyaching of some disgruntled agency employees (complaints shamelessly played out in the press), Goss is making progress. Goss, the former House Intelligence Committee chairman, is in the midst of the long, arduous process of rebuilding the CIA. His reform drive has made significant advances on several fronts, but especially in the Directorate of Analysis, where morale and product quality have skyrocketed. By many accounts, Goss is also credited with being a real team player in ensuring the successful integration of new Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte into the intelligence community - even though the creation of the DNI position diminished the authority of Goss' office. Director Goss, a former spook himself, also gets kudos for vastly improving consultation and coordination between the CIA and the Pentagon on counterterrorism issues - a testimony to his willingness to put parochial CIA interests aside in favor of the greater good. Things get a little shaky when it comes to the agency's cloak-and-dagger side - the Directorate of Operations. The DO, rooted in the proud traditions of "Wild Bill" Donovan and the vaunted World War II exploits of the Office of Strategic Services, has resisted Goss' drive for change. As mainstream media paint it, the clandestine service has suffered a mass exodus of senior officers since Goss' arrival. Not so; in fact, the departure of senior spooks has been quite limited - and junior officers are clamoring for more change. It also bears noting that neither the CIA's new head spy nor his staff have become "hostage" to the career bureaucracy. That's no small achievement in any organization - and it goes a long way in explaining the howls of protest coming out of the career service when Goss demands reform of them. Goss has no plans to rest on early laurels. In a Thursday speech at CIA headquarters, the director said he intends to put more spies overseas under different kinds of cover - and in more countries. He's started on it, vastly increasing the number of CIA operatives abroad. Equally important is the ongoing reduction in the number of spies taking up desk space at the CIA's campus-like headquarters in northern Virginia. Goss promises "to get more and more of our officers out of Washington" - intuitively knowing from his own ops days that case officers belong in the field, where the targets are. "You cannot understand people overseas, much less influence them, from Langley," Goss said in his address last week. "You cannot develop deep and trusting relationships with individuals and with governments overseas by flying in and flipping out a U.S. passport," he quipped. Goss also (wisely) said the CIA would no longer rely solely on its "liaison" relationships with foreign intelligence services to gather information. No wonder: Remember the (German-run) Iraqi agent "Curveball" and his claims about Iraqi mobile biological labs? The director said, "Unilateral operations will return to be part of the governing paradigm for the CIA," too. Adding: "We are getting more and more global. We opened new stations and bases and we've reopened some old ones. We are developing new and creative ways." Goss still has more work to do - lots: Deep budget cuts and bad policies after the Cold War, including over-reliance on high-tech satellites (as opposed to low-tech human spying) devastated Langley. Bad decisions undoubtedly increased the likelihood of 9/11 and abysmal pre-war Iraqi WMD intelligence. Considering America's challenges - from Iranian/North Korean nukes to the Iraqi/Afghan insurgencies to the rise of China - the success of Goss' Herculean efforts at CIA is critical to our national security. He's moving CIA in the right direction - the opposition's just making it take longer to get there. Which is why the covert operations inside (and outside) Langley's gates to undermine him need to stop: The next time a CIA director tells the president that a reason for going to war is a "slam dunk," it better be just that. Peter Brookes, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense, is a senior fellow at The Heritage Foundation and a New York Post columnist. ©2005 Peter Brookes townhall.com

To: Sully- who wrote (6395)	11/8/2005 11:25:01 AM
From: Sully-	Respond to of 35834

Three Years of the Condor Whose side is the CIA on, anyway? by Scott Johnson The Weekly Standard 11/08/2005 WATERGATE spawned its own subgenre of suspense films featuring various arms of the United States government as the hidden masterminds of evil schemes. The first of these post-Watergate films was 1975's Three Days of the Condor, starring Robert Redford as a CIA researcher (Joe Turner, codename "Condor") caught up in a dangerous plot. Turner works in a Manhattan CIA-front operation scanning books, newspapers, and magazines for the traces of agency operations. One day he sneaks out to lunch and returns to the office, only to find his colleagues have been assassinated. Turner realizes he is in danger, phones his Agency contact, follows his directions and soon discovers that this contact is part of the plot. Turner kidnaps and hides out with his victim/love interest (Faye Dunaway) while working to unravel the plot in which he's been ensnared. He tracks down the assassin who murdered his CIA coworkers and deduces that a rogue element within the agency is undertaking covert operations. This rogue element had hired an assassin to terminate the research office with extreme prejudice because Turner had stumbled onto this rogue group's plot to invade a Middle Eastern country for oil. The crux of the plot dawns on Turner as a revelation: "Oil fields. Oil. That's it, isn't it? This whole damn thing was about oil! Wasn't it? Wasn't it?" The Joseph Wilson affair appears to enact a postmodern variation of Three Days of the Condor, with Joe Wilson a decadent version of Robert Redford's Turner. Valerie Plame holds up the Faye Dunaway role nicely. In this variation of the plot, however, Wilson is a co-conspirator, rather than an innocent victim, of the rogue element within the CIA. THE SENATE INTELLIGENCE COMMITTEE REPORT on pre-war intelligence devotes 45 pages to intelligence on Saddam Hussein's possible efforts to acquire uranium yellowcake from Niger; of these, roughly 8 pages are devoted to events relating to Wilson's trip to Niger in February 2002. The report rebuts the claims Wilson peddled--first on background to Walter Pincus of the Washington Post, Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times, and others, in May and June of 2003, and then publicly under his own name, beginning with his Times op-ed column in July 2003. According to Wilson, the oral report he made to the CIA discredited the evidence of any Iraq-Niger yellowcake deal and showed related documents might have been forged. Wilson to the contrary notwithstanding, the Senate Intelligence Committee report concluded that, "For most analysts, the information in the report [of Wilson's trip to Niger] lent more credibility to the original Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) reports on the uranium deal" --although the State Department disagreed. In any event, Vice President Cheney had not been advised of Wilson's findings. As for the forged documents, according to the Senate Intelligence Committee Report, the intelligence community didn't acquire them until October 2002, long after Wilson's oral accounting on his trip. According to the "additional views" section of the Senate report (written by Senator Pat Roberts), Wilson had baldly fabricated his alleged disclosure of the forged documents: On at least two occasions [Wilson] admitted that he had no direct knowledge to support some of his claims and that he was drawing on unrelated past experiences or no information. For example, when asked how he knew that the Intelligence Community had rejected the possibility of a Niger-Iraq uranium deal, as he wrote in his book, he told Committee staff that his assertion may have involved "a little literary flair." In a WEEKLY STANDARD article "A Little Literary Flair," Matthew Continetti made another interesting observation: What's puzzling is that at times intelligence officials, quoted on background, also supported Wilson's claims. In a July 9, 2003, Newsday story by Timothy M. Phelps, for example, a "senior intelligence official" agreed with Wilson that his report "was widely disseminated" throughout the Bush administration. This wasn't the case. Last week in a column for the Wall Street Journal, Victoria Toensing questioned whether the CIA's conduct in the Wilson matter was a brilliant covert action against the White House or inept intelligence tradecraft. She asked why Wilson hadn't been required to sign the agency's standard confidentiality agreement regarding his trip and noted that Although Mr. Wilson did not have to write even one word for the agency that sent him on the mission at taxpayer's expense, over a year later he was permitted to tell all about this sensitive assignment in the New York Times. For the rest of us, writing about such an assignment would mean we'd have to bring our proposed op-ed before the CIA's Prepublication Review Board and spend countless hours arguing over every word to be published. Congressional oversight committees should want to know who at the CIA permitted the publication of the article, which, it has been reported, did not jibe with the thrust of Mr. Wilson's oral briefing. For starters, if the piece had been properly vetted at the CIA, someone should have known that the agency never briefed the vice president on the trip, as claimed by Mr. Wilson in his op-ed. LAST WEEK I contacted the CIA public information officer who fields media questions regarding Wilson. I first asked him why the Agency hadn't asked Wilson to sign a confidentiality agreement regarding his trip. He hesitated for a few seconds, then responded: "I don't know." At his suggestion, I followed up with a set of questions by e-mail: <<< (1) Why wasn't Wilson's February 2002 trip to Niger made subject to a confidentiality agreement? (2) Did the Agency contemplate that Wilson would publicly discuss the trip at will upon his return? (3) Did the agency anticipate that if he did so, it would attract attention to the employment of his wife by the agency? (4) Why did the Agency select Wilson for the mission to Niger to check out such an important and sensitive matter given his lack of experience in intelligence or investigation? (5) Was the Agency aware when it selected him for the mission of his hostility to the Bush administration? >>> The CIA responded: <<< Given the ongoing legal process, I don't have anything for you in response to your questions about Ambassador Wilson. >>> JOE WILSON was not, of course, the only CIA-related political opponent of the Bush administration who emerged during the run-up to the 2004 election. In July 2004, the same month that the Times published Wilson's notorious op-ed column, CIA analyst Michael Scheuer published his strange book Imperial Hubris (by "Anonymous"), which attacked American foreign policy related to the war on terrorism. (Scheuer was identified as the "Anonymous" author of the book by the Boston Phoenix even before the book's official publication date.) In the epilogue to the paperback edition, Scheuer stated that he "was never told why the CIA permitted publication." Following publication of the book, the CIA permitted Scheuer "anonymously" to criticize the Bush administration's conduct of the war on terror in media interviews until his criticisms extended beyond the administration to the intelligence community. (Scheuer left the Agency last November--the week after the election.) Last week I also asked the CIA the following questions regarding Scheuer: <<< (1) Has the Agency ever before in its history authorized the publication of a book by a current Agency employee attacking the incumbent administration? (2) Was Scheuer's employment status classified at any time between 1999 and the time he resigned from the Agency? If so, over what period? (3) Can you cite any previous instances in the history of the Agency of currently employed Agency analysts attacking the incumbent administration? >>> The CIA responded: <<< [A]ll CIA employees have prepublication obligations. Beyond the obvious prohibition on releasing classified information, the outside writings and speeches of serving officers must not affect either their ability to do their jobs or the agency's ability to accomplish its mission. Because CIA is not a policy organization, its regulations discourage current employees from speaking or writing publicly on policy issues. In light of that common-sense guidance, the chances are extremely remote--to put it mildly--that a presently serving officer would be allowed to write a book today injecting him or herself into a national policy debate. That is how things stand now. >>> Which raises raises the question: How did things stand before the election last year? AT THE CONCLUSION of Three Days of the Condor, Turner stands face-to-face with Agency contact Higgins outside the offices of the New York Times as Higgins tries to bring Turner in. Turner refuses. Higgins admonishes Turner that he will be tracked down. But Turner isn't scared; he's already told the Times his story. Higgins asks, "How do you know they'll print it?" Turner responds confidently, "They'll print it," and walks off, secure in the knowledge that the story will expose the plot. Wilson too told "it" to the Times, and the Times did indeed print "it." Yet in Joe Wilson's postmodern twist on Three Days of the Condor, "it" appears to be part of the plot itself. Scott Johnson is a contributor to the blog Power Line and a contributing writer to The Daily Standard. weeklystandard.com roberts.senate.gov weeklystandard.com opinionjournal.com

To: Sully- who wrote (6395)	11/8/2005 12:33:18 PM
From: Sully-	Read Replies (33) \| Respond to of 35834

NEW LEAK INVESTIGATION Kathryn Jean Lopez The Corner First and Hastert are reportedly about to open a leak investigation re: those CIA terror-suspect prisons Dana Priest reported on in the Washington Post late last month. Byron asked: <<< The Post's decision to publish the article raises several questions. Is the existence of the prisons classified information? If so, did a government official give that classified information to someone -- a reporter, perhaps -- who was not authorized to receive it, in possible violation of the 1917 Espionage Act? Did that official give other classified information to the paper which does not appear in the article, the disclosure of which might also constitute a violation of the Espionage Act? Should the Department of Justice open a criminal investigation of this matter? Should the president order government officials, including those at the CIA, to sign waivers releasing reporters from any pledges of confidentiality made in the reporting of this story? Should Dana Priest or other journalists be forced by a court to reveal the content of their discussions with confidential sources? In the not-too-distant past, none of these questions would be particularly urgent. Now, in the post-Plame world, they are. >>> More: Byron wrote on it here; corner.nationalreview.com Bill Bennett here. nationalreview.com corner.nationalreview.com