Getting on the wrong side of a political fight can land you in the crosshairs of a White House smear campaign, at least that is what appears to have happened during the Bush administration years. According to recent testimony by former US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officer Glenn Carle, the Bush White House ordered the agency to dig up dirt on a prominent university professor that had been outspoken against the war in Iraq, in order to publicly discredit him -- and that was apparently not the only time the administration targeted those who dared to question the legitimacy of its actions.
Bush officials allegedly approached top CIA counter-terrorism officials after observing Juan Cole, professor of History at the University of Michigan, blogging heavily against the war in Iraq. According to Carle, his supervisor at the National Intelligence Council (NIC), David Low, approached him in 2005 and asked him to dig up information about Cole in order to discredit him.