Sabotage

Since the September 11, 2001, attacks on America, intelligence collection has become the number-one weapon in the effort to defeat al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden — a plot penetrated is an attack stopped. And, to the outside observer, the CIA has performed well as a key partner in the Bush administration’s war on terror. But as Rowan Scarborough reveals in this groundbreaking new book, significant elements within the CIA are undermining both the President and national security through leaks, false allegations — and outright sabotage.

“The CIA’s job is to collect facts and let the White House, the Pentagon, and the State Department make national security policy,” writes Scarborough. “But an agency that is supposed to be scrupulously nonpartisan has become increasingly political — during a time of war — against America’s elected Commander in Chief.” Using his first-rate sources in all levels of national security — from field officers to high-ranking analysts to former intelligence heads — Scarborough paints a disturbing picture of partisan politics endangering the success of our campaigns abroad and the very lives of our soldiers and agents.

Rowan Scarborough reveals:

• How CIA analysts repeatedly leak details about classified intelligence programs with the dual intent of ending them and damaging the president
• How, on at least eight occasions, intelligence officials have made serious allegations of wrongdoing against the President’s men that turned out to be untrue
• Why, contrary to popular belief, the CIA is “predominantly liberal,” in the words of one ex-agent
• How liberals, longtime foes of CIA operations in the Cold War and Vietnam, have embraced the Agency as the internal opposition organ to President Bush
• How a CIA turf battle prevented special operators from pursuing one a notorious Taliban leaders responsible for killing 16 Americans
• The real reason journalist Jill Carroll’s abductors released her unharmed
• How current and former CIA officers fueled conspiracy theories that President Bush orchestrated the September 11 attacks on America
• How a CIA press leak about a network of secret holding cells for captured al Qaeda leaders not only embarrassed the Bush administration – but damaged relations with countries cooperating in the war on terror
• Why senior Bush administration officials felt compelled, on national security grounds, to decline daily intelligence briefings from CIA analysts
• How cables written by the CIA station chief in Baghdad, often dire in their assessments, showed up in the New York Times just days after reaching Washington
• How a CIA leak to the New York Times about a top secret program for eavesdropping on suspected terrorists enabled al Qaeda to change the way it communicates, depriving the U.S. of critical information in the war on terror
• How a CIA analyst worked with Democrats to sabotage the nomination of John Bolton to the U.N. — winning himself a plum job in Europe in return
• How a CIA leak thrust the Bush White House into a three-year crisis over the Valerie Plame/Joseph Wilson affair
• How the New York Times tried to fool congressional leaders into divulging more about electronic surveillance of al Qaeda overseas
• How Clinton’s downsizing of the CIA led to the closing of stations in scores of jihadist breeding grounds – including Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim country, and Hamburg, Germany, where 9/11 was hatched
• The “crackdown on conservatives” in the CIA that took place during the Clinton years
• The secret behind President Bush’s controversial defense of the Dubai Ports Deal
• How Bill Clinton curried favor with Iranian mullahs by designating an Iranian dissident groups as terrorists — though the group has since given the U.S. military life-saving intelligence about Iran’s sabotage in Iraq
• How Democratic senator Carl Levin tried to get the Senate Intelligence Committee to report, without evidence, that Bush aides pressured the intelligence community to write a bogus report on Iraq weapons
• How Levin himself pressured CIA analysts, in closed door sessions, to change the way they evaluated suspected WMD sites — the same type of pressure for which he accused the Bush political appointees of practicing
• The CIA “peace activist” who has committed his retirement years to railing against President Bush
• “We would have caught bin Laden a long time ago,” says a well-placed operations source – but for the absurdly restrictive rules of engagement that make the terrorist leader’s capture next to impossible
• How CIA liberals use “a leak here and a leak there” to slowly pick apart their conservative foes until their effectiveness is gone
• Good news about U.S. intelligence achievements – such as the amazing new portable device that enables U.S. soldiers to spy on al Qaeda and Taliban movements, and the software program that helped locate and kill Abu Musab Zarqawi, the brutal leader of al Qaeda in Iraq

Tags: Rowan Scarborough, Sabotage