A little history, some sharp analysis, some even sharper invective... that adds up to Required Reading:
Behind the scenes, the single most important reason for the Valerie Plame/Joe Wilson farce is that CIA Director Porter Goss has finally started to clean house at Langley. Goss's long-overdue shake-up is clearly backed by the White House, the top levels of the Pentagon and State Department, and the new National Director of Intelligence, John Negroponte.
Judging by Director Goss's remarks at his Senate confirmation hearings, those whose jobs are most in danger include the CIA "experts" in WMD proliferation – Valerie Plame's outfit – who completely failed to anticipate the Indian and Pakistani nukes, and just couldn't figure out what was going on with Iraqi WMDs. Valerie Plame's bosses are facing the axe for decades of failures.
And it's about time, because Iran is within sight of its first nukes. You don't suppose that has anything to do with the Plame/Wilson publicity stunt, do you?
Read the whole thing - it's required.
(Hat tip to the invaluable Frank Martin.)
RELATED: Here.
The American Thinker article reads like so much paranoid ramblings...yet (with the internet) it's so freakin' well documented. And it matches my memories of events as they took place, while the "official record" has been flushed down the memory hole in favor of the headlines du jour.
Am I turning into a crackpot, or maintaining a consistent worldview within a steady stream of disinformation and propaganda?
Hang on a sec . Oh, all right, then.
Sorry for the angst, guys.
Dratted HTML -- tried to say "snuck a peek at Kos: http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2005/7/18/201832/566"
and got replaced by an enigmatic period in the penultimate line.
Apologies all 'round.
Don't forget the CIA's past track record on the Soviet Union. They read about its collapse in the newspaper.
After reading that... one words automatically popped into my mind...
Strategery. ;)
Neat. So the press really are CIA dupes. Peter Jennings must sleep soundly at night knowing that...
Makes you wonder if what we think we know about Iran isn't wrong too. Maybe they really don't have a functioning nuke program. On the other hand, maybe they already have bombs ready to go. How would we know?
Um, isn't there a problem here? George Tenet was CIA Director until June 2004, meaning that the entire Plame/Wilson dustup, and the ensuing appointment of a special prosecutor, occurred before Goss got the job. While the Administration's battle with the CIA is a significant subtext, you can't run a chain of causation from today's shakeup to the launching of an investigation two years ago.
