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Emptywheel has a superb post up about "Jerry Doe," a former colleague of Valerie Plame's at the CIA who was assigned to counter-proliferation in the Middle East who is suing Porter Goss and various other people within the CIA for firing him because he refused to falsify information on Iraq.  

James Risen has written about him:

In a lawsuit filed in federal court here in December, the former C.I.A. officer, whose name remains secret, said that the informant told him that Iraq’s uranium enrichment program had ended years earlier and that centrifuge components from the scuttled program were available for examination and even purchase.

[snip]

His information on the Iraqi nuclear program, described as coming from a significant source, would have arrived at a time when the C.I.A. was starting to reconsider whether Iraq had revived its efforts to develop nuclear weapons. The agency’s conclusion that this was happening, eventually made public by the Bush administration in 2002 as part of its rationale for war, has since been found to be incorrect.

Doe is claiming that he followed all the appropriate channels to get his information out, but that his information was supressed and he was both harassed and terminated for his efforts.  Says emptywheel:

If what Doe alleges is true, the CIA five times tried to force him to stop pursuing intelligence--one time burying actionable intelligence, another time, trying to get him to falsify intelligence--that countered the party line. To punish him for not hewing to the party line, they first withheld a promotion he had qualified for. Then, they accused him (falsely, he says) of sleeping with a female asset, blackmailing James Pavitt, and embezzling money. Doe alleges these accusations served as the pretext to fire him. Then, to make sure he didn't contest the termination, they retroactively negated his move from contract to staff status, 10 years after the fact. By turning Doe, retroactively, back into a contractor, they denied him the ability to appeal or investigate his own personnel files.

Every time we hear the cry about "leakers" being pursued by the Bush administration (or in this case by Porter Goss) because they are dangerous to national security, what they really seem to be dangerous to is to the credibility of the Bush administration and the false narratives they have woven over time.  I have no idea if Doe's charges are legitimate, but they do seem to fit into a pattern.

Emptywheel also notes this tantalizing bit, which indicates that the Neocons were already setting the stage for the Iraq war even before Bush was elected, and were just waiting for the appropriate puppet president to take the stage and push the button:

The first time Doe was required to bury intelligence was in 2000, before Bush was inaugurated and probably before he was (s)elected. Which reminds me that the Niger embassy in Rome was burgled (and therefore the plot to forge the Niger documents was presumably in place) in early January 2001, before Bush was inaugurated. In other words, they've been setting up their Neocon moves since before Bush was put into office.

But (again, assuming Doe's allegations are true), the similarities are enough to suggest the beginning of a pattern. Two of the CPD officers most closely involved with ascertaining just who in the Middle East has what kind of WMDs had their careers ruined, and in the process, their ability to provide accurate information that might prevent war.

Doe claims he followed every avenue to get his information out which could have prevented war and was systematically stymied.  For any wingnut who needs a lesson in why whistleblowers are a critical check on power and vital to the integrity of the system, this would be it.