One of the many untold stories about the defence of the west, it seems to me, is the war within the west that has been waged by the CIA. Over and over again I hear accounts of the campaign of disinformation, lies and political point-scoring emanating from disaffected CIA operatives that has fuelled the anti-war movement. Indeed, the evidence has been all around us ever since the Iraq war started, as a steady stream of books and articles has gushed from an apparently endless line of former spooks, all placing the Bush administration in the worst possible light.

There was once a time when, if such a procession of CIA operatives had produced such an obvious politically motivated campaign, the media would have been crawling over every word of these utterances in excitement and outrage at such a blatant attempt to subvert a democratic government by a covert agenda that was so clearly running within the secret world. That was when journalists regarded the intelligence world as suspect by definition, since the game it played was deception, and the CIA was regarded as the antichrist. Yet now the CIA's anti-Bush propaganda has been swallowed by the media without so much as a murmur, let alone a checked fact or two, let alone any adverse comment or questions being asked about what the hell was going on here. Everything produced by these superannuated spooks has been viewed as holy writ, sanctified and guaranteed by the very aura of clandestine ops that would once have rung every alarm bell going. And that, of course, is because these ex-spooks (can a spook ever really be ex?) are delivering exactly what the hacks want to hear: apparently authoritative 'evidence' that the war was a catastrophe, Bush is a calamity and everything being done by his administration continues to be stupid, evil or both.

In the light of all this, it is fascinating to read a claim by Dr Jack Wheeler, who is described on his website as a 'professional adventurer' and 'geopolitical strategist' with links to the intelligence world. Despite this somewhat dodgy-sounding CV, his speculation about the Newsweek toilet debacle fits with what's been going on when he claims that Newsweek's Michael Isikoff was suckered by his source:

'We don’t know his name, but it’s pretty sure he’s a CIA Rogue Weasel.You read about the Rogue Weasels at Langley back in October last year in The CIA in Deep Qaaqaa. You learned that Langley has long been a left-wing warren, infested with folks so far on the left they would embarrass Teddy Kennedy. Since then, CIA Director Porter Goss has fired or pushed to quit scores of them.

'The Weasels hate Bush and want him to fail. One of them, now ex-CIA, desirous of damaging Bush’s progress with democratizing the Moslem world, who could plausibly claim access to classified information about interrogation at Gitmo and whom Isikoff had used as a source before, foisted KoranToilet on Isikoff.

'So where’s the silver lining? It’s that the Weasels have poisoned their well. No reputable journalist is going to believe any of them from now on. Isikoff will never publicly disclose his source’s identity. But all his colleagues in the MSM world know how he got burned. The Left has damaged one of their most powerful ways to influence the media: Langley lefties whispering super-secret tips into journalists’ ears. The Weasels are going to have a lot harder time peddling anti-Bush, anti-America lies. That’s a silver lining worth a riot in Pakistan.'

Well, that may or may not be true. What remains worrying, however, is that despite the efforts of new CIA head Porter Goss, some sources believe the CIA tanker has not yet been turned round. For the underlying reason for all the leaked propaganda is surely that for many years the CIA has been a slow train crash. It is said that it was demotivated and demoralised by deep personnel cuts. Maybe; my guess is that the cause of the rot goes rather deeper than that. Whatever the reasons, the fact is that it failed to analyse properly the information it was receiving, and thus failed to understand the full extent and nature of the danger posed by both the global jihad and Saddam Hussein and the connections between the two.

The Bush administration seems to believe that a new bureaucratic structure will solve the CIA's endemic problems. The signs are, however, that nothing is really changing -- or if it is, it is proceeding at a glacial pace. Given the key function of the main intelligence-gathering arm of the principal defender of the west, this is to say the least alarming. And there is no shortage of recipients for the anti-west messages which continue to be disseminated by spooks with an outsize chip on their shoulder. Those inclined to dismsiss the Newsweek debacle as a one-off error which tells us nothing about the underlying attitudes of that magazine might care to ponder this revelation that it has been publishing anti-American covers on its foreign editions which it concealed from its home market:

'For instance, while a Japanese edition of Newsweek dated Feb. 2 published a cover story featuring an American flag in a trash can under the headline, "The day America died," and the international edition featured a photo of President Bush with the headline, "America Leads ... But Is Anyone Following?," the U.S. edition cover story was an "Oscar Confidential" featuring Hilary Swank, Jamie Foxx and Leonardo DiCaprio.The cover story in the foreign editions, titled, "Dream on, America," about what Newsweek characterized as "the world's rejection of the American way of life," did not run in the U.S. edition of the magazine.'

The role of the media in the war within the west is another story which has yet to be told.

Posted by melanie at May 23, 2005