A chorus of peepings emanating from the interior of the fever swamps of the Left may be heard tonight promising that Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald really will deliver the Xmas present found heading the list in every liberal’s letter to Santa: a grand jury indictment of Karl Rove for obstruction of justice in L’Affaire Plame.

Raw Story is reporting:

Short of a last minute intervention by Rove’s attorney, Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald is expected to ask a grand jury investigating the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson to indict Deputy White House Chief of Staff Karl Rove for making false statements to the FBI and Justice Department investigators in October 2003, lawyers close to the case say.

David R. Mark

Talk Left

Booman Tribune

The Left Coaster

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If I were George W. Bush, I would note that they have all been very bad this year, and I’d transform Fitzgerald’s Xmas gift into coal with a stroke of my pen by pardoning Karl Rove, Scooter Libby, and everyone and anyone connected to the non-existent crime. While, at the same time, I would announce the appointment of a new Special Counsel for the investigation of leaks pertaining to the conduct of the War on Terror, originating from groups of persons both active in, and retired from, the Intelligence Community.

The LA Times is reporting that Alain Chouet, the retired chief of the French counterintelligence service, has, in an interview last week, revealed previously undisclosed exchanges between the U.S. and the French intelligence, demonstrating once again the lengths the Bush Administration was willing to go in ignoring powerful counter-evidence when it brazenly referred to attempts by the Iraqi regime to purchase uranium in Niger. Isn’t it convenient the way this wonderful new French revelation confirms what retired Ambassador Joseph Wilson, and the domestic opponents of the US invasion of Iraq, have been saying all along?

But there are some who have noted the possibility of a connection between Joe Wilson and French Intelligence, and who contend that French Intelligence may have been conducting a disinformation operation against the Bush Administration focussed on the Iraqi Niger uranium purchase for a considerable period of time.

See also Jack Cashill and Fedora and Anchoress

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.

Daniel Henniger in a well-worth reading editorial in today’s WSJ considers the possibilities of the motivations for the MSM’s obsessive coverage of L’Affaire Plame:

Two reasons emerge. The first is if Patrick Fitzgerald indicted Karl Rove for violating this law, Mr. Rove likely would resign and the Bush presidency would be significantly damaged. The alternative explanation is that the press is merely pursuing a possible violation of federal law and any damage to the presidency is therefore the self-inflicted wound of Ms. Plame’s outer. If it is the former, then the conservative paranoia about the press isn’t paranoia. If the latter, then the Beltway press has lost its mind; they are making the practice of journalism more litigious for all the rest of us.

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.

ABC News is reporting that

Current and former CIA officers speaking to ABC News on the condition of confidentiality say the United States scrambled to get all the suspects off European soil before Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice arrived there today. The officers say 11 top al Qaeda suspects have now been moved to a new CIA facility in the North African desert.

The disgrunted intelligence officers even disclosed an actual list of 12 high-value targets allegedly held by the CIA, and ABC is reporting it :

Abu Zubaydah: Held first in Thailand then Poland

Abu Faraj al-Libbi: Held in Poland

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Category link to previous and later related articles.

Left-wing author & journalist Robert Dreyfuss published an attack on Porter Goss a few weeks ago (10/Nov/2005) in the liberal American Prospect , which, nonetheless, supplies excellent backgound (and plenty of insider gossip) on the war inside the CIA:

Exactly as intended, Porter Goss has hit the Central Intelligence Agency like a wrecking ball… Since Goss took over, between 30 and 90 senior CIA officials have made their exit, according to various sources, some fleeing into retirement, others taking refuge as consultants. Others, unable to retire, have stayed, but only to mark time at the agency. Morale, already low after several years during which the CIA was accused of a series of intelligence failures related to September 11 and Iraq’s nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, is now at rock-bottom. The agency’s vaunted Near East Division, in particular, which served as the “pointy end of the spear,” as one CIA veteran put it, in simultaneous wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and the “global war on terror,” has been decimated (sic).

CIA doves were accustomed to looking upon themselves as an enlightened guild of mandarins, the permanent professionals who advised unsophisticated and temporarily-elected executive administrations on the realities of international affairs, of how it really was, and on what was done and not done, old boy. The Bush administration was determined to govern, and the willingness of some of its conservatives to challenge the hegemony of entrenched liberal bureaucracies in the State Department and the CIA was revolutionary. Establishment members of the notoriously liberal CIA mandarinate found themselves being ignored by a bunch of arriviste Republicans, and they were absolutely furious. Like many liberal academics, they had resided for so long in a self-reinforcing community of the like-minded, in which their own viewpoint and prejudices flourished unchallenged, that they firmly believed in their own intellectual superiority and privileged access to objective truth. Unwelcome conservative dissent, particularly dissent arriving from positions of superior authority accompanied by demands for re-evaluations of cherished liberal articles of policy faith were perceived as outside pressure tampering with Agency process :

The partisan, pro-Bush nature of the current regime at the CIA was underlined when Goss issued a widely leaked memorandum telling agency employees to “support the administration and its policies in our work,” adding, “As agency employees we do not identify with, support, or champion opposition to the administration or its policies.”

The import of Goss’ memo to staff was not lost on agency veterans. “The meaning was that from now on, there is only one acceptable view, and that’s the neocon view,” said one. For many it was the final straw, convincing them that there was no hope of salvaging independent analysis.

Goss may have put the final nail in the coffin of an agency whose expertise and analytical skills were cavalierly overridden by a White House obsessed with Saddam Hussein. From 2001 on, its covert operatives and analysts were ignored, pressured, and forced to toe the administration’s line; neoconservative ideologues considered those operatives to be virtually part of the enemy camp. Many of those who remain inside the CIA are distraught, convinced that their work is wasted on an administration that doesn’t want to hear the truth. “How do you think they feel?” asked one recently retired CIA officer with three decades of experience. “They’re watching a ****ing idiotic policy, run by idiots, unfold right before their eyes!”

This outrage at the perceived slighting of professional expertise and interference with analytic process is what has led some very angry CIA officers and analysts to apply their skills and connections as participants in an organized operation aimed at destroying and removing specific adversaries including the Vice President, and at crippling an elected administration.

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Not everyone with a CIA background shares Dreyfuss’ view of the Goss revolution as unmitigated disaster. Melissa Boyle Mahle, a former CIA operations officer and Intelligence author, who has a recently created blog writes:

Goss is doing what George Tenet could not and would not do, shedding the organization of the “old think” that led the Agency into playing it safe in the 1990s. After the Iran-Contra and Ames spying scandals, the Agency lost so much political standing that it began to implode organizationally and philosophically. Afraid to take risks that might offend Washington politicos and European allies after overstepping its legal bounds in the Iran-Contra era, gutted of the clandestine operators who knew how to run secret wars, exhausted from reform whiplash, and demoralized by criticism and poor performance, the CIA simply became unable and unwilling to get down and dirty to do the hard part to fight a real war on terrorism.

The CIA senior leaders today are those who came of age as managers during the 1990s and many unfortunately bring with them the mind-set of caution and political correctness. The culture of the Agency, particularly that of the Directorate of Operations, places a premium on organizational loyalty. The “old boy” network sticks together and resists changes that might alter its collective power and influence. The upheaval at Langley is a direct result of DCI Goss challenging the status quo, breaking some china and hitting the cultural brick wall.

Hat tip to Tom Maguire.

MSM Anti-Bush Administration Intel Operation collaborator Dana Priest, author of the Washington Post’s earlier “secret prisons” CIA leak story, has a new one this morning, based on “new details gleaned from interviews with current and former intelligence and diplomatic officials.”

In other words, leaked by the cabal of disgruntled State Department and Intelligence Community doves, referred to felicitously by William Safire as “a flock of pouting spooks,” who vigorously supported John Kerry in the last election, and who have since been waging an active Intelligence operation seeking to bring down the Bush Administration, whose greatest success, so far, has been achieved in connection with L’Affair Plame by the indictment of one of their key opponents: Vice Presidential Chief of Staff Lewis Libby.

It seems that in May of 2004 the CIA released (those dastards!) a German citizen previously detained for five months, and then had the unmitigated gall to request the German government to cooperate by keeping secret informnation shared in relation to the case. (How dare they!)

Some might consider the release by US authorities to evidence the existence of fair and rational process in the secret US battle against terrorism, of proof that allegations are investigated, and suspects established to be innocent released, but not Dana Priest. To La Priest, the release:

offers a rare study of how pressure on the CIA to apprehend al Qaeda members after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks has led in some instances to detention based on thin or speculative evidence. The case also shows how complicated it can be to correct errors in a system built and operated in secret.

How stupid does Ms. Priest think Washington Post readers are exactly? It would be a lot fairer too, let me suggest, if Priest also operated openly, and told the world just who it is that planted this story, including savory tidbits of inside gossip about “a former Soviet analyst with spiked hair that matched her in-your-face personality who heads the CTC’s al Qaeda unit,” who it is who is recklessly prepared to discredit and compromise US efforts to prevent terrorist attacks on large Western civilian population targets in order to avenge in-house slights, bring down rivals, and gain partisan political advantage.

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Some earlier related posts are linked here.

Mona Charen at TownHall is urging that Congressional oversight committees get to work. She’s perfectly right. There is at least a nominally Republican majority in Congress. The Intelligence Community cabal of doves has successfully gotten a major investigation of its own going on the most slender of pretexts. Why doesn’t this administration start using its congressional allies to defend itself and the national interest instead of standing there like a deer in the headlights? Hat tip to John Hinderaker at Power-Line.

The Dec. 1 edition of The New York Times carried a story about the damage done to U.S. interests by the revelation that the CIA maintains a number of secret interrogation prisons for terrorists in Europe and elsewhere. (“Reports of Secret U.S. Prisons in Europe Draw Ire and Otherwise Red Faces.”) Governments throughout the continent are now demanding explanations from the U.S. Department of State and otherwise strutting their outrage that the U.S. might be kidnapping suspected terrorists from European soil and transferring them to other nations.

How did this bit of classified information become public? It was a leak from within the CIA (to The Washington Post in that case) — and a breathtaking one at that. Though the agency has been steadily leaking damaging stories about the Bush administration since 9/11, it has now crossed a new threshold with a leak that severely damages CIA activities and arguably harms national security — all for the sake of crippling George W. Bush.

Thomas Joscelyn discusses anonymous source spinning of information obtained by the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, a top al Qaeda operative captured in March 2002, into firm evidence of the lack of ties between the Iraqi Baathist regime and al Qaeda. Hat tip to John Hinderaker at Power-Line.

Scott Johnson at Power-Line also is investigating another even more important leak by the ( in Safire’s happy phrase) “pouting spooks” actively participating in the onging Anti-Bush Administration Intelligence Operation, describing secret CIA transports of terrorist prisoners. Richard Miniter, author of Disinformation: 22 Media Myths that Undermine the War on Terror and Shadow War: The Untold Story of How President Bush is Winning the War on Terror and Power-Line readers discuss whether the information of the flights was simply gleaned from public records with the addition of a little trade-craft by retired CIA officers (now part of the VIPS cabal):

(Richard Miniter says:)

It turns out that the movements of the CIA aircraft (and virtually all private aircraft) are a matter of public record. All you need is a tail number and you can usually obtain its movements for the past year.

Even without the tail number, you can pore through the records looking for suspicious movements (DC to Kabul to Baku and back, say). The CIA could ask (as can private parties as well) that its leased planes not have its logs publicly reported, but, whether through incompetence or design, they have not. Also, Grey told me, the incorporation records of Aero and other leasing outfits are publicly available. Here again the CIA was sloppy. Apparently many of the people named in those documents overlapped with people named in corporation’s documents, i.e., Joe Blow shows up as the chief executive of several different aircraft companies simultaneously and a Google search strongly suggests that Blow has a CIA connection. Add in some visits to bars frequented by charter pilots and airplane mechanics’ shops, and you have a large chunk of the story — all without a single (actively-serving) CIA leak.

Readers Rich Cox and P.S. Malloy are skeptical, and Malloy argues the fact that it may have been possible to reverse engineer the story using public information does not mean that the information leaked necessarily was obtained from public sources. There is no reason to feel certain that all participants in anti-Bush intel operations are currently retired. It is known, for instance, that CIA officers not-then-retired were leaking information intended to help discredit the aministration’s case against Iraq before the 2003 invasion.

Miniter has a later response.