CIA purge may be underway

Newsday article.

CIA plans to purge its agency

Sources say White House has ordered new chief to eliminate officers who were disloyal to Bush

 

BY KNUT ROYCE

WASHINGTON BUREAU

 

November 14, 2004

 

WASHINGTON -- 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.

 

"The agency is being purged on instructions from the White House," said a former senior CIA official who maintains close ties to both the agency and to the White House. "Goss was given instructions ... to get rid of those soft leakers and liberal Democrats. The CIA is looked on by the White House as a hotbed of liberals and people who have been obstructing the president's agenda."

 

One of the first casualties appears to be Stephen R. Kappes, deputy director of clandestine services, the CIA's most powerful division. The Washington Post reported yesterday that Kappes had tendered his resignation after a confrontation with Goss' chief of staff, Patrick Murray, but at the behest of the White House had agreed to delay his decision till tomorrow.

 

But the former senior CIA official said that the White House "doesn't want Steve Kappes to reconsider his resignation. That might be the spin they put on it, but they want him out." He said the job had already been offered to the former chief of the European Division who retired after a spat with then-CIA Director George Tenet.

 

Another recently retired top CIA official said he was unsure Kappes had "officially resigned, but I do know he was unhappy."

 

Without confirming or denying that the job offer had been made, a CIA spokesman asked Newsday to withhold naming the former officer because of his undercover role over the years. He said he had no comment about Goss' personnel plans, but he added that changes at the top are not unusual when new directors come in.

 

On Friday John E. McLaughlin, a 32-year veteran of the intelligence division who served as acting CIA director before Goss took over, announced that he was retiring. The spokesman said that the retirement had been planned and was unrelated to the Kappes resignation or to other morale problems inside the CIA.

 

It could not be learned yesterday if the White House had identified Kappes, a respected operations officer, as one of the officials "disloyal" to Bush.

 

"The president understands and appreciates the sacrifices made by the members of the intelligence community in the war against terrorism," said a White House official of the report that he was purging the CIA of "disloyal" officials. " . . . The suggestion [that he ordered a purge] is inaccurate."

 

But another former CIA official who retains good contacts within the agency said that Goss and his top aides, who served on his staff when Goss was chairman of the House intelligence committee, believe the agency had relied too much over the years on liaison work with foreign intelligence agencies and had not done enough to develop its own intelligence collection system.

 

"Goss is not a believer in liaison work," said this retired official. But, he said, the CIA's "best intelligence really comes from liaison work. The CIA is simply not going to develop the assets [agents and case officers] that would meet the intelligence requirements."

 

Tensions between the White House and the CIA have been the talk of the town for at least a year, especially as leaks about the mishandling of the Iraq war have dominated front pages.

 

Some of the most damaging leaks came from Michael Scheuer, former head of the CIA's Bin Laden unit, who wrote a book anonymously called "Imperial Hubris" that criticized what he said was the administration's lack of resolve in tracking down the al-Qaida chieftain and the reallocation of intelligence and military manpower from the war on terrorism to the war in Iraq. Scheuer announced Thursday that he was resigning from the agency.

While the article only speculates that a White House-ordered purge of those disloyal to Bush, if it's true, it's damn disturbing. This lends further credence to the notion that the WH had no desire to hear of/consider intelligence they disagreed with during the lead up to the Iraq war. Publicly disagree with us? You're disloyal and out of a job. Although the article fails to speculate on the long term repercussions of such a purge, it seems to lay down the law in terms of what CIA agents can and cannot do due to the possible political effects of their actions.

i can hear the secret police taking away people in the night now!

brutal. scheuer is gonna be on 60minutes tonight. watch.

what's the latest on the plame affair?

Nothing. Still being investigated by a US Atty from Chicago - Fitzgerald, I believe. It's still in the grand jury phase. There's been a lot of noise about the judge holding journalists in contempt (and thus imprisoning them) for their refusal to give up their source(s).

This is the latest I could find on dKos.

If 9/11 never happened I wonder if we would be in this situation.

Got Damned Gestapo!

What's next? Put your political affiliation on your job resumes?

This leak is going to turn into a flood, just watch.

FUCK BUSH!

man this sick, it's seems everyday that passes something more to restrict people happens.

More divisions.

Woohoo, it's the gestapo-ola!

Your country is getting fucked up man. We dont have this sort of bullshit in the UK.

James Wolcott knows what's up:

"To have all the executive, congressional, and judicial branches run by one party, a party determined to bring the intelligence agencies into ideological line--that's fascism in the making, my friends."

http://jameswolcott.com/archives/2004/11/t...e_tidbits_1.php

CIA Director Resume

Name: Yes

Goal: To say Yes.

Education: Yes

Experience: Assistant Yes, 1970-1976

Associate Yes, 1976-1990

Senior Yes, 1990-2004

References: Yes

Raw footage from the Fallujah assault.

I'm posting the link in the Iraq thread, too.

^ I hope she gets fired and has to go to work in the private sector.

MY 'private sector' !!!

Like every single government organization in the world, the CIA is filled with lifeless, self-serving, bureacratic deadwood. They could not find their own asshole with both hands and a flashlight. They exist to feather their own nests, and get a paycheck. The actual work of intelligence gathering is the last thing on their minds.

I suppose there are a few that actually care about the work, but for the most part, no. They want their little sphere of power and influence to remain undisturbed. Along comes Bush. He says "We're going to attack Iraq. Get me the dope on it." The CIA isn't ready, they don't have the information. What they do have doesn't look promising. They say "Mr. President, it's a bad situation, don't do it." Bush says "Fuck that! Bombs away!" The war goes poorly, partially because the CIA is a bunch of incompetent nincompoops and can't find ANYTHING out that the President wants to know. They look like idiots. They say, "We told you so! We told you so!" Bush says, "Which one of you fuckwads leaked that shit to the newspapers?" The CIA guys all point at each other. "Not me! Not me! Not me!" Bush says, "These guys are idiots. Get rid of them. Keep the ones who know how to keep their goddamned mouths shut---they're the CIA, for pete's sake! And I'm the President, they're supposed to do whatever I tell them to do!"

So, because Bush wants to boot out a bunch of careerist dickwads, he's holding a purge? Bullshit. He's the boss, and they fucked him over. Adios, unfortunate spies. "See you down at Burger King, geniuses. Next time, better do whastever the boss tells you to do. And be quiet about it. You're a SPY, remember? Jesus."

the cia fucked bush over?

hahaaaaa!!!!

will this fucking asshole ever be held accountable for anything??

the war went poorly because of the cia?

even after the cia tells bush it is a bad idea, he does it anyway.

now it's going to hell and it's the cia's fault.

hmmm, and i guess it's the troops fault for not finding those wmd's

this fucking illogic makes me want to vomit.

if you know how to read, pick up a book.

"...So then you have to ask, why were they so ill-informed about Iraq? Part of it is ideology. Part of it is a desire to exclude from decision-making the people who really know about Iraq in the United States -- mostly State Department and CIA officials who have been studying the country for decades. Third, they've relied to a large extent on information from Iraqi exiles. In particular, they've relied on the Iraqi National Congress, which has been pushing for a decade for the United States to move against Iraq. Their original theory -- the Iraqi National Congress' theory -- was that the United States could support a military force, a ragtag force of Iraqi National Congress rebels, arm them and send them into Iraq with air cover and they could topple the regime because it was so weak. Now we know if that had happened, they would have been basically been blown off the face of the earth.... "

http://www.motherjones.com/news/qa/2003/04/we_352_01.html

MJ: How much of the information that Rumsfeld and Powell and other administration officials have cited actually came from the INC, do you think? The al-Qaeda link? The weapons of mass destruction claims?

RD: The real issue is that the CIA has been staunchly opposed to the notions that Iraq has working relations with al Qaeda or significant stocks of weapons of mass destruction. And they've basically been opposed to the Iraqi National Congress and its allies because they consider them to be both corrupt and lacking any significant support inside Iraq.

So, at some point in the run-up to this war, Rumsfeld decided he was sick and tired of getting opposing advice from the CIA, which is usually backed up by the State Department. So he set up his own little intelligence shop at the Pentagon, under a guy named Abe Shulsky, who was reporting to Doug Feith, the undersecretary of Defense for Policy. That information was really not new intelligence that they were gathering, because they weren't doing any spying. They were simply reworking information that already existed, and blending in information they were getting from Iraqi exiles who were directly plugged into this neoconservative clique.

The information that this Pentagon unit massaged into phony estimates then found its way into the speeches of Colin Powell and the proclamations of president Bush. And as we moved closer and closer to war, we found out that almost everything they said was either wrong or a lie. The poison factory in Kurdistan didn't exist. The Iraqi attempt to get uranium from Niger was based on forged documents. The aluminum tubes that were supposedly going to be used in a nuclear program were really just rocket tubes. Just go down the list.

I mean, there are a dozen of these claims, all of which got knocked down, one by one, by intelligent people. But it was clear that the only way this kind of stuff could get on the President's desk was because the Defense Department was churning it out.

Now, the very biggest lie was that Saddam Hussein had some sort of working relationship with Osama bin Laden's group. That is really far-fetched in terms of what anyone who knows anything about the Arab world would understand to be true. No one really took it seriously, but the President and Powell started pushing this notion, and it fed into the single biggest reason why the American people are supporting the war -- which is polls show that up to 50 or 60 percent of Americans believe that Saddam Hussein was behind Sept. 11.

This just seems too obvious, but the deal is they didn't give a shit whether it was a bad idea OR NOT. It just did not matter. Bush & Co. had decided to attack Iraq, and that's that. The CIA's job was to find out the information necessary to do it sucessfully.

In a slightly different context, they would have all been sleeping with the fishes for fucking up.

Frankly, I don't believe that Saddam did not have WMD. The motherfucker HAD them all right, but our lame ass intelligence community couldn't CATCH his sorry ass. In the end, it doesn't really matter whether he had them or not. The U.S. took him and his kleptocracy down, and now we are blasting the ever-loving shit out of whatever holdouts are willing to stand and fight. They only thing that's wrong with that is that the government refuses to send enough troops to do the job right. If Bush and Co. had listened to the military, they would have sent two or three times as many troops into Iraq to start with, and we would have overwhelmed them before they could mount any resistance.

Let's see---in Fallujah, we are killing them at a rate of better than ten-to-one. The town is heavily damaged, and will probably require years to rebuild and refurbish. The old Fallujah that the residents knew is gone forever. That's the consequences of tolerating Islamic fundamentalist terrorists in your city. The residents of Fallujah would have been a lot smarter to have arrested or killed the terrorists themselves. I wonder if this object lesson is wasted on the rest of Iraq? I guess next on the list is Mosul. After we flatten the shit out of Mosul, I'm sure there will be another one and another one.

Eventually, we will have killed enough terrorists in enough cities that the government of Iraq can hold the country by themselves. If it were up to me, I would figure out some way to seal the borders against infiltrators. But, of course, I feel the same way about the U.S. The reason we continue to have illegal immigration is because the perceived rewards of illegally infiltrating into the U.S. is greater than the perceived consequences if you get caught. I bet if getting caught infiltrating meant ten years on a chain gang in Arizona or Nevada, we wouldn't have many repeat offenders.

Ditto on drug smugglers. If getting caught meant going to a firing squad, I think the dope smuggling business would dry up. But I guess that would be inhumane, huh? Better that you should be able to buy cocaine in every elementary school in America than we should send narcotics traffickers to the Wall. The reason they won't stop is that they know Americans are pussies and don't really mean it when we pass laws that say "Don't bring dope into our nation." They aren't afraid to do it, because they know the consequences are weak ass.

I bet the 1,800 dead terrorists in Fallujah don't think that.

What do the dead civillians think?

Originally posted by KaBar2@Nov 17 2004, 12:48 PM

The residents of Fallujah would have been a lot smarter to have arrested or killed the terrorists themselves.

Quoted post

Sooooooo easy to say this when the terrorists in question aren't members of your immediate family. I wonder if you'd turn in your brother if he was breaking the law, even if he was fighting against people you don't really want in your neighborhood.

I think that if my brother was doing something that would bring down death and destruction on me and my family, I would pressure him to stop it before he got us all killed, or got Mom's house all shot up by some very annoyed American teenagers in a Light Armored Vehicle.

90% of the locals just want peace and quiet so they can go back to earning a living. If born-again Christian fundamentalists suddenly started big firefights with the police in your neighborhood, don't you think you'd take your Methodist/ Lutheran/ Presbyterian ass on over there and tell them to fucking STOP IT? I would. And if my brother was part of it, I'd ream his ass out good for being so thoughtless and stupid as to provoke the cops.

The terrorists are the bad guys. If the Ku Klux Klan was operating in your neighborhood, shooting it out with the cops, wouldn't you go tell the police where their Klavern was located? And if you didn't, wouldn't that mean that you shared partially in the blame for them continuing to shoot at the police?

The terrorists are either going to stop shooting at Americans, or we are going to go kill them. It's that simple.

if you still believe saddam had wmds than i won't keep arguing with you because you are clearly living in an alternate reality.

actually, the "terrorists" are only bad because they aren't with us.

the rest of the world thinks dubya is a terrorist (and so do i)

we are not going to kill all the terrorists

unless our foreign policy changes they are not going to stop killing americans.

after all the changes since 9/11, as far as i'm concerned, the "terrorists" are winning.

it's nice to think that killing enough people will end the conflict.

that's all dandy unless you consider that THE CONFLICT ITSELF IS CREATING MORE INSURGENCY.

and as far as all this:

Ditto on drug smugglers. If getting caught meant going to a firing squad, I think the dope smuggling business would dry up. But I guess that would be inhumane, huh? Better that you should be able to buy cocaine in every elementary school in America than we should send narcotics traffickers to the Wall. The reason they won't stop is that they know Americans are pussies and don't really mean it when we pass laws that say "Don't bring dope into our nation." They aren't afraid to do it, because they know the consequences are weak ass.

you're a terrorist too, if you think using terror tactics is a smart way to deter crime.

the death penalty didn't stop murder, did it.

Originally posted by KaBar2@Nov 17 2004, 01:48 PM

Frankly, I don't believe that Saddam did not have WMD. The motherfucker HAD them all right, but our lame ass intelligence community couldn't CATCH his sorry ass.

Quoted post

I dunno man, If I were Saddam and The USA invaded my ass and I hade WMDs, I would have launched that shit in one second.

And If I was Saddam I wouldn't have had WMDs to begin with, no way no how, why the hell would I want to give someone a reason to invade me?

I learned from the first gulf war man, I dont stand a chace against the USA, WMDs or no WMDs.

Might as well be a good dog and not have WMDs so I can stay in power (which is what I want).

I mean shit isn't that what all power hungry dictators want? to stay in power?

AMERICA IS AWESOME

At least Kabar used to avoid subjects where he knew he didn't have a leg to stand on. Now he is spreading lies. I guess this is phase 2 of operation Bushworld.

Iraq never had wmd, or connections to alqueda. The fucking 9-11 commission report states that very clearly as well as the senate intelligence commitee report on prewar intelligence on iraq.

Tony Blair is going to an impeachment trial for intelligence lies on iraq. Bush damn well should too.

And yeah we were relying on lies from that international criminal turned traitor Chalabi. Bush was cherry picking intelligence from the CIA and wasn't happy with what they were giving them. Not that they couldn't find WMDs but there ARE no WMDs. Hello? He wanted an excuse to invade iraq. You can't say the CIA wasn't doing their job cause they fucking told Bush, hey man Bin ladens finna hijack some planes and attack us. Bush didn't give a fuck. He's a fucking rancher, not a president.

Ah this shit is sick. I could go on and on of course. I could post links to verify all of this shit. But I really expected you to be more proactive than this. And at least not lie to us. This is a bunch of shit.

kabar's reply doesn't surprise me.

as we've all seen before, he has a

tough time with elementary morality.

"Republican officials acknowledged that the public is likely to learn even less about the inner workings of the war cabinet. They said the selection of Rice will also mean that fewer competing views will be available to a White House that brooks little dissent."

-- The Washington Post ponders one likely effect of Condoleezza Rice's promotion to Secretary of State.

....

Out: Secretary of State Colin Powell, whose political epitaph should now read, "You break it, you own it" for his prescient but unwanted warning to the President on the danger of imperial overreach in Iraq.

Out: Top CIA officials who dared challenge, behind the scenes, the White House's unprecedented exploitation of raw intelligence data in order to sell a war to a Congress and a public hungry for revenge after 9/11.

Out: Veteran CIA counterterrorism expert and Osama bin Laden hunter Michael Scheuer, better known as the best-selling author "Anonymous," whose balanced and devastating critiques of the Iraq war, the CIA and the way President Bush is handling the war on terror have been a welcome counterpoint to the "it's true if we say it's true" idiocy of the White House PR machine.

Meanwhile, incompetence begat by ideological blindness has been rewarded. The neoconservatives who created the ongoing Iraq mess have more than survived the failure of their impossibly rosy scenarios for a peaceful and democratic Iraq under US rule. In fact, despite calls for their resignations--from the former head of the US Central Command, Gen. Anthony Zinni, among others -- the neocon gang is thriving. They have not been held responsible for the "sixteen words" about yellowcake, the rise and fall of Ahmad Chalabi, the Abu Ghraib scandal, the post-invasion looting of Iraq's munitions stores and the disastrous elimination of the Iraqi armed forces. ...

http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20041129&s=scheer1116

I don't see it as a violation of elementary morality when my government decides to attack a murderous, tyrannical, torture-master dictator whose Mafia happens to be occupying a very valuable strategic resource. Saddam was a monster. Maybe he was more tolerable as long as he could be manipulated to do as the U.S. government wanted, but once he became a problem, it's "adios."

I'm kind of surprised at you guys. On the one hand, you say things like "Bush is a rich, greedy, corrupt asshole---I HATE him!" and then you say "Oh, I'm shocked! He gave big contracts to Cheney's buddies in KBR! Oh, what a surprise! He reduced Fallujah to rubble!"

What the heck did you expect? All things considered (since he's a nazi, etc., etc.) I'd say he's being pretty restrained.

Politics is hardball. Naivete is a luxury.

Back when I was an anarchist, in the 1970's, a famous Italian anarchist named Pinero (if I remember correctly) was arrested by the Italian cops and thrown out of a fourth-story window during interrogation. Since it was like a fourth-story window, he was killed. The cops said he jumped, of course. I was outraged, I started ranting and raving when I read it in Black Flag "Those fascist bastards! Murderers! I can't believe it!" An old guy I knew, about 65, who was in the IWW just shook his head.

"What did you expect when you joined the Revolution, kid? Flowers? It's a fucking war, and people get killed. Get used to it, or get out of the fight."

It's tit for tat. I heard later that the Italian anarchists evened the score, for what that's worth. Just more fatherless children, probably.

Originally posted by KaBar2@Nov 19 2004, 02:47 AM

a murderous, tyrannical, torture-master dictator whose Mafia happens to be occupying a very valuable strategic resource.

Quoted post

seriously, are you talking about george w. bush?