VIPS-hunter extraordinary Clarice Feldman is on the job at American Thinker identifying the connections between the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) organization and Russ Tice:

Tice is a member of a group formed in August 2004 called National Security Whistleblowers. Here’s their website.

But if you look at the NSW group you may notice that the founder, director and chief spokesperson of the group is Sibel Edmunds. She has faced a real uphill battle in her struggle with the FBI, which dismissed her. And her story about why she was fired from the FBI has a number of variations, although she, like Wilson/Plame, numbers among the darlings of the Bushitler crowd.

Then look at the group’s list of members. Along with more familiar names like Daniel Ellsburg, you’ll see Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer on the list. You’ll also find Ray McGovern and Larry Johnson. These are members of VIPS, the group that encouraged intelligence agents to leak, shopped Wilson and his story (Johnson was in the agency with Plame and is close to her.) As I noted earlier here, they seem to have been behind much of the Plame/Wilson story. I smell the same public relations/media campaign .The same phony claims of maltreated government employees. If Tice was a source for Risen, and it’s not clear he was, the reporter was certainly casting a broad net. For as Mr. Gertz notes in his article:

“Mr. Tice said yesterday that he was not part of the intercept program.”

The only significant difference between the original Plame/Wilson scandal and the revival at NSA is that the same folks who moaned about a major intelligence breach that had to be punished when Valerie Wilson’s desk job at the CIA hit print are now openly supporting a leaker and claiming he is entitled to protections — even though he hasn’t gone through the channels established by law.

Rick Moran at RWNH agrees with the hypothesis I lean to myself: that Tice is the spook who had the information, and who could be persuaded by the VIPers managing the Anti-Bush Intel Operation to leak the NSA story to the New York Times. I would also suppose that the letters from Tice to the Congressional Intelligence Committees in the news today were a key part of their plan, intended to get him off the prosecutorial hook by offering the not-very-subtle hint that he is entitled to be immunized as a “whistleblower” to Congress, disclosing Watergate-style Executive Branch crimes, not a deservedly discharged stalker seeking personal revenge on his former agency, even at the price of damaging National Security.

Clarice Feldman, in her latest, is experiencing schadenfreude at the plight of the New York Times.

Patrick Godfrey thinks the administration’s months of passivity in the face of countless opposition leaks and attacks might really be Karl Rove’s most diabolical maneuver yet:

As a long time Boxing fan and as a student of the Sweet Science, it was thrilling to watch Muhammad Ali in his prime and in particular, his patented “Rope a Dope” strategy. In the later rounds, when his opponent was particularly aggressive, Ali would back against the ropes and cover up his head and mid-section as his opponent would unleash a barrage of punches. Many of those punches would be absorbed by his arms and gloves, but occasionally some would get through. He would take some punishment as his foe would be a blur of activity, the blows coming nearly non-stop as it appeared Ali might be in trouble, on the ropes and covering up, not fighting back. His opponent would be feeling good, seemingly scoring at will, his punches hitting a man on the ropes. Eventually however, even the best conditioned fighter would become arm weary, and take a step back to rest.

This would be the moment Ali was waiting for.

Ali would come off the ropes swinging, his rested arms pounding his worn out opponent. Sure, he was on the ropes and took a few shots, but it was all part of a strategy. Once his opponent had spent himself, Ali would go in for the knockout. Now Politics isn’t Boxing and care must be taken to avoid specious analogies. That being said let me point out some things.

Like you, I have been worrying and wondering what has been going on at the RNC.

For months, I have listened to a constant refrain of; Bush Lied, Quagmires, imagined scandals and that “He doesn’t have a plan”.

I would read, with a growing sense of anxiety, daily updates of doom and gloom. Rising Troop losses, one sided reporting. A defensive posture and Bunker-like mentality was the order of the day.

Seemingly prodded by Maverick House Members and its increasingly alarmed base, the White House is finally firing back. Along with this new offence have come rising poll numbers which, lets face it, were approaching Carter-Like numbers.

It has puzzled me for a long time, why hasn’t the White House fired back on this stuff? Some of it was so easy to refute it was almost a “gimme” for the other side. A quick trip back to the Front Pages of only 2 years ago would have been enough for some of the more egregious whining.

Then it struck me, could this all be on purpose?

Today’s latest Washington Post leak, brought to you again by Dana Priest, confidante of choice to Pouting Spooks everywhere, amusingly fails to provide a definition for GST, the super-secret program which is the topic of the leak du jour.

The effort President Bush authorized shortly after Sept. 11, 2001, to fight al Qaeda has grown into the largest CIA covert action program since the height of the Cold War, expanding in size and ambition despite a growing outcry at home and abroad over its clandestine tactics, according to former and current intelligence officials and congressional and administration sources.

The broad-based effort, known within the agency by the initials GST, is compartmentalized into dozens of highly classified individual programs, details of which are known mainly to those directly involved.

GST includes programs allowing the CIA to capture al Qaeda suspects with help from foreign intelligence services, to maintain secret prisons abroad, to use interrogation techniques that some lawyers say violate international treaties, and to maintain a fleet of aircraft to move detainees around the globe. Other compartments within GST give the CIA enhanced ability to mine international financial records and eavesdrop on suspects anywhere in the world.

The bed-wetting segment of the Blogosphere is, as usual, shocked and outraged at further revelations of US inhumane treatment of terrorist latrunculi, the contemporary equivalent of the pirates, brigands, and outlaws, traditionally viewed in Western law, and conventionally treated by any lawful authority as hostes humani generis, “the common enemies of mankind.”

And they are fascinated by the riddle of the meaning of the mysterious initials.

Typical examples:

American conventional leftie profmarcus posts: bonus question: what does gst stand for…?

Sopping-wet Brit blogger WIIIAI complains the WaPo refers to this program as GST, but its crack reporters failed to crack the riddle of just what that might stand for.

Since the WaPo let them all down, I will suggest: “General Staff—Terrorism” or “General Services—Terrorism,” as opposed to “Get Serious (about) Terrorism,” as the language behind the initials, and note the interesting facet of the story, that for the first time in a very long while, one of our anonymous sources is behaving as if he thinks he might possibly have something to worry about if his disclosures proceeded too far beyond some particular point.

Bush Administration critic Michael Scheuer, author of Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror, appeared in an interview yesterday with Die Zeit , which revealed the origin under the Clinton Administration of several controversial US methods of fighting Terrorism. AFP English report here:

BERLIN (AFP) – The CIA’s controversial “rendition” program to have terror suspects captured and questioned on foreign soil was launched under US president Bill Clinton, a former US counterterrorism agent told a German newspaper.

Michael Scheuer, a 22-year veteran of the CIA who resigned from the agency in 2004, told Thursday’s issue of the newsweekly Die Zeit that the US administration had been looking in the mid-1990s for a way to combat the terrorist threat and circumvent the cumbersome US legal system.

“President Clinton, his national security advisor Sandy Berger and his terrorism advisor Richard Clark ordered the CIA in the autumn of 1995 to destroy Al-Qaeda,” Scheuer said, in comments published in German.

“We asked the president what we should do with the people we capture. Clinton said ‘That’s up to you’.”

Scheuer, who headed the CIA unit that tracked Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden from 1996 to 1999, said that he developed and led the “renditions” program, which he said included moving prisoners without due legal process to countries without strict human rights protections.

“In Cairo, people are not treated like they are in Milwaukee. The Clinton administration asked us if we believed that the prisoners were being treated in accordance with local law. And we answered, yes, we’re fairly sure.”

At the time, he said, the CIA did not arrest or imprison anyone itself.

Hat tip to Franco Aleman, who cited Davids Medienkritik. What do you suppose the Left is going to say now?

Send the subpoena to Dana Priest at the Washington Post.

The effort President Bush authorized shortly after Sept. 11, 2001, to fight al Qaeda has grown into the largest CIA covert action program since the height of the Cold War, expanding in size and ambition despite a growing outcry at home and abroad over its clandestine tactics, according to former and current intelligence officials and congressional and administration sources.

The broad-based effort, known within the agency by the initials GST, is compartmentalized into dozens of highly classified individual programs, details of which are known mainly to those directly involved.

GST includes programs allowing the CIA to capture al Qaeda suspects with help from foreign intelligence services, to maintain secret prisons abroad, to use interrogation techniques that some lawyers say violate international treaties, and to maintain a fleet of aircraft to move detainees around the globe. Other compartments within GST give the CIA enhanced ability to mine international financial records and eavesdrop on suspects anywhere in the world.

Add to the list of those indicted for conspiracy to jeopardize national security:

“In the past, presidents set up buffers to distance themselves from covert action,” said A. John Radsan, assistant general counsel at the CIA from 2002 to 2004. “But this president, who is breaking down the boundaries between covert action and conventional war, seems to relish the secret findings and the dirty details of operations.”

And be sure to nail to the barn door, as well, the hide of the:

former CIA officer [who] said the agency “lost its way” after Sept. 11, rarely refusing or questioning an administration request. The unorthodox measures “have got to be flushed out of the system,” the former officer said. “That’s how it works in this country.”

Jack Kelly quotes the Anchoress, who describes a recent conversation with a neighbor at the supermarket on democrat partisanship and MSM coverage of the NSA Flap. The Democrats and the press seem to have lost all seriousness and all credibility regarding national security, ” says the Anchoress , to which her neighbor (a democrat) responds:

“Oh, you said a mouthful, kid! I’m so disgusted with my party I’m thinking of sittin’ out the next election, because these people have lost any sense of what their jobs are; they seem to think they were put into office to destroy Bush, and that is all that motivates them – it’s all they can think about, and they seem to think this is what they were charged with, when we put them in office. Hello? I didn’t freaking vote for Schumer to shove his face into every camera, promote himself and play obstruction games when we have a war to fight. I did not vote for Hillary so she could sit around waiting for opinion polls to tell her what to do before she runs for president, and you know what, if she doesn’t mean to be a senator then she shouldn’t be running for the seat in ‘06! Let her step aside, and be honest for once, and start her freakin’ presidential campaign, already, and let a serious legislator run for her seat – her office is rude and unresponsive, anyway – she’s useless! At least you call Schumer’s office, they are respectful – if you look for help, they actually respond, even if they don’t do anything, they send a freakin’ letter letting you know they know you’re alive and they need your vote again. Hillary’s office? They can’t be bothered with anyone! And don’t get me started on this Patriot Act nonsense! When I saw Reid saying they killed it I flipped out! I FREAKIN’ FLIPPED OUT! FOUR YEARS and we haven’t been attacked – what are Reid or Schumer or Hillary gonna say if they let the Patriot Act die and six months from now we’re attacked? They’re gonna blame Bush? Of course, they are, but they’re gonna have a hell of a time convincing the country that Bush is responsible for an attack when THEY were the ones who dropped the Patriot Act! And this FISA baloney is just that: BALONEY! I want to know whose (sic) leaking this crap! We had a big investigation on that stupid Valerie Plame deal, and who was she – she’s a nobody at a desk at Langley – we have two freakin’ years of investigations on that stupid issue, and it’s all probably Tim Russert’s doing, anyway – end it, already – let’s investigate who’s freaking LEAKING real national secrets! Whose leaking the CIA work? Whose leaking the surveillance? That’s what we need to know! THAT’S what we should be investigating, and if we find out who did it, we arrest the scum and throw him in jail, I don’t care who he is! I read that Jonathan Alter piece and I wanted to vomit, I wanted to puke my guts up! You know why? Because I remember something that maybe Alter has forgotten, that when 9/11 happened, Bush said he’d use ‘every tool’ at his disposal, and we all applauded that! Remember? We all said, THANK FREAKIN’ GOD this man is in charge, and he clearly means this! I haven’t forgotten it. I haven’t forgotten what downtown NYC smelled like for weeks after the attack. I haven’t forgotten the big freakin’ hole in the city. I haven’t forgotten what it felt like to look at a plane taking off from the airport, and me worrying that it was going to be blown up before my eyes from some freakin’ crazed assh*le with a bomb in his shoe, or someone on the ground with a surface-to-air missile – I HAVE NOT FORGOTTEN - and I’m getting damned fed up with my party leadership that seems to have forgotten, and I’ll tell you what, they had better start REMEMBERING, real soon, or they’re gonna find their asses tossed OUT, come November if they don’t get with the program! And don’t even get me started with the papers, I cancelled the freakin’ papers – I’m fed up with all of them! What do I need the papers for, so I can read how everything bad that happens in the whole world is Bush’s fault? I can predict what they’re gonna write! Now, I want news, I go look at the internet, I turn on C-span and watch things for myself! I’m an educated woman, and I can think for myself, I don’t need newspapers if they’re not gonna gimmee news!”

What if they gave a scandal and nobody came? asks one of Roger L. Simon’s commenters.

Posted by: chuck at December 24, 2005 05:07 PM
————————————————————————————————————————
The New York Times’ James Bamford cheerfully tells us all about “the most secret operation in the entire intelligence network, complete with its own code word – which itself is secret,” and in the omniscient manner of journalists everywhere proceeds to evaluate the ultra-secret NSA’s current operations as “struggling to adjust to the war on terror.”

Jokingly referred to as “No Such Agency,” the N.S.A. was created in absolute secrecy in 1952 by President Harry S. Truman. Today, it is the largest intelligence agency. It is also the most important, providing far more insight on foreign countries than the C.I.A. and other spy organizations.

But the agency is still struggling to adjust to the war on terror, in which its job is not to monitor states, but individuals or small cells hidden all over the world. To accomplish this, the N.S.A. has developed ever more sophisticated technology that mines vast amounts of data. But this technology may be of limited use abroad. And at home, it increases pressure on the agency to bypass civil liberties and skirt formal legal channels of criminal investigation. Originally created to spy on foreign adversaries, the N.S.A. was never supposed to be turned inward.

Bamford naturally understands NSA’s mission better than its own leadership, or that of the elected administration. And he understands better too the limitations of data mining:

Today, instead of eavesdropping on an enormous country that was always chattering and never moved, the N.S.A. is trying to find small numbers of individuals who operate in closed cells, seldom communicate electronically (and when they do, use untraceable calling cards or disposable cellphones) and are constantly traveling from country to country… “Know how many international calls are made out of Afghanistan on a given day? Thousands.”

Ignoring these insurmountable obstacles, Bamford scolds, the Bush Administration heedlessly proceeded to engage in automated data-mining, which he refers to as “eavesdropping.” Impersonal and automated monitoring of international communications searching for keywords, he thinks, should be out-of-bounds. US intelligence and defense agencies should be forced to investigate only on an individual basis, filling out the proper pile of paper work, and going to court, presenting a case, and obtaining an individual warrant. Such practices push the boundaries of the law, and might lead to tyranny.
————————————————————————————————————————
The Washington Post’s Susan Spaulding editorializes indignantly that the Bush Administration went right ahead, and covertly conducted an impersonal and automated search for potential terrorist communications in such secrecy “that Congress was [only] briefed ‘at least a dozen times’ in the four years since the wiretap program started.”

Presumably, the president should have funded an international advertising campaign to notify everyone what he was plannng to do, then conducted a full-scale national political debate before proceeding with a secret intelligence operation in time of war:

Even assuming that these classified briefings accurately conveyed all relevant facts, it appears that they were limited to only eight of the 535 senators and representatives, under a process that effectively eliminates the possibility of any careful oversight.

EXCLUSIVE: Nuclear Monitoring of Muslims Done Without Search Warrants

In search of a terrorist nuclear bomb, the federal government since 9/11 has run a far-reaching, top secret program to monitor radiation levels at over a hundred Muslim sites in the Washington, D.C., area, including mosques, homes, businesses, and warehouses, plus similar sites in at least five other cities, U.S. News has learned. In numerous cases, the monitoring required investigators to go on to the property under surveillance, although no search warrants or court orders were ever obtained, according to those with knowledge of the program. Some participants were threatened with loss of their jobs when they questioned the legality of the operation, according to these accounts.

Federal officials familiar with the program maintain that warrants are unneeded for the kind of radiation sampling the operation entails, but some legal scholars disagree.

Another spy scandal and Bush will be at 60%.

Clarice Feldman is reporting in The American Thinker on the developments in the Pouting & Leaking Spooks affair. She is of the opinion that the tables are soon to be turned:

Liberal fantasies of Karl Rove being frog-marched in handcuffs for leaking classified information may turn into a nightmare of prominent liberals being prosecuted for damaging the fight against al Qaeda via leaks of classified data. There are no names on the public record yet, but somebody leaked the classified information about NSA surveillance to James Risen of the New York Times, and a year later his paper published the story.

The pieces falling in place are far from conclusive, but they are mighty suggestive.

President Bush believes that the national interest has been harmed. In all probability, gears are turning right now for a criminal investigation leading to a possible felony prosecution. Others are noting, as AT did last Sunday, that at the demand of the left itself, precedents have been set that could ensnare not “evil Republicans,” but “virtuous liberals” who think of themselves as whistleblowers. As the old saying goes, “Be careful what you wish for.”

She links Jack Kelley who notes that L’Affaire Plame has already established the precedent of throwing reporters in the slam until they divulge their sources.

And she refers us to a very interesting theory proposed by AJ Strata, and continued here suggesting that activist liberal FISA Judge Robertson didn’t really resign after all, that he was suspended for a participatory role in the NYT leak leading to the current NSA Flap.

Max Boot writing in the LA Times notes the left’s hypocritical double standard on leaking. Robert Novak’s mention of Valerie Plame’s employment has been treated in every MSM outlet, and throughout the leftwing Blogosphere, as the gravest intelligence-related crime in US history since Benedict Arnold tried selling West Point to the British. On the other hand, an endless succession of intelligence leaks far more damaging to US interests, emanating from the anti-Bush administration conspiracy of pouting spooks not only never receives the slightest criticism, but instead, in each and every case, the revelation is promoted as a government scandal revealed by crusading journalists, assisted by righteously distressed officials, whose identities must be kept secret.

IT SEEMS like only yesterday that every high-minded politician, pundit and professional activist was in high dudgeon about the threat posed to national security by the revelation that Valerie Plame was a spook. For daring to reveal a CIA operative’s name — in wartime, no less! — they wanted someone frog-marched out of the White House in handcuffs, preferably headed for the gallows.

Since then there have been some considerably more serious security breaches. Major media organs have broken news about secret prisons run by the CIA, the interrogation techniques employed therein, and the use of “renditions” to capture suspects, right down to the tail numbers of covert CIA aircraft. They have also reported on a secret National Security Agency program to monitor calls and e-mails from people in the U.S. to suspected terrorists abroad, and about the Pentagon’s Counterintelligence Field Activity designed to protect military bases worldwide.

Most of these are highly classified programs whose revelation could provide real aid to our enemies — far more aid than revealing the name of a CIA officer who worked more or less openly at Langley, Va. We don’t know what damage the latest leaks may have done, but we do know that past leaks about U.S. successes in tracking cellphones led Al Qaeda leaders to shun those devices.

So I eagerly await the righteous indignation from the Plame Platoon about the spilling of secrets in wartime and its impassioned calls for an independent counsel to prosecute the leakers. And wait … And wait …

Hat tip to Scott Johnson at Power Line.

The Pouting Spooks unleashed today their latest salvo against the Bush Administration. This intelligence leak concerned the National Security Agency, was released via the NY Times, and featured a civil liberties scare story. The leak was carefully timed to compete for attention with headlines of the election in Iraq, and to assist Senate opponents in preventing a vote on the renewal of the Patriot Act.

The Times informed its readers breathlessly that:

Months after the Sept. 11 attacks, President Bush secretly authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans and others inside the United States to search for evidence of terrorist activity without the court-approved warrants ordinarily required for domestic spying.

And then went on to source the story:

Nearly a dozen current and former officials, who were granted anonymity because of the classified nature of the program, discussed it with reporters for The New York Times because of their concerns about the operation’s legality and oversight.

Oh sure, they’re so anonymous. The pouting spooks behind this leak, and all the others, are a collection of Intelligence community and State Department doves, operating above-ground as Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS, which ought to be Vipers), mentioned here previously:

Ray McGovern, in a 2004 interview with the leftwing journal Mother Jones, stated that VIPS was organized in January of 2003.

We established our group, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, in January of last year. Before that several of us had been writing op-eds, and we had been giving each other sanity checks, because the conclusions we were coming up with were pretty far out — that the President and the Secretary of State were lying through their teeth.

According to McGovern, VIPS, at the time of the interview (March 2004), had 35 members consisting of retired and resigned officials from the FBI, Defense Intelligence, NSA, Army Intelligence, and the State Department, and also boasted of the existence of active members of the intelligence community working with VIPS, but “not as members.”

Earlier Posts

NY Times promises of anonymity have already been demonstrated to be valueless in the face of criminal investigations, specifically as the result of the efforts of the same pouting spooks to criminalize policy differences. It seems inevitable that sooner or later the Administration is going to get tired of passively serving as a punching bag for an endless series orchestrated media attacks, and will decide what’s sauce for the goose is also sauce for the gander, and begin prosecuting obvious breaches of federal law. The federal prison system is large enough to accomodate 35+ Vipers.

Scott Johnson of Power Line quotes a Jack Kelly column in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette which lists notable CIA failures:

it missed the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Islamic revolution in Iran, the warning signs of 9/11 and Saddam’s WMDs—
and then turns to the most spectacular failure of the Agency: its failure to stop, or punish, some Agency officers’ more-recent activities:

“The CIA’s war against the Bush administration is one of the great untold stories of the past three years,” wrote lawyer and Web logger John Hinderaker in The Weekly Standard.

The CIA has used its budget to fund criticism of the Bush administration by former Democratic officeholders, and permitted a serving analyst, Michael Scheuer, to publish and promote a book bashing the president.

The principal CIA weapon has been the leak. Reporters for ABC, The New York Times and The Washington Post didn’t have to do even the minimal legwork Mr. Laurin did to out the CIA’s clandestine “rendition” program. It was handed to them by “current and former intelligence officials.”

“So the CIA established policies that it knew would be controversial and would damage American interests if revealed, and then leaked the existence of those policies to The Washington Post for the purpose of damaging the Bush administration,” Mr. Hinderaker wrote.

A rogue CIA that subverts American democracy has long been a staple of moonbat mythology. How ironic that the rogues in the CIA should turn out to be leftists who harm America to benefit Democrats.

Kelly then refers to a conclusion reached by others:

In the 1990s, the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan proposed abolishing the CIA. That seemed far out then. It doesn’t seem so far out now. It might be easier to start from scratch than to clean up the mess the CIA has become.

“The CIA is in deep crisis,” Mr. Hinderaker said. “It is not at all clear that its survival is in the national interest.”

But the problem is even more extensive. The pouting spooks’ war against the Bush Administration has been being waged simultaneously openly and covertly, since at least the beginning of 2003, when the public announcement of the organization of Veterans Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) occurred. As we have previously reported:

Ray McGovern, in an interview with Mother Jones, stated that VIPS was organized in January of 2003.

We established our group, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, in January of last year. Before that several of us had been writing op-eds, and we had been giving each other sanity checks, because the conclusions we were coming up with were pretty far out — that the President and the Secretary of State were lying through their teeth.

According to McGovern, VIPS, at the time of the interview (March 2004), had 35 members consisting of retired and resigned officials from the FBI, Defense Intelligence, NSA, Army Intelligence, and the State Department, and also boasted of the existence of active members of the intelligence community working with VIPS, but “not as members.”

The recent leak involving CIA terrorist renditions to Poland was supplied to the press by Marc Garlasco, currently an analyst with the Soros-funded Human Rights Watch, but formerly a Defense Intelligence Agency officer, who resigned shortly after the beginning of the Iraq War.

A closer look at yesterday’s news story suggests ties between a humanitarian organization funded by vehemently-anti-Bush billionaire George Soros and the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity group, the early Iraq War era public face of the pouting spooks managing the Anti-Bush Administration Intelligence campaign.

Yesterday’s Intel leak alleging that Poland was the principal site of secret CIA detentions was provided by the Soros-funded Human Rights Watch:

Marc Garlasco, a senior military analyst with the rights organization, told Poland’s Gazeta Wyborcza that Human Rights Watch had documents corroborating its case about Poland, and showing Romania was a transit point for moving prisoners.

“Poland was the main base of interrogating prisoners and Romania was more of a hub,” Garlasco told the newspaper in an interview in Geneva, Switzerland. “This is what our sources from the CIA tell us and what is shown from the documents we gathered.”

In an interview with The Washington Post on November 11, 2003, Soros said that removing Bush from office was the “central focus of my life” and “a matter of life and death” for which he would willingly sacrifice his entire fortune.

In a November 5, 2004 NPR interview asserting unacceptable levels of civilian casualties produced by US military operations in Iraq, Human Rights Watch spokesman, Marc Garlasco described his background:

MARC GARLASCO: Right before I took my job at Human Rights Watch, I was the chief of high value targeting working out of the Pentagon, and was pretty heavily involved in the war in Iraq. I think the most aim points I had going down in any one night was about 411 weapons. On the 11th of April of 2003, I left. I, I worked my last air strike. And so I’m intimately familiar with targeting and how bombs actually meet their targets.

Baghdad fell April 9th. Garlasco had been a civilian intelligence officer working in the Defense Intelligence Agency.

Ray McGovern, in an interview with Moonbat journal Mother Jones, states that VIPS was organized in January of 2003.

We established our group, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, in January of last year. Before that several of us had been writing op-eds, and we had been giving each other sanity checks, because the conclusions we were coming up with were pretty far out — that the President and the Secretary of State were lying through their teeth.

According to McGovern, VIPS, at the time of the interview (March 2004), had 35 members consisting of retired and resigned officials from the FBI, Defense Intelligence, NSA, Army Intelligence, and the State Department, and also boasted of the existence of active members of the intelligence community working with VIPS, but “not as members.”

Reference 1

Reference 2

Rick Moran is critical of the CIA.

How many times can one agency be so wrong about so many things while at the same time selectively leaking classified data in order to put themselves in the best possible light and engage in partisan back stabbing?

The list of events and trends that the CIA has failed to either alert the government to or analyzed incorrectly in their capacity as the nation’s foreign watch dogs is astonishing. Over the past quarter century, they have proven themselves to be not just inept but also foolish, arrogant, corrupt, and incompetent as the forces of history and the machinations of evil men escaped their myopic gaze resulting in the injury and death of thousands of United States citizens. Their mistakes have also cost the US in the arena of diplomacy as faulty — sometimes ludicrous — analysis regarding both our friends and enemies has placed our diplomats and negotiators on unsound footing.

Those pouting spooks and their MSM friends have, in the opinion of this writer, gone too far this time. They’ve gotten carried away by breathing in too much of the oxygen-deprived atmosphere of high-mindedness prevailing within their rarified liberal elite circles, and have lost all touch with reality, specifically the reality of what normal people are going to think of all the recent “Gotcha! You are sooo mean to the poor widdle terrorists” stories.

ABC news informs the world, sternly wagging its finger under the nose of the Bush Administration, that though the wounded-in-capture

Abu Zubaydah was given proper care… Once healthy, he was slapped, grabbed, made to stand long hours in a cold cell, and finally handcuffed and strapped feet up to a water board until after 0.31 seconds he begged for mercy and began to cooperate.

Can you imagine? Not only grabbed, but actually slapped! And then the poor lamb had his face immersed in water for a soul-shattering 31 seconds before this brave soldier of the Prophet crumbled and began singing like a canary.

Face it, gentlemen. Abu Zubaydah was not really some bird-watching tourist erroneously scooped up in a random police sweep. He was a very major figure in Al Qaeda, its chief of military operations and its chief recruiter. Infoplease says:

Zayn al-Abidin Muhammed Husayn Abu Zubaydah is a Palestinian long believed to be one of Osama bin Laden’s top lieutenants. Experts think Abu Zubaydah became al-Qaeda’s chief of military operations after Muhammed Atef was killed in a U.S. bombing raid on Afghanistan in Nov. 2001. Early in 2002, intelligence experts said Abu Zubaydah was reorganizing the far-flung remnants of the al-Qaeda network to plan further terrorist actions. He is suspected of helping plan a wave of incidents that was to have taken place after Sept. 11, 2001, including attacks on the American embassies in Paris and Sarajevo.

Abu Zubaydah has a long history of involvement with al-Qaeda. In 1999, a Jordanian military court sentenced Abu Zubaydah in absentia to death for plotting to attack tourist sites in Jordan around the millennium.

Abu Zubaydah also organized terrorist attacks on the millennium celebrations in the Los Angeles in Dec. 1999, according Ahmed Ressam, an Algerian convicted of involvement in that plan. During his trial Ressam also said Abu Zubaydah directed Afghan terrorist camps and recruitment for al-Qaeda. Ressam indicated that Abu Zubaydah told him to obtain Canadian passports so others could carry out attacks against the U.S.

There is reason to believe that grabbing Mr. Zubaydah, shaking him, and giving him a good slap, may very well have saved a great many innocent American lives by thwarting a project he had been working on in his spare time, involving the detonation of a dirty bomb somewhere in the United States:

AP 11 Jun 2002:

Jose Padilla, the alleged American al-Qaida operative, became a protege of top Osama bin Laden lieutenant Abu Zubaydah late last year, even as the war on terrorism raged around them in Afghanistan, U.S. officials said.

But Abu Zubaydah fell into U.S. hands in late March, before Padilla could carry out any attacks, officials said. The prisoner became one of several sources of information that led U.S. authorities to Padilla.

While left-wing members of the urban chattering classes may get their knickers in a twist over “secret renditions” and the occasional grabbing and slapping of terrorist fanatics plotting mass-murder attacks on innocent people, ordinary normal Americans are only too well aware that they themselves might just one day happen to be the very same innocent people targeted by these monsters for cruel and untimely death. Most Americans do not live in the same privileged dreamworld as our liberal elite, and consequently do not subscribe to the same kind of ultra-scrupulous moral philosophies dictating that one must love thine enemy and get him an ACLU attorney. Most Americans really wouldn’t mind one tiny bit, if rough men charged with protecting their lives found it desirable to chop the likes of Mr. Zubaydah into a fine minced pate, and proceeded to serve him on toast, if that is what it took to keep innocent people at home safe from Mr. Zubaydah’s friends’ murderous plots.

My guess is that the great majority of Americans are not going to like this kind of leaking, and they are not going to like the leakers or the MSM which irrresponsibly publishes information jeopardizing this country’s efforts in the War on Terror, and that the cries of indignation drawn from the American public by the publication of this improperly disclosed intelligence information, are not going to be cries demanding the heads of leading figures in the Bush Administration or that of the fellow who gave Mr. Zubaydah a good slap. What the American public is really going to want are the heads of the pouting-spook leakers and those of the reporters assisting them.