Former CIA Agent Glenn Carle Reveals Bush Admin Effort to Smear War Critic Juan Cole

Democracy Now

Former top CIA counter-terrorism officer Glenn Carle has revealed the Bush administration sought damaging personal information on Juan Cole, an academic and prominent critic of the Iraq war, in an attempt to discredit him. Carle says the Bush White House made at least two requests for intelligence about Cole, whose blog "Informed Comment" rose to prominence after the Iraq invasion. Carle refused to carry out the request. In a joint interview, Carle and Cole join us to discuss the explosive revelation and why Cole is now calling for a congressional investigation. "I think I was targeted because this was a propagandistic administration … full of people who thought they could pull the wool over the American people’s eyes," says Cole. "The Bush administration was starkly at odds with the intelligence community as a whole—the CIA, in particular, and the National Intelligence Council even more so," Carle says. “I do know the context of tension and hostility between the Bush administration and the intelligence community, and more broadly, any critic of their policies.”




Former CIA Agent Glenn Carle Draws Agency Censorship with Chronicle of "War on Terror" Interrogation

Democracy Now

We speak with Glenn Carle, who served 23 years in the Clandestine Services of the Central Intelligence Agency. Carle’s book, "The Interrogator," has just been published and tells the story of one of the most secret and sensitive CIA interrogations during the "war on terror." Carle says he took part in the interrogation of a "high-value" al-Qaeda target kidnapped off the streets at an undisclosed site in the Middle East. The book chronicles this interrogation, and Carle says that CIA censors initially tried to redact nearly half of the book’s first draft, which was still published with significant blacked-out omissions.