Actual quotes from this new CIA recruitment ad:

"I am a woman of color"

"I am a cisgender millennial"

"I have been diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder"

"I am intersectional"

I think it's safe to say the contemporary American left has failed.pic.twitter.com/ruUzWSeIur

— Aisha Ahmad (@aishaismad) May 2, 2021

Saw an essay last night, by a Critical Theorist at the Sorbonne, arguing Wokeness is the result of the CIA learning postmodernism and pushing it into academia so the left would look stupid and be discredited so that the right wing could do more capitalist imperialism.
😅😅😂

— James Lindsay, toxic scholar (@ConceptualJames) June 30, 2020

No guarantees of veracity on this one.

I don’t normally post single-sourced “news items” totally lacking in corroboration, but in this case a Facebook correspondent claims that more information on all this is coming tomorrow, so I decided to link the video. We’ll see.

Remember the Anti-Bush Intel Operation that got Scooter Libby (who had nothing to do with the object of the investigation) convicted of perjury?

Donald Trump is still six weeks away from his inauguration and the same CIA is going after him with cooked-up reports casting doubt on the legitimacy of his election.

Well, here’s a test for Trump. George W. Bush say there, for eight years, as a punching bag for the pouting spooks, never lifting a finger to challenge their authority to undermine his presidency, attack his foreign policy, and ruin the lives and careers of his officials. What is Trump going to do?

I’d say that Donald Trump ought to find and appoint a really ruthless, hard-as-nails special prosecutor and investigator to go back over the events of the entire Valerie Plame Affair, find out and expose who sent Joe Wilson to Niger so that he could write his NY Times editorial, and then who turned Bob Novak’s identification of Valerie’s CIA position into a federal case to be used to bring down Bush Administration officials. He should have them found, prosecuted, and punished.

But Trump should not stop there.

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Ex-Spook Charles McCarry identifies why the CIA needs to be abolished in his 1992 espionage thriller Second Sight.

A description of the Agency’s earlier days:

The Outfit had no headquarters. Its employees, whose numbers cost, and true identities were kept secret from everyone except the O.G. (“the Old Gentleman,” the head of the Outfit), were scattered around Washington in gimcrack temporary government buildings left over the First World War, or in offices with the names of fictitious organizations painted on the doors, or in private houses in discreet residential neighborhoods. This milieu, in which daring undertakings were planned and spacious ideas were discussed in mean little rooms by ardently ambitious men who were mostly very young, preserved a wartime atmosphere long after WWII was over. This was exactly what the O.G. wanted.

“Nooks and crannies, visibility zero, that’s the ticket,” he said. “The day we move into a big beautiful building with landscaped grounds and start hanging portraits of our founders is the day we begin to die.”

The sentence that Patchen murmured to the O.G. over their inedible dinner at the Club was this: ‘If (Patchen were captured and fully debriefed by the enemy), we could start all over again.”

Investigative journalist Seymour Hersch has a major exposé in the London Review of Books revealing the astonishing and extraordinarily scale of Barack Obama’s lies regarding the killing of Osama bin Laden. Hersch is a hard-core radical anti-American leftist but, in this case, I expect he’s telling the truth.

And the truth seems to be:

1. Osama bin Laden was being held in Abottabad as a prisoner of ISI, the Pakistani Intelligence Service, which was using him as a hostage to keep al Qaeda from attacking Pakistan. The Saudis were funding his detention.

2. There was no courier trail. A former Pakistani intelligence spilled the beans to the CIA in order to get the offered reward.

3. The Pakistanis knew we were coming, and reluctantly agreed to let the US conduct the hit under threat of loss of US aid.

4. There was no heroism and no firefight. Osama had no guards. He was a helpless invalid and a prisoner and the Seals were under orders simply to kill him out of hand.

5. Osama was not in touch with, or directing, al Qaeda operations, and there was no treasure trove of intelligence.

6. Barack Obama then completely broke his word to the Pakistanis. There was supposed to be a delayed announcement that Osama had been killed by a drone strike on the Afghan side of the Hindu Kush, no mention of the house in Abottabad, and no clues whatsoever of Pakistani involvement or cooperation. By exploiting the killing of Osama for personal prestige immediately and abandoning the agreed-upon “drone strike” story, Obama double-crossed Pakinstan’s Intelligence Service, leading to a four-year-long rupture in relations.

7. There was never any burial at sea or Islamic service. Osama was literally shot to pieces, and the Seals happily tossed body parts out of the helicopter while flying home over the Hindu Kush.

Wow!

At least 400 non-existent Borak rockets loaded with Sarin nerve gas were secretly purchased and destroyed by the CIA in 2005 and 2006, despite Saddam Hussein’s regime, as we all know, having been merely pretending to possess undeclared WMDs as a bluff.

New York Times:

The Central Intelligence Agency, working with American troops during the occupation of Iraq, repeatedly purchased nerve-agent rockets from a secretive Iraqi seller, part of a previously undisclosed effort to ensure that old chemical weapons remaining in Iraq did not fall into the hands of terrorists or militant groups, according to current and former American officials.

The extraordinary arms purchase plan, known as Operation Avarice, began in 2005 and continued into 2006, and the American military deemed it a nonproliferation success. It led to the United States’ acquiring and destroying at least 400 Borak rockets, one of the internationally condemned chemical weapons that Saddam Hussein’s Baathist government manufactured in the 1980s but that were not accounted for by United Nations inspections mandated after the 1991 Persian Gulf war.

The effort was run out of the C.I.A. station in Baghdad in collaboration with the Army’s 203rd Military Intelligence Battalion and teams of chemical-defense and explosive ordnance disposal troops, officials and veterans of the units said. Many rockets were in poor condition and some were empty or held a nonlethal liquid, the officials said. But others contained the nerve agent sarin, which analysis showed to be purer than the intelligence community had expected given the age of the stock.

The buying of nerve-agent rockets from an Iraqi seller in 2006 was the most significant recovery of chemical weapons until that point in the Iraq War.

A New York Times investigation published in October found that the military had recovered thousands of old chemical warheads and shells in Iraq and that Americans and Iraqis had been wounded by them, but the government kept much of this information secret, from the public and troops alike.

The identification of Valerie Plame, in connection with her arranging husband Joe Wilson’s trip to Niger for purposes of disputing Saddam Hussein’s yellowcake uranium procurement efforts, was the crime of the century in the opinion of the Left, and her terrible fate was headlined everywhere, including AOL.

A far more important, and far more covert, CIA officer, not someone merely working as an analyst, the same female CIA officer portrayed in “Zero Dark Thirty” as directly responsible for tracking down Osama, has been gleefully targeted this week for exposure by the same Left.

Jane Mayer, in the New Yorker, piously avoids referring to the woman by name, but specifically describes her career, mentions her rank and official function, and castigates her for her counter-terrorism activities, styling her “The Unidentified Queen of Torture.”

NBC’s Matthew Cole discussed that agent’s age, career, and congressional appearances in detail, blamed her for “deceiving Congress” and for the existence of a US “torture program,” and hinted repeatedly that she ought to have been prosecuted. But NBC, too, bowed to the CIA’s urgent wish to protect the anonymity of an important intelligence official and avoided publishing her name.

The establishment mainstream media is just a little too self-righteous to expose the identity of important US intelligence officials when the CIA begs them not to do so. Because, after all, they have less respectable allies, like Glenn Greenwald and Peter Maass’s The Intercept, pledged “to provide a platform to report on the documents previously provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden” and “to produce fearless, adversarial journalism across a wide range of issues” to do it for them.

Let’s hope the Left will be just as keen to punish CIA outings this time, if the next Republican administration should happen to arrange to have Mr. Greenwald frog-marched out of the homosexual ghetto in Rio de Janiero in handcuffs for this one.

James Mitchell, the CIA interrogator who interviewed Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks who also beheaded Daniel Pearl, told Fox News that KSM predicted what the liberals would do and warned him.

“Khalid Sheikh Mohammed told me personally, ‘Your country will turn on you, the liberal media will turn on you, the people will grow tired of this, they will turn on you, and when they do, you are going to be abandoned.’ ”

Spence (Sean Bean): – lnterrogation.

Sam: -Let’s see… That’s two part gin, two part brandy, one part crème de menthe…

–“Ronin” (1998).

—————————

What Sam mockingly tells the pretender Spence in “Ronin” (1998) is a truth generally recognized by all adults in the military & the intelligence community: Nobody can resist all forms of coercive interrogation indefinitely.

There is, however, serious dissent on this obvious truth from the left-wing democrat party establishment, and particularly from prominent portions of the Gay commentariat.

Democrats, having just lost control of the Senate, are leaving power in the manner of dead skunk, leaving a terrible odor behind them, with today’s cynical publication of a totally partisan official intelligence report, concluding that enhanced interrogation (not even the trained attack caterpillar!) never worked, the CIA allegedly misinformed the rest of the government about the results of enhanced interrogation, the CIA roughed up some of the prisoners in manners and forms displeasing to the sensibilities of Senate democrats, confinement conditions were bleak, and the CIA was generally naughty, misleading, evasive, and destructive both to good government and the standing of the US in the world(!).

It is a total hatchet job, and it will be interesting to watch over time what the CIA does to democrats, particularly to Nancy Pelosi, in response.

Jose A. Rodriquez Jr. ran the CIA Interrogation Program, and he responded, back in April, to what was obviously coming.

On Thursday, the Senate Intelligence Committee voted to declassify and release hundreds of pages of its report on U.S. terrorist interrogation practices. Certain senators have proclaimed how devastating the findings are, saying the CIA’s program was unproductive, badly managed and misleadingly sold. Unlike the committee’s staff, I don’t have to examine the program through a rearview mirror. I was responsible for administering it, and I know that it produced critical intelligence that helped decimate al-Qaeda and save American lives.

The committee’s staff members started with a conclusion in 2009 and have chased supportive evidence ever since. They never spoke to me or other top CIA leaders involved in the program, or let us see the report.

In other words, that report is just a partisan crock.

Daily Beast:

On “60 Minutes,” the president faulted his spies for failing to predict the rise of ISIS. There’s one problem with that statement: The intelligence analysts did warn about the group.

Nearly eight months ago, some of President Obama’s senior intelligence officials were already warning that ISIS was on the move. In the beginning of 2014, ISIS fighters had defeated Iraqi forces in Fallujah, leading much of the U.S. intelligence community to assess they would try to take more of Iraq.

But in an interview that aired Sunday evening, the president told 60 Minutes that the rise of the group now proclaiming itself a caliphate in territory between Syria and Iraq caught the U.S. intelligence community off guard. Obama specifically blamed James Clapper, the current director of national intelligence: “Our head of the intelligence community, Jim Clapper, has acknowledged that, I think, they underestimated what had been taking place in Syria,” he said.

Reached by The Daily Beast after Obama’s interview aired, one former senior Pentagon official who worked closely on the threat posed by Sunni jihadists in Syria and Iraq was flabbergasted. “Either the president doesn’t read the intelligence he’s getting or he’s bullshitting,” the former official said.

Abu Zubaydah

Left-wing sissies (HuffPo, SullyDish) have their panties in a twist over a John McCain revelation from the Senate Intelligence Committee’s (partisan) report on interrogation techniques leaked to the National Journal:

McCain… elaborated on an event that was reported Monday by The Post, noting that officials waterboarding a terror suspect reported to CIA headquarters that they had “gotten everything we can out of the guy.”

“The message came back, ‘Waterboard him some more.’ That is unconscionable,” McCain said.

Poor Abu Zubaydah, after all, merely, as Wikipedia notes:

Quickly rose from very low level mujahedin to third or fourth man in al Qaeda.

Wrote al Qaeda’s manual on resistance techniques

Abu Zubaydah was one of the principal planners of the 9/11 attacks which killed more than 3000 innocent non-combatants. If I’d been in charge at the CIA and the interrogators at the scene phoned home to report that “they had gotten everything they can out of the guy,” and asked me what to do next. I would have said exactly the same thing. And that demonstrates precisely why decisions about how to deal with terrorists and illegal combatants should be made by “rough men”* and not by wimps and sissies.

*”People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.”

–attributed to George Orwell.

The Daily Mail reports on spectacular accusations made by Benghazi: The Definitive Report, an eBook published yesterday, which apparently reveals the inside story behind the exposure and resignation of CIA Director David Petraeus.

David Petraeus was betrayed by his own bodyguards and vengeful high-ranking enemies in the CIA, who made sure his affair with his biographer was exposed to the public. …

Senior CIA officers targeted Petraeus because they didn’t like the way he was running the agency – focusing more on paramilitary operations than intelligence analysis. They used their political clout and their connections to force an FBI investigation of his affair with Paul Broadwell and make it public, according to ‘Benghazi: The Definitive Report.’

‘It was high-level career officers on the CIA who got the ball rolling on the investigation. It was basically a palace coupe to get Petraeus out of there,’ Jack Murphy, one of the authors, told MailOnline. …

Perhaps the most startling accusation in the book is that Petraeus’ affair with his biographer Paula Broadwell was leaked by the members of his personal protection detail.

The authors say that senior intelligence officers working on the 7th floor of Central Intelligence headquarters in Langley, Virginia, used their political clout to ensure that the FBI investigated the former Army general’s personal life.

They then told Petraeus that they would publicly humiliate him if he didn’t admit the affair and resign.

Hat tip to John Fund, who adds:

A lot of fact-checking will have to be done to substantiate the claims by Webb and Murphy. But from my own reporting, I have learned that no one runs afoul of senior CIA officials — or John Brennan — lightly or without peril. CIA officials angry at the Bush administration’s treatment of the agency in 2006 helped elevate the Valerie Plame affair into a national scandal and crippled much of the White House’s ability to conduct foreign policy. In the end, there was precious little evidence of any real security breach or wrongdoing beyond a perjury conviction of Scooter Libby, a top aide to Vice President Cheney.