Who says George W. Bush has no legacy. He agas a great legacy, one of mean spiritedness, vindictiveness and payback for real and imagined slights. Just ask the CIA:
President Bush ordered a major restructuring of the nation’s intelligence-gathering community yesterday, approving new guidelines aimed at bolstering the authority of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) as the leader of the nation’s 16 spy agencies.
The long-awaited overhaul of Executive Order 12333 gives the DNI greater control over spending and priority-setting, and also over contacts with foreign intelligence services — a responsibility that has traditionally fallen to the CIA, according to a Bush administration document describing the changes. […]
In one of the more controversial changes, the new order allows the DNI to formulate policy for engaging with the intelligence agencies and security services of other countries — a role traditionally held by the CIA. But the new policy stipulates that the CIA would “coordinate implementation” of those policies.
Take that you traitorous bastards who leaked the findings of the NIE that said Iran wasn’t an imminent threat to develop nuclear weapons. And who whined about the outing of Valerie Plame Wilson. And who had the nerve to tell Seymour Hersh and others they were pressured to fix the intelligence around the Bush administration’s policy to invade Iraq despite the lack of evidence for WMD or a connection to Al Qaeda, etc. I wonder what his old man, a former head of CIA thinks about his boy, now?
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CIA just window dressing for political decisions, right? With support of the Pentagon’s Office of
PropagandaSpecial PlansInspired by Dwight Eisenhower’s legendary farewell speech (in which he coined the phrase ‘military industrial complex’), filmmaker Jarecki surveys the scorched landscape of a half-century’s military adventures, asking how and telling why a nation of, by, and for the people has become the savings-and-loan of a system whose survival depends on a state of constant war.
“Why We Fight” moves beyond the headlines of various American military operations to the deeper questions of why, why does America fight? What are the forces; political, economic, and ideological, that drive them to fight against an ever-changing enemy?
Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski on the Coming War With Iran
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."Why no mention about FISA here?
As I’ve mentioned over and over, the expansion of FISA serves the intelligence community, not the executive branch. The power doesn’t accrue to Dubya, who’s moving along to retirement in a palace in Paraguay somewhere.
If one were to chart transfers of power, and who is subservient to whom, it seems like the intelligence community generally, and the CIA specifically, is the winner, and the legislative and executive branches are the losers.
So Bush, son of CIA Director/President/longtime CIA asset/agent George H. W. Bush, writes a memo concentrating the power to the DCI? Qui bono? President Obama? No, the permanent government.
As despicable as our current Bush is, I think that people miss the point. Is Bush over the CIA or is the CIA over Bush? It’s harder to see if a Republican’s in the White House.
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By the way, who here still believes that Seymour Hersh is unconnected to the CIA? People think he stands by the guardhouse in the Langley parking lot and waits for someone to come out and spill the beans? If one goes back and studies his career he appears to be a mouthpiece for specific elements within the intelligence community (he kept the CIA’s Phoenix Program at arm’s length from his My Lai reporting, took the CIA’s side in the Watergate thingie, dutifully joined in the smear campaign against a dead JFK, etc.).
Maybe Bob Gates’ ascension to the DCI slot and Bush’s inability to carpetbomb Iran is the end of an internal struggle between the Cheney/Bush/Big Oil wing and more restrained elements who maybe don’t have all their money changed to Euros.
“Intelligence community,” yeah. But there appears to be a lot of infighting and backstabbing within the intelligence community lately. Bush wants to stick it to the CIA because, despite everything we know about it, the CIA still has too many honest people in it, to many people with integrity, too many people who take their consitutional oath seriously. So I don’t think it’s the CIA this time.
By the way, it’s “cui bono” (double dative), not “qui bono.” Qui is a relative pronoun in the nominative masculine, singular OR plural.
priscianus, although I did well at the time it’s been a really long time since my high school Latin. Thank you. cui cui cui cui… The best I do anymore is “Puer agricola est.”
“The CIA” is a pretty broad unit to ascribe a singular position or motive. And the “former” CIA is all over the federal government. We have the son of the former DCI as our current President, we have another former CIA employee running for President as the Libertarian candidate. A “former” CIA counterterrorist expert was spewing false propaganda against Obama for the benefit of H. Clinton while another “former” CIA propagandist and the grand dame for feminism wrote an op-ed for H. Clinton in the NYTimes this year. We have Sy Hersh getting a steady feed of information from someone within the CIA. Bob Gates doesn’t seem to be in lockstep with Dubya. Who put him in the chair?
The other thing is that while I see the CIA as a present-day international version of the Pinkertons, the, if I may, ruling class is not a unified front. High oil prices are great for oil companies but not so great for General Motors. At some point Mister Exxon is taking food off Mister Ford’s plate. While hedge fund operators get fat whole areas of the banking and real estate business are dying. With what’s been going on with BushCo it seemed only a matter of time before some part of the elite was going to start complaining.
What BushCo is doing is getting a small group very, very rich while destroying America. The treason of business, if you will. Some rich people have tied their future with our country and can’t be too happy to see it being laid waste.
Beware the Democrats
Wal-Mart Tells Workers How They Should Vote