Kudos To Laura Rozen

By Cernig

I just wanted to do a quick shout-out to our good friend Laura Rozen of War and Piece and MoJo. Laura did some of the heavy lifting on the Cunningham case which has seen fomer-Senator "Duke" Cunningham, mil-contractor Brent Wilkes and now former assistant CIA number three "Dusty" Foggo stand guilty of corruption and bribery allegations involving hookers.

Laura writes:

Thinking back, I had some rather unpleasant conversations with a CIA spokesman at the time who screamed that I was wrong, that he had marched to Foggo's office and Foggo totally denied what I was saying, and they couldn't find any Wilkes' company that had gotten a CIA contract, etc. And then, after I informed them that one firm, Archer Logistics, was a Wilkes' front company, nominally headed by Wilkes' nephew Joel Combs, the CIA public affairs official stopped yelling. It must have registered as a hit on some database of CIA contractors or something. After that, the conversation returned to polite ordinary civil discourse and the spokesman saying that as a rule the CIA doesn't ordinarily comment on who does or does not get CIA contracts. But the tone was utterly different. And as the evidence accumulated, the CIA was starting to realize that it had a Dusty Foggo problem. (The later 28-count indictment <.pdf> of Foggo revealed just how big a Dusty Foggo problem the CIA had on its hands).

Now, then-CIA director Porter Goss's decision to appoint Foggo to the CIA's number three spot had been a highly controversial and contentious one at the Agency. Foggo was well known in Agency ranks for philandering, gambling, a security issue dating to his Vienna days, and for generally being something of a sleaze. Suffice it to say, that senior Agency veterans left as a direct and indirect result of Goss's controversial decision to appoint Foggo to the Executive Director position, among them the top two operational officers who have since returned. And under Goss's hands off management style, Foggo wasn't just some CIA executive or bureaucrat. He effectively ran the CIA day to day. So you can see that when the CIA realized it had a Dusty Foggo problem, this was actually a rather big problem, and in particular it was a problem for Porter Goss.

...

"Porter Goss knew about Foggo's reputation beforehand," one former senior officer who left under Goss's tenure told me yesterday. "Why was he allowed to appoint this guy, and how did he get away with it? Goss had a criminal running the Agency."

"What the Republicans keep saying is that Porter came in to reform the Agency," he continued. "So Porter comes in and appoints to run the Agency a man everybody knew was sleazy and he paid no attention to the man's past. And he brought with him in addition a bunch of people who knew nothing about the organization and its operations and then he himself was a hands off person who basically did not get involved in managing the organization. It was a disaster from day one."

Another Bush administration heckuvajob and another stitch in the rich tapestry of the Republican culture of corruption.

And, like Scooby Doo villains, they world have gotten away with it if it hadn't been for those pesky journalists and bloggers, Laura being very much among the forefront of them. So major kudos to her, she's a great example of why jouranlists shouldn't be just stenographers for the powerful, and why blogging has become such a powerful force in keeping the comatose Fourth Estate alive.