Bush to Purge "disloyal elements" in CIA, making it even more political

[JHB]

An article in today's Newsday notes "The White House has ordered the new CIA director, Porter Goss, to purge the agency of officers believed to have been disloyal to President George W. Bush or of leaking damaging information to the media about the conduct of the Iraq war and the hunt for Osama bin Laden, according to knowledgeable sources" (http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/nation/ny-uscia... )

NYTimes columnist David Brooks doesn't seem to think that's a Bad Thing: "If we lived in a primitive age, the ground at Langley would be laid waste and salted, and there would be heads on spikes. As it is, the answer to the C.I.A. insubordination is not just to move a few boxes on the office flow chart." (http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/13/opinion/13brooks.html )

But if Brooks had been paying attention to what has been happening since Bush took office (see, for instance Seymour Hersh http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?031027fa_fact , or Robert Parry http://www.consortiumnews.com/2004/071304.html , http://www.consortiumnews.com/archive/story43.html ) he'd know that the CIA has been undergoing a process of politicization that dates back to Poppy Bush's stint as CIA Director and the "Team B" proto-neocon excercise, proceeded through Reagan's and his presidencies, and has only accellerated under W and his neocon coterie.

Michael Day, in his Day Street blog, sums up the latest phases pretty well:
"Let me summarize two premises here. Brooks says the C.I.A. is "supposed to serve the president and stay out of politics and policy" Hersh says policymakers were dismantling "the existing filtering process that for fifty years had been preventing the policymakers from getting bad information".

So which behavior -- the C.I.A.'s or the Administration's -- is the chicken and which is the egg? Unfortunately, both have pretty badly fouled the nest (Brooks: "White House officials concluded that they could no longer share important arguments and information with intelligence officials") so in one sense it doesn't matter, but I think the evidence pretty clearly shows that the Bush Administration behavior led to the C.I.A. behavior. And, in the meantime our intelligence agency and our policymakers have presented this country with deadly and incompetently managed occupation of Iraq.

But here's the real argument. Brooks, a member of our Glorious Fourth Estate, the Press Corps, that institution which is supposed to keep our policymakers in line, argues that the C.I.A. should shut its cake hole. Hersh, through his reporting in his piece, essentially argues that if the policymakers are going to so richly insist on applying their pre-determined conclusions to the unvetted, "stovepiped" intelligence, the last thing an institution like the C.I.A. should do is stay quiet about it.

I agree with Hersh. In fact, I think the safety and security of the nation depends on guys like Michael Scheuer ("Anonymous", criticized by Brooks in his piece on completely inaccurate grounds) continuing to pipe up when they feel it is their duty as a citizen, if not as a bureaucrat, to do so."
http://daystreet.livejournal.com/2883.html

If Bush is really able to bend the CIA so that they "get with the program" (i.e., HIS program), it marks one more venture into fantasy-based policy that we Democrats must fight to the best of our ability and must clean up once we finally have the chance.

The "good" news is their characterization of the CIA as "as a hotbed of liberals." I really doubt we can make a "McCarthy moment" from this given the state of the media, but we can make this the poster-child of Bush's radicalism. 20 years of conservative bashing have made the Democrats into "the party of fiscal responsibility". Now in just four W has turned us into staunch defenders of the CIA? Any fiction writer would have been tossed out on his ear only five years ago.

[mikehiggins]

1. Gollly Sarge! What a surprise!

A spy network made up of Gomer Pyles.

All our bases belong to Falwell

[H2O Man]

2. Tighten your seatbelts, America

the ride is about to get bumpy.

[Bluzmann57]

3. Something tells me that this could backfire on bushie

The CIA agents are highly trained people and know lots of things. Any disgruntled agent can come out and spill his or her guts out to the press and sooner or later, somebody will listen. Then its bye bye bush.

[tk2kewl]

4. depends how you define purge

purge=dissapear?

[lil-petunia]

6. More importantly, they are trained to plan ahead

Something subtle, that we mere mortals won't ever know.
With all the conspiracies and plots these guys have studied, even planned, I suspect that they can hold their own against these yahoos.

It does tell you that there is a coming battle, one which will pit the neocons and ultra-religious against most of the rest of us. It won't be pretty.

[JHB]

11. Remember Jimmy!

Jimmy Carter made a lot of enemies in the CIA when he fired a lot (400?) after the Church Committee hearings. Most of those looked kindly on Poppy Bush, and gave him a hand during his 1980 primary campaign and then Reagan's presidential campaign. And some of those "hands" may have been pretty shady (everything from the purloined debate briefing book to interfering with the Iranian Embassy Hostage situation). But those were mostly in the Operations side, described by former DEA agent Michael Levine as "frat boys with guns and no honor".

We can only hope something comparable forms up in opposition to *. We already have Ray McGovern and his group of retired intelligence professionals. Sounds like they're about to grow.

[fugue]

12. It wouldn't accomplish anything

How many Watergates has this administration had? The Plame affair, the "Bin Laden Determined to Attack US" memo, 9/11 itself, Abu Ghraib, the Gonzales memo . . . I've lost count. And most of the country doesn't know or doesn't care, as a result of the government's spin machine.

I thought the CIA would spill something in the week before the election, but now I get why they didn't. They knew the fix was in on the election, so turning the electorate against Bush wouldn't do any good. They weren't going to damage their position by revealing something that wouldn't do them any good and might come back to bite them later.

Say what you will about the CIA; the one thing they are is smart.

[Hello_Kitty]

15. That's what I'm hoping. Spill the beans, guys.

And if there are enough of them they'll be hard pressed to portray all of them as 'disgruntled' ex-employees.

[Warpy]

19. They'll have to spill it to the European press

I sincerely doubt they will get published in the US press, which only seems to want to mention the CIA when it suits the Texas Mafia.

[groundpilot]

5. kinda like purging the Jews from Europe aint it??

[whirlygigspin]

10. Joseph Stalin, white courtesy telephone

purging people who aren't gay or Jewish?

what IS the world coming to...!

must be a 'Christian values' thing.

[DBoon]

18. Stalin's purges paved the way for Hitler's invasion

Hitler knew that Stalin had murdered his most talented staff, including military officers, and figured with a weakened leadership, an invasion would work. The lack of military talent made the subsequent fight much bloodier for the Soviets than it would have been otherwise.

Who knows how many terrorist outfits are thinking similarly right now?

[stepnw1f]

7. Hello Journalists?!

This is History if you do not take heed. Your careers are at stake no matter how you look at this!

Stand and be counted...

[iamjoy]

8. We're Not As Brutal As Stalin

at least, that's what this quote made me think:

NYTimes columnist David Brooks doesn't seem to think that's a Bad Thing: "If we lived in a primitive age, the ground at Langley would be laid waste and salted, and there would be heads on spikes. As it is, the answer to the C.I.A. insubordination is not just to move a few boxes on the office flow chart."

So, hey, as long as we just fire or demote "disloyal" people that's still not a bad thing because at least we aren't executing them. Beautiful.

[da_chimperor]

9. Let me be the first to say

WHAT THE FUCK!? How in the hell can chimpy possibly do this! He's ordering a guy who is not qualified for the job of CIA director (as well all know he has admitted, on camera) to conduct an ideological purge of the CIA, similar to what was done by Stalin in the 30's! Except this time they're not going to the gulags. And how is this supposed to make us safer? Just look what the purges did to the red army once Hitler started looking for some Lebensraum. So I guess we're going to get rid of all the highly capable, but 'wrong thinking' agents, and this will make us safer? Oh, I forgot. Bush is out to protect his reputation rather than protecting America. Stupid fucktard. This is such a fucking STUPID idea that I'm about to smash something!

[whirlygigspin]

14. relax, you have nothing to fear if your a 'good Christian'

Hallelujia brother!

Purge them commies!

yihaw!

n.b.(is this not how MadMax started?)

waitin' on the end times brother Ralph,
waitin' on the end times.

[Cocoa]

13. no one gets fired for letting 9/11 happen

or for letting Iraq happen.

But people are getting purged for disloyalty to Bush.

[HysteryDiagnosis]

16. But people are getting purged for disloyalty to Bush.

Some people somewhere should be running around with their collective hairs on fire.... I hope this is the case.

[BJ]

17. Brooks, the effete Easterner who writes of authentic Americans.

So-called "journalists" such as David Brooks should have no credibility in a sane world. Nor should an intelligence gathering agency that tells the king only what the king wants to hear be trusted. This is exactly the kind of crap thinking that got this country sucked into Vietnam.

[Martin Eden]

20. loyal to the United States = disloyal to Bush

The primary duty of the professionals at the CIA is to serve the interests of the country. They do this by providing the president with unbiased intelligence. The Bush administration didn't want unbiased intelligence in their quest to invade Iraq. Bush demanded that CIA Director George Tenet provide the strongest possible case for war and the result was the biased 2002 NIE Report -- which Bush used to persuade Congress to vote for the Iraqi War Resolution.

When WMD didn't materialize in Iraq, the Bush administration dodged responsibility by blaming it on faulty intelligence from the CIA. When ambassador Wilson criticized Bush's false claims in his 2003 SOTU that Iraq tried to purchase uranium from Niger, Bush officials punished him by esposing his wife (Valerie Plame) as a CIA agent -- putting her and her contacts at risk and destroying her operations against the spread of WMD.

The CIA would be remiss in their duties if they took all of this lying down. Rather than criticize the leaks as disloyalty to the president, the media needs to ask why the leaks occurred. Instead, tools like David Brooks spin the issue to help pave the way for the Bush adminstration to purge from the CIA those officers who risked their careers by standing up to an administration whose foreign policy is a disaster for the country.

Bush, Cheney, et al should be impeached for how they politicized and abused our intelligence agencies in their quest for invading Iraq. Instead, they are about to replace unbiased professionals with political operatives, which will enable them and their successors to get the intelligence they demand rather than the intelligence demanded by honest analysis and sound policy.

We are witnessing a major coup in an important agency of our government, and fascism creeping up on our once proud democracy.

21. CIA is a Military-Industrial-Complex

As a liberal let me dispel a few myths about liberalism world politics and the CIA. The first myth that Reagan dismantled the Soviet Union and communism. It was liberals that dismantled communism in the Soviet Union. The world became too dangerous because of Nukes so we decided that the cold war had to stop.

So some thought that if we took way the conservatives reason for having agencies like the CIA and the Military-Industrial-Complex and the A Bomb such as making Russia from a authoritarian country into a democracy that all the sudden the giant nuclear complex would fall.

The second myth that the CIA is not involved in domestic intelligence.

Prior to when we decided to bring liberalism to the Soviet Union and change its name to Russia, the CIA worked for the military-industrial-complex, then and the CIA works for the MIC now.

The CIA used mostly reporters International news agencies and the Peace Corps to send its agents overseas not liberal groups. Liberalism is to powerful overseas for the CIA to control. With no more cold war, the war hawks went domestic. If you think Pacifica Radio and agencies like WBAI are pacifist’s tools for the left your wrong the left media is crawling with spooks from the CIA.

As a liberal some are required to study the culture, history and purpose of a liberalism movement. For example, the CIA used the Unions to manufacture violence in protests so that it could justify a reason for even having agencies like the CIA, so it created a violent left using agencies like Indymedia.

I know they have taken over the left media for the following reasons.

The far right wing is for Palestine rights, liberals have never supported the PLO. Most of the most powerful liberals in America’s history were Jews. Alan Ginsberg and others.

The CIA has never had a liberal employee in all of its 50 or so years of existence.

The liberals have always talked about America really being two Americas, and America for the poor and a America for the rich.

Liberals have always been for the poor not the middle class that make up the membership of Unions. Unions were always for the middle class and not the poor, pro war and not anti-war. Unions have always been anti liberalism,and will always be anti liberalim, and most of the Unions were dismantled in the 70s, so the CIA decided to create and manufacture a left that was in the image of the CIA a left that was violent and that would riot in the streets.

It could do this by taking over the Unions and the left media like Pacifica, and then saying they were for the poor. It was a tool and formula that could only fail because the Unions have no regard for this other poor America so thus they would have no regard for the other poor of the rest of the world that would be harshly treated by the WTO and NAFTA.

The CIA was so focused on the left in America that its other agents like Bin Laden created by Bush Sr. became out of control and turned on the right wing that created the Taliban from the beginning so 9/11 was the result of CIA blowback.

As a liberal I wish I had an answer for everyone a magic formula to help you. But these are difficult times.

[librechik]

22. we need a strong alternative media that will spend all its time

kicking the mainstream whores in the teeth.

When did our overpaid, isolated, never-ate-at-Applebees Fourth Estate become such drooling fatted monarchists???!!!

Oh, I think I just answered my own question.

[Nordic]

23. we need a benefactor who can fund the good CIA guys

so they can let themselves be fired and continue their work.

Ya know?

Give up one paycheck, the one from the CIA, we give 'em a new one, same deal, same work, except now they're going to war against their (and our) enemies in the CIA.

Ah, my fantasy world is a fun place.

[RyomaSakamoto]

24. The Night of the Long Knives

The Night of the Long Knives, in June 1934, saw the wiping out of the SA's leadership and others who had angered Hitler in the recent past in Nazi Germany. After this date, the SS lead by Heinrich Himmler was to become far more powerful in Nazi Germany.

For all the power the Enabling Act gave Hitler, he still felt threatened by some in the Nazi Party. He was also worried that the regular army had not given an oath of allegiance. Hitler knew that the army hierarchy held him in disdain as he was 'only ' a corporal in their eyes. The Night of the Long Knives not only removed the SA leaders but also got Hitler the army's oath that he so needed.

more...
http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/night_of_the_long_...

they HAVE TO get rid of the career people in the intel/military to fully execute their longterm designs.

i don't see how a politically ineffective dem party can stop this when they won't even get into a tissy over the ELECTRICAL VOTE