Did the Bush White House target professor/blogger/Iraq War critic Juan Cole?

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Looks like it:

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.

Okay, it's just an allegation, but it rings true, doesn't it, given what he know of the Bush White House and how it dealt with critics (see, e.g., Plame, Valerie)? Here's Cole:

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.

*****

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." It is sad that a politics of personal destruction was the response by the Bush White House to an attempt of a citizen to reason in public about a matter of great public interest. They have brought great shame upon the traditions of the White House, which go back to George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison, who had hoped that checks and balances would forestall such abuses of power.

They brought such shame in many ways. This is but the latest revelation -- though an awfully serious one, a Nixonian one. As Steve Benen notes, "[i]f Carle’s revelations are true, using the CIA to spy on Americans for partisan gain is a felony."

And there must indeed be an investigation.

Obama, Panetta, Petraeus

By Michael J.W. Stickings

President Obama shook up his national security team yesterday, notably moving CIA Director Leon Panetta to the Pentagon and Generalissimo David Petraeus to the CIA.

It was "a game of musical chairs," Slate's Fred Kaplan observed, though "under the circumstances, it's hard to imagine a shrewder set of moves, both politically and substantively."

Panetta is a Washington insider. Can he succeed at the Pentagon? Maybe. He certainly has credibility where it matters, on Capitol Hill:

The next defense secretary will have to wind down the wars without losing them and will almost certainly have to cut the budget without wreaking havoc in the Pentagon. It's a nightmare job for anyone, but Panetta has as much experience as anyone at carving out that sort of territory.

I don't much care for him, and he's come to be an apologist for the Bush-Obama national security state, but I suppose he has the political clout to lead what is undeniably a deeply political office. (Whether he manages to secure the trust and support of the military brass, not to mention of the rank-and-file, is another matter, though that may not matter given his political priorities in the months/years ahead.)

As for Petraeus, well, Obama had to do something with him, not least given his political inclinations, if not aspirations, and connections to the conservative/Republican foreign/military policy establishment:

Picking Petraeus to run the CIA is a move worthy of chess masters. He's been a wartime commander of one sort or another for eight years, almost non-stop. It's time for him to leave the battlefield; that was clear even to him. Yet for much of that time, he's also been a household name -- and widely hailed as the U.S. military's finest strategic mind in a generation. So the question -- which would have been vexing for any president -- is: What to do with this guy? Some who are close to the general refer to this question, with a slight smile and a cocked eyebrow, as "the Petraeus problem."

*****

Keeping Petraeus on the inside -- in a job that's related to, but not quite of, the military -- is a judicious stroke.

But will anything actually change? Well, we'll have to see. Maybe Panetta is the right man to deal with Iraq and Afghanistan, and particularly to preside of the end of the latter war. And maybe Petraeus will be a fine CIA director.

But these are political moves, first and foremost. Obama puts an ally/confidante at the Pentagon and a possible rival/critic at the CIA. Panetta will do what Obama wants him to do. Petraeus will perhaps be more independent, but he will also be constrained by his position.

Yes, it was a game of musical chairs. And Obama won.

And yet no one went to jail

By Edward Copeland 

Reliving the Valerie Plame affair in Fair Game, based on the books written by Plame herself and her husband Joe Wilson, if you didn't have any anger before over what the Bush White House did to a loyal CIA agent in the name of politics and a war they wanted no matter what the facts were, that old rage will well up once again. In Doug Liman's film, it comes up even more so because before we get to the events of the leak of Plame's covert status itself, we actually see what her job entailed and what the Bush politicos callously threw away for their own warped reasons and the cost it took in American lives, those of other intelligence sources and, of course, the truth. Still, no one who committed crimes (and crimes were committed) went to jail for their roles. It's outrageous and the film will make that outrage feel fresh again.

Naomi Watts stars as Plame and Sean Penn plays Wilson (in one of his least-mannered performances) and while many of the details of the film will be familiar to anyone who watched the episode unfold in the media, what makes director Doug Liman's film most interesting are the details that were left by the wayside.

Fair Game begins by showing us Plame at work for the agency, making frequent secret trips overseas making contacts and protecting sources in the battle against weapons proliferation. Her husband knows her real job, but her friends believe she works for a phony business service. Early on, at the behest of the Defense Department, her section gets contacted to check out stories on aluminum tubes supposedly sought by Saddam Hussein and the possibility that Saddam had tried to acquire yellowcake uranium from Niger.

Never mind that the aluminum tube story had been investigated and disputed long before since the equipment was horribly outdated and unacceptable for uranium enrichment, the Bush White House pressures the CIA to check it out again. As it happens, Wilson, the last American to meet Saddam face-to-face and someone who had strong contacts with high-ranking officials in Niger, is suggested as someone who could check out the African side of the story. Plame admits her husband's expertise in the area, but that's the extent of her involvement in his getting the assignment.

Wilson takes the trip to Niger and finds that it would be logistically impossible to remove that large an amount of yellowcake from the country without leaving physical or written evidence. He returns, issues his report that the story is a nonstarter and believes that it's the end of it. Unfortunately, the Bush gang, represented especially by the unctuous Scooter Libby (played to smarmy perfection by David Andrews) are ghouls who can't say no and, much to Wilson's surprise, President Bush says those 16 words that mean so much in his 2002 State of the Union speech about Saddam attempting to acquire quantities of uranium from Africa.

Just to be certain, Wilson calls a source of his to make certain that Bush isn't referring to a different African country than Niger, but no, that's the lie that's being spun, followed by the big p.r. push from Cheney, Rice and the gang about not letting the "smoking gun be a mushroom cloud." An outraged Wilson pens the infamous op-ed in The New York Times about what he didn't find in Niger and the White House declares war on him and his wife, including outing her identity as a CIA operative in Robert Novak's column, which still is a crime.

The rest of the story should be fairly familiar to anyone who followed it, but if you've forgotten some of the details, you are certain to get riled once again (and to question the wisdom of the Obama Administration letting sleeping liars sleep free for the crimes they committed).

Still, as well known as the tale is, Fair Game proves quite compelling thanks to a solid cast and Liman's solid direction. Of course, the true Bush believers will have no interest and partisans already will have been converted, but those who are fuzzy on the facts owe it to themselves to see this film. A little history never hurt anybody. 

(Cross-posted at Edward Copeland on Film.)