Hayden Throwing Mudd at Bloggers
Jeff Stein chronicles former CIA columnist Stephen Lee’s woes with the CIA’s pre-publication process.
Stephen Lee, a former CIA operations manager who blogs for The Washington Examiner, suspects the spy agency’s censors are trying to sabotage his new career.
Lee recently launched the critical "Examiner Spy" column for the Examiner newspaper chain, which has a D.C. daily edition. He also pens a biting cartoon for his own Web site, NationalSecurityDrone.com, under the name Frank Naif."
I believe I am being subjected to a campaign of low-level harrassment," Lee said Wednesday.
Most interesting, though, Stein describes the problems Lee had getting a piece blaming Michael Hayden–rather than the bloggers that Hayden himself blamed–for the withdrawal of Phil Mudd’s nomination to the top DHS intelligence post.
The first was a critical piece on former CIA Director Michael V. Hayden, acidly headlined, "CIA ex-chief Hayden blames bloggers for damage caused by his policies."
Lee says he submitted the piece for clearance on Friday, June 19. The weekend passed. Finally, at mid-morning on Tuesday, June 23, he learned the PRB had "lost" it.
He resubmitted the piece, and around 4 p.m. Tuesday, he got an answer: It was cleared.
Here’s some of what the CIA tried to "lose."
Ex CIA chief Michael Hayden’s opinion piece in the Washington Post on Friday, 19 June 2009, decried how “today’s atmosphere” of mistrust in Washington caused former senior CIA analyst Phil Mudd to withdraw his nomination as Undersecretary of Homeland Security for Intelligence.
Predictably, Hayden did not take responsibility for his own role in “today’s atmosphere”—in particular Hayden’s own policies of excessive secrecy and shirking command responsibility for specific programs and policy on his watch.
Hayden nonetheless excoriated “the blogosphere” and chicken-hearted congressional aides for hyping up Mudd’s association with discredited torture and detention practices.
[snip]
I count myself as one of those intelligence officers who has reason for pause about future service inside US intelligence. But it’s not cheeto-eating bloggers or opportunistic congressional staffers that I fear.
[snip]
Mudd was a CIA analyst, and probably was aware of the torture and detention programs. But he was almost certainly not instrumentally involved in managing or participating in actual torture or extra-judicial detentions. Unfortunately, journalists, bloggers, congressional staffers, and ordinary Americans (all belittled as “internal threats” by Hayden in his Post essay) are not able to precisely discern Mudd’s involvement, if any, with that secret black box of terrorist detention and torture. Even though Americans are entitled to have a say in what CIA is doing in the Republic’s name, Hayden and other CIA directors’ disdain for transparency kept Mudd’s record out of view.
Gosh, are you telling me the former top spook is hiding beind attacks on us cheeto-eating Yirgacheffe-sipping bloggers?
Incidentally, some time 25 years from today, we’re going to finally get the document that shows this was a deliberate, coordinated effort to hide behind the Yirgacheffe-sipping bloggers.
It’s those enormously wide weed-pulling aprons those Yirgacheffe-sipping bloggers wear while tending okra. Makes it all too easy to hide.
Yirgacheffe. Sounds kind of nasty; kinda like something Sanford and Maria might have been doing to each other in the Thornbirds moonlight.
That’s why I used it instead of “sourdough pancake eating.” But we’ve finished the Yirgacheffe–we’re back to the standard “Lobster Butter Love” coffee.
But then, maybe that sounds even dirtier.
Here’s how Roos describes Lobster Butter Love:
That does sound kind of Argentine.
Speaking of wide weed-pulling aprons, time to don mine and go clean up the pepper plants, prepare the pole bean trellises.
But I’ll only be sipping some iced Kona while I’m out there, nothing exotic like Yirgacheffe. Maybe that’s why there aren’t any bald-pated intel folks hiding in my raised beds…
Kona’s not exotic? You checked with Cokie Roberts on that?
HA! Exotic, right, Kona being the only American-grown coffee.
Next thing you know people like Corky’ll be questioning my citizenship, being the spawn of a Hawaiian born in the islands before 1959 and a Yooper (the UP we Michiganders know isn’t a state but God’s country).
BTW, nice one, Mary (7). Fudd-ian he is, and now in retrospect, I think just about as smart. Highly predictable, too, brings to mind my favorite Looney Tunes’ Rabbit Fire cartoon. Wabbit Theathon!
Back to hoeing the weeds for me…isn’t there something constructive somebody can do with bloody crabgrass?
Hayden.
Elmer Fudd’s evil twin.
I don’t know why he’s so worried about bloggers. Despite them, he’s pulled off something relatively incredible, something I’m not sure any other criminal enterprise has done since Prohibition. He and the CIA have used their co-opted uniforms and propaganda tools to reshape the United States into just another torture regime – they’ve taken a nation that would have never needed to be “polled” on torture of innocent people and created one that can barely scrape up a 50% resistance to it.
Take a fucking bow.
Hayden Fudd is spot on.
Be vewwy, vewwy qwiet . . . We’re hunting bwoggers.
LOL. It’s a good thing I wasn’t drinking my Coke when I read your post. LOL
careful Mary they might stick you in one of them “communication managemnt units” in Indiana
http://www.aclu.org/prison/res…..90618.html
Why do I get a sense of deja vu? Oh, yes. This is exactly the same bullshit we heard about John Brennan, i.e., that bloggers had so unfairly trashed him for his patriotic and self-sacrificing work on behalf of the nation that his nomination had to be dropped. The fact that he was an advocate/appologist for war crimes was never mentioned by his hand-wringing supporters. To them it was all the fault of unreasonable left-wing bloggers.
The situation with Phil Mudd is summarized in this HuffPo article. Apparently, some bloggers and aides had claimed that Mudd had “knowledge of” the torture program, so:
My interpretation of Hayden’s attitude:
“How dare they, those DFH bloggers. They can’t handle the truth… God help me, these people are relentless… and wicked smart. I told you we should have renditioned them. I’m melting… melllllting.”
Well, he’s clearly very agitated lately. It must be getting very uncomfortable for him. Maybe some of those who were disenfranchised during the Bush admin. are breathing down his neck, and maybe the ones who weren’t disenfranchised are of even more concern. I hope he worries every night about being “wiretapped” and followed, and that he expends exorbitant amounts of time trying to keep all of his communications private and looking over his shoulder.
Let’s hope that the dots get connected all the way to the upper levels, publicly sometime soon. But I’m not holding my breath.
heh ..heh .. i’d note the sheer irony of lee’s having submitted his piece for clearance by the see-y-a on June 19th … the slaves being freed and all ..ya gnoes .. sort of a “shot across’t the bow ” so to spook-speak..
and also ..please note he [lee] got his licks in on you “cheeto-eatin’-bloggers” .. as an aside for extra credit .. lol
the coffee in argentina will melt your teeth btw .. very strong stuff .. expresso-like ..
there’s a lot of mixed english and german customs .. they take their pastries from the german tradition .. [but with double-cream .. double sugar .. double egg whites .. ] and they’re more into an english-type mornin’ cuppa-’ott-tea than big coffee drinkers ..
at least that was my experience in short r.o.n.’s down there during the early and mid 70’s ..
“Bloggers” is just a euphemism for this pesky electronic media age. When the only record available was the newspaper “morgue”, only the dedicated reporter could call someone on a distortion of the past. There was few of them back before the fourth estate died.
Now ANYONE can look it up online.
Where do the ordinary people have to report what we find?
…..those lowdown DFH blogs.
If reporters and their media would do their f’in jobs, Bloggers wouldn’t have to do it for them.
This is obvious to us here, but it will be years before these idiots catch up.
(BTW…I have trouble calling the commentors here “ordinary people”; maybe “extraordinary”, but seldom ordinary.)
a note of irony: Firefox’s built in spell checker choked on bloggers.
Let me apologize for the horrid grammar and the whole inane comment. It’s morning to me as a second shifter, and I was just simplifying for a 12 year old what was going on.
It leaked into my writing….
(excuses excuses)
Only problem is that I have to simplify for most of the people I work with as well; it’s sad to see that most are still relying on the traditional media to tell them what is going on in the world. I just want to bang my head against the wall because it’s more productive than trying to educate someone that think that faux spews reports news.
Incredibly frustrating.
These are the cracks in the SYSTEM. This is where the Light gets in. The DarkSide knows that.
Is Lee is undergoing a combination of test-and-indoctrination – or is making a myth? Consider the different experiences reported.
Baer left the CIA in the late ’90s — just as importantly Before Bush — so his experience is superficially vulnerable to labeling as stale dated and contextually irrelevant; despite that the TYPE of problem Lee reports is consistent with the agency’s history as reported by Tim Wiens, and may be in it’s DNA. Authoritarians, Bushies in particular. ANYONE vested in staus quo will need to expend more effort dismissing a view emanating from the closer, more current inside perspective.
Also, Baer is working broader territory, where a single, narrow, non-nuanced, politicized message is actually counterproductive to his career: the occasional op-ed in WaPo or NYT; some foreign policy mag work; panel appearances at wank tanks; left-edgier pieces on the prettier sites like Salon and HuffPo; appearances on PBS, MSNBC and CNN, with the odd foray onto Fauxnews for ‘balance’.
Whereas Lee is starting from an Anshutz project, so, taking his complaint at face value, either he learns CLARITY or he’ll move — or be moved — on.
From this and other of his pieces, it’s not apparent he has either the writing talent or depth of purpose to risk the latter.
This whole stance could be self-planted to gain early cred, both for him and the media venture: layers of falseness. He is, after all, a CIA grad; and this, after all, a CLARITY street sheet; and to conclude otherwise suggests an incautious hiring model, or uncharacteristically skipping it.
OT – Koh confirmed
http://legaltimes.typepad.com/…..s-koh.html
62-35
no, not OT: Dan Froomkin tells us that tomorrow is his last day at the WaPo.
The CIA is afraid of My Muse
the DOJ wants the federal courts to protect dead eye dick from Jon Stewart
batshit insane backmann fears that the census will lead to internment camps
what’s next
Mickey Mouse beats the shit out of newt gingrinch ???
Liberty University is invaded by drag queens causing half the student body to flee (and the other half to convert) ???
it’s gittin REALLY hard to make this shit up, folks …
I’m surprised they have never tried to hire her
For Hayden to act as if there are no reasons for the immense amount of “today’s distrust” in Washington and the “distrust” for our Reps Presidential administrations, legal system he is complete and utter denial about what has taken place during the last eight years. Not one friggin thug held accountable for false pre-war intelligence, not one thug up line held accountable for the horrendous torture, not one frigging thug held accountable for undermining the Dept of Justice. One thug (scooter) held accountable (kind of) for purposely outing Plame, Not one thug held accountable for the hundreds of thousands dead, injured, millions displace in Iraq. The whole world knows that the Bush administration operated outside of the law and so far they are still walking the streets and filling our air waves with their endless lies.
EW know you cleaned the mud out of your “Yigacheffe” coffee and cheeto bag (when is the last time you have eaten a cheeto?)
EW I would think these folks (CIA spooks) would be knocking on your door to hire you. Hope we never lose you
I’ve been really busy with the day job recently and am late to the party here, but I have a few things to say. First, the notion that liberal bloggers “got” Phil Mudd is ludicrous. There was essentially zero notice of Mudd among liberal bloggers until after he withdrew. Then, there was more support or neutrality (Spencer Ackerman, Laura Rozen) than opposition (a Daily Kos diary or two).
Although most of mainstream media reported that Democrats did him in, it’s pretty clear from Laura Rozen’s reporting that it was Republicans who did Mudd in. If you look back at what was going on when this went down (early June), you can’t help but conclude that Mudd was sacrificed to the Republican effort to get Pelosi. At least one report (by Ronald Kessler at Newsmax, so no link, go find it yourself) is unintentionally revealing:
The other thing I want to make clear is that I like Cheetos(tm) and Yirgacheffe coffee (although not together, yech). Neither, however, is very good for your keyboard, so avoid applying while blogging. Actually, neither is very good for me either, but at least I can taste them…