This is just too weird. John Cole calls it “mind numbing.” Any which way you look at it, this represents the strangest turn yet in the Rove-Wilson-Plame affair.

The story starts at a hearing held by soon-to-be-once-again-former Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney whose defeat in 2002 was a direct result of her nutty conspiracy theories about Bush and 9/11. Not content to leave well enough alone, on Friday McKinney put on a show for C-Span by holding forth with dozens of witnesses for 8 hours on 9/11 conspiracy theories. These include the theories that no plane hit the Pentagon, that the Twin Towers came down as a result of a “controlled demolition,” and that Flight 93 was shot down by F-16’s over the fields of Pennsylvania.

The hearing featured loons from every corner of the conspiracy spectrum including a former CIA agent Melvin Goodman who was quoted as saying that McKinney’s wacky views on the attack would some day become “conventional wisdom.”

How is this relevant to the Rovian kerfluffle? Mr. Goodman signed this letter along with several ex-CIA agents who were upset about the outing of Valerie Plame. The letter has been widely publicized and passed off as indicative of the way CIA operatives view the publication of Mrs. Wilson’s name.

Okay…so we have a genuine barking moonbat who thinks Cynthia McKinney is a prophet signing a letter criticizing the Bush administration for revealing the name of a covert operative. But dig a little deeper and you find this about the other signatories of that letter:

Ray McGovern, for instance, contributed an article to the ultra-left truthout.org arguing that the Downing Street Memo conclusively proves that Bush deliberately forged intelligence to get us into war in Iraq. Now, are we to believe that he just innocently and in a non-partisan manner became concerned about what happened to poor old Valerie Plame? If you’re still unconvinced, read his hysterical rant at DemocracyNow about what a right-wing rag the WaPo is.

And here’s a quote David MacMichael, another signer of this “non-partisan” letter:

Those were 1981-1983 under Reagan and under William Casey. In fact I embarked on that job the day Casey came in. I can assure you that the way in which the National Intelligence Council and the National Intelligence officers, the directing officers in there were stacked during the Casey years, meant that intelligence was designed, and I focused principally on Central America, the whole Iran Contra thing later, truthful analysis was not the highest priority there. The determination was to produce analyses that would support the previously decided upon policy so for me, getting back involved with Ray McGovern here and VIPS dealing with this current situation, its kind of like déjà vu all over again. It’s a familiar process.

You might recall during the Reagan years that the CIA was at war with the White House over a wide variety of issues, not the least of which was Russian military capabilities which were consistently overstated as was the strength of the Russian economy.

Leon of Red State highlights another signatory to the letter:

Additionally, several of the other signatories had been outspoken critics of the administration’s decision to go to war before the incident with Plame erupted, including Col. Patrick Lang. Vince Cannistraro was part of the group of CIA officials who suspiciously began speaking critically about the Bush administration in the month before the general election, rather than at a time when it might have been practically useful (such as, before the war).

This letter becomes less credible by the minute. We are still looking for a signatory that didn’t have an axe to grind with Bush BEFORE the outing of Plame.

Keep looking Leon but I don’t think you’ll find one.

If Rove or anyone else deliberately or otherwise outed a covert CIA agent he should be fired, even if he didn’t break the law. This should be a given. Hell, I’ve been calling for Rove to leave since the story heated up earlier this month.

But there’s something else I’ve been calling for:

I WANT AN INVESTIGATION INTO THE ACTIVITIES OF THESE FORMER CIA AGENTS AND THEIR CONNECTION TO CURRENT INTELLIGENCE PERSONNEL WHO ARE SELECTIVELY LEAKING CLASSIFIED INFORMATION TO DISCREDIT THE ADMINISTRATION AND DELIBERATELY HARM THE WAR EFFORT.

This is what the Rove-Plame-Wilson affair is all about; push back by the White House in their war with the CIA. They may have gone too far. They may have harmed national security. But that doesn’t change the fact that unelected bureacrats in the CIA have opposed the Administration from the start and sought to sway an election last year by leaking cherry picked intel reports that showed the CIA in the best possible light with regards to WMD.

Some of the signatories to that letter may be in the thick of this scandal. Some of them may be conduits for classified information that journalists like Walter Pincus, Bob Novak, and Judith Miller received prior to the election last year. And the whole sordid mess is being ignored by the press in their effort to get Rove.

Fine…get Rove. But when is the MSM going to turn their attention to this clandestine conflict that Mrs. Wilson and her cohorts have been fighting for more than 2 years? This, not the Rovian affair, is the real threat to our country.