I guess all these years, when I was making fun of the “sternly worded letters from Congress,” I was wrong, because right now, former CIA operative Bob Baer is about to cry on Hardball because, and I am not making this up and hope to have video for you later, “some House Democrats wrote a letter and it’s not fair.”
I guess sternly-worded letters sting more than I thought.
Zifnab
I never realized Bob Baer was such a little bitch. Did the CIA know this when they hired him?
Elroy's Lunch
Must have gotten a paper-cut when he opened the letter.
Tax Analyst
“WAAAAHHH!!!”
I guess this is a demonstration of how tough ya’ gotta’ be to torture somebody.
Surprise – Not very.
jeffreyw
Saw that while eating pork steaks, Tweety did push back some, seemed half pissed at Baer.
SpotWeld
.. I wonder if this is why he’s a *former* CIA operative.
The Moar You Know
@Zifnab: I think they did. Think about the mentality needed to follow folks around, listen in on people’s phone calls, and speculate about the horrible things they may be doing, and you’ll find that “crying like a little bitch” fits right into that personality type.
freelancer
Don’t have cable access right now, but I remember Baer’s book See No Evil, as being an amazing look into how the Middle East functions and how serpentine the intelligence world is inside that region. I thought it was very informative, and showed a lot of insight. It’s disheartening to hear that he’s showing this kind of theatrically unstable behavior.
Between this, PUMA-king Larry “Agent Flowbee” Johnson, and Michael “The Only Way to Save America is to Nuke It” Scheuer, what the hell is going on with the HR dept at the CIA?!
demkat620
The first accurate thing I’ve heard Chuck Todd say in months:
“Diane Feinstein is not very popular in the Democratic party.”
You’re godamn right.
And back ot, David Ignatious is looking to fill Broder’s spot as Village concern troll.
Carol A.
Watched the segment on tonight’s Hardball. Bob Baer needs to man up! Whining that the poor CIA is defenseless against attack letters sent by Democrats in Congress is pathetic. CIA operatives risk their lives everyday, but their leaders have a history of secretiveness, lying to Congress, throwing their own under the bus, and committing undeniable atrocities. Hayden was in cohoots with Cheney and still defends him today. Blaming Pelosi was intended to take the heat off both bottom feeders.
GregB
You also realize that the U.S. military is also very fragile and can’t even handle the concept of democratic debate while they are abroad.
It ruins their morale and they can’t do their jobs.
Unless the criticism is coming from conservatives, of course.
-G
geg6
Fuck Chuck Todd. Check out his bullshit talk with Glenn Greenwald today. Even a stopped clock is right twice a day and that’s how he got it right about how much we despise DiFi.
Roger Moore
@GregB:
No, it still hurts them when it’s coming from conservatives. It’s just that when the liberals are in charge, the wonderful, glorious, patriotic wars are instantly converted into evil, wrongheaded ones, so it’s patriotic to undermine the troops.
demkat620
@geg6: I am with you to a point. Todd is a good numbers and horse race guy.
He is in over his head as a WH correspondent. He doesn’t know how to do it.
John Cole
I respect Todd for going on Greenwald’s show, and I bet if you asked GG, he would tell you the same.
Mary
I’ve listened to Baer before on a variety of topics (including endorsement of McCain over Obama on the one hand and rejection of torture as something the CIA should be doing in an interview with Bernsten (where Bernsten was making the argument that torture works) on the other.
I haven’t seen this and I’d like to, but I think you have to realize that he has ties to guys who are still there and who are kind of caught. I don’t make a lot of excuses for people who sign on to torture the helpless, especially not in a exigencies setting, but in a “here’s our 30 day torture regime” setting, but Baer and others have mentioned that someone involved in the torture of KSM is a, broken is I think the word they use, man.
They also have guys who have tortured to death and there’s no SOL. They have guys who have willingly disappeared children. To be honest, if you are halfway human and you see your agency and people you know caught up in all that, it’s going to tear you up some. So he might have a bit more and broader context on his mind than the letter.
Or not – who knows.
Jay B.
I respect the fact that he debated Greenwald. But after hearing his “defense”, I don’t think I have to respect him or his argument.
The CIA HR department is a terrible mess. They first tried staffing with armies of stiff Ivy WASPS and they ended up fucking up most of Latin America and then Vietnam. Then they diversified and ended up fucking up the Middle East and now even the U.S.
Great work fellas. When they aren’t conspiring to kill people or stage coups that inevitably come back to bite us in the ass, they are stovepiping bad intelligence to their superiors AND crying about minimal oversight when all they do is LIE when testifying anyway.
Someone, anyone, please point out a single success that the CIA has had.
John Cole
@Mary: Mary, of course there are good people at CIA. AT the same time, there are people in he CIA who tortured people on video, destroyed the video because they could, and basically do whatever the hell they want whenever the hell they want.
If they get the vapors because Democrats call them liars when they routinely lie, they seriously need to find a different line of work.
DBrown
@Jay B.: If they told you that, then they’d have to kill you. See?
geg6
John Cole: Oh, I guess I have to tip my hat to Todd going into the lion’s den unarmed and all. But he didn’t cover himself in any glory there. In fact, he sounded like the biggest apologist tool ever. Not to mention his stunning ignorance of the simplest of legal AND foreign policy AND poltical issues. I mean, he makes the argument, apparently seriously, that no one in America wants legal investigations of torture, that such investigation would be politically difficult and so it shouldn’t be done for that reason, and that other countries would lose respect for us if we investigated. I mean, WTF? Even when Glenn points out that the facts don’t exactly agree with him and that he is basically advocating a two-tiered justice system (one for pols and one for us peons), he still keeps saying that, yeah, torture and murder are wrong but it’s so scary that someone might call it a political prosecution that we should just never prosecute such things if it’s politicians that do it. Fuck Chuck Todd. Fuck him sideways.
Jay B.
DBrown;
I had thought of that, but then when I think of the good things that have happened in post-world war II history, they have distinctly little to do with intelligence. I mean even the Fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the USSR was completely missed by a CIA that didn’t see it coming. The end of apartheid wasn’t CIA, naturally. What else?
In that vein, even a cretin like Charles Taylor of Liberia comes off as more credible than the CIA. In his war crimes testimony in The Hague, he explained how, in the mid 1980s, he managed to escape from a maximum security prison in Massachusetts:
In the second day of his testimony in his war crimes trial that could settle the long-standing mystery, Taylor said that on the night of Sept. 15, 1985, his maximum-security prison cell was unlocked by a guard and he was escorted to the minimum-security part of the facility.
According to news reports from The Hague, he said he then escaped by tying sheets together and climbing out a window and over a prison fence where he said a car with two men he assumed were agents of the US government drove him to New York, where his wife was waiting with money to get him out of the country.
“I am calling it my release because I didn’t break out,” Taylor, 61, told the Special Court for Sierra Leone of the episode that has long been alleged to have been orchestrated by the US government. “I did not pay any money, I did not know the guys who picked me up. I was not hiding (afterwards),” Taylor testified in The Hague.
Does anyone doubt he’s telling the truth about this?
srv
This is all a hand waving distraction. Cheney would never give the CIA any more rope than to hang themselves. The guy made it his personal project to set them up on WMDs.
Any real program out there would be outsourced and staffed with ex DoD people, not CIA. Probably some small offshore corp contracted by KBR, Blackwater or Xe to perform travel logistics or computer support.
And it’s funded by money in a Swiss bank account containing a billion or two pilfered from the Iraq contracts.
The only question is whether it reports to the WH or a cabal of Republicans.
freelancer
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_W._Bush_pretzel_incident
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dick_Cheney_hunting_incident
On second thought, no. Even those were botched ops.
JK
Bob Baer is about to cry
Musical Tribute to Bob Baer
Wah Wah – George Harrison
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dd8K5juJ_1M
Cry Baby Cry – The Beatles
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mLgCeCfWgXo
andrea
George Clooney’s all “the guy they based my Syriana character on is a WATB?”
Jay B.
Tim Wiener in his great history of the CIA, Legacy of Ashes, often wrote about individuals in the CIA being “one of the talented ones” and things like that — but in his litany of charges against the agency and its ops he points to catastrophic — I mean catastrophic failures — time after time after time. Sometimes even botched by the same people (who were obviously some of his sources) who he singled out as the good ones.
I think the CIA did pretty well with some of their propaganda efforts, particularly the sponsorship of art magazines and exhibits in Europe and their involvement with Radio Free Europe — because they were generally run on the level and because it was a battle of ideas that more expression was better than less. I mean there was some dishonesty of course, but by and large, it was clever and benign.
But throughout Wiener’s book I’m not sure he pointed to a single success that was, in the end, successful. They were able to kill some folks and organize a few “successful” coups, but the blowback was almost always worse than the temporary victory.
DZ
@Freelancer:
The CIA did successfully fabricate the Gulf of Tonkin incident in 1964.
Interrobang
Baer’s rump must be huge, to generate that much butthurt.