Nicholas Kristof's column in the New York Times, as part of a charge that the Bush administration has corrupted intelligence gathering, has this interesting bit:

But Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, a group of retired spooks, issued an open letter to President Bush yesterday reflecting the view of many in the intel community that the central culprit is Vice President Dick Cheney. The open letter called for Mr. Cheney's resignation.

Well, maybe, or maybe not. Kristof cites mostly the alleged views of unnamed intelligence officials. So we just have his word for it. Among the only people cited by name are a newly formed outfit, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS). Kristof treats them as a disinterested group of non-partisan, non-ideological experts. These are not crazed anti-Bush fanatics, like Paul Krugman or ANSWER. Yeah, right.

VIPS does not seem to have a website, but its email is vips@counterpunch.org, and their open letter appears to have been published at CounterPunch (run by Alexander Cockburn, the Nation columnist), an outfit whose staple is stuff comparing Bush to Hitler. VIPS also published an open letter in opposition to the war at Common Dreams back in February. The spokesman for VIPS is Raymond McGovern, a retired CIA analyst. McGovern's email is also at CounterPunch. He is giving a briefing today with Rep. Dennis Kucinich. McGovern has compared the Iraq war to Vietnam, even saying that it could lead to nuclear war. He has charged that if WMDs are found in Iraq, they may well have been planted. He believes Tenet's job is safe because if Tenet were fired, he would reveal that the White House ignored intelligence warnings pre-9/11. McGovern has urged CIA analysts to illegally release classified documents to show what he believes to be true, specifically citing Daniel Ellsberg.
Another member of the VIPS steering committee is William Christison, who among other things believes that the Bush administration is attempting to colonize the Middle East, jointly with Israel. He believes that the war on terror is being used to turn the US into a military dictatorship. He is also a backer of the left-wing UrgentCall, along with people such as Noam Chomsky, Barbara Kingsolver, Julian Bond, and Jonathan Schell.

None of this proves that VIPS is evil, or even wrong. It does say that Kristof is trying to pass off a fairly left-wing group as a group of non-partisan "professionals". Remember Katie Couric's description of MoveOn.com, a very left anti-war group as simply an outfit “started by two Silicon Valley entrepreneurs frustrated by the political process”? This is the same kind of scam.

Daniel Ellsberg once said:

And at that time, it was very hard to get the public to believe or to act on the possibility that a president was lying to them or deceiving them. That was not in the American consciousness, and it was a very unpopular notion even to put forward.

http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/people/Ellsberg/ellsberg98-6.html

Of that war, and that time, I would have shared his concerns. Of this war, and this time, I believe the human proclivity to deceive and the benefits of deception are the same, but the credulity of the public is far less, and the quality and quantity of information available to the public is better.

But I don't think VIPS really wants the complexity and intelligence of a new Daniel Ellsberg; those guys want a new Linda Tripp with a killer soundbite convicting someone in the current administration of lying.

Also a minor point, Ellsberg was at RAND, not the CIA.

Up to a point Lord Copper ... the intelligence community is in a rage, and it isn't just the VIPS people who are saying it. I'm in DC at the moment, and the town reeks with bitterness at what's happened - and it's not just lefties or even Democrats; moderate Republicans in the intelligence and foreign policy community are aghast at what's happened. And if a patent, non-American outsider like me can pick up on the vibes, they have to be very strong indeed. Read http://www.prospect.org/print/V13/22/dreyfuss-r.html too.

Bad vibes, Henry? Well, I'm sold. I've been won over by your convincing argument. Now all you have to do is turn it into a song and you can change the world.

FYI, the "mainstream" news network CNN has a link to this leftist NY Times op-ed on the main page of cnn.com today:

http://www.cnn.com/2003/ALLPOLITICS/07/15/nyt.16words/

Think CNN will ever link to an op-ed from Charles Krauthammer?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/opinion/columns/krauthammercharles/

"Our tendency to control with a dominating kind of power is a far cry from the example of Jesus, who is a paradox of powerlessness and power. This course will explore the differences between unilateral and relational power, between a stereotypically all-powerful, unchanging God and the Jesus of powerlessness and compassion, deeply touched and influenced by others. Together we will take a look at our inordinate attachments -- to money, for example --which can prevent us from being moved by others and by God.”

Ray McGovern is on the staff of the Servant Leadership School and is chair of its Nature of Divine Power department. He has a Certificate in Theological Studies from Georgetown University

It’s a bit of conjecture, but it could be said that Mr. Kristof’s source takes issue with the kind of power exercised by the Bush Administration, stereotypically dominating and unilateralist. This predilection was brought to Mr. Kristof’s attention after the publication of his May 30th article, Save the Spooks.

I’m all for liberation theology, I simply have a marked preference for effective liberation.

This sounds like a pattern of deception and hype that deserves further investigation. /HyperLeft mantra mode

About Mr. Ellsberg, he was RAND, yet some
how attached to the pacification effort,
apparently, at the outset of his Agency
stint, he became involved with the moll
of a Corsican gangster, who understandably
was upset; he was saved from a gisly fate
by the late Col. Conein, who in
retrospect, felt. . .when he flipped from his exposure to the counterculture, he began doing some rash things, like sending
the Russian embassy, a copy of the nuclear
war plan

The Christison's are an interesting lot,
to say the least. Madame Christison,
a known Palestinian apologist, who stated
in her Arab News piece,as well other
apologetic works, that the great Haj Husseini; Arafat's uncle and Hitler's
accomplice in Croatia and Hungary, was pacifist until 1936. The protests against Zionism' (riot) of 1920 and 1929;( the
orig. Hebron massacre escapes them) One recalls that Mrs. Christison, as well as
her husband was a longtime ally of Frank Snepp, the rogue CIA man in Saigon, whose
Decent Interval, was used as a torture tool by the Vietnamese.They Probably cheered the rise of Pol Pot as well. If
she was one of the top analysts on the
Middle East, well it explains a good deal
of our behavior. Another fellow, who though not formerly associated with VIPS;
though uses many of their arguments in Ray
Close; a former CIA station chief, who became on of the chief lobbyist for the
Saudi regime. And as Matt Welch points
out; consider their argument in that light

Mr. Snepp, as an ABC News producer in the
1980s, was one of the main promoters
along with Judy Woodruff, and Robert
Parry, of the CIA-cocaine meme, which
did much to sow civil unrest and undermine the reputation of the CIA; at
a time when it was really needed for it
to be focused; Snepp was one of the
first to sow the Mena story, in the VV which some conservatives got trapped by later in the 1990s. One of the other players in VIPS is David MacMichael, whose previous jobs involved sanitizing the reputation of the Salvadoran
guerrillas; who probably waged
at least an effective , yet ultimately
futile insurgency as the Iraq business;
In the early nineties, he ran one of these
conspiracy mongering web sites, that according to the late Michael Kelly, in a post OKC bombing in the New
Yorker,contributed to the 'fusion paranoia' atmosphere, of the time, including the worldview of the Montana militias spokesman; This is the source
of Kristof's latest craze