Posted on 12/12/2007 7:12:17 AM PST by SJackson
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Shadow Warriors |
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By Jamie Glazov
FrontPageMagazine.com | Wednesday, December 12, 2007
Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Kenneth R. Timmerman, the New York Times bestselling author of Countdown to Crisis, The French Betrayal of America, Preachers of Hate: Islam and the War on America, and Death Lobby: How the West Armed Iraq. In 2006 he was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for his groundbreaking reporting on Iran ’s nuclear weapons program. He is the author of the new book, Shadow Warriors: The Untold Story of Traitors, Saboteurs, and the Party of Surrender.
FP: Kenneth Timmerman, welcome to Frontpage Interview.
Timmerman: Thanks, Jamie. It’s always a pleasure to appear alongside other founding members of the Vast Right-wing Conspiracy.
FP: My pleasure as well.
What inspired you to write this book?
Timmerman: In the beginning were the leaks. I was curious how highly-classified intelligence information was winding up on the front pages of the NY Times and in other leftist media. Two stories, in particular, caught my attention initially: the leak of the CIA “secret prisons,” and the smearing of Ahmad Chalabi, to which I will return below.
I knew quite a bit about both stories, and knew that the way they were being reported was incredibly selective and politically motivated. I wanted to track them back to the source.
What I discovered was a vast, underground network of government officials, former intelligence officers, members of Congress and their staffs, who were in bed with a complacent, anti-Bush media. They were eager to publish anything that did damage to this president, even if it put the lives of our intelligence officers or of our front-line troops in jeopardy.
FP: So tell us about the underground resistance movement against President Bush.
Timmerman: It certainly comes as no surprise to readers of this page to discover that a segment of the Democrat party never accepted the legitimacy of the 2000 presidential election, and sought in every possible way to delegitimize George W. Bush.
What I discovered, however, was that this political “pay-back” went far beyond the realm of domestic politics, and that legions of “shadow warriors” purposefully burrowed into the bureaucracy with the sole purpose of undermining the president and his policies.
The sabotage was so intense, for example, that CIA officers actually stood by and watched as a key moderate Iraqi cleric was hacked to death in front of their eyes on the steps of a Shiite shrine in Najaf by the pro-Iranian radical, Muqtada al-Sadr, in April 2003. The death of Majid al-Khoie, who was brought back to Iraq by the Bush administration just after the overthrow of Saddam, was a tremendous setback to our efforts to help the Iraqi Shiite community to distance itself from Iran and organize itself around moderate, pro-Western leaders.
For the shadow warriors, the failure of the liberation of Iraq was not “collateral damage.” It was the actual goal of their efforts. Within just weeks of the liberation, as I reveal in the book, a retired State Department officer who briefly served in Iraq devised the mantra “Bush lied, people died.” The Left has never tired of repeating it.
FP: Your thoughts on the politicization of intelligence by Senate Democrats?
Timmerman: The end result of the extraordinary cherry-picking of intelligence by Senate Democrats that I describe in detail in the book is to devalue intelligence and to make it suspect.
As you know, I follow events in Iran quite closely. You will not be surprised to learn that I am skeptical of the latest National Intelligence Estimate that concluded with “high confidence” that Iran stopped nuclear weapons work in late 2003.
What I find truly disturbing, however, is the widespread skepticism that has greeted this NIE by ordinary Americans and by intelligence specialists alike. No one trusts the intelligence community to come to an unbiased conclusion any longer. This NIE is far worse than the much disputed October 2002 estimate of Iraqi WMD programs, which failed to properly weigh conflicting information but never recommended a policy to the President or to Congress. (No, Rosie, there was no ‘rush to war.’) This NIE explicitly advocates policy – something the intelligence community is not supposed to do – and gives the impression that the intelligence information it chose to credit was pre-cooked in support of a political conclusion.
FP: Shed some light for us on the shadow warriors at the State Department. How much have they hurt Bush administration policies?
Timmerman: Let me answer with an anecdote I describe in the book. After President Bush was elected to a second term in November 2004, Secretary of State Colin Powell called a town meeting at the State Department in Washington . Faced with a sea of Kerry-Edwards stickers in the parking lot, Powell decided to confront the problem head on. “We live in a democracy,” he said. “As Americans, we have to respect the results of elections.” He went on to tell his employees that President Bush had received the most votes of any president in U.S. history, and that they were constitutionally obligated to serve him.
One of Powell’s subordinates, an assistant secretary of state, became increasingly agitated. Once Powell had dismissed everyone, she returned to her office suite, shut the door, and held a mini town meeting of her own. After indignantly recounting Powell’s remarks, she commented: “Well, Senator Kerry receive the second highest number of votes of any presidential candidate in history. If just one state had gone differently, Sen. Kerry would be President Kerry today.” Her staff owed no allegiance to the president of the United States , especially not to policies they knew were wrong, she said. If it was legal, and it would slow down the Bush juggernaut, they should do it, she told them.
Here was an open call to insubordination, and, I might add, it was not an isolated incident. We have heard recently from John Bolton confirmation of another story I tell in the book about Vann Van Diepen, one of the authors of the recent Iran NIE. Van Diepen systematically refused to carry out direct orders from Bolton to enforce non-proliferation sanctions against Iran and North Korea , because he disagreed with the policy.
Scott Carpenter, who had been in charge of the Iran pro-democracy programs at State, recently told the New York Sun that those programs were “dead” because they had been sabotaged by career State Department officials and Democrat political appointees, such as Suzanne Maloney, who now works at Brookings.
Thanks to those efforts, we now have only two policy options when it comes to Iran : acquiesce to an Iranian bomb, or bomb Iran (as French president Sarkozy has said so eloquently). The much better option, which I have advocated in these pages for some time, is to help the people of Iran to overthrow the regime. Thanks to the shadow warriors at State, we no longer have that option.
FP: The war in Iraq is going very successfully now, but for a while there it did go wrong. Where, when and why did it go wrong?
Timmerman: I believe the single most catastrophic decision in the war was made by L. Paul (“Jerry”) Bremer just two days after he arrived in Baghdad in May 2003.
I comment everyone to read this particular chapter of Shadow Warriors. It is entitled, “The Viceroy Cometh,” and it describes how Bremer single-handedly overturned the long-standing strategic plan of the Bush administration to liberate Iraq and hand over power to the Iraqis, without even consulting with the White House. Bremer, who knew nothing about Iraq , decided upon arriving in Baghdad that the Iraqi Governing Council was “unrepresentative” and that he should replace them and rule Iraq directly. His decision single-handedly transformed the liberation of Iraq into an occupation and spawned the insurgency that ultimately cost the lives of more than 3000 U.S. soldiers.
FP: The CIA’s war against Chalabi?
Timmerman: Google the name Ahmed Chalabi and “fraud,” and you get more than 55,000 hits. Google his name plus the word “crook” and you will get more than 12,000 hits. This gives a measure of how successful the effort to smear Ahmad Chalabi’s reputation has been. As I reveal in Shadow Warriors, that effort was spear-headed by the CIA,
Why did the CIA hate Chalabi? It wasn’t because he was an Iranian “agent” (just one of many false accusations made against him). The hatred began in 1996, when Chalabi came to Washington to warn then CIA director John Deutch that a CIA-sponsored coup plot had been penetrated by Saddam Hussein. In short, he had intelligence the CIA did not, and they never forgave him for it. It’s the old story of exposing the Emperor with No Clothes.
The Senate Select committee on intelligence vindicated Chalabi, and the information the Iraqi National Congress supplied to the US intelligence community on Saddam’s WMD programs, in a scathing report released last year. Never heard about that report? Little wonder. The “mainstream” press almost totally ignored it. That is why I reproduce parts of it in Shadow Warriors.
FP: What was the insurrection at the CIA against Porter Goss all about?
Timmerman: Porter Goss was the president’s pick to replace George Tenet, who most famously predicted that building a case against Saddam’s WMD programs was a “slam dunk” and failed to inform the FBI of information the CIA had gathered about the future 9/11 hijackers that could have allowed them to foil the terrorist attacks.
As he was leaving CIA, Tenet and his deputy, John McLaughlin, stacked the decks against Goss, naming Steve Kappes to head the Operations Directorate, making him America’s top spy. Normally, an outgoing director would leave that type of major personnel decision to his successor. This was a key move, because Kappes had been under investigation by Goss’s staff at the House intelligence committee for serious security breaches while at a previous job.
Once Goss came in, as I reveal in Shadow Warriors, Kappes and an Old Boys’ network at CIA fought tooth and nail against Goss, even providing him with false intelligence to take to the White House that subsequently had to be called back. (That particular black op was symptomatic of the type of thing Kappes and his rogue weasels did to undermine Goss, hoping to discredit him with the president and force his removal).
Ultimately, Goss called Kappes’ bluff, and Kappes resigned in November 2004 –but never gave up. In the end, Kappes won, and his allies, who included Judge Lawrence Silberman and the incoming director of National Intelligence, John Negroponte, urged the president to get rid of Goss and bring Kappes back.
It was a tremendous victory for the shadow warriors, and a story that has never been told until now.
While the CIA will deny this, Kappes has always been big on “liason” rather than developing unilateral American sources. This willingness to rely on agents controlled by foreign intelligence services can get you in a lot of trouble, especially when “friends” do not always behave as “allies.”
FP: You have a unique angle on the Valerie Plame/Joe Wilson saga. Share it with us please.
Timmerman: Valerie Plame has got some explaining to do. In March, she testified under oath before Congress and swore she had “nothing” to do with sending her husband, former ambassador Joe Wilson, to Niger to investigate claims that Saddam Hussein was seeking to buy uranium there.
In fact, Val sent an email to her bosses recommending that they send him on this mission because he “has good relationships with both the [Prime Minster] and the former Minister of Mines (not to mention lots of French contacts), both of whom could possibly shed light on this sort of activity.”
I guess she never realized anyone would check her emails, or ask the CIA to declassify them. Oops! Val, you may want to read page 354 of Shadow Warriors before you are next asked to testify…
But rest assured. I have high confidence that Valerie Plame will NOT be hauled before a federal grand jury on perjury charges, as was done to vice president aid Scooter Libby. The Dems do a much better job than this president has done at protecting their own.
FP: Kenneth Timmerman, thank you for joining Frontpage Interview.
Timmerman: My pleasure Jamie.
Yes I hope so, truly hope so but the problem is the left only allows “justice” for its enemy’s they have no problem with crime for the cause. I just hope their influence hasn’t reached the point of no return. From the Dept of State to the CIA to NASA from Kindergarten at Lincoln Elementary to Harvard the Marxist ideologues have deep deep roots and now have a generation of people who accept the tyranny they propose as the way, as freedom. However If we can rip out the heart of the enemy at The Dept of State it will be the first in several necessary steps for America.The ability definitely exist but are there people in the right places that are willing to do so?
What is your general impression of Timmerman’s credibility?
Why did DCI George Tenet suddenly resign on June 3rd, only to be followed a day later by James Pavitt, the CIA's Deputy Director of Operations (DDO)?
The real reasons, contrary to the saturation spin being put out by major news outlets, have nothing to do with Tenet's role as taking the fall for alleged 9/11 and Iraqi intelligence “failures” before the upcoming presidential election.
Both resignations, perhaps soon to be followed by resignations from Colin Powell and his deputy Richard Armitage, are about the imminent and extremely messy demise of George W. Bush and his Neocon administration in a coup d'etat being executed by the Central Intelligence Agency. The coup, in the planning for at least two years, has apparently become an urgent priority as a number of deepening crises threaten a global meltdown.
Shortly after the “surprise” Tenet-Pavitt resignations, current and former senior members of the U.S. intelligence community and the Justice Department told journalist Wayne Madsen, a former Naval intelligence officer, that they were directly connected to the criminal investigation of a 2003 White House leak that openly exposed Valerie Plame as an undercover CIA officer.
Seymour Hersh dropped a major bombshell that went virtually unnoticed, 54 paragraphs deep into an October 27, 2003 story for the New Yorker titled “The Stovepipe.”
“Who produced the fake Niger papers? There is nothing approaching a consensus on this question within the intelligence community. There has been published speculation about the intelligence services of several different countries. One theory, favored by some journalists in Rome, is that [the Italian intelligence service] Sismi produced the false documents and passed them to Panorama for publication.Source“Another explanation was provided by a former senior C.I.A. officer. He had begun talking to me about the Niger papers in March, when I first wrote about the forgery, and said, 'Somebody deliberately let something false get in there.'
He became more forthcoming in subsequent months, eventually saying that a small group of disgruntled retired C.I.A. clandestine operators had banded together in the late summer of last year and drafted the fraudulent documents themselves.”
From some more reliable sources:
If Joe diGenova is right, and I suspect he is, the federal investigation into the disclosure of the identity of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame should never have happened.
“My views are stronger than ever,” the former U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia said Monday when asked about the white-hot controversy that has sent a New York Times reporter to jail, changed the rules of investigative journalism and now threatens to envelop the White House in a major crisis. “This investigation never should have started because it’s apparent that no crime was ever committed.” “The only way an investigation can begin is if the agency swears — swears — that it took every conceivable step to protect this person’s identity.”
For example, the CIA had to answer 11 specific questions about what steps it took to protect the identity of a covert agent. But diGenova questions whether some of the information the CIA provided the Justice Department on those 11 questions “was materially false.”
In addition, he pointed out that the CIA paid for Wilson’s trip, didn’t ask him to sign a confidentiality agreement, didn’t object to his writing the op-ed article in the Times and allowed him to conduct TV interviews and to appear in a photo with his wife in Vanity Fair, he noted.
“The CIA isn’t stupid,” he said. “They wanted this story out. I’m raising the question: Did the CIA mislead Fitzgerald?”
Hold on to your hat. The plot is about to thicken.
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?
The farcical Plame/Wilson assault on Karl Rove is a shot across the bow of the White House. The spook bureaucracy is fighting for its perks, hand-in-hand with the Democrats and the media. This is exactly the same iron triangle that destroyed Richard Nixon. [My comment: Hence all the sudden media hype about Watergate]
Valerie Plame's CIA bosses took care not to ask Mr. Wilson to sign a confidentiality agreement, routine in such cases, almost as if they wanted him to make a public fuss. They were not surprised, one might think, when Mr. Wilson promptly took his story to New York Times Op-Ed Editor Gail Collins, one of the great Bush-haters of all time.
The farcical "outing" of Valerie Plame therefore raises a genuinely frightening monster from the swamp: A subversive alliance between the intelligence bureaucracy, the Democratic Party and the media. The common thread among all the characters in this low-brow comedy is hatred of President Bush and American power. Joe Wilson's eyebrows go ballistic when he talks about the White House. Just watch him sometime.
It was a publicity stunt from the get-go. Wilson's "confidential trip" to Niger gave him the superficial credentials to publish his "expose" in the Times. He'd gone there, talked to the top officials face to face, and by gum, they told him it was all a lie! Not even Gail Collins could possibly believe this banana sauce, but Wilson's charges provided a useful stick with which to beat the White House.
Ahhh...thanks for the clarification.
He is very credible.
You are weclome Tom :)
Indeed. Anyone with an ounce of intelligence has been aware of what was coming down for the past six or seven years, at least. The day Bush took office, it was clear that he needed to broom out the holdover clintonoids and carterites.
Clear, that is, to everyone but President Bush. The only person who seems not to have noticed this ill-kept "secret" is George Bush.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,215397,00.html
WALLACE: ... but the question is, why didn't you do more, connect the dots and put them out of business?
CLINTON: OK, let's talk about it. Now, I will answer all those things on the merits, but first I want to talk about the context in which this arises.
I'm being asked this on the FOX network. ABC just had a right- wing conservative run in their little "Pathway to 9/11," falsely claiming it was based on the 9/11 Commission report, with three things asserted against me directly contradicted by the 9/11 Commission report.
And I think it's very interesting that all the conservative Republicans, who now say I didn't do enough, claimed that I was too obsessed with bin Laden. All of President Bush's *neo-cons* thought I was too obsessed with bin Laden. They had no meetings on bin Laden for nine months after I left office. All the right-wingers who now say I didn't do enough said I did too much — same people.
They were all trying to get me to withdraw from Somalia in 1993 the next day after we were involved in "Black Hawk down," and I refused to do it and stayed six months and had an orderly transfer to the United Nations.
OK, now let's look at all the criticisms: Black Hawk down, Somalia. There is not a living soul in the world who thought that Usama bin Laden had anything to do with Black Hawk down or was paying any attention to it or even knew Al Qaeda was a growing concern in October of '93.
I do not remember the Clintons ever blaming the neocons during his administration, and certainly nothing was mentioned about them during Clintons urging US to get ready to war with Saddam, sending out the FEAR of Saddam's sack of sugar comparison of anthrax by his front people (Cohen and Albright).
GW Bush is his own worst enemy. He doesn't need anyone to destroy his presidency. He's done a good job all by himself.
GW secured Tenet’s resignation on June 3 but couldn’t get the Senate to confirm Goss until September 24. During those almost four months, the left-wing CIA bureaucracy waged a war against Goss’ confirmation. That war is a part of the open warfare being waged by the CIA against the re-election of George Bush and on behalf of John Kerry – as described in To The Point last week by Tony Blankley in Kerry and the CIA: Both Living in a September 10 World .
The key to understanding this war is that the CIA doesn’t simply live in a pre-September 11 world where terrorism is only a “nuisance” – it is that the CIA lives in a left-wing world, the same left-wing world as the State Department. Both worship at the Shrine of Accommodation, Appeasement, and Compromise. Both Langley and Foggy Bottom bureaucrats hate George Bush for alienating the Euroweenies and taking the fight to the Moslem terrorists. Both are working overtime to do what they can to secure Bush’s defeat.
The leader of this effort at the CIA is Paul Pillar. His 1983 book, Negotiating Peace was a paean to appeasement with the Soviets – and yes, he was one of the main guys at Langley supporting Gulbuddin. Pillar’s the guy who leaked the gloomy NIE (National Intelligence Estimate, or rather selected portions of it) on Iraq so Kerry could bash Bush with it. Pillar knew it was OBE (Overtaken By Events, obsolete) by the time it was written in July, much less when it was leaked in September, as it was based on research conducted in April – but all’s fair in war.
Here’s how desperate the bad guys are. Six days after Porter was sworn in as DCI (Director of Central Intelligence), at the September 30 morning staff meeting, he announced he was replacing four top-level positions, starting with Executive Director, the third-ranking spot under the Director himself and the Deputy Director. A. B. “Buzzy” Krongra! d, Tenet’s ED, then announced his resignation, and Porter introduced his replacement Mike Kostiw.
Mike was the staff director for the House Subcommitte on Terrorism and had been with the CIA for 10 years in the 1970s. The next day, Pillar’s gang asked their buddies at the Washington Post to run a hit piece on Kostiw, dredging up an old shoplifting charge back in 1982. They gave the Posties all the private files of the investigation, which – even though Kostiw was exonerated – they managed to twist into character assassination. The hit piece appeared in the October 3 edition and Kostiw resigned the next day. It had taken the lefties five short days to knock Kostiw off.
All of Porter’s people – and Porter himself – now have bull’s eyes painted on their backs. Nonetheless, they are determined to root out the Pillar Gang and replace it with folks willing and able to wage the GWOT (Global War on Terrorism). Right now, however, the most crucial battle of al! l is to block Pillar’s plan to spring an October Surprise on President Bush.
The October Surprise is the CIA Inspector General’s 9-11 Report. It is a total whitewash of Tenet and other top CIA officials and attempts to place the blame on the Bush White House, naming specific Administration personnel. It is a political document far removed from an honest and objective assessment. Pillar is desperate to have it released, Goss will not and has threatened that should it be leaked, those responsible will not only be fired, they will be criminally prosecuted.
Somehow, though, a Langley bird has perched on Jane Harman’s shoulder, whispering into the Congresswoman’s ear that the report was being “suppressed.” She and her fellow Democrats are now baying to the moon about a “cover-up.”
Porter has managed to stop this phony scandal just in time. Pillar and his fellow conspirators are tearing-hair-out enraged. It’s wartime at Langley as you read t! his. If Porter wins this battle and Bush wins the election, the bull’s eyes will be on the lefties and we may have a CIA worth our respect once again.
A CIA that has no qualms about waging war on Moslem terrorists instead of accommodating them, or supporting them like Gulbuddin. There are many, many tough, dedicated, first-class folks at the CIA – but they have been sold out by their left-wing superiors who are doing their best to sell out the President of the United States.
See also:
The CIA 'old guard' goes to war with Bush
The CIA speaks, with forked tongue
The CIA's War Against President Bush
Congressman's letter: Anti-Bush faction now controls CIA CIA Run Amok
Was the Wilson Affair a CIA Plot?
Columnist Confirms CIA Plot The CIA's war on Bush
CIA is out of control: Bush ally
Leaking At All Costs What the CIA is willing to do to hurt the Bush administration
No one who has not had interactions with State and CIA can even imagine the depth of treachery that is deeply embedded in these institutions. If a Republican wins the White House, it is essential that they be cut out of the intel/policy loop. Without a doubt, if it is politically feasible a top-to-bottom purge is essential.
The related story is the management failures of the Bush Administration, starting from day 1 with the US attorneys and Norm Mineta at transportation, and continuing to the present day with this NIE estimate. He should be calling out the authors and saying that the CIA can no longer be trusted because it has become a captive of the Democrat party, but he feels constrained to fight back. That's what he should have been doing all along.
That reminds me, Bush let the best DOD official of his term, Pete Pace, go because of Rat pressure. That is a significant leadership failure on his part. We are at war, you don't get rid of a good general because the NYT doesn't like his position on Homos. Lucky for Bush, he found Petreus when he did, or else he would be a total failure, ending his term with a war that the rats are forcing him to lose. Now, he may squeak by, but it could have been so much better.
It is very hard to argue with your point.
Because can't fire them based on political beliefs.
SK is OK. I anticipate that there is a lot going on behind the scene. Some of it is described here http://blogs.stratfor.com/friedman/2007/12/04/further-thoughts-on-nie/
That’s not political belief, that’s refusing to follow orders.
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