In fact, I know it is.... (H/T Big Government) The Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982 (Pub.L. 97-200, 50 U.S.C. § 421–426) is a United States federal law that makes it a federal crime to intentionally reveal the identity of an agent whom one knows to be in or recently in certain covert roles with a U.S. intelligence agency. This is the same law that was used to prosecute Scooter Libby for talking about desk jockey Valerie Plame, who, as it turns out, was so covert that when she was "outed," her husband went to ground immediately by appearing on every news outlet that had a camera near it and Valerie E&E'ed to Vanity Fair, concealing her identity with a pair of sunglasses on the cover of the magazine. Oh, and guess who voted against the bill.... Senator, now Vice President Joe Biden.... But my own feelings aside about that, this seems to be a bit of an Onion story (as in layers).... According to Washington Post columnist, David Ignatius, “[T]he U.S. military has long been unhappy about the quality of CIA intelligence in Afghanistan,” and the senior military intelligence officer in Afghanistan, Maj Gen Michael T. Flynn went so far as to publish a stunning report calling for, “sweeping changes to the way the intelligence community thinks about itself.” It seems that all is not well in the spook community. I promise to go into much more detail on the report later, and having just scanned it briefly, it lays down the way forward. I can tell you that I was never really certain of the sources of most of the intelligence that we received when I was driving around Eastern Afghanistan, but I do know that one particular mission involved chasing a non-existent bad dude with a non-existent 100 Taliban fighters, and that the intel came from "really high up." Piled Higher and Deeper indeed.... This internecine fight between Defense and CIA has always been there. My Step-dad was an interpreter in the intel community in Vietnam and told me that the CIA never seemed to get anything worth a crap and that he didn't like them very much. The OGA fellas at the FOB I was at for half my tour in Afghanistan were good guys, and they saw alot of the two way range, but I can make no judgments on how good or bad they were in gathering intelligence because I have no idea which "OGA" they were from, which I am guessing is the whole point. The report itself advocates for a "sea change" on the way that intel is gathered and where the focus of this information should be. When I walked the ground, I advocated for some of the same ideas; and I imagine that every platoon sergeant did as well. Much of it describes what anyone who has been in the fight knows. But given the penchants and priorities of this administration, they seem determined to do whatever it can to cause itself to be the most unsuccessful administration in history. If CIA is about to do something like this because it believes it is not getting it's fair share of the credit or work in killing bad guys, gathering actionable intel, shaping the battlefield against our enemies or being relevant; maybe they should look no further than the current administration (who is their boss) as to the reasons why they are sucking massively at what they do for a living. Director Leon Panetta knows about as much about intelligence gathering as I do about quantum nuclear mechanics. But if someone at CIA leaks this and they go nuclear and drop the "NOC List" bomb on the New York Slimes in order to wedge their way back into the war, then the brainiacs at Langley will have reached the lowest point in the agency's history.... And broken the law. Between investigations into "torture" that keep opening and closing and the fear that your face and name might be on the front page of every newspaper in the free world, this certainly seems like one of the crappiest times in history to be involved in the intelligence field. My bet is that HR is having fits trying to hire anyone competent to do the job at all. And if they do publish this list, then someone at Justice with some intellectual honesty needs to have warrants prepared for the FBI, who in turn, needs to be prepared with some handcuffs and a transport van headed to the Stony Lonesome.
Read the complete post at http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Blackfive/~3/0TEjU4_vYiQ/i-am-pretty-sure-this-is-a-crime.html
Posted
Apr 20 2010, 02:45 AM
by
BLACKFIVE