Ex-Spy Alleges Effort to Discredit Bush Critic (Prof Juan Cole)

[EFerrari]

Ex-Spy Alleges Effort to Discredit Bush Critic
By JAMES RISEN
Published: June 15, 2011

WASHINGTON — 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.

It is not clear whether the White House received any damaging material about Professor Cole or whether the C.I.A. or other intelligence agencies ever provided any information or spied on him. Mr. Carle said that a memorandum written by his supervisor included derogatory details about Professor Cole, but that it may have been deleted before reaching the White House. Mr. Carle also said he did not know the origins of that information or who at the White House had requested it.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/16/us/politics/16cole.html

[Electric Monk]

1. Wow, imagine the odds of that?

100%, cuz that's how the BFEE roll?

[leveymg]

2. Interesting, CIA requested to dig up dirt on a US Citizen critic teaching at a US university.

Cheez-itz, what the hell happened to the Agency's charter that forbids domestic operations and the FBI's legal role as lead investigator of suspected domestic lawbreaking, counterintelligence, etc.?

This is the kind of stuff the U.S. Congress used to investigate when we still had a Congress.

Moving forward, I guess.

[Wilms]

3. ^

[leveymg]

4. Last effort to legally expand those powers was defeated in 2003. So, they did it anyway.

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/02/international/worldspecial/02TERR.html.

Broad Domestic Role Asked for C.I.A. and the Pentagon
By Eric Lichtblau and James Risen
New York Times
May 2, 2003

WASHINGTON - The Bush administration and leading Senate Republicans sought today to give the Central Intelligence Agency and the Pentagon far-reaching new powers to demand personal and financial records on people in the United States as part of foreign intelligence and terrorism operations, officials said.

The proposal, which was beaten back, would have given the C.I.A. and the military the authority to issue administrative subpoenas - known as "national security letters" - requiring Internet providers, credit card companies, libraries and a range of other organizations to produce materials like phone records, bank transactions and e-mail logs. That authority now rests largely with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the subpoenas do not require court approval.

The surprise proposal was tucked into a broader intelligence authorization bill now pending before Congress. It set off fierce debate today in a closed-door meeting of the Senate Intelligence Committee, officials said. Democrats on the panel said they were stunned by the proposal because it appeared to expand significantly the role of the C.I.A. and the Pentagon in conducting domestic operations, despite a long history of tight restrictions, officials said.

[EFerrari]

5. And iirc, one of the first official actions Obama took after he was elected

was to go to tell "the fine men and women of the CIA" that there would be no prosecutions.