Two disgraced Bush flunkies have written a Wall Street Journal op-ed attacking Barack Obama for releasing the torture memos. In doing so, they admit that what we did actually was torture.
So the C.I.A. consists of 20,000 "professional liars" accountable to no one, because they are secretive spies. This means, apparently, lots of rape.
When times get tough and employment becomes a far-fetched hope for many, it's good to know that you can still turn to the Paper of Record to direct you towards the last remaining employers. Specifically, the Central Intelligence Agency. They still need bodies! The shadowy government spymasters are the lead advertisers under the "Jobs" tab on the New York Times' website (the ad clicks straight through to their homepage). There are only two possible explanations for this. Both of them are bad. Conspiracy: The recession has forced the Times' true role as a government propaganda agent to the surface! You think Judy Miller's WMD coverage was a mistake? The paper has been promoting the CIA's position to the publi for years! Open your eyes, people! This ad is but the tip of the iceberg! The Job Market Is Even Worse Than You Thought: I mean, they couldn't even get Wal-Mart or somebody to sponsor the Jobs page? Campbell's Soup isn't hiring factory workers? Clandestine operations in the War on Terror, it seems, are the last place to get reasonable health care coverage. And Jesus Christ, you can't even make 80K for parachuting into Pakistan with a submachine gun to hunt Al-Qaeda. Times are tough.
A couple years ago, the CIA was instructed by the Justice Department to waterboard and torture all the al-Qaeda members they secretly detained in illegal prisons. But the CIA got a bit worried! Because, you see, administrations come and go, but the CIA is forever. They've become quite skilled as ass-covering. So they pressured the White House to give written policy approval of "enhanced interrogation techniques." Why? So they could leak the memo to the Washington Post in case someone like Condi Rice tried the "it was all the CIA's idea and we knew nothing" line. Which she did! Condi told Congress last month that the Bush administration was "initially uneasy about a controversial CIA plan for interrogating top al-Qaeda suspects." She says she asked someone to look into whether the torturing was legal or not. But the CIA remembers it differently.
BigStage — which lets you map your face from carefully staged photos into a video clip — was built on technology originally developed by the Central Intelligence Agency. The obvious and unanswered question is why in the hell was the CIA developing technology to automagically replace one person with another in photos and videos? Sure, the CIA was deeply involved in early LSD research, but this seems like a trippy idea even for that particular fratty bunch of Yale Bulldogs.Yet everyone got their panties in a twist over the Iranians using Adobe Photoshop to fake up a few extra missiles. Lucky for Tehran, Photoshop and Adobe's other compositing tools are still the way to go for blatantly lying in propaganda. Because while it seems like a good idea to insert yourself into the iconic opening flying scene from Great American Hero like I did, the number of hoops you have to jump through at Bigstage.com are maddening, and the results anticlimactic. Keep trying, CIA, and we may just believe that disgraced Enron CEO Ken Lay is actually dead sooner rather than later.
A writer at Wired put his story on a CIA.gov address yesterday, taking advantage of a simple coding vulnerability that lets anyone make any page look like it's on the CIA's site. Whip up a fake version of the CIA's real sites, send a few spams, and you've got a neat Internet fraud outfit, convincing people the CIA is demanding their credit card numbers. Gimme 5% for thinking of it, kay?
Did you know that seemingly harmless job listings site and blog network MediaBistro is a tool of the FBI? It's all true. FishbowlLA editor Kate Coe wrote an item about the Clintons' secret CIA plot to destory former POW John McCain. Which led one intrepid blogger to uncover the secrets behind the CIA control of the entirety of MediaBistro and Kate Coe's connection to the political assassinations of artists Theresa Duncan and Jeremy Blake.
Oh come on now, again? The CIA has subpoenaed Pulitzer-winning New York Times reporter James Risen, to get the name of a source from the journalist's blockbuster 2006 book State of War, in which he disclosed all sorts of things about U.S. intelligence shenanigans and said some mean things about President Bush. Maybe Risen can get some fashion tips from his former colleague, Judith Miller-it's so hard these days to figure out what goes with a public stockade.
NICK DOUGLAS — A simple Internet search could have prevented the war in Iraq, says Washington Post editor Peter Eisner in his new book, The Italian Letter. Searching for terms from a "smoking gun" letter (later used in Bush's 2003 State of the Union address as evidence that Saddam was building WMDs) would have shown it was a forgery. Granted, given the war machine already in motion, the CIA was one Google away from preventing the war in the same way that my scrawny ass is one Google away from a rigorous exercise program.
Before he was hosting The Mole and crusading around New Orleans, CNN anchor Anderson Cooper was just a rich kid with a whitebread dream: to be a spy. Radar reports (correctly, we hope) that after his sophomore and junior years at Yale, Anderson Cooper eschewed paper-shuffling summer internships in lieu of some quality time in Langley, Virginia, at the CIA's headquarters, where he was part of a CIA summer program for student interested in intelligence work. (And, as an aside, doesn't the concept of a CIA summer program give you the chills? Like Space Camp meets WarGames meets Silence of the Lambs.)
