Daddy ran the CIA, and W. is president, so why not let Jeb Bush run the CIA now? Okay, that’s a slight exaggeration. But the Porter Goss-led regime change at the CIA is working its magic, and the Bush family mafia seems to be pushing it.
According to Newsday , Goss is carrying out White House orders for a purge:
The White House has ordered the new CIA director, Porter Goss, to purge the agency of officers believed to have been disloyal to President George W. Bush or of leaking damaging information to the media about the conduct of the Iraq war and the hunt for Osama bin Laden, according to knowledgeable sources.
"The agency is being purged on instructions from the White House," said a former senior CIA official who maintains close ties to both the agency and to the White House. "Goss was given instructions ... to get rid of those soft leakers and liberal Democrats. The CIA is looked on by the White House as a hotbed of liberals and people who have been obstructing the president's agenda."
Goss, the former CIA official who ran a newspaper in Florida and then got himself elected to Congress where (of course) he ended up overseeing the CIA, now heads it. His team of “Hill pukes”—as New York Times columnist David Brooks says they are being called at Langley—are running amok, angering CIA veterans. Resignations are piling up, with John McLaughlin, the deputy director, and Stephen Kappes, head of the clandestine service, jumping ship in the last few days, joining Mike Scheuer, the CIA’s Osama bin Laden expert, and James Pavitt, the deputy director of operations, in exile. More departures are expected.
According to the Post , four senior retired CIA officials tried to meet with Goss to help smooth the transition, but Goss—apparently seeking the kind of chaos now unfolding—rebuffed them.
It’s exactly what the neocons want—a wholesale purging of the agency that was the main source of opposition in the Bush administration to its obsessive Iraq strategy. A lot of heads will roll, and then the CIA will be a Stepford Agency, like the rest.
David Brooks, in the Times , added this charming comment:
If we lived in a primitive age, the ground at Langley would be laid waste and salted, and there would be heads on spikes. As it is, the answer to the C.I.A. insubordination is not just to move a few boxes on the office flow chart.
So what’s the Jeb Bush connection? Not only was Goss close to Gov. Bush when Goss was a Florida representative, but a candidate being rumored to replace Kappes—or at least to get a senior CIA post—is Richard P. Lawless, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for Asian and Pacific affairs. The Post says that Lawless “was described as having ‘long-term ties to President Bush’s brother, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush.’” But what the Post doesn’t say is that in 1987, Lawless—then in private business—founded a company called U.S-Asia Commercial Development with Therese Shaheen, a former Taiwan-based businesswoman and Bush contributor who was named last year to head up the American Institute in Taiwan, the quasi-U.S. “embassy.” Between 1989 and 1993, Lawless, Shaheen and Jeb Bush did millions of dollars of business together. Shaheen is also well connected: Her husband is Larry di Rita, Secretary of Defense Don Rumsfeld’s chief of staff. You can read the reports about all this in the Taipei Times here.
Here’s a relevant excerpt from the Taipei Times :
Shaheen comes to AIT well connected with the Bush administration. Her husband, Lawrence Di Rita, is Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's chief of staff, and her former partner in US-Asia Commercial Development, Richard Lawless, was recently appointed the deputy assistant secretary of defense for Asia and Pacific affairs.
Lawless, who founded US-Asia Commercial Development with Shaheen in 1987, was previously a close confidant and business partner of President Bush's brother, Florida Governor Jeb Bush, with whom he conducted millions of dollars in real-estate and import-export business between 1989 and 1993.
The CIA has been at war with the White House for two years. They’ve been leaking anti-Bush stuff for all that time, including reports about how the CIA knew that Iraq was going to be a tar baby. Bush, of course, incredibly blamed the CIA for the intelligence reports on Iraq’s WMDs, even though it was the Pentagon and the White House (i.e., Cheney), who demanded that the intelligence fit the policy. But Bush won re-election. And so he can push the CIA around.
