Negroponte did not go voluntarily to State Department

[DemReadingDU]

Richard Sale writes:

Contrary to the bland stories in The New York Times and Washington Post of Friday, Negroponte did not go voluntarily to State from his job as director of intelligence. In fact, there was tremendous administration pressure to get him out of his current job. The chief cause of the quarrel involved Negroponte's balking at at request from Vice President Cheney to increase domestic collection by the National Security Agency on U.S. citizens.

Negroponte flatly refused, Cheney bridled, and from then on the pressure built to get rid of him.

... the rift over increased domestic surveillance was the real reason Negroponte was forced out.

read more...
http://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/2007/01/sale_on_negropo.html

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

1. Wow.

If this is true, it appears that even "Death Squad" Negroponte has more principles than Darth Cheney, at least about some things.

[DemReadingDU]

4. Richard Sale: sources on this are excellent -- 8.5s out of 10s

I try to read Richard Sale, Pat Lang, and Larry Johnson. They have great insight.

[Robbien]

9. I expect it is not principles

To expand survellience Negroponte would need more funds and more people, and he would need to work. Negroponte has had it very easy the last couple of years and spends most of his time lounging in clubs in DC. Negroponte has done very little in overseeing all intelligence agencies.

[DemReadingDU]

11. probably more people to read our mail

:eyes:

[Bluestar]

41. My thoughts exactly

I thought that I remembered Negroponte disagreeing with the Chimperor and his First Dick a couple of months ago, and I thought that was the real reason that he was demoted. No one ever gets "fired" from this administration unless they don't toe the Bushco line.

As you say, who'd have thought that Negroponte has more principles than Cheney and Bush? It's kind of like when Ashcroft got pushed out--we all thought he was the worst of the right-wingers but even he wasn't evil enough for Bush.

[acmavm]

2. People pitch a bitch and moan and groan about bush** but he's

never been our problem. Cheney has. He and the rest of the neocons who treasonous ly took over our government, violated each and every right and rule laid out by the Constitution, and raided the treasury and stuffed their own pockets.

Poopy wanted Cheney to pick out a VP for his son. The old fool gave one of the most criminal persons alive the break he needed to gather up his larcenous friends and commit the biggest crimes against this nation ever committed.

[rox63]

3. The idea that

Negroponte stood up to Bush for the rights of US citizens' privacy is very surreal. He's guilty of some really horrible stuff. But if he is that much better than Bush & Cheney, then they are evil beyond belief. The deep dark pit where their souls should be is a place I never want to see.

:scared:

[ChiciB1]

13. You May Not Want To See It... But This Needs To Be Busted

WIDE OPEN! I've known for many years that these were truly evil people but can't say I actually thought they would sell out OUR country just to "appear" to be the guys in the white hats.

Funny thing, I just now finished watching "Conspiracy Theory" with Julia Roberts because there wasn't much else on and I figured what they hey, never did watch it before. Now I come in here and this seems surreal! Some movies seem to have been so far ahead of their time!

Like The Siege, when I saw that movie it gave me goose bumps! It's just too much!

[Diane R]

5. Is this info dependable? It's a bombshell.

[DemReadingDU]

7. Pat Lang and Larry Johnson seem to think so

They often have Richard Sale post in their blogs.

[Pirate Smile]

15. I love that these guys now have their own blogs to put out info. I had the

same question as you did so I looked at the "about" section on the blog - i.e. who is this guy? why would he know? why should I believe him?

Here is the info:



Biography
Colonel W. Patrick Lang is a retired senior officer of U.S. Military Intelligence and U.S. Army Special Forces (The Green Berets). He served in the Department of Defense both as a serving officer and then as a member of the Defense Senior Executive Service for many years. He is a highly decorated veteran of several of America’s overseas conflicts including the war in Vietnam. He was trained and educated as a specialist in the Middle East by the U.S. Army and served in that region for many years. He was the first Professor of the Arabic Language at the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York. In the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) he was the “Defense Intelligence Officer for the Middle East, South Asia and Terrorism,” and later the first Director of the Defense Humint Service.” For his service in DIA, he was awarded the “Presidential Rank of Distinguished Executive.” This is the equivalent of a British knighthood. He is an analyst consultant for many television and radio broadcasts.

Interests
History (all kinds), theology, literature, cowboy boots, the War Between the States, Norwich Terriers.

[DemReadingDU]

18. Pat Lang's blog & Larry Johnson's blog

Pat Lang
http://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/


Larry Johnson
http://noquarter.typepad.com/my_weblog/


both are excellent to read!

[bananarepublican]

44. "The Beltway Boys" just assured me that the new role is Negroponte's dream job!

F*X(ed) News sets the record straight once again!!!

When will this biggest gaggle of nitwit commentators and "journalists" be held to account for their infinite dishonesty?

O'Reilly deserves a special place in hell. (For South Park fans, let's hope O'Lielly replaces Satan's lover Chris.)

P.S. Hannity, is a slightly more obvious idiot - and hence a slightly more 'honest' a character - than the boy from Levitown(sp?).

[babylonsister]

6. So Cheney is pulling all the strings, as has been suspected. nt

[ChiciB1]

8. At First I Was Speechless... But NOW... If This IS True I Simply

do not understand WHY these people can't be STOPPED! This scares the holy S--T out of me!

AMERICA UNDER SURVEILLANCE is absolutely true, and yet it goes on and on and on and on!!

Why Oh Why won't somebody just BLOW THE DAMN Whistle Already???? Blow the lid off and get it over with, we can't let this keep seeping into everything we do! There are people who know so much more and yet they just sit idly by and let it happen. What is WRONG???

[annabanana]

Wow! My flabber is gasted at this tidbit.

(and I have some gastable flabber, I'll tell you )

How bad does darth cheney have to be that Negrodeathsquadponte is objecting? Who is replacing him to be more "helpful" in furthering the destruction of our rights?

[DemReadingDU]

16. Retired Vice Adm. Mike McConnell

Retired Vice Adm. Mike McConnell, a veteran of more than 25 years in the intelligence field, will be named by President Bush to succeed John Negroponte as national intelligence director

http://www.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/01/04/negroponte.ap/index.html

[elfin]

10. Condi wanted him to fill the embarrassing vacancy at that post ....

and her "husband" obliged.

i think she has at least enough smarts to know she is out of her league and NEEDS someone pronto to navigate long enough to see her into a cushy job somewhere before she is tarnished irrevocably at any semblance of a "thinking" institution as opposed to a neocon backwater.

[KittyWampus]

34. Read the article- Condi wanted a bunch of others BEFORE Negroponte

[DemReadingDU]

40. Wasn't it Robert Zoellick who resigned

From the article...

Rice, of course, has been looking for a deputy since last June when Zoellick resigned to go to Goldman Sachs. She first asked for Nick Burns, a very canny and experienced guy and that request was squashed by Cheney. Burns will resign, I'm told. She asked for Phil Zoellick who is her special advisor and that went nowhere. She finally negotiated with Bush first and then Cheney and got approval for Negroponte. She can use his expertise on the Middle East.


my note - I don't think the name is Phil Zoellick, but should be Phil Zelikow, Condi's special advisor.

[bridgit]

12. what's wrong with dick cheney? why does he hate America so?

and Americans? that was what i had heard, that Negroponte was aghast at the level of bile & vitriol oozing from the office of dick cheney

[ChiciB1]

20. You Know... I Am Actually Feeling Light-Headed!! Kind Of Like

I might faint. This is just too much, my hands are a bit quivery too! Oh, please let's put a STOP to this!!!

[rox63]

24. I know exactly what you mean

The implications are terrifying...

[seabeyond]

14. i would say negroponte does not want to get deeper into breaking the law

and constitution and can see the writing on the wall with investigations. can see himself being the scape goat and said no way.

[Peace Patriot]

26. Yeah, I think you nailed it, SeeBeyond! Negroponte is an utterly

unscrupulous, vile sack of shit, pardon my French. The horrors he has perpetrated are difficult to think about, let alone describe. That he would suddenly be conscience-stricken about spying on Americans is not credible. But the source he planted this on may not realize that they have been used. Hard to say. What is credible is that he wants to create a perception of distance between himself and Cheney, for PR and legal purposes; or that some vile shit that he has done recently is about to come out, or has been thrown in his face by the intel community, and they forced him out of that job. We're seeing a purge--but it's difficult to tell by whom, and where it's going. Possibly old intel (connected to Bush I). Was Negroponte as head of intel threatening to Jr. in some way? That's another possibility.

I tend to think everything's connected either to Treasongate, or to 9/11. And I tend to think that, of all their probs, 9/11 might be the worst. That may be the real reason Rumsfeld is out. Another possibility (re Rumsfeld) is that he was masterminding a plot to plant nukes in Iraq, to be "found" by the US troops, and that blew up in their faces, maybe someone in the Plame counter-proliferation network caught them, foiled the plot. But the outing of Plame and that entire network (putting our covert agents/contacts' lives in grave danger) was prompted by that, not primarily as political punishment of Wilson (a cover story). (And that's why Rove hasn't been indicted. Rove was just a front man--the plot was much deeper, and might even have reached over to England and the assassination of the Brits WMD expert, David Kelly, four days after Plame was outed.)

Negroponte could have been in the middle of either of these things--9/11 or Treasongate--and his expulsion as head of intel makes me think it's Treasongate. If the shit is finally hitting the fan in that investigation, that could have something to do with Negroponte's ouster.

Then there's South America. The Bush Junta has been trying to get rid of Hugo Chavez for six years, and he keeps not only surviving, but getting re-elected by bigger and bigger margins. Not only that, with Ecuador's recent election of Rafael Correa, by an even bigger margin (65%!) than Chavez's last election, it's become clear that Chavez has friends and influence in the Andes region, and throughout South America, and the Bushites are now faced with a solid wall of very popular leftist governments in the Andes--Venezuela, Bolivia, and Ecuador, with growing leftist movements in Peru and Paraguay--and also friendly (to Chavez) leftist governments in Brazil, Argentina, Chile and Uruguay. In fact, even the president of Colombia (something of a fascist dinosaur country) has refused to participate in Bushite plots against Chavez. In other words, the Bushites have "lost" South America (--and the South American people have re-gained it!). This was my first thought when I heard Negroponte was going to State. He specializes in killing and torturing poor peasants and leftists, and overthrowing popular governments. The South Americans have pretty much had it with this crap from the US, and the Bushites won't succeed--whatever they are currently plotting--but that doesn't mean they won't try, especially given the vast oil, gas and mineral riches in the Andes which are currently being wasted on benefits for the poor. And with their loss of control of the Iraqi oil fields, they may be desperate for black booze. Also, the couple of trillion bucks unaccounted for in the Bush budget may have been spirited into private accounts earmarked for some sort of private corporate resource war in the Andes. (There are some signs of this.)

All I'm saying is: made to order for Negroponte. And all the death squads that he ran through all the jungles of Honduras, into Nicaragua, in defiance of Congress, resulted in..guess what? His old nemesis, Daniel Ortega, getting elected president of Nicaragua! That must frost his ass. And he had Ollie North down there, in country, working for the opposition. I swear, these guys really don't know what to do with peaceful, democratic elections. It's like they never heard of them before. Violence they understand. But they haven't a clue how to deal with genuine, grass roots democracy. ("You can kill some of the people all of the time...")

So maybe it's a combo of things--Negroponte in trouble with the intel community, and is going to need a new job pretty soon, maybe running the Bush Cartel compound in Paraguay--and he's laying some ground work at State.

[DemReadingDU]

29. This is all such a convoluted mess

Negroponte being in the middle of it.

Richard Sale puts an interesting twist to everything, as I had assumed that Rice was getting ready to resign or be 'retired', and Negroponte would step in as the next Sec of State.

We can only hope that the upcoming investigations will eventually sort thru and resolve this corrupted administration.

[ChiciB1]

30. Hope Ain't Gonna Get It Sista!! However OR Whoever It Is We

PRAY to better be getting tapped into right now. We are under the control of "mind freaks!" I can't believe I even said that, but it's beginning to become my reality!

Song going through my head right now... Everybody's Talkin Bout Revolution, Revolution, Revolution... John Lennon! Wonder what he might be thinking right now?

[seabeyond]

33. lmao... man i am good. see all i said in the one little sentence

wow peace you.... what a post chalk full of stuff. just amazing. these people have so much trash on them i canot begin to stay caught up and remember all the stuff behind me. thanks for the reminder of all the fronts they have trying to protect. lordy..... i felt like i was playing risk reading your posts. excellent stuff. thank you.

[hang a left]

49. It didn't make sense to me either.

I am telling you, that you don't know who to trust. I know that Larry Johnson is supposed to be on the up and up, but lets face it folks the guy is CIA (former supposedly, I heard there is no such thing). I also remember October 2005 he was telling us there were some 27 indictments to be handed down in the Libby matter, right before Libby was the only one indicted.

So either they get used for stories sometimes, or they are there to muddy the water. I swear I don't know who to trust anymore as far as sources go on the right or the left.

[stillcool]

17. I'm not going to bite...

I couldn't swallow that even if I held my nose.

[DemReadingDU]

19. Richard Sale article on Larry Johnson's blog now

http://noquarter.typepad.com/my_weblog/2007/01/richard_sale_on.html

[Virginia Dare]

21. The question is, how did they "force" him to accept the job?

because they've got 2 tons of dirt on him, and they'd throw him under the bus if he didn't take it. Is there no depth to their evil doings? That is a rhetorical question by the way.

[DemReadingDU]

22. Pat Lang was on PBS Newshour w/ Judy Woodruff

http://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/2007/01/newshour_transc.html



here is the Newshour transcript from 1/5/07
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/politics/jan-june07/iraq_01-05.html

[rox63]

23. My God, we are truly f***ed as a nation...

Ever since reading this, I'm having to fight an overwhelming sense of despair over how bad things have gotten here.
:scared: :cry:

[UTUSN]

25. I am totally unable to see NEGROPONTE in any heroic role

From the moment I heard the NEGROPONTE news, I pegged it as his being demoted. Without knowing why, my guess would have been his being good only as a houseboy, errand boy only able to follow orders, not to be the head of an important, huge department.

This fellow is saying it was because he stood up to CHEENEE. I have trouble seeing NEGROPONTE in a heroic role.

[salin]

32. I remember thinking (during reagan era) how odd is it when

George Schultz suddenly seems moderate? All in relation to the rest of the reaganites. I mean he was a hardliner - but relatively speaking, by the end of his tenure he sure seemed "moderate".

Now you have negroponte seeming to be "reasonable" - but then today's 'relative' is far more extreme than I could have imagined in the Reagan years.

[KittyWampus]

35. It's not heroic, it's pragmatic. Cheney wants people who will invent false intel and ignore reality

especially concerning the ME and Iran/Syria.

Really, would you want to be in position to take the fall for when Cheney et al start revving up the engines for an Iran airstrike or whatever heinous acts they are planning?

[nam78_two]

37. eh... there can be gradations among the crazies

He doesn't have to be a hero-only marginally less of a psycho/sociopath than Dickhead.

I truly loathe Cheney ...what a vile creature :puke:

[Sal Minella]

38. But can you see Negoponte trying to escape being Cheney's scapegoat?

Or sin-eater. Or whatever.

[Stinky The Clown]

27. Holy shit! If Blackbridge won't go along with the WH, we are TRULY fucked

Blackbridge is one of the most nasty, bloodthirsty, amoral motherfuckers to ever breathe air and if **he** won't go along with their plans, you know the place is in the hands of lunatics.

[jgraz]

28. Cheney should have asked for domestic death squads

I'm sure Negroponce would have been all too happy to comply.

[Gregorian]

31. OMG! For the first time, I believe I have to step away from DU and take a deep breath.

Tonight is truly frightening me.


Nukes. Negroponte not being evil enough. The administration fighting the Constitution all the way to the Supreme Court. What next? What could possibly be worse? I don't see a mushroom cloud out my window YET.

[nebenaube]

42. I saw one in a dream two months ago... right out my window n/t

But then again I grew up 27 clicks from the czech border...

[Reterr]

36. kr.eom

[nam78_two]

39. K&R-as one of the comments on that blog said

"Too illegal for Negroponte-thats a scary thought" :scared:

When these guys get too scary for their own attack dogs...yikes. Kick to the top-thanks DemReadingDu for posting.

[DemReadingDU]

43. interesting comments to read in Lang's & Johnson's blogs

comments to read on Pat Lang's blog
http://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/2007/01/sale_on_negropo.html#comments


comments to read on Larry Johnson's blog
http://noquarter.typepad.com/my_weblog/2007/01/richard_sale_on.html#comments

[dogindia]

45. K&R

[Morgana LaFey]

46. Oh, man, you KNOW you're in trouble when

a Negroponte suddenly becomes something of a "good guy." (However temporarily.)

[Stephanie]

47. Cheney has to go NOW.

My god, how long can his heart hold out? He's years past the expiration date on his quadruple bypass. What's keeping him alive?

[Jacobin]

48. Cheney is doing a Nixon

He wants to eavesdrop on those who are about to investigate and convict him.
Bank on it

[Marie26]

50. Who is Richard Sale?

And why should we believe him? Is he ex-CIA or NSA?

[DemReadingDU]

51. Richard Sale - UPI Intelligence Correspondent

Richard Sale's articles are often picked up in both Pat Lang's blog and Larry Johnson's blog.


edit to add:

Traitors: The Worst Act of Treason in American History from Benedict Arnold to Robert Hanssen by Richard Sale
http://www.amazon.com/Traitors-Treason-American-History-Benedict/dp/0425191850

some background info about Sale in the editorial & customer reviews