As I noted yesterday, I believe the many in the mainstream press will, so long as the can manage it, attempt to “do their best to softpeddle some of the upcoming revelations [concerning the CIA leaks]. For instance, we’ll almost certainly see equivocation, red herrings, non sequiturs, and a number of other attempts to minimize the potential damage to the CIA leakers (and, potentially, it seems, US Senators Durbin and Rockefeller) who have been feeding the media […] select state secrets. Similarly, they will work editorially to diminish the story and staunch the bleeding by burying of ledes or providing readers with what they will say is the extra historical “context†needed to understand the story (which will amount to tu quoque, with a lot of talk about conservatives smearing Clinton, [or, as it turns out, Condi Rice as an intelligence leaker, or George Bush’s perfidy] etc.).”
And so far, this has been the case: the NYT, the Wapo, the Chicago Tribune, and others have tried to protect McCarthy and present her as a powerless victim and scapegoat in a Goss / White House power play.
This is to be expected, and it will continue so long as those who have an interest in doing so are able to keep control of the narrative by whatever means available to them—from misdirection to misinformation. But as I also argued yesterday—an argument about which many people expressed (understandable) skepticism and cynicism— “I think it possible that the story will be too big for the press to hold back and minimize after a while,” a point expanded upon by Steven den Beste in a comment at Ace’s site:
The press isn’t monolithic. What’s going to happen is that reporters working for right-leaning publications (e.g. New York Post, Weekly Standard, and blogs) will start looking into this story and will find and publish more elements to it, and publications like the NYT, Wapo, LaTimes will in the end be forced to report them too because otherwise they’ll look like complete idiots.
That was more or less the pattern with the reporting of Rathergate.
The lefty media would like this story to go away, but they don’t have the ability to bury it. But at the same time they won’t help open it up. Instead, they’ll stand on the side wringing their hands and wondering where their power as keepers of the gate went.
The key here—and is a key I perhaps didn’t stress strongly enough in yesterday’s post—is that, at least in the beginning, it is up to those who have an interest in seeing this story receive the attention it deserves not allow an ideological press sympathetic to the anti-war left (and it is possible, too, that some on the right who rely on sources not averse to leaking classified information might come out in defense of, say, Dana Priest) exclusively define and shape the narrative.
To that end, AJ Strata points to a couple of posts from those in the know that counter an already ossifying MSM meme: that Mary McCarthy was simply a mid-level operative and so would have had limited influence over policy—an argument that conveniently ignores the point of “leaking,” which is that the influence is provided by the media’s embrace and promotion of the leak, not necessarily the power of the leaker herself.
But be that as it may.
First, here’s GroupIntel:
Ms. McCarthy was an understudy to, and eventually replaced, Charlie Allen. Allen, who is now head intel officer at DHS is as close to a living legend on the analysis side of the intel house as there is. Charlie don’t work with dummies. She went from line analyst to the NSC, which for you sports fans is akin to the story of Kurt Warner (obscure journeyman, lucky break, superstardom). She worked for, with, or supervised any number of famous ex-IC players whose names have been in the news the last few years. In short: she had pull, she had options, and she had protection.
Unlike the names associated with real or perceived IC fiascos (Tice, Edmonds, Shaffer, etc.) if Ms. McCarthy had a serious, legitimate gripe with what was going on at the CIA, she could have walked down the hall to the IG, she could have had lunch with someone at the FBI or Justice, or she could have made a phone call and been talking to members of Congress. In short she would have suffered almost none of the pain that most whistleblowers normally face.
As far as we know to date she didn’t do any of the things she should have done. What she did was reach out to a reporter and spill the beans on a highly classified intelligence operation. If the Post’s assertion that they didn’t publish all the details provided to them is true, she didn’t just spill beans; she backed a truck full of them up to the door and hit the dump button. I’m sorry, but that is not the action of a professional who has the best interests of the nation and her people at heart.
And here’s ex-intel professional Spook86 at In From the Cold:
You’ll note that many media accounts describe the leaker as an “analyst,†suggesting that she was, at best, a mid-level staffer. That was hardly the case; few analysts make the jump from a regional desk at Langley to the White House. A “National Intelligence Officer†is the equivalent of a four-star general in the military, or a cardinal in the Catholic Church. There are only a handful of NIOs in the intelligence community; they are in charge of intelligence community efforts in a particular area.
As AJ notes:
Any news media article you read that protrays little old Mary as an analyst or a ‘historian’ realize your are probably reading garbage. Either the reporters have no clue what they are reporting on, or they do and want to sell you propaganda.
And while the right side of the blogosphere is now well aware of McCarthy’s party sympathies (her contributions to Kerry and other Democrats has been well documented), the MSM, to this point, has been careful to downplay that part of the story.
Which is why, if we are to get to the point where many members of the mainstream press see the writing on the wall and begin turning on some of their own—a point that steady pressure from the blogosphere, the right-leaning press, talk radio, and Goss (along with the White House and Justice Department) will make inevitable—we need to remain persistent and measured in our analysis and criticisms.
The MSM has been at great pains to gin up scandal against the Bushies—using, in large part, the very leaks that are now under investigation. So they will be hard pressed to ignore the story.
But they can and will attempt to shape it—and it should be our goal to question and problematize their shaping of the story until they can no longer hold back the flood of damaging information and lawbreaking that is almost certainly more widespread than we can prove at this point.
One way to do this is to constantly reiterate applicable law concerning whistleblowing (going to the press is NOT the legal behavior of a protected whistleblower) and the limits placed on the press with regard to publishing state secrets.
(see also, Belmont Club)
”…if Ms. McCarthy had a serious, legitimate gripe with what was going on at the CIA, she could have walked down the hall to the IG”
Considering press reports say she was working in the IG office at the time she was fired, she wouldn’t even have had to walk. And she certainly should have known the proper process for whistleblowing.
Jeff,
Spot on. I think this story has legs, but we need to keep chumming. It’s just like Rathergate; once there is enough blood in the water, the rats will turn on each other.
I wonder if our gal Mary will turn state’s evidence? I wonder whose mug we’d find under that rock? J Effen K? He’s certainly blowing kisses to this point.
The media in general is treating this as a fart in a tornado; nothing material to the story given the administration’s lack of control over its own classified information (because they’re willing to de-classify when it suits them) and/or their pattern of abuses over the past 5 years. To them, Ms. McCarthy’s action is noble, because she leaked a truth that had to get out.
But any infomation that’s classified can be assumed to be true, but leaking it still remains illegal. And to what extent do Americans benefit from this leak? Or the NSA “wiretapping” leak? The express purpose of the leaks seems less to do with informaing the public than embarassing and undermining the administration.
Porter Goss must persist in any crackdown on leakers of classified information. If he doesn’t, Ms. McCarthy’s firing seems as politically motivated as any story the papers publish using that information. I hope McCarthy’s firing is the tip of the iceberg, regardless of how the media cover it. (Side note: isn’t it strange that gov’t employees are being subjected to lie detector tests? Is this SOP in the CIA?)
I’m confused. I thought that the press and the Left believed in prosecuting people for leaks?
Isn’t that their argument in the Plame affair?
The folks at the corner are pushing the story. I hope that, as more comes out about her “rolling over”, that the MSM will start trying to CYA and preempt some of the stuff coming out.
I do believe that whatever is going to come out, will come directly (no leaks). I’ll bet everyone is scared shitless about leaking now.
Brian, actually the rule is :
If it hurts Bush: release it
If it hurts a bush critic: put em in chains
The administration looked for, and has finally found, a hammer.
The essential thing now is that that hammer be used.
They (and the rest of us) must look past this particular mole and focus on the bigger picture.
The democrats in media, along with moles like McCarthy and ignorant traitors like Rockefeller and Durbin, have been running their own little coup from within govt. for the last five years.
The republicans absolutely must use the hammer they now hold to smash this cabal.
If there aren’t half a dozen democrats on trial for this crap by years end, then words like secrecy, treason, and service will no longer mean anything.
Jesus, I hate a traitorous spy more than anything else.
And people like this “are” traitors.
Excellent post, Jeff. Spook86 and AJ are exactly right in their points. Even without knowing who the leaker was anyone with any experience with classified would assume it was someone at that decision-making level. It’s almost always policy shapers or congressmen or their ilk that leak this stuff. They’re the only ones with the political motivation to do it and the political clout to get away with it.
If an actual “analyst” or “historian” leaked something like this he’d get to look forward to spending years locked in a cell with some guy whose idea of safe sex is bashing your teeth out before making you blow him.
John Gibson is pushing the “CIA secret war” against the Bush Administration. Let’s hope this gets more air time.
Hey, where’s Mona to regurgiate Greenwald’s latest steaming pile of crap? I had to go all the way to memeorandum yesterday to find out how that mendacious twit was spinning this story.
Well, I think the first key in the key is this question:
DID ANY SECRET PRISONS REALLY EXIST?
The Captain suggests that they didn’t, and that this whack-a-mole:
Here’s a tidbit from Reuters with denials at the end —
CIA uses secret prisons abroad: report
(Reuters)
Updated: 2005-11-03 07:32
“The CIA has been hiding and interrogating al Qaeda captives at a secret facility in Eastern Europe, part of a covert global prison system that has included sites in eight countries and was set up after the September 11, 2001, attacks, The Washington Post reported on Wednesday.
“The secret network included “several democracies in Eastern Europe” as well as Thailand and Afghanistan, the newspaper reported, but it did not publish the names of the European countries at the request of senior U.S. officials.”
“Russia and Bulgaria immediately denied any facility was there. Thailand also denied it was host to such a facility.”
Sorry jj,
Doesn’t matter one iota whether or not the prisons existed. We’re talking about spying, moles, spilling what the mole BELIEVED to be her country’s secrets for the craven purpose of harming the president politically in order to run her own private foreign policy..
In my mind, that is treason, pure and simple.
And until one of these traitors winds up swinging from a lampost in front of CIA headquarters, any talk of national security is simply “air”.
As to the “detention facilities”, if they existed, what would they be for?
Interrogating prisoners? Bull. Easily done at military bases, where it’s highly unlikely anyone would spill any beans. Locating such a facility in another country, especially a European country, would be tempting fate at the very best. And that answer also presumes the question, i.e. Bush is bad because he hides prisoners, and he hides prisoners because he’s bad—perfectly circular.
Note that nothing like that could possibly be established without the knowledge of the intelligence agencies of the countr[y|ies] in question. The EU couldn’t find any evidence of such. Are their intelligence agencies lying to them? All such agencies? Even the French?
As for “Goss wouldn’t do that because it damages the United States’s reputation”: In 2003 American soldiers mistreated prisoners. That mistreatment was discovered immediately and reported to the proper authorities by another soldier in the same unit. The military investigated the incident, paying all due respect to the Constitutional rights of the suspected malefactors; ultimately charges were filed, trials held, and the malefactors convicted and imprisoned. Moreover the malefactors’ superiors were also investigated and tried, some of them being convicted of wrongdoing and removed from their posts. The whole mess was, after the initial (very real) outrages, an exemplary, even textbook example of how a modern liberal democracy acts when its citizens misbehave—but that’s not how it played in the Press, is it?
Thanks to the likes of the NYT, actus, and the international Left, anything no matter how innocuous can be used to “damage the reputation of the United States.” I’m reminded of the spokesman for Chrysler talking about the Ram pickups. “We’re at 16%,” he said. “It means we can piss off four out of five pickup buyers and still gain market share.”
When Bush first took office, a friend snarked that if George walked across the Potomac the headlines would read “Bush can’t swim”. It ain’t funny any more, but it does leave him and Goss with a wide range of options, since literally nothing they can do won’t “damage the reputation” etc. I’m not totally sure that’s what the MSM intended…
No. The detention facilities did not and do not exist; if they did the Euros would all be crowing, and the detainees would be stars on French television. It was a sting. And, as has been pointed out elsewhere, “entrapment” is not a defense in such cases.
Regards,
Ric
Since McCarthy was no mid-level desk jockey, but someone “equivalent to a 4-star general”, it seems doubtful that she could have been kept in the dark about a sting operation. Keep in mind too that she undoubtedly had friends and ideological fellow-travellers in the CIA, any of whom could have tipped her off if some kind of set-up was going on. I think we can assume that although she may be many things, stupid isn’t one of them.
I am also very skeptical that a sting operation would use false information that, when leaked, would embarrass friendly foreign governments (as this certainly did). I just can’t see doing that, because it is just as damaging as a leak of real secret information would have been.
So it seems to me there are two possibilities:
1) What McCarthy leaked was substantially true, because she was in a position to have reliable information. It is conceivable that she didn’t know every detail, due to compartmentization of information, but unlikely that whatever she leaked had no basis whatsoever in fact.
2) What McCarthy leaked was a total fabrication to embarrass the administration. This seems unlikely to me, since it would eventually also embarrass the friendly reporter (Dana Priest) and newspaper (WaPo) that share McCarthy’s goals of damaging the Bush administration. Hard to completely rule this out, because we know what BDS does to people, but it seems like someone so highly placed would have plenty of real secrets to leak.
This weekend, I think the LeftMedia and Democrats are getting their story straight. After all, usually they are the ones who decide on the timing of these stories, and they can wait until the talking points are ready. The real push-back will probably start next week. I suspect the cue will be when McCarthy or her husband has a press conference or otherwise breaks media silence. The defense needs a visible and suitably indignant victim or surrogate victim before they can start shifting the blame to her evil Kultist persecutors.
When you got nothing, you got nothing to lose
You’re invisible now, you got no secrets to conceal
(Sorry, couldn’t resist)
LD,
Supposition here, as is everywhere else – I think it may well be a combination of the two options you propose. What I understand is that very few people were in the know on this operation – sting or real. If there were in fact prisons (8 to 18 mentioned) there would need to be one hell of a support group to operate them. There would be a ton of people that were “in the know”. That makes me think that these prisons do not exist.
However, there very well could be refueling facilities for CIA flights in some of these countries. We pick up a bad guy and tell him we are sending him to Egypt (or bumfuck) and we fly him around for a day or so, stopping and refueling, and he ends up in Afghanistan somewhere thinking he is in Egypt. Only a couple of people know the whole deal.
“Elephant? What elephant?”
Trackback? What trackback?
”We need to remain persistent and measured”
I have to wonder if Ms. McCarthy was leaking to the press when she was on the NSC during the Clinton administration, considering Clinton’s National Security Council authorized renditions to Egypt and Jordan, according to Bush critic Michael Scheuer.
LagunaDave,
OK. Eight to eighteen “detention” facilities. Call it ten.
Each needs guards 24/7. Three shifts a day, and not even Eastern Europeans will do that without time off for weekends, etc. plus people getting sick, Granny’s funeral twice a year, etc. So each facility needs a minimum of 5, preferably 7 guards. Seventy people. Probaly more like a hundred, realistically.
Each needs cleaning/maintenance, etc. Call it two persons per facility. Twenty people, total 90.
Each needs a supervisor and at least one assistant. If the supervisor is an American, he will need a secretary/factotum; total three people, thirty for all. Up to 120.
Each needs, at a minimum, weekly supplies of food and other consumables. There’s also laundry to consider. This will involve anywhere from three to ten people, call it five on average per facility. We’re up to 170.
According to the story as leaked, the host countries were cooperating. This means, at minimum, that the major intelligence service of each involved country knows and is helping. This will involve at least one liaison person per country, probably more like one per facility (average). 180 folks.
The facility needs electrical power, water, communications services (phone, at minimum), and other services. Again, three or four people at least know it’s there.
So we have almost 200 people who are either directly involved or know the facilities are there. With the firestorm, world-wide, over the story, is it likely that any of those people doesn’t know they can make a mint by dishing out dirt to the Press? Hell, at this point any scumbag with a plausible story could make ten or twenty grand by peddling it to Pinch & Co. Someone with real knowledge could double that or more. Out of 200 folks, all of them unsavory enough to go along with such a scheme in the first place, what’s the chances that absolutely none will rat it out?
Yet we have heard nothing of that kind, and the EU’s investigating committee couldn’t come up with any credible ones despite a considerable period of trying. One of the things that’s become more and more obvious over the last couple of years is that we don’t really have any friends in foreign countries, with the possible exception of the Aussies. That goes double for anyone in the Press or other media. Do you seriously believe all those a.h.es aren’t digging really hard for this? Do you seriously believe that an EU commission chaired by a known leftie just-short-of-moonbat wouldn’t have trumpeted anything even slightly credible from the houstops at 500 MW P.E.P.?
But for a sting what you need is, max, three people in Operations at Langley: a supervisor and a couple of planners. They build files and make regular reports, including reports to the IG’s office, about what they’re doing, just as they would for a normal operation. Helpful, but not necessary, would be at least one person overseas who could send pseudoreports in the dip. bag from time to time. Such things could be faked. The IG can’t be looking over everybody’s shoulder all the time.
As for damaging relations with other countries, sorry, that’s—not quite bullshit, but pretty close. Countries that really are friendly can ask their intelligence services, who will tell them it’s just a media frenzy that will have to be waited out. Countries that put on a friendly face while stabbing us in the back have already damaged the relationship beyond repair. It’s a near zero-cost problem. It also falls well within the parameters of something I have long suspected, which is that Bush from time to time deliberately issues tests to see what other countries’ real attitude is. The WMD thing was, in part, just such a test, and if nothing else it made the French fly their true colors in the open, didn’t it?
No. The more I think about it, the more I think the “sting” hypothesis is what Sir William’s razor sliced through to. It’s actually simpler than the alternative as presented.
Regards,
Ric
If each prison was run by intelligence people from the host countries, there might not have been much of “support group” within the CIA, since the facilities belonged to other people, and were run by other people.
After I posted, it occurred to me that maybe there is a third possibility: McCarty had heard
incomplete and/or inaccurate information about a somewhat different program and either she or the reporter filled in the blanks by extrapolation (which is something both intelligence agents and reporters do a lot of). Possibly she thought that even a fuzzy revelation would eventually force the program into the open.
I don’t think it’s anywhere near “bullshit”.
The democratic countries we are talking about are run by politicians who care about staying in office just like ours do. It seems pretty unlikely to me that the PM of, for instance, Poland, would say: “Sure, tell people we run secret prisons for you on our soil. There will be huge political backlash when people hear about this, and it will be a gift to my own political opponents, but hey, I’m happy to do it for you.” Of course, if we put such a story out without consulting the governments who would have to answer for it, it would be insane.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t see anything wrong if such prisons exist; in fact, they seem like perfectly sensible thing to do. If they are effective at gathering information from captured terrorists, I want to know why we *aren’t* doing it…
Rather than speculation, what do we know?
We know that McCarthy leaked sensitive information to the media.
We know that the EU has failed to find any evidence for the claimed prisons.
The latter could mean they do not exist, that they do not exist exactly as described in Priest’s article, or that they do exist (in some form) but foreign intelligence services are better at keeping their secrets than we are.
We do not have sufficient information to know which is the truth.
If they do exist, it is plausible to suppose that McCarthy knew something about them.
There is even less evidence for the “sting” hypothesis, which raises quite a few puzzling questions:
1) Did the friendly governments agree to cooperate or did we dump our dirty laundry in their basket and tell them to deal with the mess? This does not strike me as the way President Bush treats his friends.
2) It is not clear that McCarthy is even going to be prosecuted. If the goal was simply to dismiss her, surely it could have been done with less collateral damage. And why wait months after the mark takes the bait to spring the trap?
3) If it was a sting, that means the leaked information was false, and we could repair some of the damage by revealing that immediately. What is the point of keeping the sting secret once the trap has been sprung? Law enforcement authorities typically announce this sort of thing, because it has a strong deterrent effect. It would make people thinking of repeating McCarthy’s misdeeds more nervous, and it would make reporters less certain of the reliability of any future leaks.
None of this proves that there wasn’t a sting operation, but all the theory really lacks is a finger pointed at Karl Rove as the evil genius behind the whole thing to make it into a run-of-the-mill tin-foil hat DU conspiracy theory…
2 points for your consideration, L. Dave:
1. The damage to our relations with friendly countries would be if the detention facilities did exist, since the revelation of their existance might be used to enflame Islamists in those nations.
2. Why could the trap only be sprung one time? If the operation is kept isolated and secret, might it not work more like a net, than a wolf trap?
I tuned in to ABC World News Tonight this evening, to see if/how they covered the story. The last piece in the show did cover it, but in the context of “Leaks are as old as the country itself”, going on to cite significant instances where presidents going back to Washington were undermined by leaks of secret info pertaining to the country’s business.
It was couched almost in humorous terms, “Oh, geez, this has been going on for so long. You think THIS was bad, lemme tell you some great anecdotes about how our Founding Fathers played this game”. Interviewees were all smiles, and viewers with no other reference will walk away thinking that McCarthy was part of an old cat-and-mouse game that will never end, and was reminded that Nixon was the real example of governmental criminality (the subtext being “Republicans are the bad ones, folks, and don’t forget it”). And to rub salt in the wound, I just saw Joe Wilson on “60 Midgets” (about how Bush cherry-picks intel).
I feel like I’m watching a national cult in action. Not 72 hours have elapsed in this story, yet the story is being dismantled, diluted, dissolved into nothing. The media’s contempt for their viewers, and the Left’s intellectual dishonesty (Plame=bad; McCarthy=good) are a wonder to observe.
Don’t want to steal too much of Jeff’s bandwidth, but left a link on the Top 9 soup post above this one. Gist of it is, if the story in the Denver Post is any indication, the New York Times is moving on its newswire a substantially different version of the story that was in the print edition today. The story on the wire leaves out the Kerry contribution, every quote dissenting from the Larry Johnson standard, and the fact that she admitted to the leak.
Which leads me to believe the Times doesn’t even want us rubes to know all the information it deems fit to print.
Stranger things have happened. I was sure the Rather “memogate” story was never going to break out.
The blowback from the left and the democrats has already begun. Kerry today said the following,
As well as the downplaying her position as an ‘analyst.’ Not mentioning her ties to Kerry and the democrat party, etc.
Any relatively informed person knows exactly what the democrat’s talking points will be as this contiues to unfold.
There will either be an MSM full court press pushing back, or more likely, silence. Silence coupled with downplaying the stroy at every opportunity, because there are already way too many damning facts. Like Rathergate and the Swifties.
It’s go time.
The object here is the media.
They touted the secret bases—nine or ten maybe mini GITMOs. And they are being run by the same who gave you Abu Ghirab.
Consider the irony. The only proof of the existence of secret prisons was an anonymous source, and that source has proved a boo-boo. Not just an oops, but lots of additional planted information. And now, the chances of any verification of the secret prisons—on the scale reported—are rare.
That the Worst Media in History has spun itself into this corner is something that they need to reminded of.
It’s a talking point: Was it true since your source was not true?
LagunaDave,
You make good points, but I think you place too much credence on the Euroleft media as representatives of their population. Especially in the case of the ex-Soviet possessions, secret prisons are old hat—and a secret prison in which the prisoners are kept warm and fed, not worked to death, and simply interrogated is a wussy, overliberal vacation spot.
And—if you were fishing for McCarthys, what bait would you use?
These are not people who just fell off the turnip truck. They know all about canary traps and similar tricks. They check things. They’re not going to fall for minor variations, and anything small is going to simply become part of the general gaseous diffusion of secrets into the public sphere. If you’re going to get them to come out of their deep holes and splash around in the shallows where you can get to them, you’re going to have to dangle something big, juicy, and wiggling in front of them. Homosexual Ambassadors just ain’t gonna do it.
Anything sufficiently juicy is going to be damaging to somebody, because if it isn’t, it isn’t by definition juicy enough. Mary McCarthy would never have exposed herself by such a blatant move if the matter in question didn’t seem big enough to do real damage. This story seems to me a good compromise—any real damage done to foreign politicians is unfortunate, but as I said I think you overstate it, and it doesn’t really add anything to the general calumny. The only one really hurt is probably Berlusconi, and unfortunate as that is it’s been clear since at least the “kidnapped journalist” bit that the Italian intelligence service is not on our side. Collateral damage is sometimes inevitable.
As I said before—what would secret prisons be for? The “explanations” I’ve seen are all either question-begging, circular, or both. I could buy temporary detention of prisoners in transit, but setting up whole prisons? What the Hell could anybody get out of it that would be anything like worth the expense?
Regards,
Ric
I have a ex-classmate who sends me moveon memos and a father in law that sends me catholic stuff. I dont want to tell the moveon lady to stuff it because I want to know what they are up to. The catholic stuff I just ignore. Point being, I dont forward any of it like I am asked to. If somebody would type up a concise email that highlighted all this stuff in a way that could be understood by the general public, including co-oberating links, I would scour my address book for recipients. I dont know of a better way to “get the word out”.
Found this MoveOn.org movie online at YouTube.
Anyone see this before?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2FgiNq0yBts
From Tim P’s Kerry quote:
John Kerry: Secret prisons = truth. Niger/Yellowcake = lie, because Joey Plame said so, over mint tea. Disregard that British intel stands by the claim.
And this clown still wants to be President?
Vladmir, couldn’t they get Ramsey Clark? Where’s Sandy Burglar?
Since McCarthy was no mid-level desk jockey,………………I think we can assume that although she may be many things, stupid isn’t one of them.
I don’t know LagunaDave, she did bet big money on the Viet Nam hero. The story goes that a single piece of shrapnel ripped through the skin on the back of his hand yet he still had the guts to re-enact his daring rescue of 12 drowning men without fear of some foreign infection. IT BROKE THE SKIN MAN!!!
I’m still waiting for Mary McCarthy’s pictures to be plastered all over the news.
I expect her husband will lead the push-back. She is in an odd position, since she may face prosecution, and it would presumably still be a crime for her to talk openly about essentially anything related to the story she leaked.
LD:
One of your main arguments, it seems, is that such a sting would hurt US relations with allies.
But that depends on how much you’re prepared to sacrifice your relationships, and to what end. It would seem pretty inconceivable that, in a mere political campaign, you would have Justice Ministers comparing one of your largest trading partners and major allies of being headed by a Hitler-like figure. But that happened in the Schroeder reelection campaign a few years ago. Some would argue “freedom fries” hurt our relations with France, one of our oldest allies.
So, “alliance relationships” are frequently sacrificed on the altar of politics. Do you think preserving national security secrets and plugging leaks are more or less important than that?
LD, it is not just our relationship with foreign governments that is at risk with leaks; it is also with foreign agencies.
By leaking information the way the CIA has done in the past, well, forever, it destroys the working relationship of our intelligence agencies with their foreign counterparts. Why give up information that might become compromised within a fortnight and endanger German, French, British, Italian interests? Why torpedo investigations that have been in place for 2-3 years? Why risk that?
And maybe there is some other factor, maybe French or German agencies are also playing hardball? What better way to find out than to leak a story in their backyard?
Personnally, I figure the CIA is incompetent enough to document CIA detention centers that do not exist and incompetent enough to let that information out without stomping on every swinging dick/clit at Langely who might have known: Occam’s Razor, after all. But I would not look for sympathy from people that believe 9-11 was a CIA conspiracy (Germans).
People need to read the news a little more closely. The EU investigators said they could not prove the “secret prison” charges beyond a reasonable doubt and found no evidence of illegal CIA activities. It’s the sloppiness of the media turning that statement into “no evidence” of anything. I doubt gov’t officials talking about the damage done to US relations with foreign intell services (and Goss telling it to Congress) if there was nothing to the story. Rather, there is probably something to it, but no evidence that what the CIA did was illegal. Thus we have McCarthy and Priest blowing an intell op, damaging US relations with allies (esp. intell services) when the activities appear to have been legal. Which may be why McCarthy didn’t report it to herself in the IG’s office.
Keeping this story in the news, despite the strenuous attempts of the usual suspects in the Press should be part of a larger effort to expose the cynical use of leaks to undermine the Bush Administration by Democrat partisans in the Executive Branch with the active collusion of the Press. The reason the Administration is down in the polls has a great deal more to do with the success the Press and their friends in the Democrat Party have had in pressing forward the narrative that Bush “lied”, “misled”, “manipulated”,”cherry-picked” and/or “exaggerated” the nation into War on Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.
The fact is, the New York Times and its cohorts made the cynical and completely unethical decision to play on the ignorance of the American people on how Intelligence is gathered, analyzed and presented to the decision makers in American government, in order to conduct a long running political assassination campaign on President for no other reason than partisanship just before the 2004 elections. Unfortunately, it seems that there are still many members of the White House staff, who resolutely hold on to the idea that there is nothing worthwhile in actively defending the Administration’s use of pre-War Intelligence because it would be “re-litigating” the case for the War on Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. This pose is a hybrid of arrogance, hubris and stupidity. The Bush Administration should never have conceded, through its silence, the WMD argument against Saddam Hussein.
Mendacious MSM boosters like Jay Rosen over at PressThink like to pretend that the justification for the war is no longer a pertinent topic of discussion, even as they work day and night to establish and shore up the narrative that the President deliberately used false Intelligence to send American soldiers to die in Iraq for some nefarious reason or other. Most normal people can differentiate between Bush
“lying”/”misleading”/”manipulating”/”cherry-picking”/”exaggerating”, and operating from honest belief. Most normal people would find no fault with the man who does the latter (especially if target is someone like Saddam Hussein) … which, I guess, is why the American Press is desperate to convince the American people that the President did the former.
But the fact remains that it was the overwhelming consensus of the Intelligence Community that Saddam still maintained stockpiles of WMDs and was running programs to create more. It is right there on the front page of the 2002 NIE on Iraq.
Anyone with any experience in Intelligence matters knows that it is not possible to overstate the importance of this issue of “consensus”.
There are literally hundreds of thousands of pages of information on almost every single nation on Earth at the CIA, DIA, NSA, INR, NRO, etc. On top of those pages of raw Intelligence data are thousands of pages of analysis of that data prepared by the agencies’ analysts. Mali poses no threat to America, but you’d better believe that there is a great deal of paper about that nation at Langley.
Iraq was/is an entirely different kettle of fish. The amount of information on the country must have been massive. It is the analysts’ job to sift through this information, come to conclusions, attach a certain level of confidence to them, and present the finished product to their superiors who futher work on it and present their findings upward till it gets to the President and other decision makers (which includes Senators and Representatives on the Intelligence Committees). At each step, conclusions by the analysts are accepted or rejected.
This is not a science. It involves a huge amount of estimation, extrapolation, reconciliation and consensus-building, using information
already known about the subject/target in question. In other words, the analysts who prepared the 2002 NIE didn’t just use information gathered exclusively from 01/21/2001 but information going all the way back from the 1970s.
Despite what the Press and their allies the Democrats would have the nation believe, there are ALWAYS caveats and dissenting views among the analysts. There are literally thousands of them working in more than a dozen agencies. How can there not be differences of opinion? How can there not be many differences of opinion?
This is why reaching a consensus on what the Intelligence means is so very important. There is not enough time in the world for the President (or anybody else) to read (and follow up) on the monstrous amounts of analysis reports produced at the agencies every single day. So what happens is that the reports are condensed all the way up the chain to the DCI who presents his report (which is the consensus of his analysts) to the President as the definitive word from the Intelligence Community as regards a particular subject.
Tenet described it as a “slam dunk” that Saddam had WMDs. This had been the consensus view since the Reagan Administration (note how many Democrats were fulminating about Saddam’s WMDs in the 1990s up until 2003). Are we honestly expected to believe that the Intelligence Clinton based his decision on to launch Operation Desert Fox had no caveats and dissenting views? Yet did any Democrats (or Republicans for that matter) accuse him of lying when he said Saddam had WMDs? Is anyone so accusing him now?
Is there any plausible reason for Bush, considering Saddam’s history of brutality, obfuscation, lies and deception to have rejected the conclusion reached by the vast majority of the nation’s Intelligence agencies as well as EVERY other nation’s (UK, France, Germany, Israel, Russian, Jordanian, etc.) Intelligence agencies, about Saddam and WMD?
None whatsoever …
What the New York Times and its cohorts have been doing for the past two years is simple enough. They get Leftist partisans at the Intelligence agencies, not to mention the Democrat staff of the Congressional Intelligence Committees, etc. to leak these minority conclusions that had been discarded in the course of preparing Intelligence for upper level consumption and tout them as definitive proof that the “Administration” was “informed” that there were no WMDs, Saddam could never ever consort with terrorists, etc. and therefore the President “lied”, “misled”, “manipulated”,”cherry-picked” and/or “exaggerated” Intelligence to start a war for fun, profit and/or pat on the head from Daddy.
The careful editing of Ben Bradlee:
– The issue is a trusted high level CIA official letting her political ideas drive her to espionage, and lord knows how many others are out there taking a totally indefensible position of putting themselves above the law. Of course the “early†spin the left is trying is the dumbass idea that the President breaks the law when he declassifies material. This is another blatant attempt to confuse the public and try to obfuscate the issue. The President, as a part of his Constitutional duties IS the authority on all things secret, and has that authority to classify or declassify as he sees fit. Thats one of the things he has as his elected power. The left hates that because they can’t lie with immunity like Wilson did without being caught at it when the President releases the truth by declasification. So they lie, get caught, then lie some more. Someone should take the time to tell the Liberal leaders that if you live by the lie, you die by the lie. The end does NOT justify the means in a Democratic Republic. If they continue along these lines they are not going to win elections or the hearts and minds of the public, but they are definately going to suffer the consequences.
– For myself, I shake my head at a party that would sacrifice its own peoples lives so shamelessly for their own arrogant gains. In some respects I feel badly for McCarthy. Shes a victim in some ways, albeit a willing participant, whos long public service has been destroyed by vicious anti-American minds that have used her for their own agendas.
– To those discussing the prisons as a possible part of a sting. No one is infallible. Canary traps can be set up with a subtlety thats almost impossible to detect. In fact the more “cover” and limited the distribution, the more likely they will be taken as truth. As one writer put it, we may never now whether it was in fact a sting, or the other possibilities. Theres nothing to be gained from the agency standpoint by ever making that part of the puzzle public, and every reason, as someone else has pointed out, to let potential “moles” worry the problem.
– In any event, the legs on this story will most probably be defined by future disclosures. Kerrys writers were clever, but not clever enough. At some point in the future he may be called on to explain why hes proud of “espionage”.
No Actus? No trolls? …I think we’re on to something here.
Hows this for a troll.
JG is a moral subhuman degenerate who should have been the dinner for that child-killing freak.
Ok then. The asshats are down to bowel movements of the mouth. Pretty much says it all.
– I was pretty sure that was a loud collectivistic “Aww shit” I heard emminating from over in the Konrads sandbox when this story first broke. Twist slowly in the breeze moon-fuckin-bats.
Why is that? We know people are willing to take risks to fight for justice. Its all part of the game.
Irrelevant, immaterial, and incompetent.
Ah, but to throw the gameboard up in the air while neglecting to reflect on the resultant injustices that she’s no doubt wrought on others?
Some players are “above it all” I suppose.