[Vox Taciturn, who recently retired from blogging due to family obligations, happily takes me up on my offer to host his guest posts. Vox, a former member of the intelligence community, attempts to connect a few dots in today's post. -- Captain Ed]

Anyone who isn't purposefully and willfully deluding themselves has seen the folly of Plame-gate: The alleged White House-driven plot to seek vengeance against “truth-telling” Joe Wilson. That Joe has been proven to be anything but a truth-teller is beside the point; the neo-cons attacked his wife, the mother of his children, and a dedicated public servant in covert status at the CIA.

That a simple search of public information – something any reporter could have done, something the FBI Special Agents working for Special Prosecutor Fitzgerald surely did, and something any foreign intelligence service would have done had they decided to do business with CIA front Brewster Jennings – would have revealed the woefully inadequate steps Ms. Plame and the CIA were taking to keep her identity and true employer a secret. The balloon floated by anti-administration rogues in the CIA, and carried by their cohorts in mainstream press, was popped when the end result of all the wailing and gnashing of teeth was that maybe someone lied about something that wasn’t a crime.

Intelligence officers are not dummies. They had to know that Plame-gate was too weak to withstand serious scrutiny, so they had to have a backup plan. Speak of the devil and he appears in the form of a story that blows the cover of a covert program of interrogation centers/prisons. Another dastardly deed concocted by the evil doers in the White House who, when they are not beating up women, take their frustrations out on innocent “militants.”

Still think rogue Bush-haters in the CIA aren’t getting reporters who cover the national security beat to carry their water? Let’s go to an impartial source. I don’t have a LexisNexis account so we’ll use Google News to search for the non-issue that is “Valarie Plame”: 21,800 hits. Now a search for the real intelligence related controversy that is “Able Danger”: 72 hits. Correct me if I am wrong, but isn’t that what is known as a blow-out?

Plame, Able Danger, Intelligence Identities Protection Act, Data Mining . . . it is all so confusing to Joe Six-Pack and Molly Homemaker in Peoria . . . why should anyone outside of DC care?

This is how the system is supposed to work: We, the people, elect others to represent our interests. We empower these representatives to build an apparatus necessary to carry out the details of administrating and defending the nation and preserving our way of life. When we get the impression that those who represent us aren’t looking out for our best interests we, the people, through our votes change the representatives. In turn these new representatives of ours change the apparatus that failed the people and their predecessors. The apparatus is supposed to serve as a tool of our representatives and a servant of the people; it is NOT supposed to bypass the people and bring about regime change by itself.

Of course renegade intelligence officers can’t just hold press conferences and air their politically motivated opposition to administration policies, so they leak to willing and able journalists who hold similar political dispositions. See, it is exciting and something to brag about when you talk to a member of the Senior Intelligence Service and can attach your byline to an intelligence-related expose. These comrades with clearances are even willing to provide corroboration to their stories; usually like-minded pals who aren’t on active duty anymore, but who have lucrative consulting gigs from their pals who still run the secret show. No sense in talking to the Gerechts and Baers of the world who might provide a little balance, since they are probably disgruntled (and Republican) anyway.

Offered as further proof that it is the apolitical CIA that has our best interests at heart are stories of the draft-dodging, Zionist-loving, neo-conservative cabal based in the White House that set up its own intelligence apparatus to bypass the efforts of the CIA. The real story is actually the reverse: What is an administration supposed to do when those who are supposed to serve it fight, obstruct, and otherwise don’t deliver?

Conservatives roll their eyes at the “moonbats” who shout about “no blood for oil” and join the ranks of ANSWER, but there is little difference in belief and outlook between the nut-jobs waving signs and their fellow-travelers in the intelligence business; except of course that intelligence officers can actually help bring about change. The CIA made a name for itself destabilizing regimes, only this time the leader of the regime they are aiming to change isn’t named Allende or Pahlavi.

Joe Six-Pack and Molly Homemaker should care about this stuff because even if they didn’t vote for the current administration, I’m fairly sure that voting is how they want such decisions to be made.

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