The Justice Department charged that John Kiriakou, 47, who worked as a CIA officer from 1990 to 2004, revealed the information to journalists and that one reporter passed some of the secrets onto attorneys representing prisoners at Guantanamo Bay.
Kiriakou worked for Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) as a Senate Foreign Relations Committee investigator from March 2009 to April 2011, according to Senate records.
I’m sure the outrage over this will match the tantrum the media threw for Valerie Plame, yes?
The Washington Post, which never passes up an opportunity to attack Sarah Palin, has gone after her for criticizing President Barack Obama’s “Sputnik” reference in the State of the Union Address. Palin noted accurately that what Obama was calling for was “big government” as the solution to our problems. She further pointed out big government socialistic solutions are what in part did the Soviet empire in. Those comments sent Steve Stromberg at the Washington Post into a hyperbolic fit, declaring that her analysis is “weird.” But his response indicates that he knows as little about the Soviet Union and Sputnik as President Obama’s speechwriters.
Stromberg says that Palin misconstrues Obama’s main point that “the Americans who responded to early Soviet success in space exploration by educating themselves and out-innovating the Soviets.” But Stromberg misses Palin’s larger and more important point about history: Sputnik was really meaningless in the larger scheme of things. It was all hype, and it was basically used by people in Washington to advance their own political agenda. Perhaps Stromberg should have consulted the Post’s own archives before he went after her. As Newsweek (which the Post used to own) wrote on the fiftieth anniversary of Sputnik:
Less than a week after Sputnik began orbiting Earth once every 96 minutes, politicians and the press had spun it into a shocking symbol of Soviet superiority that could soon lead to nukes falling on American cities. But far from being alarmed by Sputnik, newly released archives show, Eisenhower and his military and intelligence advisers welcomed it. The terror triggered by the uninstrumented, 184-pound silvery satellite, roughly the size and shape of a blue-ribbon watermelon and emitting an A-flat beep from its rudimentary radio transmitter, had little basis in reality.
Newsweek goes on: “With Sputnik’s 50th anniversary this week, we’re in danger of getting it wrong yet again, for the supposed lessons of Sputnik are ones we should actually unlearn.” Ouch. Memo to Stromberg: Read some history next time. Memo to President Obama: quit the myth-making.
It seems the activist old media is a lot older than originally thought – they’ve already forgotten one of their favorite stories during the George W. Bush Administration. Anybody remember Valerie Plame?
Ah – Valerie Plame and her hubby Joe Wilson. She was the super-secret covert CIA agent who was “outed” by somebody in the Bush administration. Certainly it had to be Karl Rove, Dick Cheney, or perhaps even Bush himself who must have been pouring over his enemies list and said, “Go get ‘er boys, take ‘er down!” This story had a solid 3-4 year life span and was the main theme at MSNBC during that time. Chris Matthews and that other guy would’ve had nothing else to talk about back then were it not for this horrific scandal that rocked the nation and threatened our safety, if not the very fabric of the Union (no, I am not exaggerating there). There were special reports, special “CIA Leak Investigations,” opens built, dramatic new music cast for the “scandal that rocked the White House.”
In April, I reported that the New York Times was about to publish a list of covert American operatives providing force protection for our troops in Afghanistan. A month later, the Times admitted that it did in fact have the list, but that they did not intend to publish the names. It was the right thing to do and we commended them for it. We are hoping that they will once again exhibit such sound judgment.
From a source inside the Times, I have just been told that the findings of a confidential Department of Defense investigation have been leaked to a specific NYT reporter (whose name I am withholding).
Since March, I have been writing about the ongoing battle between the CIA and the Department of Defense over the DoD’s use of former Special Operations and former CIA personnel to provide force protection for our troops in the Af/Pak theater. The good news is that the CIA and the DoD have decided to bury the hatchet. The bad news is that they are doing so right in the back of one of America’s most dedicated patriots, Michael Furlong.
Until recently, Furlong helped coordinate the DoD’s force protection efforts in Afghanistan. His efforts, as well as those of the brave men and women working within the force protection program he oversaw, have prevented the deaths of incalculable numbers of American troops. It would seem, though, that Furlong and his team were too good at their jobs.
At great personal risk, they were doing what the CIA claimed couldn’t be done. What’s more, they were doing it more efficiently and for far less cost to the American taxpayer. The turf battle that ensued between Langley and the Pentagon quickly found its way onto the front pages of the New York Times where the Central Intelligence Agency drove most of the narrative, including all sorts of accusations. (more…)
Just when you think Wikileaks couldn’t stoop any lower, or the CIA get any worse, this just in from the Washington Post:
A little-known fact, according to a once-secret CIA analysis, is that America has long been an exporter of terrorism. And if that phenomenon were to become a widely-held perception, it could damage relations with foreign allies, the agency analysis said, and dampen their willingness to cooperate in “extrajudicial” activities, such as the rendition and interrogation of terrorist suspects.
That is the conclusion of a three-page classified analysis produced in February by the CIA’s Red Cell, a think tank set up after the 9/11 attacks by then CIA Director George Tenet to provide “out-of-the-box” analyses on “a full range of relevant analytic issues.”
Titled “What if Foreigners See the United States as an ‘Exporter of Terrorism’?” the leaked paper, released Wednesday by the Web site WikiLeaks, cites the example of Pakistani-American David Headley, among others, to make its case that America is a terrorism exporter. This year Headley pleaded guilty to conducting surveillance in support of the 2008 Lashkar-i-Taiba attack in Mumbai, India, that killed more than 160 people. The militant group facilitated his movement between the U.S., Pakistan and India, the agency paper said.
Thanks to all of you, my new novel, Early Warning, is in stores now, as well as on Kindle. It’s the sequel to last year’s thriller, Hostile Intent, which went to No. 1 on Kindle upon its debut, sat high on the the Barnes & Noble mass-market list for months and even managed to sneak onto the New York Times extended bestseller list.
Clearly, something about my protagonist, “Devlin,” resonated with the public, and I hope you find his latest incarnation even more compelling. He’s a hero for our times, a complex man with a mysterious past, part superhero and part everyschmuck, the kind of guy you probably wouldn’t notice on the street but who you most definitely do not want to meet in a dark alley — or, in the case of Early Warning, under the Central Park Reservoir — when he’s got his blood up. As the most secret, and lethal, weapon in the United States’ arsenal, he puts the security in the Central Security Service — which, believe it or not, actually exists.
The themes of this series — there will be at least three more installments — are the very real and manifest security threats that keep our Homeland Security and intel agencies johnnies awake at night. In Hostile Intent, it was a terrorist assault on a middle school in the Midwest and an EMP attack on the east coast; in Early Warning, it’s a Bombay-style assault on Times Square, complete with car bombs, automatic weapons fire and one hell of a subway explosion. And yes, I wrote it all months before the Times Square bomber.
One of the tricks of the thriller-writing business is extrapolating horrific scenarios from known facts, keeping the tale plausible while still observing at least some of the conventions of the genre — even if the story itself may be, if not impossible. not-yet thinkable. One of the greatest of all thrillers, Frederick Forsyth’s The Day of the Jackal, manages to keep us in suspense right to the end, even though we all know that De Gaulle died in bed, not at the hands of an assassin. And of course we all hope that there won’t be an armed attack on Times Square, a school hostage crisis, or something even worse…
We”l be posting a couple of excerpts from Early Warning over at Big Hollywood next week. In the meantime, here’s a Q&A I did for Books-a-Million. I hope it raises more questions than it answers, and that you’ll check out Early Warning for at least some of the solutions: (more…)
The Washington Post has published massive amounts of secret intelligence material in the interests, they say, of improving US national security. The two authors, Dana Priest and William Arkin, complain about a national security enterprise that has grown by leaps and bounds since 9/11. The reveal in detail the firms working for the US intelligence community including their location, contracts, and work subjects, whether border security, cyber-security or counter proliferation.
There are two common explanations for the story. First, it is juicy story. It has lots of secret information. And for two reporters, pursuing a Pulitzer Prize in journalism, well isn’t this what reporters do? The second explanation: their view is that the national security establishment represented by the $75 billion intelligence community and its network of firms, organizations and contractors is not serving the American people, that it is bloated, redundant and need of serious downsizing. But all, mind you, to make our security better.
There may be a third explanation. It may be they think little if any of this intelligence work is necessary. Nearly a decade ago, on October 12, 2002, William Arkin, the co-author of the article, spoke at the Naval War College. One key part of his talk is nearly identical to the thesis of the Post article. He said: “More than 30 billion of our tax dollars each year go towards government generated intelligence information. We had, and have, a CIA and an intelligence community that has a fantastic history of failure, that is mostly blind to what is going on in the world, that seems to know nothing and at the same time is so bombarded and overwhelmed with stimuli from its millions of receptors it can hardly sense what is happening.”
Arkin goes on in his 2002 speech to blame America for the terrorist attacks of 9/11. He says our military prowess forced our adversaries to use attacks against our vulnerable infrastructure, such as airplanes or trains because they could not successfully fight our military. And he says our support for Gulf autocracies and stationing troops there gave cause for the attacks of 9/11. The implied solution is very simple: stop supporting harsh regimes, withdraw our forces from the Gulf and terrorism disappears.
DAVID GREGORY: Our guest today on Meet the Press, CIA Director Leon Panetta. Welcome, sir.
PANETTA: Good Morning, Tim. I heard you’d passed away. Glad you’re back.
GREGORY: Uh, thanks. How do you see the Afghan struggle playing out?
PANETTA: Well, my wife insists on a wall covering, but I prefer a rug, say a Turkestan Kunduz in the Persian style. We may need a mediator.
GREGORY: Sir, would you embed journalists in CIA special ops teams?
PANETTA: I resent that question, Tim. I’m a happily married man.
GREGORY: Sorry. Do you employ Muslims at Langley, sir?
PANETTA: I do, Tim. I chose muslin with cheery Wide Ruffles® for my office windows. I also ordered muslin backdrops for videographic contrast in our interrogation rooms.
GREGORY: The ”ticking time bomb” scenario, sir. You capture a terrorist after he’s hidden a nuke in New York. Now what? (more…)
Last week,at the Truman Presidential Library in Independence, Mo., a conference on the Korean War saw the CIA release of a large volume of long-classified documents. One of them led to this revelation:
Declassified Documents Show CIA Blunders in Korean War
The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency committed two major blunders during the Korean War by underestimating the threat of a North Korean invasion of South Korea and failing to predict the intervention of Chinese communist troops until a day before it happened. . . . The revelations are contained in a set of CIA documents that were declassified on Wednesday, including a report entitled “Two Strategic Intelligence Mistakes in Korea, 1950,” which reviews the mistakes.
According to the report, a [CIA] paper dated on June 19, six days before the Korea War broke out, noted that “while [North Korea] could take control of parts of the South, it probably did not have the capability to destroy the South Korean government without Soviet or Chinese assistance,” adding “This belief caused them to ignore warnings of [North Korea’s] military buildup and mobilization near the border, clearly the ‘force protection’ intelligence that should have been most alerting to military minds.”
The CIA had been monitoring China’s moves from the start of the war, but even after the balance tipped in favor of South Korea with the success of [MacArthur’s] Inchon landing operation that choked off the communist advance, it saw no signs of Chinese intervention. On Oct. 12, it reported, “While full-scale Chinese Communist intervention in Korea must be regarded as a continuing possibility, a consideration of all known factors leads to the conclusion that such action is not probable in 1950” . . . But on the following day, 30,000 Chinese troops poured across the Duman (or Tumen) River followed by 150,000 more soldiers a few days later, leading to a full-blown battle with allied forces.
Pretty enormous mistakes, considering that the North Korean and Chinese offensives required mobilization and movement to launch-points of large military forces opposite RoK and U.S. units, something not easy for intelligence collection to miss in a tinder-box environment like the Korean peninsula at the time. (more…)
Mullah Abdul Salam Hanafi, a former senior member of the Taliban and governor of central Urozgan Province under the Taliban regime, is quoted as saying:
Pakistani security forces are harboring the fugitive Taliban leader, Mullah Omar in Karachi.
As the tempo of Omar stories increases, so does the pressure on Pakistan and its Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI), as well as the Obama administration and the CIA to deal with the Omar issue.
More than a week since a New York Times story on the Obama-approved program to assassinate U.S. citizens named as terrorists, Keith Olbermann still has not condemned that program. One reader correctly observed that Olbermann reported on the story in early April but, inexplicably, without commentary or expressing an opinion and, instead, he gave a commendably fair and balanced presentation almost worthy of broadcast on Fox News. As Glenn Greenwald noted at Salon:
What’s most striking to me about all of this is that — as I noted yesterday (and as Olbermann stressed) — George Bush’s decision merely to eavesdrop on American citizens without oversight, or to detain without due process Americans such as Jose Padilla and Yaser Hamdi, provoked years of vehement, vocal and intense complaints from Democrats and progressives. All of that was disparaged as Bush claiming the powers of a King, a vicious attack on the Constitution, a violation of Our Values, the trampling on the Rule of Law. Yet here you have Barack Obama not merely eavesdropping on or detaining Americans without oversight, but ordering them killed with no oversight and no due process of any kind. And the reaction among leading Democrats and progressives is largely non-existent, which is why Olbermann’s extensive coverage of it is important. Just imagine what the reaction would have been among progressive editorial pages, liberal opinion-makers and Democratic politicians if this story had been about George Bush and Dick Cheney targeting American citizens for due-process-free and oversight-less CIA assassinations.
And back then, as he did with Bush, Olbermann castigated Obama as a fascist; a criminal committing impeachable offenses. Oh, wait. I’m sorry. No, he didn’t. (more…)
The Power Line blog has a post this morning on a surprising honest review in the Washington Post of the new book, Necessary Secrets. From the Power Line post:
The review is by Leonard Downie, Jr., who was the Post’s executive editor until 2008. Downie is obviously uneasy with Schoenfeld’s view that editors and reporters at the New York Times should be prosecuted and imprisoned for revealing two of the Bush administration’s antiterrorism programs – the warrantless intercept program for monitoring calls to the U.S. by foreign terrorists and the program though which the international financial transactions of terrorists were secretly tracked.
The exposure of these programs by the fearless reporters and editors at the Times unquestionably contributed to the prolonged detention of its reporter, David Rohde, because we lost the tools for finding to a kidnap victim in the tribal areas of Pakistan. For that very reason the Times was forced to find “outside the box” options to try and gain Rohde’s freedom and apparently one of those options involved hiring civilian contractors who had contacts and access into the denied areas of the North West Frontier. Here is a quote from the first story the Times published on the subject: (more…)
Over a month ago, I warned that the New York Times was about to go public with a list of American operatives covertly working in Afghanistan and Pakistan providing Force Protection for our troops. Yesterday, in a front page article the New York Times admitted that it did in fact have said list in their possession.
The Times is withholding some information about the contractor network, including some of the names of agents working in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
I believe in giving credit where credit is due. For not releasing those names, I commend the New York Times. Even more heartening is the fact that it appears that the Times is warming to what I have dubbed, the “Petreaus Perspective.” It is General Petraeus’s unique view of the battlespace melded with a combination of traditional military and outside-the-box approaches to securing victory in Afghanistan. In short, General Petraeus appreciates that there is a lot more to winning against al-Qaeda and the Taliban than just bombs and bullets.
In that spirit, General Petraeus signed off on a new program in January of 2009. It comprised former Central Intelligence Agency employees and former Special Operations personnel willing to risk their lives in Afghanistan and Pakistan in order to secure intelligence that could protect the lives of American and Coalition troops. (more…)
Through key intelligence sources in Afghanistan and Pakistan, I have just learned that reclusive Taliban leader and top Osama bin Laden ally, Mullah Omar has been taken into custody.
According to the State Department’s Rewards for Justice Program there is a bounty of up to $10 million on Omar for sheltering Osama bin-Laden and his al-Qaeda network in the years prior to the September 11 attacks as well as the period during and immediately thereafter.
At the end of March, US Military Intelligence was informed by US operatives working in the Af/Pak theater on behalf of the D.O.D. that Omar had been detained by Pakistani authorities. One would assume that this would be passed up the chain and that the Secretary of Defense would have been alerted immediately. From what I am hearing, that may not have been the case.
When this explosive information was quietly confirmed to United States Intelligence ten days ago by Pakistani authorities, it appeared to take the Defense Department by surprise. No one, though, is going to be more surprised than Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. It seems even with confirmation from the Pakistanis themselves, she was never brought up to speed.
Since I began blogging about the dysfunctional, bloated bureaucracy at the Central Intelligence Agency, I have been inundated with phone calls and emails encouraging me to keep it up. Not surprisingly, many of them are from people fed up with the culture at Langley who have moved on to greener pastures.
What has been surprising, though, is the number of people within the Agency itself who have been quietly reaching out to me. As I have taken pains to point out in the past and will do so here again, it is important for everyone to realize that there are exceptional men and women working at the Central Intelligence Agency. Unfortunately, they are being very poorly led and very poorly managed.
On Wednesday, April 14, the CIA’s Deputy Director, Stephen Kappes announced his retirement. The New York Times ran a softball piece on him the next day, but it was Kenneth R. Timmerman of the Washington Times on Sunday, April 18 who drove home many of the real problems surrounding Kappes.
The CIA quietly announced the “resignation” of its deputy director on Wednesday, accompanied by all the accolades normally reserved for a top government official forced to resign in disgrace.
There were many reasons why Stephen R. Kappes needed to resign at age 60, five years before the agency’s mandatory retirement age. Even the CIA’s Greek chorus at The Washington Post and the New York Times have acknowledged that this mandarin had no clothes.
In his piece, Timmerman cited Kappes’s “long record of failure as an operations chief,” how he “played politics with intelligence,” and how he had taken the CIA out of the spy business and transformed it into a “liaison service” by outsourcing the recruitment of agents and clandestine intelligence sources (once the Agency’s bread and butter) to other “friendly” intelligence services. One can’t help but ask – what good is a spy agency that doesn’t even do its own spying? (more…)
Hard to know what to make of this piece by Eliott C. McLaughlin — except, of course, that it pretty much sums up the state of journalistic thinking in the MSM these days, which includes a reflexive disdain for constitutional principles it disagrees with while trying to be “fair and balanced.”
Experts: Angry rhetoric protected, but can be disturbing
Here’s how it begins:
Letting disgruntled citizens vent is important to national security, experts say, but some messages emanating from angry Americans in recent weeks have pressed the boundaries of free speech.
Important to national security? Free speech is important for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is that, since John Milton’s Areopagiticaessay, it has been the basis of all the liberties of modern democracy. And what, exactly, are the “boundaries of free speech” in a society whose Constitution states, in the First Amendment, that “Congress shall make no law.. abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press…”
Politicians have reported slurs as well as threatening letters and phone calls. Congressmen have reported vandalism to their offices. One said he was spit on. Another said his brother’s gas line was cut after a Tea Party member posted his address online.
Tea Party leaders denounce the threats and deny involvement, pointing to fringe elements — not Tea Party members, per se, but groups with degrees of overlapping ideologies.
But the angry rhetoric is not isolated to fringe groups. Both mainstream liberal and conservative camps have joined the chorus, and while some of the language sounds threatening, most of it is protected.
***UPDATE: As expected, Politico's Dylan Byers uses Martin's suspension to once again admonish CNN for not "punishing" (his word) Erick Erickson and Dana Loesch. Fascistic GLAAD wins another scalp. Over the years, CNN's Roland Martin has said some awfully outrageous stuff about Republicans and the Tea...
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