CIA REFORM ??????????????????
Make it appear that the White House favors reform of the CIA
The President and the Speaker of the House both said they favored enactment
of the proposed legislation, but many experienced observers thought it was
all Grand Kabuki by the Republican Party, intended to make it appear that
the White House favored reform while ensuring that reform did not actually
occur.
On November 20, 2004, right-wing members of the House of Representatives
scuttled the major recommendation of the 9/11 Commission -- namely, to
provide the leader of the American intelligence community with greater
authority to direct and coordinate the analyses of all 15 intelligence
agencies. Reflecting the Pentagon's interests in maintaining control over
80% of the $40 billion annual intelligence budget, Duncan Hunter (R-CA),
Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee and an ally of Secretary of
Defense Donald Rumsfeld, withdrew his support. Other Republican congressmen
joined him, demanding that the bill go even further than was already the
case in harassing so-called illegal immigrants, primarily from Mexico.
The agency was created in 1947 on the orders of President Truman for the
sole purpose of collecting, evaluating, and coordinating -- through
espionage and from the public record -- information related to the national
security of the United States.
The National Security Act of 1947 placed the CIA under the explicit
direction of the National Security Council (NSC), the president's chief
staff unit for making decisions about war and peace, and gave it five
functions. Four of them concern the collection, coordination, and
dissemination of intelligence. It is the fifth -- which allows the CIA to
"perform such other functions and duties related to intelligence affecting
the national security as the National Security Council may from time to time
direct" -- that has turned the CIA into a personal, secret, unaccountable
army any president can order into battle without first having to ask
Congress to declare war, as the Constitution requires.
Clandestine operations, although nowhere mentioned in the CIA's enabling
statutes, quickly became the Agency's main activity and as one of its most
impartial Congressional analysts, Loch K. Johnson, has put the matter, "The
covert action shop had become a place for rapid promotion within the
agency."[6] The Directorate of Operations (DO) soon absorbed two-thirds of
the CIA's budget and personnel
Meanwhile, CIA covert operations subverted domestic journalism, planted
false information in foreign newspapers, and covertly fed large amounts of
money to members of the Christian Democratic Party in Italy, to King Hussein
of Jordan, and to clients in Greece, West Germany, Egypt, Sudan, Suriname,
Mauritius, the Philippines, Iran, Ecuador, and Chile. Clandestine agents
devoted themselves to such tasks as depressing the global prices of
agricultural products in order to damage uncooperative Third World
countries, and sponsoring guerrilla wars or miscellaneous insurgencies in
places as diverse as the Ukraine, Poland, Albania, Hungary, Indonesia,
China, Tibet, Oman, Malaysia, Iraq, the Dominican Republic, Venezuela, North
Korea, Bolivia, Thailand, Haiti, Guatemala, Cuba, Greece, Turkey, Vietnam,
Afghanistan, Angola, and Nicaragua, to name only a few of those on the
public record. All this was justified by the Cold War, and no one beyond a
very small group inside the government knew anything about it. The Central
Intelligence Act of 1949 modified the National Security Act of 1947 with a
series of amendments that, in the words of that pioneer scholar of the CIA
Harry Howe Ransom, "were introduced to permit [the CIA] a secrecy so
absolute that accountability might be impossible."[7]
The CIA's power to provide such unrequested information to a president
constitutes a potential restraint on his freedom of action and may on
occasion totally derail his policies, particularly since such intelligence
is very rarely certain or unambiguous. Over the years the powers of the DCI
to compel a president to read an intelligence estimate have been
systematically diluted...
Such revelations have usually taken one of two forms. In the first instance,
the president, it is argued, has been shielded from or has refused to read
accurate intelligence. In the second instance, the president is accused of
secretly ordering the suppression of intelligence or of fabricating
intelligence to support his preferred policies. President Bush has engaged
in both forms of dishonesty, but he is certainly not the first president to
do so. The examples are legion.
CIA History:
In 1961, at the time of the invasion of the Bay of Pigs, Richard Bissell,
then head of the Directorate of Operations, gained the ear of President
Kennedy and assured him that elated Cubans would welcome American-supported
insurgents, strew rose petals in their path, and help overthrow the Castro
government. Bissell simply did not show Kennedy the estimates that said
Castro had extensive popular support and the invasion would fail.
(1960s) Gen Lemnitzer, Chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff, believed that
the Bay of Pigs Invasion would fail(based on his military assessment of the
invasion force and the Cuban defense forces), but withheld his judgement
from President Kennedy. (Source: Body of Secrets, p. 82)
The CIA knew in advance that the date of the invasion had been leaked to the
Russians, who had in turn relayed that information to Castro. In spite of
this information, the head of the CIA, Allen Dulles, ordered the Bay of Pigs
Operation forward. The CIA's intention was for Kennedy to send in jets to
bomb Cuba and for the Marines to join the (US trained and equipped Cuban
"freedom fighters") brigade already on land. If this had happened the
survivors would have been placed in a Cuban prison, which would have created
an uproar by the American public and forced Kennedy to order a full-scale
invasion. High-ranking officials within the CIA spread the myth that Kennedy
was responsible for the failure of the invasion. Many Cubans continue to
hold this belief when, in truth, the betrayal lies with Allen Dulles and the
CIA. (Source: Crime So Immense, Texas Observer, May 26, 2000
Similarly, in May 1970, as President Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger
plotted their "incursion" into Cambodia, the Board of National Estimates
(BNE) concluded that "an American invasion of Cambodia would fail to deter
North Vietnamese continuation of the war." DCI Helms failed to deliver this
estimate to the White House, knowing what the BNE did not -- that the
decision to invade had already been made. Former DCI Robert M. Gates
generalizes: "It has been my experience over the years that the usual
response of a policymaker to intelligence with which he disagrees or which
he finds unpalatable is to ignore it."
Examples of the distortion or fabrication of intelligence are rarer, but
they do occur. During the Vietnam War, Gen. William Westmoreland, U.S.
military commander from 1964 to 1968, omitted from his estimate of enemy
forces all Communist guerrillas and informal local defense forces -- perhaps
as many as 120,000-150,000 fighters -- that another estimate indicated had
been responsible for up to 40% of American losses. His apparent intent was
to make victory in Vietnam look more plausible to the American public. On
March 14, 1967, DCI Helms included Westmoreland's figures in an NIE going to
the White House even though he "knew that the figures on enemy troop
strength in Vietnam provided by military intelligence were wrong -- or, at
any rate, quite different from CIA figures. Yet he signed the estimate
without dissent. The apparent reason, according to his biographer, was that
'he did not want a fight with the military, supported by [National Security
Adviser Walt] Rostow at the White House.'"
Some members of Congress even collaborated with unscrupulous CIA officials
to subvert controls over expenditures and covert operations. When
Congressman Charlie Wilson (D-TX) became chairman of the House's
Intelligence Oversight Committee, he wrote to his friends at the CIA, who
were then secretly enlarging the supply of weapons to the mujahideen in
Afghanistan, "Well, gentlemen, the fox is in the hen house. Do whatever you
like."[19] Similarly, in 1985, the oversight system virtually collapsed when
it was revealed that NSA director Vice Adm. John Poindexter and his aide Lt.
Col. Oliver L. North had secretly collaborated with DCI William Casey to
sell arms to Iran and that no one in Congress had been informed about it in
any way.
When it comes to ignoring accurate CIA intelligence, the preeminent example
in the Bush administration was National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice's
indifference to al-Qaeda and her failure to ensure that the president read
and understood the explicit warnings of an imminent surprise attack that the
agency delivered to her. As the Washington Post's Steve Coll has summarized
the matter in his book Ghost Wars, "BIN LADEN DETERMINED TO STRIKE IN U.S.
was the headline on the President's Daily Brief presented to Bush at his
Crawford, Texas, ranch on August 6 [2001]. The report included the
possibility that bin Laden operatives would seek to hijack airplanes. The
hijacking threat, mentioned twice, was one of several possibilities
outlined. There was no specific information about when or where such an
attack might occur."
The number three civilian defense official in the Pentagon, Douglas Feith,
had set up the Office of Special Plans, an operation devoted to going
through all the raw intelligence available to the various spy agencies and
finding items that offered possible evidence of (or hints of evidence of)
links between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. It was this effort to get
around both the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency, neither of which
had found links or ties between Iraq and 9/11, that eventually led some
officials to break ranks and charge that the war against Iraq was in fact
undercutting the "war on terrorism" -- specifically, Richard A. Clark, the
White House's coordinator for counterterrorism in both the Clinton and Bush
administrations, in his book Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on
Terrorism; and the CIA's Michael Scheuer in Imperial Hubris and in his
letter to the House and Senate Intelligence Committees entitled "How Not to
Catch a Terrorist"
Comment: Now we have the Richard Winter, author of the book, Shadow War
attacking critics ( Michael Scheuer) of the Iraq invasion/war as
"hyper-partisan, conspiracy theorists". He also said the increase in opium
production in Afganhistan is ok because the over-throw of the Taliban is a
greater good. But of course he fails to mention that the Taliban repeatedly
tried to give Osman bin Landen to the US or help kill him. Winter's book
is a disinformation operation. (source: Winter on C-Span)
Read the source, it is long but worth it.
How to Create a WIA - Worthless Intelligence Agency
By Chalmers Johnson
TomDispatch.com
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/112504Y.shtml
posted by T. Scott Brineman at 7:20 PM
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