Friday, June 17, 2011

Wow—some pretty disturbing news: 

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.

Cole, meanwhile, is rightfully demanding an investigation into the matter. From the Detroit Free Press: 

"The Bush White House request that the CIA spy on me to discredit me clearly violated the American constitution, U.S. law, the CIA charter, and my civil and human rights," Professor Juan Cole told the Free Press. "It was criminal." 

Here is an excerpt of a piece written by Cole in response to the allegations.  

Carle's revelations come as a visceral shock. You had thought that with all the shennanigans of the CIA against anti-Vietnam war protesters and then Nixon's use of the agency against critics like Daniel Ellsberg, that "the Company" and successive White Houses would have learned that the agency had no business spying on American citizens.

I believe Carle's insider account and discount the glib denials of people like Low. Carle is taking a substantial risk in making all this public. I hope that the Senate and House intelligence committees will immediately launch an investigation of this clear violation of the law by the Bush White House and by the CIA officials concerned. Like Carle, I am dismayed at how easy it seems to have been for corrupt White House officials to suborn CIA personnel into activities that had nothing to do with national security abroad and everything to do with silencing domestic critics. This effort was yet another attempt to gut the fourth amendment of the US constitution, in this case as part of an effort to gut the first amendment of the US constitution.

Needless to say, this is totally outrageous. There is no way that something like this should just fade away, news-wise.  

Stay tuned....hopefully we'll be hearing more about this.