Hat tip to Mick Arran for this post on the CIA's latest machinations
As I posted in his thread, and I'll say again here: the CIA always has and always will pose one of the greatest imaginable threats to our national security. A greater threat than terrorism, because the CIA practically created it. Throughout its existence, the CIA has been a malevolent organization fraught with corruption, continually mobilized into committing secret acts of terror upon other nations and catering to the ugliest dark side that this country has to offer.
I have never for a moment, thought of them as an organization which is beneficial to our society, integrity as a nation or that is concerned with governmental ethics and responsibility.
It should be abolished.
These latest developments in the ongoing saga of our notoriously poisonous Central Intelligence Agency are just another nail in the coffin as far as I'm concerned. But that doesn't mean it doesn't represent a downgrade in the dependability of that agency to provide us with any amount of intelligence that will truly protect people.
New C.I.A. Chief Tells Workers to Back Administration PoliciesBy DOUGLAS JEHL
WASHINGTON, Nov. 16 - Porter J. Goss, the new intelligence chief, has told Central Intelligence Agency employees that their job is to "support the administration and its policies in our work,'' a copy of an internal memorandum shows."As agency employees we do not identify with, support or champion opposition to the administration or its policies," Mr. Goss said in the memorandum, which was circulated late on Monday. He said in the document that he was seeking "to clarify beyond doubt the rules of the road."
While his words could be construed as urging analysts to conform with administration policies, Mr. Goss also wrote, "We provide the intelligence as we see it - and let the facts alone speak to the policymaker.''
The memorandum suggested an effort by Mr. Goss to spell out his thinking as he embarked on what he made clear would be a major overhaul at the agency, with further changes to come. The changes to date, including the ouster of the agency's clandestine service chief, have left current and former intelligence officials angry and unnerved. Some have been outspoken, including those who said Tuesday that they regarded Mr. Goss's warning as part of an effort to suppress dissent within the organization.
In recent weeks, White House officials have complained that some C.I.A. officials have sought to undermine President Bush and his policies.
At a minimum, Mr. Goss's memorandum appeared to be a swipe against an agency decision under George J. Tenet, his predecessor as director of central intelligence, to permit a senior analyst at the agency, Michael Scheuer, to write a book and grant interviews that were critical of the Bush administration's policies on terrorism.
One former intelligence official said he saw nothing inappropriate in Mr. Goss's warning, noting that the C.I.A. had long tried to distance itself and its employees from policy matters.
"Mike exploited a seam in the rules and inappropriately used it to express his own policy views,'' the official said of Mr. Scheuer. "That did serious damage to the agency, because many people, including some in the White House, thought that he was being urged by the agency to take on the president. I know that was not the case.''
But a second former intelligence official said he was concerned that the memorandum and the changes represented an effort by Mr. Goss to stifle independence.
"If Goss is asking people to color their views and be a team player, that's not what people at C.I.A. signed up for,'' said the former intelligence official. The official and others interviewed in recent days spoke on condition that they not be named, saying they did not want to inflame tensions at the agency.
Some of the contents of Mr. Goss's memorandum were first reported by The Washington Post. A complete copy of the document was obtained on Tuesday by The New York Times.Posted by Maria at November 19, 2004 08:49 PM | TrackBackTensions between the agency's new leadership team, which took over in late September, and senior career officials are more intense than at any time since the late 1970's. The most significant changes so far have been the resignations on Monday of Stephen R. Kappes, the deputy director of operations, and his deputy, Michael Sulick, but Mr. Goss told agency employees in the memorandum that he planned further changes "in the days and weeks ahead of us'' that would involve "procedures, organization, senior personnel and areas of focus for our action.''
"I am committed to sharing these changes with you as they occur,'' Mr. Goss said in the memorandum. "I do understand it is easy to be distracted by both the nature and the pace of change. I am confident, however, that you will remain deeply committed to our mission.''
Mr. Goss's memorandum included a reminder that C.I.A. employees should "scrupulously honor our secrecy oath'' by allowing the agency's public affairs office and its Congressional relations branch to take the lead in all contacts with the media and with Congress. "We remain a secret organization,'' he said.
Among the moves that Mr. Goss said he was weighing was the selection of a candidate to become the agency's No. 2 official, the deputy director of central intelligence. The name being mentioned most often within the C.I.A. as a candidate, intelligence officials said, is Lt. Gen. Michael V. Hayden of the Air Force, the director of the National Security Agency, which is responsible for intercepting electronic communications worldwide. The naming of a deputy director would be made by the White House, in a nomination subject to Senate confirmation.
In interviews this week, members of Congress as well as current and former intelligence officials said one reason the overhaul under way had left them unnerved was that Mr. Goss had not made clear what kind of agency he intended to put in place. But Mr. Goss's memorandum did little to spell out that vision, and it did not make clear why the focus of overhaul efforts to date appeared to be on the operations directorate, which carries out spying and other covert missions around the world.
"It's just very hard to divine what's going on over there,'' said Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, who said he and other members of the Senate intelligence committee would be seeking answers at closed sessions this week. "But on issue after issue, there's a real question about whether the country and the Congress are going to get an unvarnished picture of our intelligence situation at a critical time.''
Mr. Goss said in the memorandum that he recognized that intelligence officers were operating in an atmosphere of extraordinary pressures, after a series of reports critical of intelligence agencies' performance in the months leading up to the Sept. 11 attacks and the war in Iraq.
"The I.C. and its people have been relentlessly scrutinized and criticized,'' he said, using an abbreviation for intelligence community. "Intelligence-related issues have become the fodder of partisan food fights and turf-power skirmishes. All the while, the demand for our services and products against a ruthless and unconventional enemy has expanded geometrically and we are expected to deliver - instantly. We have reason to be proud of our achievements and we need to be smarter about how we do our work in this operational climate.''
I think it's a mistake to tar everyone in the CIA, the FBI, the US military, or the various police departments, and other government organizations with unpleasant duties, with the same brush. After all, that's one of THEIR sins: Guilt by association, and collective punishment.
In this shitty, fucked up world we live in, there is a real need for spies, soldiers, cops, etc. You and I don't feel we need them, or want them, but there are guys in the world who would love to hurt us, even if we support some of their causes. Then there is the Big Game, the eternal struggle between nations, which we do NOT want to lose. It's for all the marbles.
So, in New York City, we have some cops who are every bit as bad as the Mafia. At the Justice Department, we have people who are not much better than the terrorists they hunt. In the military, there are some people with no more respect for human life than Stalin or Hitler had. And at the CIA, there are people who are indistinguishable from the old KBG agents, in their methods. That doesn't mean we can simply do without cops, soldiers and spies. Not until the other side gives up.
In the meantime, there are, thank God, a few good men and women in every one of these organizations. More than a few. If there weren't, things would be SO much worse, bad as they are now. I trust the average footsoldier, flatfoot, or spook more than I do their masters. But that's another matter.
The fact is, that at CIA in particular, especially since the post-Nixon purges, there are quite a few liberals, who actually do manage to bring their world view to the Agency. They're in trouble for that now, and they need our support.
It's the people at the top that scare me. Especially when they are nothing but raw politicos, not professionals in the field, who've never been out in it, and experienced the realities of it, as spies, soldiers, or cops. They have their off-the-wall theories, their curious notions, their crypto-nazi worldview, their partisan political agenda. And they will misuse their offices and agencies just as Hoover and Nixon did.
It's those unscrupulous, unprofessional, ideological zealots and sleazy politicians we have to go after. Without honest people at the top, the powers of those agencies are deadly, to us. Look what Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, et al, have done in Iraq. Look what Ashcroft has done here.
It just doesn't make sense to blame the deckhand when the ship hits an iceberg. Yeah, there are some REAL bad apples in these organizations, at all levels. Worse yet, they have too much power, and too little good supervision. That should be fixed, and the bad guys should be purged, and punished. But we can't afford to trash the whole organization, or the good people who remain in it.
What Porter Goss and his masters in the White House are doing now is nothing less than criminal. It's a strictly ideological, Stalinist purge of good people from the CIA, which will leave us even blinder than we are now, in the midst of a so-called "war on terror." In the Second World War, we employed communists and mafiosi to help us defeat fascism. In the Cold War, we used ex-nazi's and scumbags of all sorts to beat communism. Now, Bush is saying, he can't work with loyal, upstanding Americans who didn't happen to vote for him? Is he INSANE???
Or, is this so-called war all just bullshit: A pure power grab, domestically and internationally, by the neocons? If so, he's cutting loose the very people who can tell us the truth about that. We'll see. So, let's give SOME of these spooks a little leeway, and see what they do with it. And lets see if Bush is not, in fact, hanging himself with his very own rope.
Cosa,
I don't disagree with you. And by saying that the CIA should be abolished, I don't mean we shouldn't have cops or spies or homeland security. Only that the CIA as the organization that it is has notoriously focused their energies on more nefarious activities and been irreversably tarnished by those activities, and I think we could have a much better intelligence agency if this one was canned and we started from scratch to some extent. I realize this is a pipe dream. One that JFK seemed to think to accomplish, but obviously got nowhere with...
Anyway, I get where you're coming from and we're on a similar page. I agree that in the end, this blatant strategy of weeding out dissent may be just the thing that bites this admin in the ass. Unfortunately, you would think that with everything else Bushco has done, that this would just be the icing on the cake, but apparently we still have a long way to go before the majority of Americans really start scrutinizing the ins and outs and the media starts doing their job by questioning these types of policies more heavily. I am with you though in hoping that this CIA shennannigan turns into the monster that could take Bushco out. Unfortunately, for that to happen, I think Americans would have to see repurcussions that actually affect their own lives. Americans will ignore just about anything as long as its not happening in their living room.
Do you live in NYC my friend?
Posted by: Maria at November 20, 2004 11:27 AM
I used to live two blocks from the WTC. I left shortly after the first bombing (not because of it). I'm in Hawaii, now. But I know the NYPD all too well, through relatives. They have their uses. The cops, not the rellies. They're useless.
Yeah, I think we're stuck with cops & spies & soldiers until after the Rapture, when God cons all the assholes into jumping into a volcano or something.
And I wouldn't mind seeing the name CIA disappear, as long as it wasn't just window-dressing for more of the same, or a cover for something worse. But we're blowing our chance, right now. It's the Bushes of the world that are the problem, not the guys in the field. They're risking their asses for nothing, most of the time. Nobody listens to them. Nor the analysts, who have an incredible pile of bullshit to sift through, just to have their product distorted by politicians. Gotta be frustrating. Seeing a lot of that, at CIA, now. Right out in the open. Unusual.
The thing about this purge, is that the purgees know where many of the bodies are buried, and where the WMDs are not. I'd love to hear the skinny on the WTC bombing. I think a lot of people would. I think it could get Dubya impeached.
But what's happening reminds me of the paranoid schizophrenic self-immolation that took place in the time of James Jesus Angleton: All sorts of people were purged in a mole-hunt, and it was all a Russian double-bluff. The real spy was left in place. It virtually blinded the CIA for years.
I'd also suspect that far more intel-gatherers and analysts will go now than operations people. Many of them are ex-military, and very "loyal," i.e., right-wingers. Those are the idiots who, historically, have done the most damage to us, to our reputation and our real interests. We need intel, and analysis. Do we need cowboys to go on ill-considered, unlawful, destructive "wet-work"?
Still, blame belongs at the top. It was Kissinger who killed Allende, and had a major hand in the Phoenix program, killing thousands in SE Asia. I saw him on the street once, in the late 70s, walking right toward me. I didn't know who he was at first: You know how it is with famous people: They look so familiar that you think you know them, personally; but you've never seen them in your own, personal life. It's weird.
It took me a second to realize who he was. He's just a little schlub. Coulda been an orthodontist. What really gave it away was the six-foot-six guy in the dark suit right behind him, who gave me a hard look when I started hocking up a loogie for the Nobel Peace Prize winner. It was all over in a second. He passed me before I could spit in his face, (damned cottonmouth) heading down Madison Avenue in the Forties, as I headed uptown.
"My friend." That's Spanish, mi amiga. My favourite aunt was from Chile. Vina del Mar, a paradise, before Pinochet, I understand. She never went back.
On the other hand:
Shining Light in Dark Corners