Pregled posta

Karl Rove is so effective at manipulating public perception, so radically unprincipled and so abysmally cynical, that it's difficult to believe he isn't controlling whatever the headlines say is happening to him. Maybe the 21st Century Watergate is just Karl's latest grand operetta, designed to distract us all from the savageries "our troops" are committing in the Persian Gulf as you read this. In that case, some legal technicality is even now being incubated inside Mr. Fitzgerald's briefcase, ready to hatch at the right moment and send us all back to business as usual.
Or maybe this Watergate, like the last one, is a creature of the CIA. All those years ago, Dick Helms may well have instructed one of Nixon's burglars (namely, CIA employee Bernard Barker) to sabotage his own burglary by leaving behind the strip of tape on the door-lock. That way, when the burglars were caught, all their orders would point backward to Nixon except that one, which pointed not to Helms but to sheer incompetence. Goodbye, Nixon. If this were being repeated, the Agency will have somehow contrived to trap Rove and his bosses into outing Valerie Plame, while using the Downing Street leaks as a lever to force the White House into jeopardy.

This time, however, the CIA is not being run by someone like Dick Helms, a veteran werewolf whom President Nixon inherited. It is run by Porter Goss, whom Bush (i.e., Cheney) appointed as part of a long war against the agency. That conflict pits the CIA against a solid alliance comprising the White House, the Pentagon, and the titans of the oil industry. Though the Agency's bark remains as horrifying as Cerberus' howling from the porches of the Inferno, it may have few teeth left for either attack or defense.

Mike Ruppert surmised as much, eight months ago in 'GlobalCorp':
"Look, the agency does many things in many roles from raw intelligence gathering, to economic warfare, to satellite recon, to paramilitary operations requiring cover and deniability, to drug smuggling. But since its inception it was always focused in large part on medium and long-term intelligence gathering and covert operations through the costly, patient, expensive means of placing NOCs (non-official covers) or assets in missions where it might take five, ten or fifteen years to bear fruit. These programs were always centered on "what if" contingencies which inherently implied that multiple outcomes were possible; that there were alternative futures to be influenced and shaped.

"Battlefield intelligence is a different critter. It presupposes that there is nothing more important than the battle that has been joined at this moment. If the battle is not won, there are no future choices. Hence nothing matters other than the war that is being fought today. No Yaltas or Potsdams; no future deep cover moles will be needed.

"Every country in the world is betting everything it has on this one hand knowing that after 2007 or 2008 the game ends. The map of the future after that is unknowable and, to large extent, irrelevant. That's why Rumsfeld has won the battle to control American intelligence operations and why the new National Intelligence Director John Negroponte is getting the job."

Either the White House is controlling this Rovegate scandal (in which case it is a grand diversion that will come to nothing), or the CIA is controlling it (in which case it may sink the administration and perhaps the Republican congressional majority, anointing Hillary Clinton), or nobody is controlling it - in which case this is part of the institutional flake-down of what used to be the government.

Either way, we all get front-row seats. Pass the popcorn (and don't mention Peak Oil). Read More