Can You Trust ANYTHING that Present and Former CIA Agents Say?

I have to admit that my emotional reaction to the Washington Post story about how seven CIA agents died in Afghanistan is more a reaction of mirth and amusement. According to the WaPost story, the CIA encouraged a Jordanian man to gather information for the CIA surreptitiously. After what seemed like one good bit of information, these hotshot CIA administrators admitted this Jordanian guy into their inner-geographical-sanctums, where he promptly blew himself and seven CIA smart-asses to hell.

That's what the WaPost reports, anyway, but who is their source for this information? Their sources are "former U.S. government officials":

. . . the new evidence points to a carefully planned act of deception by a trusted operative from a country closely allied with the United States in the fight against al-Qaeda. U.S. and Jordanian officials had come to regard Balawi as trustworthy, former officials said, despite a history of support for Islamist extremism -- a point of view he appeared to endorse in an interview with an al-Qaeda-affiliated publication as recently as this past fall.

"He was someone who had already worked with us," said a former U.S. counterterrorism officer who discussed the ongoing investigation on the condition of anonymity. The official said Balawi had been jointly managed by U.S. and Jordanian agencies and had provided "actionable intelligence" over several weeks of undercover work along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.

The CIA declined to comment on reports identifying Balawi as the bomber, first posted by al-Jazeera television on its Web site. A U.S. intelligence official said only that the agency is "looking closely at every aspect" of the attack on the facility known as Forward Operating Base Chapman, in the province of Khost near Afghanistan's border with Pakistan.

Well, this is just unthinkable! The CIA has fallen victim to a "carefully planned deception" when they are supposed to be masters of "carefully planned deception". Aside from the account, to the press, by someone who admits that he was an intelligence officer (and therefore trained to lie, dissemble, and invent cover stories), how can we know that this WaPost version of events is true? The WaPost says,

In September of last year, Balawi gave an interview to Vanguards of Khorasan, a magazine associated with al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, according to SITE. His handlers presumably were aware of the interview but may have regarded it as part of his cover.

Oh, so an agent needs a "cover"? That can't be true! That's a "conspiracy theory" of the sort that gets people banned from DailyKos. But, let's think about Markos C. Alberto Moulitsas Zúñiga (MAMZ) again for a just moment and ask ourselves jypothetically what part of his public personna and histrionics might be "as a part of his cover," if in fact he still works for the CIA, which he has said he would have "no problem" doing.

Isn't it logically just as likely that the seven CIA agents were blown up by a pizza delivery man, or a prostitute with a heavy handbag, and now the CIA needs a cover-story that will not leave them looking like perfectly incompetent jackasses?

Is it possible that the next country the US plans to overthrow, invade, or supply massive arms to is Jordan, and therefore the CIA is preparing the public to believe that something very serious needs to be done about Jordan? Or is this whole story for the purpose of getting the US public angry enough at "perfectly planned deceptions" that kill US Government employees, so that the public will show more support for the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and now Jordan?

I don't have any way to answer these questions. I offer them only as several alternatives to the stories that the paid liars at the CIA and other "intelligence officials" are telling us, through the ever-willing reporters and editors at the Washington Post.

And that brings us, of course, back to Markos C. Alberto Moulitsas Zúñiga. He says he spent two years at the CIA, training to be a secret agent, at the same time when he started "leftist" DailyKos. Does the CIA really permit legitimate leftists to start legitimately left-wing blogs while training at the CIA? Or is it possible that the CIA just didn't KNOW that the Markos Moulitsas they were training was a left-wing bloggers? Or did the CIA know with utter certainty that the Markos Moulitsas they were training was NOT a "left-wing blogger", but was instead preparing a cover story that would be helpful as he pretended to be a left-wing blogger?

Certainly, these are all convoluted questions (not assertions) but then MAMZ's account of starting a left-wing blog while training at the CIA to be a secret agent is the most convoluted and irrational proposition that the public has even been asked to accept. It's more preposterous than the Weapons and Mass Destruction stories of the Bush Administration. It only makes sense if MAMZ was training to be a secret agent who would infiltrate the US Left. Then, it makes sense!

Why are the two years MAMZ spent at the CIA invariably omitted and excluded from biographies of him, whether he writes them (autobiography) or someone else does? When he made a public confession in a June 6, 2006 appearance at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, in which he stated facts that can only mean that he was at the CIA from 2001 to 2003, didn't that fact become an obligatory and highly relevant part of his biography, if only because his "training" at the CIA to be "a secret agent" allegedly lasted for TWO YEARS?

Now, let's suppose that he is lying. How can we possibly trust anyone who would like about how he spent two years of his life, when his activities are of obvious relevance to his present credibility when he claims to be a "liberal," "leftist" "progressive"? A man who would lie in public about two years t at the CIA would lie about just about everything else, wouldn't you agree? And so NOTHING Markos Moulitsas says can be taken at face value, either because he is a dilettante sophomoric amateur liar, or because he is a Government-trained liar, just like the "former US Counter Terrorism Office," to whom the WaPost anonymously attributes the "facts" it reports about the alleged deaths of several CIA officials in Afghanistan.

When asked to tell how you have spent your professional life and what experiences have led you to where you are today, isn't it lying to omit two years of training in Washington, DC with the Central Intelligence Agency?

To my knowledge, no mainstream news agency has reported what MAMZ, himself, has confessed to, or even reported his confession as a story that needed further definition. That's why we cannot automatically believe what the Washington Post tells us about how seven CIA employees ended up dead in Afghanistan. When they don't tell us the truth that we already know, how can we trust them to tell us truths about which only they have gathered information, and even that information has been gathered from the same sort of "counter-terrorism" officials who were paying Iraqi reporters to write positive stories about the US Armed Forces?