This is one post by AJStrata that should not be missed. He ties together many things regarding the CIA leak case, the McCarthy affair and the Plame “leak”:
[…]What intrigues me most are all the connections to the Center of International Policy (CIP), run by Dana Priest?s husband. Obviously Dana has bought into the CIP-brew given her responses concerning her role in leaking national security details. But we most note Mary McCarthy embraced this organization when she left the government after her stint on the National Security Council under Clinton, Beers, Berger, Wilson and Clarke (I see a new DC law office in the making here).So what is CIP all about? Well we have the words of its leader, Mel Goodman, to guide us. A man whose vision McCarthy definitely believed in when she jumped ship to join CIP, and which I think the view of a lot of the Democrat party because these views overlap so well with the rantings of Kerry and Gore. If Rand Beers is close enough to Mary McCarthy to come out and help her PR effort, then my guess is he is close in sharing her vision and that of Mel Goodman. So let?s look into the mind of Goodman, keeping one phrase in mind: Nirvana-delusions (the concept that if we disarm the world will disarm and love us).
In February 2001, Mel Goodman penned this article on the need to reform the CIA. This is after Bush?s inaugeration and only a brief time before Mary McCarthy will join CIP. It is also 7 months before 9-11. It contains four main sections:
The Need to End Covert Action
The Need for Glasnost
The Need to Demilitarize Intelligence
The Need for an Intelligence Network
The end of covert action means the end of targetting Al Qaeda in the battlefield. We successfully taken out many key Al Qaeda using covert action via UAVs. It also includes snatching people and bringing them in for interrogation. This is tantamount to disarming ourselves and being left with the impotent law enforcement approach when detecting our enemies overseas, or the overkill military approach (i.e., being forced into military actions: an act of war) to grab someone we know is heading our way with intent to kill.
The need for Glasnost is a quaint way of saying send more Pulitzers to my wife as we expose our entire national security capabilities to our enemies so they can exploit our weaknesses. Too many people think secrets are all about illegal acts. The fact is, the secrets are typically about where we have established boundaries between what is technically feasible and what is legal. These boundaries expose areas we will not tread due to legal issues – an area the terrorists want to find in order to exploit. This is what Risen and Priest exposed. Not what is feasible (we all know it is possible to vacuum up everbit of data passing around and to nab someone and hold them in a secret location for a good beating), but where we draw the line. That is what was leaked.
The need to demilitarize intelligence is another way of saying put the DIA and NSA out of business. We have seen attempts to do just that in the Able Danger fiasco and the NSA leaks by Risen and the NYTimes, respectively. This would provide a way for the CIA folks to control all intelligence! Talk about an obvious plan to seize control. Note: I have not read this section yet, but I am expecting to see parallels to what has transpired in the last 5 years since this piece was created!
Finally, the need for an intelligence network sounds like a nice, vacuous alternative of sweetness and light (no pun intended to the good blog by the same name) which will be the supposed replacement for the current corrupt systems, but somehow never gets implemented. The classic false-promise bait necessary in any bait-and-switch scheme.
Interestingly, this piece ties into the event which brought Valerie Plame into contact with one Joe Wilson – the Aldrich Ames incident. Note how Goodman feels for all those poor souls fired for allowing Ames to destroy our intelligence capability:
Reprimands in the Ames case prompted a mass exodus of bitter senior managers, who had refused to accept the need for punishing those who ignored the fact that a Soviet spy had contaminated the agency at the highest levels. These managers were the generation that had run the CIA during the cold war and had served as the agency?s institutional memory for clandestine operations. Perhaps as a result, espionage operations have gotten increasingly clumsy, causing major strains with such key nations as France, Germany, India, Italy, and Japan. Operational failures in recent years include the unbelievable bombings of both the Chinese embassy in Belgrade and a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan. Intelligence failures include the agency?s surprise over the nuclear tests in India in 1998 and the skewing of judgments on the implications of a national missile defense in 1999.
Now I see what attracted Mary McCarthy to these Nirvana-delusionists. She too was against Clinton?s attack on the Sudan factory – as I guess were many in the NSC. Maybe what bothered these people so much was that their own President Clinton was ?no better? than a rabid neo-con. Maybe that is when the cabal began to coalesce.
[…]Recall that Clinton was decimating intelligence capabilities with the combination of the Gorelick Wall and the Durbin idiocies restricting covert activities with criminals. Calling these policies insufficient towards ?fixing? the CIA is one reason I cannot decide if these people are truly naive delusionists or something much, much more sinister hiding behind the facade of delusion in order to attract the hordes of useful idiots. Goodman goes on to confirm my suspicions that his plan is to hamstring the US to only law enforcement or military actions:It is not enough to suggest (as defenders of covert action have) that the world remains a dangerous place and the president needs an option short of military action when diplomacy alone cannot do the job.
Covert action could be radically reduced, if not eliminated, with no compromise of U.S. national security. CIA propaganda has had little effect on foreign audiences and should end immediately.
CIA propaganda? Like what Larry Johnson would say in the coming months about the fact we have nothing to fear from terrorism? Yeah, right. In fact, this line epitomizes the mindset that terrorists and enemies of the US are at zero fault for posing risks to us:
CIA penetration of Iraqi communications, contrived to topple the regime of Saddam Hussein, made a liar out of the White House and a truth-teller of Saddam Hussein. It also doomed further inspection efforts in Iraq and undercut the credibility of multilateral inspection teams around the world.
What is scary is that Mary McCarthy bought this hook, line and sinker. This is the vision she was attracted to when she left the CIA. It is the same warped vision of the VIPerS, and of Kerry, Sores, Clooney and Michael Moore.
There is soooo much more, you need to go now and read it all. I gotta tell ya, after the election of 2000 I was glad that Gore didn’t get into office, but I wasn’t too committed either way. Didn’t know a whole lot about Bush and figured either way it couldn’t get worse after what Clinton did to our country. But after reading this post by AJ and the paper written by Goodman I am shaking at the thought that Gore almost got in. You will understand after reading AJ’s post.
As I, along with AJ and many others, have surmised, this leak affair goes much much deeper then simply a single disillusioned CIA officer….much deeper.
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