Reinforcing Bush's Secretive Fascist Cabal

Slate's Fred Kaplan takes a look at Bush's new nominee for CIA Director, yet another Florida millionaire and old Yale alumni, Porter Goss. Does anyone know if he was Skull and Bones?

Kaplan says that Goss is way too pro-Republican and will not be confirmed by the Democrats, and in fact probably could not be confirmed before the November elections anyway. So the nomination - like Bush's acceptance of an "intelligence czar" last week - is just part of the pre-election show. But Goss could get the job if Bush wins, which is a scary thought.

Goss is a red-meat CIA insider whose time with the agency goes back to the dirty days before the Nixon Church Committee. That puts him in with the post-Allen-Dulles crowd, with secretive links back to the bad old Prescott-Bush-and-the-Nazis days. This is the Fascist cabal that FDR warned about before he died. These are the people who probably killed Kennedy. These are the people who put the idiot son of an @$$hole in the White House.

Kaplan points out a few other scary things about Goss:

- He is a co-sponsor of the bill extending the Patriot Act II.

- after the 1998 terrorist bombings of the U.S. Embassies in East Africa, Goss said the CIA's directorate of operations (the branch in charge of spying) had become too "gun-shy."

- In an interview with PBS's Frontline, Goss said he thought no laws would need revising to give a president the authority to order assassinations. He also relied on the Condoleeza Rice defence for the intelligence failures leading up to 9/11:

"I don't think 'failure' is the right word. … Here we are, a nation at peace going along and all of a sudden some bad guys come along and they are playing by different rules. … They have simply come in and done something that is, to us, unthinkable."

For anyone with CIA connections to say such a thing is just straight-out lying.

Former CIA Director Stansfield Turner called the nomination "the worst...in the history of the job. To put somebody who is so highly partisan in this job will further diminish public confidence in our intelligence."

The question is: Who Cares?