Pelosi Is A Distraction
I have never really taking a shine to Nancy Pelosi and certainly don’t like her results as leader of the House and failure to whip the Blue Dogs into shape, but I see no reason to put up with the lies being pushed by the GOP and CIA to cover their butts.
Ignore Nancy Pelosi and her statements, and look at what my former Governor and Senator, Bob Graham has to say about CIA records and recollections concerning members of Congress. He was the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee from 2001 until 2003, the period in question, and he says the CIA records are wrong.
Bob Graham has a few unusual habits.
One is Workdays, when he works at someone else’s job for a complete 8-hour shift. He has been a busboy, baggage handler, cop, teacher, etc. to give him a feeling for what workers go through. He started doing this while a member of the Florida Senate, and never stopped.
There are a few things people remember about him as a Senator
He has a quirky habit of keeping a detailed log of his daily activities on color-coded notebooks, which some say may have cost him a spot on past vice-presidential tickets. He keeps all of these notes in a file cabinet arranged by month and year. A great champion for his home state, Graham always kept Florida orange juice on hand in his Senate office and was rarely seen without his trademark Florida tie.
If you claim you met with Bob Graham on a specific date, he damn sure has the paper trail to know if you are telling the truth. When he says he met with the CIA once, not four times, he damns sure has the paper trail to back that up. He is famous for it. Failing to account for the Graham notebooks is a rookie mistake of a political appointee, not the action of a professional. These “records” are a sloppy CYA cover-up by the CIA.
Graham is also known as an opponent of the Iraq War, and he spoke against it before it was launched on the floor of the Senate. He would have spoken against torture if the entire thing hadn’t been presented in a classified briefing. Bob Graham wouldn’t reveal classified information for any reason, even to support his unpopular opposition to the Iraq War.
We need a special prosecutor, not a dog and pony “truth commission”. Laws were broken and people need to be prosecuted. I don’t care what party they are in, if they are complicit, they need to be tried.
Update: I just remembered that Jay Rockefeller’s letter makes the same point about no staff being present when he was briefed on warrantless wire-tapping in 2003. The CIA records are wrong about when these briefings took place and who was in the room. Why assume they were right about anything?
Update: NPR has a Bob Graham interview covering this issue.
12 comments
if only all of them were as concientious as mr graham. I wouldn’t trust too much of what comes from cia. I think they’re kind of known to have shady coverups when it suits their needs.
The public face of the CIA are either political appointees or from their public relations group, not intel people. Valerie Plame was intel – no one knew who she was until Cheney and co. blew her cover. She didn’t brief outsiders. No one who identifies themselves publicly as a member of the CIA is actually involved in real intel work.
A real intel analyst would never say that anything is certain. Highly probable is as good as it gets. Someone who is video taped murdering someone else in front on a dozen witnesses who know both the victim and the witness would be rated as a highly probable murderer.
The CIA didn’t initiate the torture program, it is highly probable that Cheney did.
From my own personal experience, I don’t trust a single thing the CIA says, unless there are at least 3 unimpeachable witnesses who can undeniably prove every word.
Let us not forget that Cheney & Rumsfeld were yanking the CIA’s chains since the 80’s. They were responsible for Saddam’s rise to power and helped to sponsor Iraq’s own nuclear weapons program supervised by Saddam’s son-in-law until he defected in 1995. He later told interrogators (before the Iraq invasion) that he had ordered all work on Iraq’s nuclear program destroyed in ’91 except for the blueprints. This had been confirmed by other sources.
I find all the timing and the people involved in events of the past 30 years or so to be enlightening. The USA were allies and friends of Iraq under Saddam in the early 80, even long after the Dujail massacre for which Saddam was eventually hanged and which eventually Rumsfeld & Cheney pushed as a reason for invading Iraq. This in spite of several photo’s of Suddam and Rumsfeld being very pally more than a year after the massacre and World condemnation. Just like Cambodia. Then it all chenged when it finally dawned on the morons-in-power that Saddam wasn’t going to be *a good boy* and just do what the US told him (like every other dictator the USA has backed). During the 90’s, Rumsfeld became a founding member of the think tank Project for a New American Century, which argued for an American policy of military force against Iraq, but which stated in a key 2000 document entitled “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” that, “absent a new Pearl Harbor,” it would be difficult to generate public support for this goal. Other members of The Project for a New American Century who joined the Bush administration after the 2000 election were Vice President Dick Cheney, Richard Armitage (Deputy Secretary of State,) I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby (Chief of Staff to the Vice President,) Richard Perle (Chairman of the Board, Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee,) and Paul Wolfowitz (Deputy Secretary of Defense.) On September 11, 2001, a “new Pearl Harbor” took place.
I leaned long ago that in intelligence, coincidences are extremely rare. If anyone thinks that everything that has happened in the USA over the past decade is just a coincidence, or an accident, you are fooling only yourself.
As Ray McGovern said in 2003: “Did the president himself know that the information used to secure congressional approval for war was based on a forgery? We don’t know. But which would be worse – that he knew or that he didn’t?”
And yes, Pelosi is a distraction. So are most of the Dem party leadership. I wonder what they have to hide? 🙂
The Democratic ?leadership? have “whipped dog” syndrome, they are so afraid of being called “bad dogs” by the GOP that they won’t put them in their place at the bottom. The bulk of the media react they same way.
You dealt with the “action” guys who still think think that they are part of the OSS, those that aren’t all politics. The back room guys are OK, but no one really listens to them except other analysts, and listening to their Rodney Dangerfield/no respect mantra gets old after a while.
There are rumors that some people referred to the CIA ops people as the Wile E. Coyotes for their spectacular failures caused by plans of actions that only work in cartoons, and that the agency was called “the Company” as a reference to ACME by other agencies.
Almost every problem the US currently faces is the result of blowback from the Company’s screw-ups.
I read an interesting column written by Roger Morris (himself a very interesting and enviable ex-politician) about Rumsfeld entitled The Undertaker’s Tally (Part 1). ‘The Undertaker’ was Rumsfeld’s nickname (with good reason). He was, essentially, the mastermind behind the past decades of disasters and it began over 50 years ago when he was a young and hungry rising political player from Chicago.
And all it was really about, was that he wanted to prove he had a bigger set of balls than the power mad Henry Kissinger whom Rumsfeld totally despised. All the current pain was just one man’s ego trip. More people REALLY should read and understand history!
Even the current financial crisis can be directly linked to Rumsfeld and Cheney (who’s first job as Rumsfeld’s protege was to destroy the OEO (Office of Economic Opportunity). It wasn’t only because Rumsfeld ran the CIA assassins and goon squads that Rumsfeld became known as The Undertaker. He helped bury many good ideas and programs (mostly social in nature) and even people within the USA.
Anyway, there’s a lot more enlightenment to read at the above link. Enjoy.
Betcha Bob Graham would have a hayday on Twitter.
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I’ve been watching the pair for a very long time, as Henry was no fonder of Don, than Don was of him. That level of arrogance wants the stage to themselves, and Tricky Dick attracted an amazing group of slimy characters, some of whom are still around causing problems. You have to take them all out or they attract more of their kind to the centers of power. They are the political equivalent of cockroaches.
The problem is that they are “true believers” and reality doesn’t intrude on their delusions. No matter how often something they believe in fails, they return to it because it is one of their core beliefs. They still think that tax cuts are the answer to all financial problems and privatization is cheaper and more efficient than government. They always have an excuse when they real world shows they are wrong.
[OT: I fixed the link in the first incident]
That, Jill, is a scary thought. He really is OCD about keeping records, which makes his records more credible in court, if we can ever get this to a court. He has a known established history of doing it, and that weighs very heavily in court decisions, i.e. this wasn’t unusual behavior, this was habitual and consistent, like business records.
This is a CIA effort to stop an investigation by attempting to implicate Democrats. It won’t wash, and without media assistance it would have stopped almost immediately.
We know that Cheney kept “visiting” over at the CIA during his tenure…I want to know how many times and with whom did he meet. I’m sure we’ll never know what they talked about…I don’t hear a peep about it from the media on this instance…it just seems a little “too convenient” for Cheney to come out of his undisclosed location and do more media talking head shows in one week then he did in the last 2 years of his presidency…I mean “vice” presidency and have this little “kerfluffal” with the CIA and Pelosi.
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Cheney is behind all of this. As Bob Graham said, the CIA wasn’t speaking truth to Power, it was trying to say what the Power wanted to hear. Strangely enough, that is what happens when you torture people …
I suspect Rummy is still running things. 🙂
The major problem the USA has is enlightened self-ignorance. People of just about every Nation except the USA have known about the CIA and their interference, assassinations, black ops and so on for decades. When word of the ‘renditions’ began seeping into the US conscious, Americans were surprised and most disbelieved the stories. Everyone outside the USA just shrugged and said “And, so?” It’s been known about for decades.
The major reason the USA has any problems with ‘Terrorists’ are thanks primarily to the CIA.
In Cambodia, even while the USA was trying to extricate itself from the disaster it once again created, the CIA were still running their program of support for the KR, still funneling money and weapons etc. My team arrived in an area that had been reasonably quiet and then suddenly erupted in violence. When we talked to the local villagers, they said the local warlords had been secretly given weapons by America. We spent a few weeks and tracked down the warlord who was controlling things in the region and we observed for a time. We discovered meetings with someone who was obviously not a local, or Asian. I *knew* what he was as soon as I saw him. We sent photo’s and requested information. Our mission was to observe & report, but we also had orders to *take out targets of opportunity* and had a list. this KR warlord was on the list. We got word though our underground contacts that we had taken months to get to know that the other guy was CIA and that the underground had been after him for awhile. I was observer/spotter that day, and my second was shooter (we took turn to keep in form etc). We knew each other well, and he knew what I was thinking. The two guys were standing and talking near a truck about 800m away downrange, an easy shot for us. 🙂 My friend simply asked (whilst readying the weapon) “Two?” He was asking for permission to take both out. I think if I had been shooter that day, I would have. But I wasn’t. I would have taken the heat, if any, but I wouldn’t put that on anyone else. So I said “Primary only. Wait until they are close and make it messy.” and I saw the shooter smile as he understood and repeated “Primary target only. Headshot.” I watched through the scope and waited. I heard my friend settle and get ready, then heard the shot. The KR warlords head exploded all over the CIA goon and the look of fear and total surprise, then he dived for cover and we retired back to camp. Maybe, just maybe, that close call was enough to make him get out. Maybe. He must have known how close he’d come to dieing that day. BTW, for the record, snipers usually don’t do head shots, unless there is no choice. CBM (central body mass) is the training. But head shots under certain conditions can be appropriate.
I filed the usual action report and was told “Good job”, then I heard through the grapevine that some people high up within the UN command were very unhappy. 🙂 But we’d followed orders and that was that. As it happened, I heard the underground had caught up with him. I used to wonder how long it took him to break? But, for every rat taken out, there are always more.
That’s reality. It’s not a game for some of us.
Apologies if some find this subject distasteful . But that’s the World we live in, sadly.
I would assume that this was part of an “alternate funding operation”, the way ACME funded operations they didn’t want Congress to know about. They technically weren’t “official” ops, they just involved CIA assets.
Why would anyone mind being left in a freaking jungle for days while the company was using the resources for drug and gun smuggling that were supposed to be available to pick you up? [according to rumors, of course]
Most of the CIA’s contractors couldn’t remember whether they were working for the US or the drug bosses, not that it mattered all that much.