The State of State

OSIIS – Open Source Internet Intelligence Service


The United States Department of State, affectionately known as State, has been long held by some as the crème de la crème of intellectual thought and Jeffersonian democracy. It is viewed by others as the last entrenched repository of Washington’s left wing radicals. The fact of the matter is State has been neither of those as of late. The transition at State has been a deep and troubling one. It has been most disturbing to long-term employees who like to think or give subject matter careful consideration. So much of the current scandal and controversy in American politics are only a few degrees of separation from the goings on at State. Joe Wilson, uranium in Niger, CIA leak, the War in Iraq; these and so many others involve the sweeping revolution and battle with which the State Department is currently engaged.

Is there truly a battle, a revolution, a revolt happening in Foggy Bottom? Check out this article, http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/13814730.htm.

According to this Knight Ridder article, the Department of State has been undergoing a political cleansing. This cleansing has resulted in the replacing of career experts by Pentagon and White House political operatives. Apparently, loyalty to George Bush and Condoleeza Rice has replaced expertise and intelligence on the subject matter at hand.

The end of the article notes the following achievements by State after the Bush administration coup de tat.


The Bush administration's arms control policies began with a refusal to submit a global treaty to ban underground nuclear-test blasts indefinitely for Senate ratification.
The administration withdrew the United States from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and blocked international efforts to conclude a pact on verifying compliance with a global biological-weapons ban.
The administration also rejected a mechanism for verifying that the United States and Russia are adhering to a 2002 accord to cut deployed nuclear warheads, has embraced new uses for nuclear arms and is spending billions modernizing and improving the U.S. arsenal.

It certainly doesn’t inspire the warm fuzzies. Why is America blocking an international pact that verifies compliance with a global biological-weapons ban? You would think that such verifications would provide valuable information; especially since we went into Iraq because of such WMD. Not to mention the face masks our soldiers had to wear in the desert.

Furthermore, this culling of common sense is being executed by the same gentlemen; Frederick Fleitz and Robert Joseph, involved in the Valerie Plame leak and other sordid State Department fiascos such as the “uranium in Niger”.

(http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/022406J.shtml.)

A dozen State Department officials drafted a dissent letter to W. Robert Pearson, Director of Human Resources and Director General of the Foreign Service about this unprecedented shake-up. If the dissenters had done their background they would have known not to waste their time.

W. Robert Pearson is a relic from back in the Iran-Contra days when he was Deputy Executive Secretary on Reagan’s National Security Council. Even back then he was trying to avoid the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

http://72.14.203.104/search?q=cache:BavvoBwM0QQJ:www.dailykos.com/story/2005/7/
20/162520/783+nswrp+pearson&hl=en&gl=us&ct=clnk&cd=10

Once again liberal compassion bit itself in the behind. W. Robert Pearson stayed on and stayed employed through both Democratic and Republican administrations. H e stayed on long enough to become Ambassador to Turkey where he compared the Armenian genocide to UFO sightings, not quite the diplomatic things to say about the murder and execution of over 1.5 million people.

http://www.armenian-genocide.org/

How he went from that to Director of Human Resources is perhaps the biggest mystery.

Nevertheless, the resistance at State continues as the latest Country Report on Terror lists Iraq as a training ground for terrorists, Colin Powell recollects his unheeded advice to President Bush and perhaps the final piece de’ resistance; the collateral explosion of the CIA leak case and NSA domestic spying. As some anonymous State Department employees, both present and former, maybe thinking; it is almost payback time.