Intel Ironies

Again, the NY Times has missed the target by saying Negroponte is leaving the DNI position because he pines for the State Department. A source tells Pat Lang:

Contrary to the bland stories in The New York Times and Washington Post of Friday, Negroponte did not go voluntarily to State from his job as director of intelligence. In fact, there was tremendous administration pressure to get him out of his current job. The chief cause of the quarrel involved Negroponte's balking at a request from Vice President Cheney to increase domestic collection by the National Security Agency on U.S. citizens.

Negroponte flatly refused, Cheney bridled, and from then on the pressure built to get rid of him. (The White House did not return phone calls, but there is nothing new in that.)

The Bush people, chiefly Cheney and the president, were already annoyed by the fact that the Negroponte group has been busy producing drafts of reports that predict utter disaster in Iraq and which are utterly opposed to any increase of troops. Cheney and Bush both flared in wrath over this. Of course, intelligence is simply evaluated information. Its purpose is to help inform decisions by policymakers, as Pat as so often pointed out. But this this administration perceives objectivity as a inadequate commitment or as an absence of complete loyalty. [my emphasis - J.]

Meanwhile, Valerie Plame doesn't get permission from the CIA to write a book because... are you ready for this... it might be revealed that she was a CIA officer under "nonofficial cover."

But in what could be a precursor to a separate legal battle, Plame recently hired a lawyer to challenge the CIA Publications Review Board, which must clear writings by former employees. The panel refused Plame permission to even mention that she worked for the CIA because she served as a "nonofficial cover" officer (or NOC) posing as a private businesswoman, according to an adviser to Plame, who asked not to be identified discussing a sensitive issue. "She believes this will effectively gut the book," said the adviser. Larry Johnson, a former colleague, said the agency's action seems punitive, given that other ex-CIA undercover officers have published books. But even Plame's friends acknowledge that few NOCs have done so. CIA spokesman Mark Mansfield said the panel was still having "ongoing" talks with Plame to resolve the dispute. "The sole yardstick," he said, is that books "contain no classified information." A spokesman for Simon & Schuster, Plame's publisher, declined to comment.

This administration is not interested in truthiness, only loyalty. Sinners will be punished.

Comments

[Lurch]

So, if they refuse to admit that she was an employee, does that mean that, effectively, she was NOT an employee? If she was NOT officially an employee, does he really need their appproval to publish? Isn't their position somewhat analogous to being a non-person in Stalinist Russia? (Minus the NKVD, of course.)

Do they really feel strong enough to duke it out on newspaper pages before it goes to court? And, say, wasn't it their idea to stir up dust because her cover was blown?