On Sunday, CBS Evening News featured a segment discussing the twin controversies surrounding the secret CIA program Dick Cheney ordered withheld from Congress and new rumors Attorney General Holder may yet seek a special counsel to investigate some aspects of the Bush administration regime of detainee torture. As its expert on the American intelligence community, CBS trotted former CIA operative Michael Scheuer.
That would be the same Michael Scheuer who just two weeks ago proclaimed President Obama doesn't care "about protecting this country" and "the only chance we have as a country right now is for Osama bin Laden to deploy and detonate a major weapon in the United States."
In its reporting on Eric Holder's deliberations regarding a special investigation of potential torture of terror suspects by the CIA, the CBS pitted Republican Senator Jeff Sessions (R-AL) against Vermont Democrat Pat Leahy. And then correspondent Kimberly Dozier turned to Scheuer:
"I just don't want to see an instance where if the higher-ups gave the order to break the law, that the ones who get punished are the people basically on the front line, the lower-level troops," Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., said.
That's exactly what those on the front line believe will happen, according to one former CIA official, Michael Sheuer.
"I think it will pull everybody back from doing anything that smacks of the non-conventional," he said.
He points out that the CIA already encourages every one of its agents to take out personal liability insurance, just in case they're prosecuted, if one White House decides whatever the last one authorized was illegal.
To be sure, Michael Scheuer is non-conventional, at least in the sense of encouraging the mass slaughter of his fellow Americans.
Appearing on Fox News with Glenn Beck on June 30th, Scheuer was determined to see Bin Laden strike in the U.S.:
SCHEUER: The only chance we have as a country right now is for Osama bin Laden to deploy and detonate a major weapon in the United States. Because it's going to take a grass-roots, bottom-up pressure. Because these politicians prize their office, prize the praise of the media and the Europeans. It's an absurd situation again. Only Osama can execute an attack which will force Americans to demand that their government protect them effectively, consistently, and with as much violence as necessary.
BECK: Which is why, I was thinking this weekend, if I were him, that would be the last thing I would do right now.
Not content with a remark that should have ended his career as a broadcast commentator, the CIA agent turned Osama-phile ratcheted up his Obama hatred the next day. Appearing on Alan Colmes' radio show, Scheuer essentially branded the President a traitor:
COLMES: You don't think the President of the United States, Barack Obama, cares about protecting this country.
SCHEUER: No, I don't. Because I don't think he realizes what the world is like outside the United States. [...]
COLMES: You don't think he wants to protect the country?
SCHEUER: I don't think he can, sir. [...]
COLMES: He doesn't want to protect the country?
SCHEUER: Not if it costs votes.
(While Scheuer's views are shared by only a small minority of Americans, the picture among senior executives at CBS may be changing. In February, CBS News hired as its senior vice president of communications Jeff Ballabon, a former Bush operative who announced last fall that "Obama is incredibly dangerous.")
In any event, the storms over Cheney's deceptions of Congress and potential torture prosecutions are far from over. And neither, apparently, are the appearances by Obama-hater Michael Scheuer on your television screens.
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