Rove Was On The Grassy Knoll, Update V

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I know I’m coming a bit late to the “new” news about the Plame affair but better late then never.

It appears some of the Grand Poo-Bah Idiots have held a Congressional hearing with all the schizo’s spewing their conspiracy theories:

Washington ? Revisiting the issue that helped spur her ouster from Congress three years ago, Rep. Cynthia Mc?Kinney led a Capitol Hill hearing Friday on whether the Bush administration was involved in the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

The eight-hour hearing, timed to mark the first anniversary of the release of the Sept. 11 commission’s report on the attacks, drew dozens of contrarians and conspiracy theorists who suggest President Bush purposely ignored warnings or may even have had a hand in the attack ? claims participants said the commission ignored.

“The commission’s report was not a rush to judgment, it was a rush to exoneration,” said John Judge, a member of Mc?Kinney’s staff and a representative of a Web site dedicated to raising questions about the Sept. 11 commission’s report.

Lots of problems with this one but the main one being those involved in this sham. What precipitated this hearing is this letter signed by Melvin Goodman, David MacMichael, Ray McGovern, Col. Patrick Lang, and Vince Cannistraro…all outspoken critic’s of Bush and the war. No bias in this letter huh?

The letter just reeks of hypocrisy and partisanship. This letter was just the opening salvo against the White House by the unelected employee’s of the CIA who feel as if they are scapegoats. That they screwed the intelligence up so bad is no matter. They could care less about Plame, this is the start of their battle.

Right Wing Nuthouse has an excellent biography on these so-called non-partisan critic’s: (I’ve pasted selected part from his piece, go read the whole thing)

MELVIN GOODMAN:

But dig a little deeper and what you find is someone who worked in a section of the CIA – Soviet Affairs ? that got it more wrong, more often, with the subsequent effect on policy that was nearly ruinous. When some intelligence reports from that era were declassified in 2001, it was discovered in a 8 year period between 1978 and 1985 the CIA consistently overestimated the nuclear threat the Soviets posed. From 1982 until 1987 CIA estimates regarding Soviet economic strength were also grossly exaggerated. And in the area of Soviet intentions, we were virtually blind thanks to this attitude Mr. Goodman describes in an interview with CNN:

I think, in looking back at the work of the CIA, we?ve seen the exaggeration of the value of clandestine reporting. … I think the Cold War would have evolved no differently whether we were doing clandestine reporting or not?that there were no overwhelming successes with regard to clandestine reporting. You can?t say that about satellite photography, and you can?t say that about signals intelligence. Satellite photography and signals intelligence really gave us a means of understanding what the Soviets were doing with very scarce resources in the way of military deployment.

Mr. Goodman?s love affair with satellites and signals intel is admirable except for one small detail. Both the Senate Intelligence Report on Pre-War Iraq Intelligence and the 9/11 Commission excoriated the CIA for their lack of human intel. These two intelligence failures ? arguably the biggest failures since Pearl Harbor ? along with missing the fall of the Soviet Union, would be puzzling except for this statement by Mr. Goodman that reveals a mindset prevelant at the time in the Soviet Affairs section at CIA about being able to glean Soviet capabilities from satellite and signals intel:

This was extremely valuable material to all American negotiators and policymakers who had any interest in arms control whatsoever. … [I think this] worked to lessen tensions, because it?s given the United States a very good idea, at the highest levels, of what is actually in the Soviet inventory.

This was the basis for the ?war? the CIA waged against the Reagan Administration. To be fair, it was a war that raged across the entire national security establishment; arms control or military build up? There was a suspicion among the William Casey faction at the CIA that people like Mr. Goodman were overstating Soviet nuclear capabilities to push the Administration towards arms control. As we now know, Casey shared President Reagan?s belief that the whole rotten edifice would come crashing down if pushed hard enough.

Guess who was right.

RAY MCGOVERN

To put it bluntly, Ray McGovern is a moonbat.

A 30 year man at CIA, McGovern has gone off the deep end on the Iraq war. Despite not being in the CIA for nearly 15 years, he has taken the hard left talking points on the reasons for going to war with Iraq and run with them.

In an interview with the Atlanta -Journal, McGovern had this to say about the lead up to the war:

A: We?re trying to spread a little truth around. I?ve just been watching very, very closely how intelligence has been abused in the lead up to the Iraq war and, now, after the war. I fear for what this will mean for a very crucial part of our government. If the president can?t turn to the CIA for straight answers, whether he knows it or not, he?s in bad shape. He has nowhere to turn for a straight answer. He can?t expect [Deputy Defense Secretary Paul] Wolfowitz or [Defense Secretary Donald] Rumsfeld to tell him, ?Sorry boss, we didn?t think of A or B or C. We thought it would be a cakewalk.? He?s getting slanted advice from the people running the policy toward Iraq.

Sounds like he?s concerned for the President. Guess again:

Q: Do the American people care that they were misled on Iraq? Does Congress? The press?

A: There?s still a lot of torpor, but there are two new elements now. No. 1: The men and women who are being killed every day in Iraq. No. 2: The fact that no one?- not even the press?- likes to be lied to. I?m an American, and I never thought the president would lie so often and so demonstrably.

Which is it? Is the President being ill served or is he lying through his teeth?

Mr. McGovern also has this to say about Iraq and al Qaeda:

The other main thing, of course, was the alleged tie between Iraq and al-Qaida. CIA analysts spent a year and a half poring through each and every report and found none to be persuasive or reliable. Then [Secretary of State] Colin Powell made his speech to the United Nations on Feb. 5, where he produced some cockamamie evidence suggesting that al-Qaida types were roaming around Iraq with Saddam Hussein. In the period leading up to the war, the president would say that we have to go after Iraq because of 9/11. That is the way that the president played on the trauma of 9/11 to persuade the American people that we couldn?t take a chance on Saddam Hussein.

McGovern is also a founder of the radical group Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIP) whose Op-Ed?s, articles, and interviews have been featured in every far left magazine imaginable and who demanded in a ?Memorandum to the President? that Bush fire VP Cheney.

Yup, two moonbats sitting in a tree.

Then there is Larry Johnson (the author of another letter recently):

“Larry Johnson, a former CIA agent and registered Republican, accused Bush of flip-flopping on his promise to fire anyone at the White House implicated in the leak and said Americans deserved better.

“We deserve people who work in the White House who are committed to protecting classified information, telling the truth to the American people, and living by example to the idea that a country at war with Islamic extremists cannot focus its efforts on attacking other American citizens who simply tried to tell the truth,” Johnson said.”

He claims to be a Republican but has been an outspoken critic of Bush for quite some time, with plenty of venom….he is a partisan hack, plain and simple. Who do you think gave this last Saturday’s radio response to President Bush? Yup, Larry Johnson….no partisanship there huh? Even more interesting is this article he penned a few months before 9/11:

“Judging from news reports and the portrayal of villains in our popular entertainment, Americans are bedeviled by fantasies about terrorism. They seem to believe that terrorism is the greatest threat to the United States and that it is becoming more widespread and lethal. They are likely to think that the United States is the most popular target of terrorists. And they almost certainly have the impression that extremist Islamic groups cause most terrorism.

“None of these beliefs are based in fact. … While terrorism is not vanquished, in a world where thousands of nuclear warheads are still aimed across the continents, terrorism is not the biggest security challenge confronting the United States, and it should not be portrayed that way.”

–Larry C. Johnson, “The Declining Terrorist Threat,” New York Times, July 10, 2001. Johnson, a former CIA officer, was deputy director of the U.S. State Department’s Office of Counterterrorism from 1989 to 1993. A more detailed version of this argument appears here.

Yup, that’s right….he was waaaaay wrong on the terrorist threat before 9/11. Just as it appears most of these people were at the CIA. I think this tells us even more about the direction the CIA was in up to the point when Bush came into office. The wrong direction. This might also tell us where the venom and hatred comes from, these agents and the CIA were told by many that they screwed the pooch so they’re pissed. This Plame non-story comes out and they see a chance to jump on the moonbat bandwagon, to dig the knife in a little more.

These people all have an agenda, just looking at their papertrail with all the articles they have written will prove this to anyone but the blind (or the left).

This is starting to smell alot like some rogue agents in the CIA had a completely idiotic view of world terrorism and was told to change their thinking. Bush puts in Goss who then sweeps the place clean. An excellent analysis of this comes from JunkYard Blog back in Nov:

Two senior CIA agents resigned today, amid tales of internicine warfare gripping the agency. Depending on whom you believe, either President Bush is engaging in a post-election purge of agents and officials he deems personally disloyal, or he is bringing a rogue agency to heel by ridding it of agents who have become cocky freelancers with sinister designs. I go with the latter, as does Sen. John McCain, who used the very phrase above–“rogue agency“–to describe the CIA on Meet the Press this weekend. What follows is this blog’s very speculative read of events surrounding the CIA’s role in the war, both against terrorists and against the Bush administration.

Since the inception of the Iraq war, and really even before, some officials inside some government agency in a position to know secrets and leak them to a hungry press have been working a scheme with two apparent purposes. The first purpose was to oust President Bush by undermining his case for war with Iraq and his handling of Afghanistan (remember all those leaks to Sy Hersch during the early phases of the ground war there? Those leaks didn’t come from DoD). The second purpose was to undermine US intelligence generally and dent our ability to win the larger war–a war that requires the entire intelligence community’s best and brightest to perform at their peak. Which of these purposes was primary and which was secondary is up for grabs.

To be fair to the CIA, the entire agency is not to blame for the leaks and underhanded games. The CIA has performed well on the ground in both Afghanistan and Iraq, where its agents have been on the front lines and played pivotal battlefield roles. The majority of the CIA is in all likelihood composed of hard-working and patriotic officers who only want to do what is right and help America win the war. But within the CIA there is apparently a cabal, scope unknown, acting in a rogue fashion entirely outside the agency’s mission and against stated US government policy. They are the leakers and schemers who have been on a mission to bring down the President.

The dimensions of this cabal need not be very large. It only took a few, maybe as few as a dozen or so, officers to concoct the Joseph Wilson Africa gambit. It only takes one or two officers to leak the right secret–war plans prior to the invasion of Iraq, bleak long-range agency assessments of the war’s progress leaked in the run-up to the election, etc–to the right reporter to make maximum impact. And it only took one officer and a few other officers in the upper echelons to author the “Anonymous” books that castigated Bush admininstration war policy. At most you need a couple dozen officers for these operations, with perhaps one overseeing it all from a strategic point of view. Most if not all of the officers involved will be career types with years of experience. Rookies would not be in positions to pull off the stunts this group has accomplished and be able to keep themselves in position as long as they have.

The Bush White House has in all likelihood known about the cabal for some time, but due to electoral realities was never in a position to act against it until now. This group had created the Joseph Wilson fiasco, and when someone either in the White House or allied to it offered up the feeble but in hindsight reasonable defense of “look, the guy’s wife sent him on that trip,” that group was smart to turn things around so that talk of an independent prosecutor was soon in the air. This group of evidently very experienced officers had leaked creatively and intelligently to create an air of futility in the early Afghan campaign, and then continued to leak with great effect all the up through the election. The Bush White House obviously feared that such a group could always have one more secret to leak at the most advantageous moment and spin it so that it might well decide the election against the President. In chess terms, the cabal had the President in a perpetual state of “check” as long as the election was in the future.

So the President waited, and even with the departure of George Tenet he wisely held his fire. He named Porter Goss, a man with a long record in intelligence and with a long and trusted relationship with the President, to replace Tenet. And I believe the plan to move post-election against the rogue elements within the agency began to take shape then. First, the President just had to win the election.

This is a partisan hackjob and the spotlight WILL begin to shine on these folks….they just don’t understand the power of the blog. The MSM can’t just put a few soundbites of these idiots up anymore without the blogosphere answering back. MacRanger puts it well:

While every pundit (instant and otherwise), are speculating that Fitzgerald is looking at what Rove said and whether or not someone in the agency leaked info, the fact is that no leak occured. No matter what people are saying, Valerie simply doesn’t fit the bill.

I believe, and from what I gather from ears at “the office”, the top of the “tent” is coming off this game, and rather quickly.

The proof of that is the re-emergence of key “ex-CIA ops” hanging around with Democrats and clogging up the airwaves. Why all this “increased activity?”. Simple, The false Plame Leak was a decoy to throw the scent off the real culprits in the story, namely the rogue CIA ops who designed to undermine the War on Terror. Look for even more “leaks” and “ex-op” appearances to come – trust me on that.

He goes on to highlight the importance of Goss:

As noted in this Article from American Thinker, the CIA is undergoing sweaping changes from Peter Goss, housecleaning at Langley:

“Porter Goss’s new broom should also sweep away:

1) personnel who utterly failed to thwart critical technology theft by China during the Clinton years;
2) those who constantly undermine the war on terror;
3) the ones who make a regular habit of dropping media stinkbombs against the White House.
4) Finally, there is the faction that supported Saddam Hussein’s hold on power, as Joe Wilson did.

It could be a bloodbath, and the Permanent Establishment knows it.

Has Fitzgerald come across an even bigger crime perpetrated by this unit in the CIA? Or is he now just after a perjury charge? Who knows….But I have a feeling this is a bit bigger then a perjury investigation now.

And finally, today the WaPo has a article which contain’s the usual amount of conspiracy theories we are familiar with on the left:

Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales said yesterday that he spoke with White House Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr. immediately after learning that the Justice Department had launched a criminal investigation into the leak of a CIA operative’s identity. But Gonzales, who was White House counsel at the time, waited 12 hours before officially notifying the rest of the staff of the inquiry.

In the New York Times yesterday, columnist Frank Rich cited news reports from 2003 that when Gonzales was notified about the investigation on the evening of Monday, Sept. 29, 2003, he waited 12 hours before telling the White House staff about the inquiry. Official notification to staff is meant to quickly alert anyone who may have pertinent records to make sure they are preserved and safeguarded.

Asked on CBS’s “Face the Nation” about the column, Gonzales said the Justice Department had informed his office around 8 p.m. and that White House lawyers said he could wait until the next morning before notifying the staff. He did not say why he called Card.

Yup, there you have it…even tho the Justice Department said he could wait till the morning, the fact that he did is enough to believe CONSPIRACY! They were shredding documents I tell ya.

As JustOneMinute has shown, this inquiry was known quite some time before the official notification:

First, this referral was delivered from Justice to Gonzalez on the evening of Monday, Sept. 29. However, NBC News reported late on Friday, Sept 26 that a criminal referral was imminent, and the Sunday, Sept 28 WaPo front-paged the story that broke this case open.

Inquiring minds have wondered why the Justice Dept waited until the evening of the 28th to tell Gonzalez the obvious, but any criminal conspirators had plenty of warning.

This is getting more interesting as time goes on, but you know what? Rove will still come out of it clean because he didn’t do a damn thing wrong. The lefty CIA agents and their cronies might not make it out so clean tho.

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Rove Was On The Grassy Knoll, Update IV
Rove Was On The Grassy Knoll, Update III
Rove Was On The Grassy Knoll, Update II
Rove Was On The Grassy Knoll, Update
Rove Was On The Grassy Knoll