Juan Cole
The accusation that the Bush administration directly ordered the CIA to “get” a prominent academic and Iraq War critic with disparaging personal information has taken a serious turn, with the U.S. Senate now prepared to investigate the incident. ..
The story emanates from information given to the New York Times by a former CIA official, in which he recounted how he and other intelligence officials and operatives were given orders by the White House to investigate Juan Cole, a Univeristy of Michigan history professor and well-known blogger that wrote many articles in opposition to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, among other works.
The ex-CIA official, Glenn Carle, said in a piece that ran in the Times that in 2005 he was told specifically that the Bush White House wanted “to get” and “discredit” Cole for his antiwar articles, and that he and other intelligence officials were ordered to find damaging information on him.
A former senior C.I.A. official says that officials in the Bush White House sought damaging personal information on a prominent American critic of the Iraq war in order to discredit him.
Glenn L. Carle, a former Central Intelligence Agency officer who was a top counterterrorism official during the administration of President George W. Bush, said the White House at least twice asked intelligence officials to gather sensitive information on Juan Cole, a University of Michigan professor who writes an influential blog that criticized the war.
In an interview, Mr. Carle said his supervisor at the National Intelligence Council told him in 2005 that White House officials wanted “to get” Professor Cole, and made clear that he wanted Mr. Carle to collect information about him, an effort Mr. Carle rebuffed. Months later, Mr. Carle said, he confronted a C.I.A. official after learning of another attempt to collect information about Professor Cole. Mr. Carle said he contended at the time that such actions would have been unlawful.
It is not clear whether the White House received any damaging material about Professor Cole or whether the C.I.A. or other intelligence agencies ever provided any information or spied on him. Mr. Carle said that a memorandum written by his supervisor included derogatory details about Professor Cole, but that it may have been deleted before reaching the White House. Mr. Carle also said he did not know the origins of that information or who at the White House had requested it.
The account given to the Times by Carle is a damning piece of evidence that shows the Bush administration abusing the resources of the CIA and apparently openly demanding the CIA spy on an American citizen for solely political purposes.
Just a day after the New York Times article first ran, the seriousness of the allegations has led the Senate Intelligence Committee to launch a preliminary investigation into the case.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), chair of the Intelligence Committee, told reporters on Friday that they are “looking into this” and that “further action” could be taken.
The Senate Intelligence Committee has begun a preliminary investigation into allegations that the Bush White House pressed intelligence agencies to gather damaging information on a prominent critic of the Iraq war.
“The Committee is looking into this,” Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the California Democrat who chairs the committee, told The Lookout in a statement sent Friday afternoon. “Depending on what we find, we may take further action.”
Cole responded directly to the developments by calling the Times article a “visceral shock” and decrying the “nakedly illegal” tactics used by the CIA and Bush administration against him.
Eminent national security correspondent at the New York Times James Risen has been told by a retired former official of the Central Intelligence Agency that the Bush White House repeatedly asked the CIA to spy on me with a view to discovering “damaging” information with which to discredit my reputation. Glenn Carle says he was called into the office of his superior, David Low, in 2005 and was asked of me, “‘What do you think we might know about him, or could find out that could discredit him?’”
Low actually wrote up a brief attempt in this direction and submitted it to the White House, but Carle says he intercepted it. Carle later discovered that yet another young analyst had been tasked with looking into me. It seems to me clear that the Bush White House was upset by my blogging of the Iraq war, in which I was using Arabic and other primary sources, and which contradicted the propaganda efforts of the administration attempting to make the enterprise look like a wild shining success.
Carle’s revelations come as a visceral shock. You had thought that with all the shennanigans of the CIA against anti-Vietnam war protesters and then Nixon’s use of the agency against critics like Daniel Ellsberg, that “the Company” and successive White Houses would have learned that the agency had no business spying on American citizens.
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What alarms me most of all in the nakedly illegal deployment of the CIA against an academic for the explicit purpose of destroying his reputation for political purposes is that I know I am a relatively small fish, and it seems to me rather likely that I was not the only target of the baleful team at the White House. After the Valerie Plame affair, it seemed clear that there was nothing those people wouldn’t stoop to. You wonder how many critics were effectively “destroyed”.
Another article written by Juan Cole in the wake of the allegations of government agencies spying against him takes points out the questions that ought to be raised about the PATRIOT Act, a measure that legalizes similar methods of “intelligence gathering” potentially used on Cole.
President Obama recently signed a four-year extension of the most controversial PATRIOT provisions that give the government and intelligence agencies almost blanket authority to eavesdrop on “terrorism” suspects or potential enemies. Cole argues from personal experience that Congress “should repeal the damn thing.”
Very unfortunately, President Obama just signed a four-year extension of the so-called PATRIOT Act, with three central provisions that permit warrantless spying by government agencies on US residents. This extension was rushed through the Congress with parliamentary maneuvers and opponents of it who wanted a public debate were shut down by Reid and Boehner.
If the Bush White House blithely picked up the phone and asked the Central Intelligence Agency to gather information on my private life for the purpose of destroying me politically– a set of actions that was illegal every which way from Sunday– then imagine how powerful government officials are using the legal authorization they receive from the PATRIOT Act to spy on and marginalize perceived opponents.
The act is clearly unconstitutional and guts key Bill of Right protections. Among its disturbing aspects is the access it gives government agencies to individuals’ library records, business records and other personal effects without requiring probable cause of a crime being committed. And while the wiretap provisions target non-US citizens, they extend to any conversations the latter have with US citizens. The framers of the constitution in any case believed that the liberties they proclaimed extended to “all men,” not just citizens.
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The Congress should revisit the PATRIOT Act in the light of the revelation of what was attempted in my regard, and should repeal the damn thing.
Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rove…etc, should all be serving life’s internment in a federal prison for their war atrocities of killing multiple civilians in far away countries. These thugs will argue until the sun burns itself out, until the clouds can no longer project their shadows upon the earth because they are a greater distance from Earth than the sun they are America’s saviors…sans any monetary gains of and for private pirating.
Hell, the Republican party can’t even make a simple choice as to who they want to lead them?
There is NO crime committed by the Bush/Cheney Crime Family that will be prosecuted by the Obama DOJ. None. If WikiLeaks posts video of George W. Bush personally shooting a 16-year old pashtoon in the head while shackled to a wall in Abu Gharib, Obama would declare that we can’t backward but must look forward, and then add five more counts to the criminal complaint against Pvt. Bradley Manning.
INVESTIGATE. PROSECUTE. JAIL.
Listening, Obama?