Must Read: Ray McGovern on "Corrupted Intelligence"

[flpoljunkie]

http://www.tompaine.com/articles/corrupted_intelligence.php

Ray McGovern, a CIA analyst for 27 years, is co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.

In our various oral and written presentations on Iraq, my veteran intelligence officer colleagues and I took no delight in sharply criticizing what we perceived to be the corruption of intelligence analysis at CIA.  Nothing would have pleased us more than to have been proven wrong.  It turns out we did not know the half of it.

Several of us have just spent a painful weekend digesting the report of the Senate Intelligence Committee on prewar intelligence assessments on Iraq.  The corruption is far deeper than we suspected.  The only silver lining is that corrupter-in-chief George Tenet is now gone.

When the former CIA director departed, he left behind an agency on life support—an institution staffed by sycophant managers and thoroughly demoralized analysts, who are embarrassed at their own naiveté in believing that the passage carved into the marble at the entrance to CIA Headquarters—“You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free”—held real meaning for their work.

The Senate Committee report is meticulous.  Its findings are a sharp blow to those of us who took pride in working in an agency where we could speak truth to power—with career protection from retribution from the powerful, and with leaders who would face down those policymakers who tried to exert undue influence over our analysis.

more...well worth reading in its entirety

[ewagner]

1. Important read

Give it a :kick:

[Octafish]

2. Must-read!

McGovern is emblematic of the vast majority of people in CIA and government service -- they swore allegiance to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States. They know what kind of gangsters run the BFEE.

From the article:

Tell It To The Families

I would like to hear Roberts and McLaughlin explain all this to the families of the almost 900 U.S. servicemen and women already killed and the many thousand seriously wounded in Iraq.

Roberts seemed at pains to lay the blame on a “flawed system,” but a close reading of the committee report yields the unavoidable conclusion that CIA analysis can no longer be assumed to be honest—to be aimed at getting as close to the truth as one can humanly get. For those of you cynics about to smirk, I can only tell you—believe it or not—that truth was in fact the currency of analysis in the CIA in which I was proud to serve.

Aberrations like the Tonkin Gulf cave-in notwithstanding, the analysis directorate was widely known as the unique place in Washington where one could normally go and expect a straight answer unencumbered by any political agenda. And we were hard into some very controversial—often critical—national security issues. It boggles my mind how any president, and particularly one whose father headed the CIA, could expect to be able, without that capability, to make intelligent judgments based on unbiased fact.

CONTINUED...

So...Tonkin Gulf was a "cave-in?" Gee. Didn't Prof. John Newman document how JFK didn't want to go into Vietnam? Odd how LBJ and his enablers in the War Party were so gung-ho for war -- just like today.

[Wilber_Stool]

3. They didn''t do

verry well with the Bay of Pigs either.

[JHB]

4. Must also read: this 1997 Robert Parry article:

A nice bookend to Ray McGovern's article is this 1997 article by Robert Parry, at the start of Tenet's tenure, on the ongoing politicization of the CIA. It's kind of interesting to note where the same names come up, and who their patrons have been...

CIA at 50, Lost in the 'Politicization' Swamp
By Robert Parry

Through its first three decades, the CIA prided itself on maintaining an intellectual integrity in its analysis of world events. CIA analysts often delivered to the White House data that conflicted with what presidents wanted to hear. President Eisenhower was challenged on the bomber gap and President Kennedy on the missile gap. Presidents Johnson and Nixon didn't like many of the discouraging words on the Vietnam war.

The CIA's "operations" branch may have stumbled into bloody controversies from time to time. But the CIA's "analytical" division maintained a relatively good -- though by no means perfect -- reputation for supplying straightforward intelligence to policymakers. Like so much else at the CIA, however, that tradition changed in the early 1980s, with Ronald Reagan's determination to enforce his "Evil Empire" vision of the Soviet Union.

The writing was quickly on the wall. The Reagan transition team denounced CIA career analysts for allegedly underestimating the Soviet commitment to world domination. "These failures are of such enormity," the report claimed, "that they cannot help but suggest to any objective observer that the agency itself is compromised to an unprecedented extent and that its paralysis is attributable to causes more sinister than incompetence."

To make Reagan's apocalyptic vision stick -- to blame Moscow for the world's terrorism, Yellow Rain chemical warfare in Indochina, the Pope assassination attempt and virtually all revolutionary movements in the Third World -- Reagan and his CIA director, William J. Casey, set out to purge the CIA analytical division of those who wouldn't toe the party line, those who saw the Soviet Union as a declining empire still interested in detente with the West.

Full article:
http://www.consortiumnews.com/archive/story43.html

[flpoljunkie]

5. Thanks for the link. Well worth reading.

[ewagner]

6. Fall of the Soviet Union

Do you remember that the CIA took crap for completely missing the economic collapse of the old Soviet Union?

Thanks to your post above, I think I know why. Any analyst who dared diminish the threat of the Soviet Union was consigned to the broom closet.