CORRECTION: Title corrected. Year was written as 2000. Actual year of events described in this post were 2005.
Find Bin Laden? Nope! As detailed in the New York Times the Bush Administration had real menaces to worry about: Get Juan Cole!
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. Months later, Mr. Carle said, he confronted a C.I.A. official after learning of another attempt to collect information about Professor Cole. Mr. Carle said he contended at the time that such actions would have been unlawful.
They wanted to collect information to defame Cole because he was deemed influential and deeply anti-Iraq War. Cole wants to find out if this illegal action took place. If this is true, the CIA, may have broken the law (and I doubt Cole was the only person).
“These allegations, if true, raise very troubling questions,” said Jeffrey H. Smith, a former C.I.A. general counsel. “The statute makes it very clear: you can’t spy on Americans.” Mr. Smith added that a 1981 executive order that prohibits the C.I.A. from spying on Americans places tight legal restrictions not only on the agency’s ability to collect information on United States citizens, but also on its retention or dissemination of that data.
An unethical, Illegal misuse of our intelligence resources in a time of war. Was there any dissent during George W. Bush’s White House years that didn’t drive them to overreact?