© Detroit Free Press
Juan Cole, professor at the University of Michigan.
Juan Cole, professor at the University of Michigan.
And he called upon Congress to launch an investigation into what he said was illegal spying on an American citizen.
"The Bush White House request that the CIA spy on me to discredit me clearly violated the American constitution, U.S. law, the CIA charter, and my civil and human rights," U-M professor Juan Cole told the Free Press. "It was criminal."
Under pressure from the White House, a CIA official asked his staff to spy on Cole, a noted history professor from Ann Arbor who writes a popular blog about the Middle East called Informed Comment, according to story in the New York Times. In 2005, a CIA supervisor, David Low, spoke with a colleague after returning from a White House meeting.
"The White House wants to get him," Low said after that meeting to Glenn Carle, a former CIA officer who was a counterterrorism official, the New York Times reported.
"'What do you think we might know about him, or could find out that could discredit him?" Low added, according to Carle. "Does he drink? What are his views? Is he married?"
At one point, a memo on Cole was written that included "inappropriate, derogatory remarks" about Cole's lifestyle, Carle said in the New York Times story.
"Carle's revelations come as a visceral shock," Cole wrote on his blog today. The White House and CIA have "no business spying on American citizens."
According to the Times story. Carle resisted pressure to spy on Cole, saying it was a violation of the law, but another CIA official carried out the order.
"I hope that the Senate and House Intelligence Committees will immediately launch an investigation of this clear violation of the law by the Bush White House and by the CIA officials concerned," Cole wrote on his blog. "Like Mr. Carle, I am dismayed at how easy it seems to have been for corrupt (White House) officials to suborn CIA personnel into activities that had nothing to do with national security abroad and everything to do with silencing domestic critics."
Cole specializes in the history of the Middle East and South Asia. He achieved worldwide popularity for his blog, which he started in 2002 to talk about the war against Al-Qaeda and in Iraq. At times, he is critical of U.S. efforts in the Middle East, but is not seen as a radical.
"It seems to me clear that the Bush White House was upset by my blogging of the Iraq War ... which contradicted the propaganda efforts of the administration attempting to make the enterprise look like a wild shining success," Cole wrote on his blog.
Cole said that the Bush administration's efforts may have succeeded in blackballing him from speaking at certain conferences that were attended by U.S. government and intelligence officials.
"It seemed likely to some colleagues, according to what they told me, that the Bush administration had in fact succeeded in having me blackballed, since the invitations rather dropped off, and panels of a sort I had earlier participated in were being held without my presence," Cole said.
"What alarms me most ... is that I know I am a relatively small fish and it seems to me rather likely that I was not the only target of the baleful team at the White House," Cole added.
The White House, Cole wrote, ordered a "nakedly illegal deployment of the CIA against an academic for the explicit purpose of destroying his reputation for political purposes."
"Each of us tend to think we see things as they are, that we are objective. But this is not the case. We see the world, not as it is, but as we are - or as we are conditioned to see it"
You mean Dubya saw things as he was conditioned to and Juan Cole is conditioned to think tha Dubya wanted to "get him" and Im conditioned to belive this - well good thing it aint Friday 13!