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While America is distracted by the eight of clubs and other New Iraq propaganda wizardry the biggest spy scandal since Aldrich Ames is coming down on Shrub’s watch. Should it be surprising that when Curt Anderson’s story moved over the AP wire on April 11th, the White House made short shrift of it.

Bill Cleveland, chief of security at Lawrence Livermore National Labs and a former FBI counterintelligence expert, resigned recently after acknowledging he had a long affair with alleged Beijing double agent and Los Angeles socialite Kathrina Leung. James Smith, another FBI counterintelligence agent who was caught in Leung’s honeytrap, is free on $250,000 bond on charges of gross negligence for allegedly allowing Leung access to classified materials during their twenty years of sex and, uh, alleged spying. Leung, 48, worked for the FBI while spying for China; she remains in custody without bail.

Cleveland and Smith worked in the bureau’s San Francisco office when it was run by current FBI director Robert Mueller. Nothing better than having the ex-boss of the two alleged traitors be the one riding herd over the damage assessment.

The betrayals go back as far as the Poppy Bush administration, and possibly into Reagan presidency. In the days that followed 9/11 Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, a likely Secretary of State or Director of Central Intelligence under a Democratic president, made the rounds of the talk shows raising the issue of massive US intelligence failures. But in the new, and unconstitutional Patriot Act environment, he hasn’t seen any air time.

This latest breech, which is as important to China as the Kim Philby-Sir John Cairncross-Antony Blunt nuclear betrayals were to the Soviets, makes the duplicity of the Republicans on national security issues even more transparent.

When Los Alamos nuclear researcher Dr. Wen Ho Lee was charged with spying for China the Republicans blamed Bill Clinton and called for Energy Secretary Bill Richardson’s head on a plate. When Cleveland and Smith were busted on Shrub and Spence Abraham’s watch the dismal Dems did nothing. Los Alamos and Sandia National Laboratories, located in New Mexico, are under operational jurisdiction of Lawrence Livermore, where Cleveland and Smith worked.

A costly blanket polygraph screening program, implemented by Richardson and supported by Abraham is supposed to root out the moles at DOE. But a National Academy of Sciences study has found that the polygraphs the DOE uses are unscientific, missing spies while implicating the innocent.

Richardson, who took office as governor of New Mexico in January, has not commented. Some observers say he hopes to tip the balance of power in the Senate by naming himself to the seat that could be vacated by the ailing Pete Domenici should the long-time Republican lawmaker resign for health reasons.

Beating up on 26 million underarmed and undernourished Iraqis is a real political ego-builder for Shrub and Turdblossom. Getting your bits handed to you on a plate by a honeytrap courtesy of 1 billion strong China makes you wonder who put the HO in Homeland Security. Maybe Tom Ridge can reflect on his moments as a young junior officer in Viet Nam when he glanced peacefuly to the heavens and thought deep thoughts, and tell us how he plans to get the FBI to clean up its act before it gives away the duck sauce.

posted by Groom 6:13 PM

Christian Chutzpah

The subject of today’s sermon, ladies and gentlemen, is duplicity and the apparently limitless amount of it flowing out of ShrubCo these days. While professing that “Iraq will be run by Iraqis” and the UN “will play a role” in determining Iraq’s future, the Pentagon has not only airlifted convicted bank thief and fugitive from justice Ahmad Chalabi and his made-to-measure Saville Row pals of Richard Perle into a country many of them haven’t seen for decades, but also allowed or encouraged one of Chalabi’s deputies, Mohammed Mohsen al-Zubaidi, to pre-emptively declare himself the elected mayor of Baghdad, although no one can figure out when or how this election was held.

The Pentagon and the military are pretending that they have no idea where the guy came from although it’s clear that he has their tacit approval to establish “facts on the ground,” as the current jargon has it. The AP reports that the “mayor” held a press conference earlier today:

The balding, goateed al-Zubaidi, acting as if he was already running the place, congratulated Iraq's Christians on Easter Sunday and expressed sadness to Shiite Muslims about the 7th-century martyrdom of Hussein, a grandson of the Prophet Muhammad.

Meanwhile, the NY Times reports that Salem Chalabi, Ahmad’s nephew, says the exile group had been working for three years with the State Department, legal organizations and Iraqi lawyers outside the country to create a "transitional justice program" for a postwar Iraq.

In a nearby universe, another of Chalabi’s cronies Major General Jawdat al-Obeidi , who now calls himself the “deputy governor” of postwar Baghdad announced on Sunday that he would head a delegation to an OPEC meeting in Vienna this week.

Now, let me get this straight. Most Iraqis are still without electricity or clean water; hospitals are understaffed, without medications, and overflowing with wounded; the cities have been looted; and 7,000 years of history and precious manuscripts have been lost forever. Meanwhile, the oil fields and the oil ministry are safe and a pro-American delegation to OPEC—acting on unknown authority--has been assembled out of absolute chaos in record time.

Aren’t you proud to have a government that has its priorities straight?

posted by Jerry Bowles 12:40 PM