The Wise I Asks-What's Going on at the CIA?

An Editorial by the Imperial Pundit: The Wise I.

What’s Going on at the CIA?

The election of 2004 is over and I now find that I must constantly mind changed cabinet appointments, the State Department and to my complete surprise, no less than the CIA.

It’s a big job but somebody’s got to do it.

The spoils of victory are such that the victor can appoint his or her own people. We all understand that, except for the liberals.

And with experience, it makes sense that President Bush would know who’s good, who’s a slacker and surely he knows that Colin Powell has the NY Times on speed dial in his Blackberry.

Thus the cabinet gets a shake up and Colin’s gone.

The premise of the re-shuffling, as The Wise I understands it, is that too many operatives of all statures, positions and congressional seats have been a little too anti-administration. More, these same statures, positions and congressional seats spent a lot of time this past election cycle trying to unseat the President.

So why keep them around having proved such nefarious goals?

If any one of us had been in that same situation in the more normal world of our work life we’d be cleaning house toot de sweet.

Yes, before my unbelieving eyes I saw Joe Wilson write a book full of lies, claiming persecution by the administration. This diplomat and husband of CIA employee Valerie Plame got her to use her influence to send him on a search mission in Nigeria in pursuit of weapon materials purchased by Saddam Hussein. Ole Joe sipped some plantation tea, the Nigerians denied any such purchases by Saddam and that, ladies and germs, was that.

Joe reported his “findings” back at the White House. The administration applied incredible pressure on this poor soul and did not include his research as part of our national argument for invading Iraq. In fact, alleged Joe, the administration referred to Nigeria as having verified Saddam’s purchase of yellow cake uranium, a component of any decent nuke. When, tada, right there in front of tea and crumpets the Nigerians denied it all. Not that the Nigerians would lie or anything, damn, having all those bank accounts they try to have me invest in via email spam.

The whole nonsense episode concocted from assignment of Joe Wilson’s trip to his eventual book was planned and fermented by employees of the CIA and state department with a little help from the DNC. Loving wife Valerie, was ‘outed’ by somebody and was the cause of another nonsense furor what with the administration revealing her CIA secretarial position and everything.

While this lying drama played out on the national stage, Richard Clarke looms upon the national scene. He too wrote a book, exposing an administration so utterly clueless as to pay no attention to his endless skill as the former Clinton czar of terrorism. Although he’d held that position for eight years under Clinton and Willie J. sure didn’t catch Osama even with a whole lot more opportunities than Bush had. Clarke’s terrorism expertise was in the field of cyberspace at any rate when right now the problem is insurgents and renegade airplanes.

Which is to say that I was not oblivious to the many leaks and what seemed to be direct hits to the sitting administration by, who? Let me get this right, a bureaucracy? A bureaucracy designed to SERVE the country via the job assigned to it?

Now let’s suppose that Verizon’s accounts payable department decides it wants to set company policy. The fine and dedicated employees in that famous business department that pays the bills think that Verizon should offer a better pricing plan than is currently offered. How should this be handled?

Because surely some, if not most via the employee stock ownership plan, own stock in Verizon. As a stockholder individual employees could attend the Board meetings and make a motion. At the time of the annual employee review again, individual employees could make such a suggestion. Speaking of, most companies have some sort of suggestion plan, some method of communicating ideas upward.

Or should Verizon’s loyal accounts payable department simply refuse to pay the bills, thereby stopping vital supplies to various Verizon entities. The offices would not be cleaned, telephones would go silent, eventually there would be no electricity at Verizon nationwide.

Or perhaps various employees should leak to local business papers that Verizon is in serious shape and stock is about to fall. Or maybe write a piece vilifying the executives at Verizon as stupid buffoons and Accounts Payable should be consulted for the real scoop.

The President of Verizon might be kicked out on his ear had he allowed such a thing to happen. But the top executive at Verizon did everything he could to keep his thumb in the dyke and managed to avoid a total shutdown before a new contract gave him the freedom to fire the whole bunch of AP employees, from top supervisor on down.

Our state department and CIA are functions of our GOVERNMENT. As such, they should be neutral, do the jobs as assigned, and pursue personal policy goals in the more appropriate arena. These bureaucracies are the payroll, accounts payable and accounts receivable departments of our government. If they want to be managers they should run for an elected office.

I’ve never been a great believer that so many are followers of an ideology to the exclusion of everything else in their lives.

Follow the money is what I’m saying here.

This week, we have one Michael Scheuer.

Here’s what a recent Google search turned up on this man.

Michael Scheuer is a 22-year CIA veteran. He served as the Chief of the Bin Laden Unit at the Counterterrorist Center from 1996-1999. He resigned from the CIA in 2004.

According to the Boston Phoenix, Scheuer is the anonymous author responsible for Through Our Enemies' Eyes: Osama bin Laden, Radical Islam, and the Future of America and Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror.

Much as The Wise I hates to admit it, this is a book that didn’t cross my radar this past election cycle. So this CIA guy writes a book but under the nom de plume of “anonymous” and with full approval of The Agency?

We’ll forego comparisons to Verizon’s Accounts Payable employees and their book and take a closer look at this fellow.

Because, hey, he’s been a CIA operative for 22 years. With the advent of Porter Goss the man is out the door and now free to use his real name. But The Wise I must always keep a portion of her brain open to ideas and it could be this man knows something I don’t.

Not that he hasn’t been on every talk show across the wide world of punditry of late, an action that tends to increase book sales. So I listened closely.

First thing I noticed on this past Sunday’s Meet the Press is the man constantly called Tim Russert “sir”. He did the same thing on another talk show on which he was a guest.

Second thing I noticed, the man hates Jews. The third thing I noticed is that he called Osama Bin Laden a ‘great’ man, justifying the appellation by asserting that when a person changes history he must be considered ‘great’.

From that same Google search, I find this:

He alleges our actions that created Muslims who hate us.

…unqualified support for Isreal
…lower oil prices
…presences in Arabian peninsula
…presences in Iraq, etc.
…supports tyrannical governments

The Wise I must elaborate. According to Michael Scheuer, Osama hates us because we support Israel, because we plunder Arabian oil on the cheap for our own industrialized comfort, because of our military presence on the Arabian peninsula and now our presence in Iraq, and because of America’s support for tyrannical Arab governments.

This bothers Osama, does it?

All of this brouhaha from the CIA and this is all Mr. Scheuer can come up with? And if Mr. Scheuer alleges this to be how Osama REALLY feels than what does he think the administration should do about it?

We should give up our support for Israel, our only ally and the only legitimate democracy in the region? What on earth good would that do? Except to cause Israel to be totally eliminated, baboom, from the planet. Would this somehow make the despots and dictators of the Mideast happier, make their citizens more productive? As for oil prices, well we buy it as cheap as we can get it here in America, which is why Wal-Mart is so popular here. If we paid more money for oil this would be better? More money for the Arabian poor excuses for leaders to carouse the western obscene culture with.

As for our military presence, damn, the Saudis can’t risk having any sort of army to protect its endless oil wells. But that country does sit on over a third of the planet’s oil supply and any extreme damage to them would affect countries across this planet far worse than the United States of America. So the U.S. helps defend the oil fields, particularly when the kind Saddam lived right next store and wouldn’t mind having all that oil.

But hey, Mr. Scheuer, you were right when you said the U.S. supported tyrannical governments in the Midest. Not that we had any choice or anything. Because the leader of a country is the leader of a country even if he or she is a genetic dumb bell as in the case of the Sauds or a mob boss as in the case of Egypt’s Mubarak. Hey, America didn’t elect those people!

Talk about your Catch-22. Finally a President decides it’s time to do something about those Mideast leaders because in an effort to deflect criticism from their own horrible selves their citizens have taken it into their heads to come over here, destroy our legally built buildings and murder our law-abiding citizens.

Now the world and all liberals in general rise up in horror at the notion when, according to Michael Scheuer, we are finally doing what the great Osama wants.

I’ve listened to Mr. Scheuer enough and I still wonder, what on earth is in this all for him? What’s driving him, indeed, driven him even when he had a full-time job? Like The Wise I has stated, I tend to be skeptical when an ideological explanation is given for this sort of behavior.

For Michael Scheuer, indeed many in the CIA and state department, wanted to keep Saddam in power via the American ballot box. It was too late by election 2004 to keep their hero in power but they sure wanted the person in charge of the administration to take it easy on the Arabs and go hard on the Jews.

Like not investigate that pesky UN Oil for Food scandal too closely.

The Wise I tentatively concludes, hey I’ll throw it out there, that a whole bunch of these people are somehow and in some way, very involved in this soon-to-explode scandal. With Scheuer it could be as simple as proceeds from a book. Follow the money.

Remember Scott Ritter? Another Saddam apologist who turned out to be a child molester and did get some money from an alleged Iraqi documentary “producer”.

There’s more to all of this than ideology is what I’m saying here.

This administration is very evidently desperately trying to keep this food-for-oil scandal under the radar until the new Iraqi government is elected.

THEN both Saddamn and the UN will go on trial with the plaintiff being the Iraqi government. I predict there will be some American blood in that mess.