I want to believe that the CIA is going to revolt against the Busheviks, I really do.
However, looking back over the publicly reviewable career of the CIA, (v. the secret history), you find an agency that does the bidding of the Executive, the facilitation of policy, no matter what it is.
Consider the case of Ralph McGehee,
http://www.parascope.com/articles/1197/mcgehee.htm , a prisoner of conscience, he went public with his criticism of the CIA's methods. He went so far as to establish a database of CIA activity from publicly available sources and started to sell it as a software package called CIABASE.
None of the data in CIABASE was secret, yet he was driven from public life by typical uber-patriotic (ex?) spooks who considered him a traitor.
Also worthy of consideration is Phlip Agee.
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/CIA/CIA_Diary_Agee.htmlBut most recently we have the case of Scott Ritter. We all know who he is, but I highly recommend reading "Iraq Confidential" if you haven't. These 4 paragraphs from the epilogue sum up his experience with the CIA, but you really have to read the book to believe the shit he went through;
"The notion of the war in Iraq resulting from an intelligence failure is very convenient for all parties involved. The intelligence community can simply say that intelligence is a tricky business, and sometimes you get it wrong. This, of course, provides a convenient excuse for the politicians, and compliant media, to contend that they were simply acting in the public interest based upon the information they were given...
...In the end, to accept the concept of Iraq as an intelligence failure, one must first accept the premise that the USA was implementing, as its primary objective for Iraq, the Security Council's resolutions on disarmament. This argument is simpy not sustainable. The behavior of the United States government and its intelligence agencies during my time as an inspector was not that of a government that was serious about disarmament. Support for UNSCOM's mission was, at best, tailored to the political imperatives at any given time. There was a total willingness to compromise the integrity of UNSCOM (and with it the whole notion of multilateral disarmament) for short-term tactical advantages in the battle between the US and Iraqi regimes. Towards the end of the inspections era, elements of the US government actively sought to make UNSCOM's job more difficult by cutting it off from intelligence sources. Disarmament was simply not the USA's principal policy objective in Iraq after 1991. Regime change was.
The CIA was designated as the principal implementer of this policy. Therefore, when one looks at the March, 2003 invasion of Iraq and the subsequent removal of power of the government of Saddam Hussein, the only conclusion that can be reached is that the CIA accomplished its mission. Iraq was, in fact, a great intelligence victory, insofar as the CIA, through its manipulation of the work of the UN weapons inspectors and the distortion of fact about Iraq's WMD programs, maintained the public perception of an armed and defiant Iraq in the face of plausible and plentiful evidence to the contrary. We now know that both the US and UK intelligence services had, by July 2002, agreed to 'fix the intelligence around policy'. But the fact remains that, at least as far as the CIA is concerned, the issue of 'fixing intelligence around policy' predates July 2002, reaching as far back as 1992 when the decision was made to doctor the intelligence about Iraqi SCUD missile accounting, asserting the existence of missiles in the face of UNSCOM inspection results which demonstrated that there were none.
As an American, I find it very disturbing that the intelligence services of my country would resort to lies and deceit when addressing an issue of such fundamental importance to the security of the USA. Intelligence, to me, has always been about the facts. When intelligence is skewed to fit policy, then the entire system of trust that is fundamental in a free and democratic society is put at risk. Iraq, and the role of the CIA in selling the war with Iraq, is a manifestation of such a breach of trust."The CIA executes the will of the president, and will continue to do so. Now under Negroponte's purview, the chances of contrary intel leaking to politically harm the President are less than they were before the disastrous recommendations of the 9/11 Commission began to be implemented.
Ex-CIA analyst Mel Goodman on the DNI post:"...The first reform obviously was the creation of a Director of National Intelligence. I’m not going to get into the major problem of the DNI because Ray McGovern is going to discuss that from the terms of politicization of intelligence. But, I just wanna say, that if you wanted to politicize intelligence, on any sensitive issue, I can’t think of a better way to do it, than to place the DNI inside the Executive Branch.
And I don’t want to talk a lot about John Negroponte, but given his history in Nicaragua and Honduras, and the cover-ups of the rapes and the murders that took place, and we know about the cover-ups, this was certainly a poor man to turn to if we’re gonna try to really tell truth to power, which is the job of the DNI.
So you’ve taken a step that is going to be vastly expensive, vastly disruptive, and we’ve already seen the kinds of problems it’s created in the intelligence community. This problem is further worsened by the fact that John Negroponte is on record as saying that he believes that intelligence is a service function, and that the job of intelligence is to “meet consumer demands”.
Well, anyone who believes that is halfway on the road to politicization..."
http://reprehensor.gnn.tv/blogs/11620/Mel_Goodman_July_22nd_2005_afternoon_remarks------------------------
Former CIA analyst Ray McGovern on the DNI post;"...Let me point out that there are people around that have the experience to comment on these things. And sometimes they do it beside themselves, and sometimes they just instinctively react, and Tom Ridge was such a person.
Of all people, Tom Ridge.
When he heard about this plan to have a National Intelligence Director (DNI) sit on top of all these 15 agencies and bureaucracy, on top of the DCIA, he said very quickly, ‘You know, I don’t think you need a czar,’ he told FOX News, ‘We already have one level of bureaucracy that we don’t need.’
Now, who better to comment on that, than Tom Ridge, who has been given 180,000 people from 32 separate government agencies to sit on top of as a ‘czar’.
So he spoke Truth, despite himself.
So did Slade Gordon… he was a member of the 9/11 Commission. And exactly a year ago, after the issuance of their report, I had been asked by BBC to go to their studios and talk on their TV, as I’m coming out who’s coming in but Slade Gordon and Jamie Gorelick.
And I said, ‘Hi’ and Jamie went right into the studio, but I had a chance to talk with former Senator Gordon. And I took him aside and I said, ‘Senator Gordon, do you know that the DCI already has all the authorities that he needs under the National Security Act of 1947, all he has to do is have the President back him up, he can do the job!’
You know what? He took me, he put his arm around me, he said, ‘Yeah, I know, but this one won’t use the power, won’t use those authorities…’
And then Slade Gordon got invited into the BBC thing.
What?
So we’re gonna create a whole new Superstructure because one fellow wouldn’t use the authorities that were easily available to him given the necessary Presidential backing.
Perhaps the best comment came from Bill Odom… he was about as high as you could go in the Army Intelligence, he headed up Army Intelligence, and then he headed up the NSA. He’s a Ph. D., Soviet specialist… very well respected around town.
He wrote a little Op Ed in the Washington Post, August 1, last year (2004), just 10 days after the release of the 9/11 Report, and what he said was, ‘No organizational design can hope to compensate for incompetent incumbence.’
Well, yeah, you can add sycophantic incumbence to incompetence, and that’s a sad story to tell..."
http://reprehensor.gnn.tv/blogs/11700/Ray_McGovern_July_22nd_2005-------------------------
Ex-CIA analyst, David MacMichael;"...There has been a
failure. Pearl Harbor, the unpredicted Soviet development of the Atomic bomb, the Chinese Communist victory in 1949… the equally unpredicted North Korean invasion in 1950, the Bay of Pigs failure, Vietnam, the overthrow of the Shah in 1978, and of Simosa in Nicaragua a year later, both these last events not only unpredicted, but confidently declared by our intelligence estimates as ‘impossible’, or a
scandal. And Iran/Contra inevitably comes to mind here, and some others in the 1970’s.
What happens next? A commission will be appointed. Usually by the executive, but post Vietnam, often by the Congress. We recall the Hoover Commission in the 1950’s, the Church and Pike Commissions of the 1970’s, and the Iran/Contra joint Committee in the 1980’s, often forgotten are the Senate hearings of 1992, which tried to learn how we were so unprepared for Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, and led among other things to Senator Moynihan’s very serious proposal for doing away with the CIA altogether, and Senator Arlen Specter’s repeated and now accepted idea that the post of National Director of Intelligence and DCIA be separated.
The committee will labor long and hard, and recommend inevitably that the agencies concerned coordinate their activities better and share their information. Depending on the era, if it’s “post-attack” or “post-scandal”, the recommendations will either call for more or less executive branch independence in using the intelligence system. Usually with reference to the use of covert operations, or for more, or less congressional oversight and control of intelligence. Attention inevitably is called to the need for better, qualified officers, particularly in the area of language skills in the intelligence services.
And again, depending on the era, there will be calls for more openness, the matter of publishing the total amount of the intelligence appropriation is one example, or for less. When we call for less, as we’re doing now, the great fear is that our skilled and unscrupulous opponents will be able to use something, like merely the publication of the total intelligence budget, that one apparently innocuous tile from the intelligence mosaic, to uncover our most precious secrets, the ‘crown jewels’ so to speak.
I will close now with a dated but still useful reference and a quotation which is also dated but also useful, the reference I have here is the Congressional Research Service Report of August 15th, 1988, during Iran/Contra, on intelligence reform, recent histories and proposals. I think it’s very worth reading this relatively brief report, to see how frequently these issues are revisited, and what the results are.
Now, the quote I want to give you is from a book written by a very interesting man, now deceased, Arthur Macy Cox, who was George Kennan’s principal assistant, when George Kennan, post-WWII, was heading the State Dept’s planning office. Arthur Macy Cox went on to have a very distinguished career in government, including service in the CIA, and I had several lengthy discussions with him back in the early 1990’s.
His book is called, “The Myths of National Security: The Peril of Secret Government”, it was published by Beacon Press in 1975… he wrote then, in the midst of Watergate;
“The political demise of Richard Nixon was devastating evidence of a national illness which has pervaded our society for years, but the first Presidential resignation in our history did not arrest the disease, it merely focused attention on the need for a cure. The corruption of Watergate was a symptom of a larger malaise resulting from the use of the ‘Big Lie’ technique to deceive the American people, countless lies perpetrated under cover of a vast system of executive secrecy, justified on grounds of protecting our ‘national security’.
Unless we understand how this happened, we will not be able to restore our Democracy to health…
…the drafters of the Constitution provided us with an ingenious system of government with machinery to check and balance the use of power, but they did not anticipate the problem of secret government, nor has that problem been dealt with in subsequent constitutional amendments.
Despite a lack of safeguards, a large consensus of the American public since WWII has granted to succeeding Presidents extraordinary secret powers to protect the security of the nation. The people felt that in matters of national survival, the President should be given total trust. He should be allowed to make decisions in secret to protect our national security.
But Democracy and secrecy are incompatible, and it has now become clear that secret powers should never have been delegated without guarantees of accountability to the people’s representatives in the Congress.”
http://reprehensor.gnn.tv/blogs/11813/David_MacMichaels_July_22nd_2005-------------------------
Moderators the large quotes are from the public domain, there should be no copyright issues.
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