By Brad Friedman on 6/24/2011, 3:36pm PT  

According to explosive new assertions from a credible former CIA agent, President Barack Obama's administration is said to have attempted to use the CIA to target, spyon, and smear an American conservative blogger and university professor on Middle-Eastern affairs, simply because he opposed the President's policies in Libya.

The alleged attempt to use the powerful U.S. intelligence agency for domestic spying and/or discrediting of a private American citizen would be in gross violation of the law disallowing domestic use of the agency. Uncomfortably, it's also precisely what so many on the Right have long warned of in regard to this President's proclivity for turning Big Government apparatchiks against the freedoms and liberties of private, law-abiding citizens simply because they dared to use their constitutionally protected rights of free speech to criticize his policies. It would also be, as folks on the Right have also long charged, a gross violation of the U.S. Constitution, which the President is sworn to defend, rather than abuse.

Republicans in Congress have vowed to investigate the matter, while Democrats, hypocritically and shamefully, have remained completely silent.

Given this startling and exceedingly troubling news --- particularly in light of Democrats ignoring the revelations, after so many years of charging George W. Bush with similar behavior --- we have to admit that perhaps we were too quick to ridicule the many Tea Party patriots for their warnings about the dangers of Obama's Stalinist and Maoist tendencies!

If the details of this story turn out to be true --- and so far, they certainly seem credible, as the blogger/professor says he was no longer invited to CIA conferences following the incident --- as much as we'd hate to admit it, we'd suggest impeachment or even legal proceedings against the President of the United States would be entirely appropriate here.

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CORRECTION: It's a little embarrassing, but it appears we got at least one key detail in the above story completely wrong...

As it turns out, the President who allegedly attempted to abuse Big Government apparatchiks to illegally strip a private American citizen of his liberties and freedoms by ordering the CIA to spy and discredit him, was actually George W. Bush, not President Obama. It was, according to the former CIA agent, Bush's administration, not Obama's, who ordered that non-Rightwing blogger and Middle-East scholar Prof. Juan Cole of the University of Michigan be discredited due to his public criticism of Bush's policies in Iraq, not Libya.

Oh, and it's not the Democrats who have remained silent about this matter, it's the Republicans who have so far failed to criticize the apparent gross abuse of power by the Bush White House, as Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) has now vowed to open a probe in the Senate Intelligence Committee to investigate the extraordinarily troubling allegations against the Bush Administration.

The BRAD BLOG regrets the error.

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Article Categories: CIA, Rights And Freedoms, U.S. Constitution, Journalist Intimidation, Accountability, Barack Obama, Bush Legacy