{"id":142990,"date":"2015-01-13T19:50:37","date_gmt":"2015-01-13T19:50:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/?p=142990"},"modified":"2015-01-13T19:50:37","modified_gmt":"2015-01-13T19:50:37","slug":"crime-cia-embarrassments","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/crime-cia-embarrassments\/","title":{"rendered":"Crime and CIA Embarrassments"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>Ray McGovern<\/em><\/p>\n<p>I confess to being na\u00c3\u00afve.\u00a0From what I had read about \u201cOperation Merlin,\u201d a harebrained scheme to sabotage Iran\u2019s nuclear program, I was convinced that the CIA would be determined to avoid calling more attention to it.\u00a0Or, by extension, to author James Risen\u2019s continuing revelations \u2014 in his new book <em>Pay Any Price<\/em>\u201d\u00a0\u2014 of unconscionable incompetence by our intrepid spies.\u00a0\u201cMerlin\u201d was exposed in an earlier Risen book, <em>State of War<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>How wrong I was!\u00a0The decision by the CIA and hired hands at the Justice Department to prosecute former CIA official Jeffrey Sterling reflects, rather, a clear determination to give priority to deterring potential whistleblowers privy to information extremely embarrassing to the government \u2014 I repeat, to the government, not to the national security.<\/p>\n<p>As for risk of extreme embarrassment once U.S. citizens got additional insight into the dumb schemes of amateur intelligence operators, the government presumably thinks it can depend on mainstream media to treat bungling by our sophomore spies \u201cwith discretion.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>In short, the prosecution of Jeffrey Sterling seems to have little to do with exposing secrets, but everything to do with hiding the kind of gross misfeasance that \u2014 truth be told \u2014 <em>does<\/em> constitute a real and present danger to our national security.<\/p>\n<p>Similarly, one might think the government would be embarrassed when it became more widely known that Jeffrey Sterling did go to Senate Intelligence Committee staffers to tell them of this unconscionably stupid covert action (which involved delivering flawed nuclear weapons blueprints to Iran in 2000 with the goal of sabotaging any bomb-building\u00a0plans, but the flaws were apparently detected and the real data\u00a0inadvertently exposed genuine nuclear-weapons secrets).<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/consortiumnews.com\/2015\/01\/13\/crime-and-cia-embarrassments\/?\" target=\"_blank\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Ray McGovern I confess to being na\u00c3\u00afve.\u00a0From what I had read about \u201cOperation Merlin,\u201d a harebrained scheme to sabotage Iran\u2019s nuclear program, I was convinced that the CIA would be determined to avoid calling more attention to it.\u00a0Or, by extension, to author James Risen\u2019s continuing revelations \u2014 in his new book Pay Any Price\u201d\u00a0\u2014 of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":142991,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[487,1616],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-142990","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-breaking-news","8":"category-usa-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/142990","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=142990"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/142990\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/142991"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=142990"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=142990"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=142990"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}