Internet and Politics

[Super Dude]

This article is way too long for me to bother with copying the whole thing, but I did want to focus on this one passage in particular:

Liberal Blogger as Enemy of the State?: The privacy-related story that got perhaps the most attention this week was this one by James Risen of The Times:

A former senior C.I.A. official says that officials in the Bush White House sought damaging personal information on a prominent American critic of the Iraq war in order to discredit him.

Glenn L. Carle, a former Central Intelligence Agency officer who was a top counterterrorism official during the administration of President George W. Bush, said the White House at least twice asked intelligence officials to gather sensitive information on Juan Cole, a University of Michigan professor who writes an influential blog that criticized the war.

In an interview, Mr. Carle said his supervisor at the National Intelligence Council told him in 2005 that White House officials wanted “to get” Professor Cole, and made clear that he wanted Mr. Carle to collect information about him, an effort Mr. Carle rebuffed. … Intelligence officials disputed Mr. Carle’s account, saying that White House officials did ask about Professor Cole in 2006, but only to find out why he had been invited to C.I.A.-sponsored conferences on the Middle East. The officials said that the White House did not ask for sensitive personal information, and that the agency did not provide it.

Cole, whose traffic at his blog, Informed Comment, must be spiking noticeably, had this, among other things, to say:

It seems to me clear that the Bush White House was upset by my blogging of the Iraq War, in which I was using Arabic and other primary sources, and which contradicted the propaganda efforts of the administration attempting to make the enterprise look like a wild shining success.

Carle’s revelations come as a visceral shock. You had thought that with all the shennanigans of the CIA against anti-Vietnam war protesters and then Nixon’s use of the agency against critics like Daniel Ellsberg, that the Company and successive White Houses would have learned that the agency had no business spying on American citizens.

…

What alarms me most of all in the nakedly illegal deployment of the CIA against an academic for the explicit purpose of destroying his reputation for political purposes is that I know I am a relatively small fish and it seems to me rather likely that I was not the only target of the baleful team at the White House. After the Valerie Plame affair, it seemed clear that there was nothing those people wouldn’t stoop to.

https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/17/the-week-in-privacy-just-between-you-and-me/?hp

is speechless.

[rumborak]

With the blunder of the Iraq war, I have at this point concluded that the CIA is a money drain with very little value. They seem to have been a great organization in the Cold War, but in this day of decentralized, internet-based warfare they seem to be 5 steps behind.

rumborak

[El Barto]

I read about this earlier in the week, and as I recall, the CIA told them to go climb a tree.  I could be mistaken, but I believe there was pressure for a while, and then they gave up.  That said, they might just as well have found somebody else who would play ball that this Carle fellow doesn't know about.  Still, the Bush administration made it a habit of interfering with and politicizing their intelligence organizations, so this isn't at all surprising. 

[Super Dude]

I just find it disturbing that they'd pour so many resources not into trying to expose this guy as a militant or terrorist or something, but to publicly ruin him so they can shut him up.  And he's not even such a major guy, he's just some professor at U of M!  They were using government intelligence to basically try and denounce a dissident.