1. Some historical context on the Harman matter. Go read this absolutely terrific 2007 piece by CQ's Jeff Stein that Zach Roth links to. Damned if the Stein piece doesn't perfectly capture -- and recognize as such -- just the kind of abuse of power that may have been at work in the Harman case too:

“Shelby hated Tenet,” said another former CIA station chief. “Shelby would come through town and ask for dirt about Tenet. He made no secret of that. He always said, ‘I’m going to get you a new director.’”

Tenet got back at Shelby in a little-noticed passage in his memoir.

He recounted how, in December 1996, shortly after President Bill Clinton nominated his national security advisor Anthony Lake to be CIA director, Shelby approached him after a committee briefing. (Tenet was then deputy director.)

“George, he drawled,” according to Tenet, “if you have any dirt on Tony Lake, I sure would like to have it.”

Tenet was taken aback, he wrote, because he and Lake were friends.

Tenet also wrote that, “National Security Agency officials told us that Shelby staffers had been asking whether there was derogatory information in their communications intercepts on Lake.”

But the NSA refused Shelby’s entreaties, two sources said, and there was no derogatory information in the FBI’s files.

Shelby also demanded, and got, the FBI’s raw files on Lake. The senator did not respond to three days of requests last week for comment.

But Lake did.

“The facts speak for themselves,” he said in a brief interview.

Shelby’s ability to obtain FBI files, which could be filled with uncorroborated allegations and rumors, he added, set a bad precedent.

“Using intelligence agencies to go after officials,” he said, “is not a good idea.”

Hmm: Using NSA intercepts, FBI files and intelligence agencies to go after officials for political reasons -- not a good idea.

Now -- why didn't I think of that???

Abuse of power. Playing with such incredible powers as NSA/FBI wiretaps and FBI files to attack a political opponent is serious stuff. But looking at what happened in the case of Richard Shelby as Stein sets up above is instructive. Shelby abuses the powers of the US intelligence agencies to go after political targets. And then you know what happened? As Murray Waas reported in a piece it's worth rereading, Shelby got fingered as the leaker of the highly classified information in 2002 that the NSA had intercepted calls showing that Al Qaeda had planned a major attack on the U.S. the day before the September 11th attacks, but hadn't translated them until the day after. The Fox reporter gave Shelby up to the FBI. And though Shelby was spared prosecution, the Department of Justice did turn over its investigation findings fingering him as the culprit for the leaks to the Senate Ethics committee (which later dismissed it). (Talk about a case which merits judicial review!) (Shelby for his part, Waas reported, resented that law enforcement had been whispering that he was the culprit, which he denied -- imagine that! The guy who had gotten everybody's NSA and FBI files!) People who abuse such powers so brazenly seem to have a tendency for overreach that comes back to bite them.

2. More historical context: the Gosslings' MO: use intelligence community moles to get dirt on Tenet, political enemies. This also from the same terrific 2007 Stein piece perfectly describes the MO of the Gosslings: using the intelligence community to dig up dirt on their political enemies. It was all about recruiting moles throughout the intelligence community to get dirt on their Democratic enemies, including George Tenet, a project they fantasized about pursuing when they got their chance to take over the CIA when Goss was made CIA director in November 2004.:

The knives were out for years before the Gosslings arrived in Langley, by Drumheller’s account — as far back as 1997, when Goss became chairman of the House Intelligence Committee.

According to Drumheller, Goss’s aides and like-minded conservative friends inside the agency would gather regularly at a restaurant just down Route 123 from the CIA’s gates to trade gossip and indulge in their dreams about how they would remake the agency if they had the chance.

“They used to meet at Da Capo, now Michael’s, once a month or so,” Drumheller said. “They called themselves ‘the revolutionaries.’ They would talk about Tenet and their other enemies.”

In their capacity as aides on an intelligence oversight committee, they regularly traveled to CIA stations abroad, where, Drumheller and other agency sources say, they continued their efforts to recruit critics of Tenet.

“They were in congressional oversight, so therefore they were certainly welcomed and encouraged to visit places,” said another senior intelligence official, speaking on the basis of anonymity. “But they would try to dredge up stuff on people.”

“The field and headquarters always had a frictional relationship, at any time,” he continued. “Healthy tension probably should exist. But in their case they used that to kind of exploit people, to draw them out to criticize [Tenet]. They would ask about operational things they were entitled to know about, and if they got a whiff of a complaint, either just a disagreement with headquarters or something like that, the Gosslings would elevate that as if it was some sort of strategic issue.”

“It was common knowledge that they were doing that,” added a recently retired former station chief.

But other intelligence sources sympathetic to Goss’ reform efforts said they didn’t recognize Drumheller’s descriptions of the staff who were out to change the agency’s culture, and they laughed at his depiction of “the revolutionaries” who allegedly conspired at a restaurant outside the agency gates — nothing remotely like that happened, they insist.

But they did note that the team Goss brought to the CIA would have been remiss if they didn’t listen to out-of-channel complaints about the agency’s management.

Among those the Gosslings recruited to be anti-Tenet and anti-Democratic moles at this time was one CIA logistics officer named Kyle Dusty Foggo, who was serving as the head of a CIA logistics outpost in Germany in the early 2000s. When Goss was made CIA director in November 2004, the Gosslings recommended Goss hire Foggo as the CIA's executive director, the No. 3 official at the Agency.

But that appointment ultimately became a problem for them. The top two CIA operations officers quit within weeks in a dispute related to Foggo's promotion given his troubling counterintelligence file. (Just as well for the Gosslings, who were sent over they thought with a mandate from the White House to bring the CIA and in particular its Directorate of Operations to heel and stop what the White House and GOP thought was a campaign of leaks pointing to the White House for pressure to massage Iraq intelligence.)

And then just a year into the Gosslings' rein at the CIA, they learned that Foggo had been tossing CIA contracts to a defense contractor friend, Brent Wilkes, who was indicted as a conspirator in the Duke Cunningham bribery case. Foggo became the subject of a CIA IG investigation. By May, the FBI was raiding his home and office.

Goss was forced to resign in May 2006 in disgrace, amid the FBI investigation of Foggo.

Foggo went to prison last month after testifying to a special prosecutor investigating the illegal destruction under Goss's leadership of hundreds of CIA videotapes recording harsh interrogations of terrorism suspect detainees.

3. Did Goss no longer have authority to certify the FISA Warrant when the call in question happened? The Time 2006 magazine piece on Harman coming on the radar in the Aipac case says that the tapped conversaation in question in which the possible alleged-by-some quid pro quo occurred was in "mid 2005." A former intelligence official familiar with the matter told me that Goss had certified a FISA warrant to target Harman based on that intercepted communication, but didn't know exactly what time it had occurred.

But a former intelligence community source tells me that DCI Goss no longer legally had the authority to certify FISA warrants at all beginning January 1, 2005 when the law creating the Office of the Director of National Intelligence went into effect. So if Goss did try to certify a FISA warrant to target Harman in 2005, sources tell me that would be unkosher at best, and legally suspect. That authority was no longer in the Director of Central Intelligence's hands and had gone to the Director of National Intelligence.

Did Goss and the Gosslings try to use the powers of the intelligence community to go after a political enemy, as Shelby had with Tony Lake? Did they break the law in doing so? And then break the law again to leak sensitive wiretap communications more recently to continue a campaign to try to damage her? Which possible violations of the law revealed by the case and its media presentation are more disturbing? Will the Justice Department figure it all out?

4. Backfired. An irony. Per this more recent Jeff Stein story, about a second alleged intercepted conversation of Harman allegedly discussing with the wiretap-targeted "suspected Israeli agent" that the alleged fundraising ploy to make her chair of HPSCI had backfired....

Don't you just bet there were such conversations going on yesterday between some of the sources for this story when the whole AIPAC case got dropped? Their campaign had backfired, or perhaps the case would have been dropped anyhow. Bet there were.

5. Harman's interlocutor. The sources keep talking about a "suspected Israeli agent" that Harman was speaking with. Take their word for it (though they proved wrong on the NSA tap picking her up matter apparently -- wrong or lying to sex their story up.) The Times has gone on to just write "Israeli intelligence operative" straight out, e.g. someone on the payroll of the Israeli government to spy for Israel. Arrest the guy for espionage already, right? Well, why haven't they?

What to make of the fact that this person has never been indicted, arrested or prosecuted? Are we to assume that he is an Israeli spy because the sources are saying so? Take their word for it? Why haven't they brought a case? If they've been tapping his phone for how many years as we now know thanks to their leaks, do they have the goods to make a case against the man they describe as an Israeli agent? And if they don't have a case, why call him an Israeli spy to the press? And why does the press just write it?

What's that concept in the US about innocent until proven guilty? Or even charged? Or should all that be tossed aside because Israel is involved, and therefore we have to assume that it's just true whether or not they have decided to even bring a case? That would be quite a special standard.

And presumably, they aren't planning to bring a case since, they have now told the whole world and him too he's been tapped all these years as part of a major counterintelligence investigation, right? Surely he'll recognize the conversation with Harman that's been so widely described. Whatever, right? What's the statute of limitations on "suspected" but we can't be bothered to bring a case? Maybe they don't care or the "suspected" was never backed up with enough evidence to bring one? Remember when many circles "suspected" that Obama was a Muslim and terrorist sympathizer? Did the Times feel compelled to say Barack Obama, "the suspected Muslim, and terrorist sympathizer?" Lots of people suspected of things that are not true. Needless to say, often it says more about the people doing the suspecting than the person suspected.

6. You can resent Aipac, long for a different US pollicy towards the Middle East, not care for Harman, think what she might have said on that call may be unseemly and suspect, and still think this is a seriously nasty case which raises as many or more questions about the motives and actions of her accusers and targeters as of hers. So far, with some notable exceptions, the case's partisans seem to be choosing sides based almost solely on whether they are rooting for Aipac and associates to get knocked down, or held up, no matter what the truth of the matter is. That is just a terribly prejudiced way to look at it. One the sources on this Harman call have utterly played to and encouraged.

7.The destroyed torture tapes. As the chairman and ranking of the House Intelligence committee, Goss and Harman were both notified of the existence of CIA videotapes recording the CIA harsh interrogation of terrorism suspects in February 2003 (H/T Marcy Wheeler). Those tapes were destroyed under Goss's tenure as CIA director, we now know. Was Harman notified? Was she not notified? How did that play into Goss Harman tensions and Gosslings' concern about her possible ascent to chairman of HPSCI? Goss has said he did not approve the destruction of the tapes. That is not what other people at CIA are saying. Former deputy director of operations John Sano has told others that Goss told him and the director of operations to "take care of this." According to what Sano has told others, Goss told Sano to call the CIA station in Thailand to order the tapes be destroyed, and ordered then director of operations Jose Rodriguez to notify the committees. But it's not clear that Rodriguez, who was still under cover, actually did notify the committees. Goss has denied that he approved of the destruction of the tapes, and that he was consistent in expressing his opposition to it. Special prosecutor John Durham has been investigating the episode. Dusty Foggo's prison sentence was delayed a week so he could testify to Durham about what he knew of the matter a few weeks ago. There's surely more to be coming out on this that is of first order concern including potentially legally for some of the actors involved.

Update: I've passed on some interesting critiques to this post and responded to them here.

Posted by Laura at May 1, 2009 11:40 PM