BLOWBACK, my Anti-CIA/Foriegn Policy rant

[Solon]

OK, let me first say this, when I first heard about 9/11 on the radio, my first thought was "Blowback". Of course that term is generally defined as an unintended consequence of a previous action, in this case, two actions. CIA funnelling money to Osama Bin Laden for a decade (3 Billion Dollars!!!) as well as training his troops (Al Queda), and the decision to put U.S. bases on Saudi soil, the spark that pissed him off.

America provided both the means and motive for Osama to pull off the attacks, yet the Agency that is responsible has since gone untouched. Who directs it means little, it is a strongarm for whoever is president, with no congressional oversight at all.

The fucked up part is that the CIA has failed, again and again, at its primary mission, watching the Soviet Union. So busy was it undermining democracy worldwide, that our lauded intelligence service failed to predict that nation's collapse.

Transmutated in its inception to become the arm of "Big Business" where Marine tactics of before became intolerable. The CIA has not only brought misery to the 3rd world, but to Americans as well. Kennedy's own Peace Corp was highjacked by the CIA and endangered all volunteers of it when that was revealed.

I find it shocking that anyone would think that this failure of an agency is neccessary for our "National Security" when it has endangered that very security for 50 years. Why the fuck do we need to screw with the internal workings of other nations for our security?
Spy on them if neccessary yes, sabotage or assassinations in peacetime, no. I haven't even started on the experiments on U.S. citizens or even wilder speculations involving the "Agency". These reasons alone should force anyone of reason to think about scrapping them entirely.

We need a new intelligence are, one that reports directly to the House, not the President. Restrict the charter to only intelligence gathering and only activate sabotuers upon declaration of war. That is reasonable.

[Kolesar]

1. Consider the intelligence agency's position in the 1970s and 1980s

If the CIA had produced reports that said that the Soviet economy was teetering on collapse and that the military threat was slight, the public would have forced Congress to cut the defense and intelligence budgets. As a result, the CIA kept overstating the Soviet threat to keep their jobs and keep their pernicious department in existence.

"The right wing cannot do what it does without an enemy." -- Gore Vidal

[Solon]

2. That is true, but at the same time

The CIA endangered the entire world for the ulterior motive of money. That's plain, and also to fight to justify their existance, especially now. If not Muslim Terrorists, China will be next, I shudder to think as to what type of damage they would do to them and us, if given the chance.

[Kolesar]

4. Intelligence agencies are supposed to IMPLEMENT policy, not MAKE policy

Those (CIA) goons operating in southeast Asia shaped the events and made alliances and enemies that got us into the Vietnam war. At least that is my take on it.

[JHB]

8. You're forgetting about "Team B" and neocon atttacks on the CIA

From http://www.american-reporter.com/2,173/94.html

Yet, even Bill Keller, a pro-war writer in the New York Times who said in a June 20 OpEd that Wolfowitz led the attack on the CIA's supposed underestimate of Soviet strength in 1976, suggested in a column entitled "The Boys Who Cried Wolfowitz" that the Deputy Defense Secretary's "Team B" inserted the documents into the intelligence mix separately from the national intelligence estimate.

"Mr. Wolfowitz was part of a famous 1976 Team B that attacked the C.I.A. for underestimating the Soviet threat," Keller wrote. "These days the top leadership of the Defense Department is Team B. Mr. Wolfowitz and his associates have assembled their own trusted analysts to help them challenge the established intelligence consensus."

--------
From http://www.prospect.org/print-friendly/print/V13/22/dreyfuss-r.html

Manipulating the CIA is nothing new, of course. For decades, politicians annoyed that intelligence from the agency might work against policy goals have sought to bring pressure to bear on the CIA to alter its views or, failing that, to diminish the CIA's standing. During the Vietnam War, the Pentagon disparaged CIA analyses that cast into doubt the projected "light at the end of the tunnel." In the 1970s, then-CIA Director George H.W. Bush invited a so-called Team B group of neoconservative hawks to spin out a report accusing the CIA ("Team A") of consistently underestimating the Soviet threat. (Team B, it's worth noting, was created at the instigation of Albert Wohlstetter, the political godfather to Perle, Wolfowitz, et al.) That pressure continued, in other forms, during Ronald Reagan's military buildup in the 1980s. In the 1980s, too, then-CIA Director Bill Casey was notorious for constantly trying to politicize the CIA, repeatedly trying to influence the agency's reporting on Central America, Afghanistan and the Soviet Union.

...(emphasis added above by JHB)...

------
From http://intellit.muskingum.edu/analysis_folder/analysissovteams.html

The exercise in competitive analysis that involved the pitting of Team A (CIA analysts) against Team B (outside experts) on the National Intelligence Estimate on Soviet Strategic Objectives (NIE 11-3/8) was commissioned by DCI George Bush in 1976. (Actually, there were three B-teams, but the teams on Soviet missile accuracy and air defense did not engender the controversy associated with the strategic objectives team.

The Team B leader was Prof. Richard Pipes. Associates were Prof. William Van Cleave; Lt. Gen. Daniel Graham, USA (Ret.); Dr. Thomas Wolfe, RAND Corporation; and Gen. John Vogt, USAF, (Ret.). The Team's Advisory Panel was comprised of Ambassador Foy Kohler; The Honorable Paul Nitze; Ambassador Seymour Weiss; Maj. Gen. Jasper Welch, USAF; and Dr. Paul Wolfowitz, Arms Control and Disarmament Agency.
...(emphasis added above by JHB)...
-------
From http://www.psupress.org/books/titles/0-271-01790-2.html

Two things tie the present situation and the earlier period together: people and methodology. In both cases, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and Richard Perle played key roles. They were instrumental in backing the bodies that could be used to dispute more nuanced views of threats facing the United States in both instances and they provided the intellectual methodology that distorted the available intelligence. By aggressively over-emphasizing worst-case scenarios, they argued for policies based on judgments that were later shown to be wrong.
As Dr. Cahn's book makes clear, after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the opening of its archives, it was shown that the CIA's estimates were more accurate than Team B's account of events which was wrong on almost every count. Today, we have likewise learned that reports of Iraqi attempts to acquire uranium from Niger were based on forgeries, recognized as such by the CIA.
Alternative threat assessments can be useful if they are as balanced and as objective as possible. But when they are ideologically driven, they can force the Intelligence Community to lean towards policy rather than rely on hard evidence. When that happens policy makers are depriving themselves of the best available information, misleading the American public, and endangering the lives of our fighting forces. Killing Détente, The Right Attacks the CIA provides a trenchant body of evidence outlining this process and the dangers that it conceals.
-------

From http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2001/11/8/174016.shtml
(yeah, I know)

Back in the mid-1970s they decided on a unique approach: Team B. CIA brought in an entirely new group of analysts and experts who looked at the very same data that the regular CIA had examined.

And guess what happened? Team B 'read' this Intel entirely differently. Team B saw that indeed the Soviet military was twice the strength and size that the regular CIA analysts had determined.

Of course, Team B was then disbanded.
---(end of Newsmax quote)---

Naturally, the Newsmax "analyst" leaves out the part where we later discover that even "Team A" overestimated Soviet capabilities, and "Team B"'s analysis was pure right-wing paranoid fantasy...but in the meantime it had been leaked to conservatives and provided the justification for the Reagan arms buildup.

Wolfy and rummy and the rest of the PNAC Gallery have been working their sick ju-ju on public affairs for thirty years now. The only difference is that before they were buffered by old-line conservatives and always at least one step removed from the reins of power; now they're in control.

JHB

[emad]

3. You still surprised they renamed its HQ to the George Bush

Centre for Intelligence???How many more Aldric Ames have they failed to spot? Why did the FBI take so long to weed out Bob Hanssen? Anyone still wondering how Mad Vlad Putin managed to slime his way up the greasy pole to replace Yeltsin?

[Jim Sagle]

5. Excellent post. Outstanding thread.

You have explained a MAJOR truth of life in the 20th century - and this one, unless we abolish the agency.

[Patriot_Spear]

6. You're living in a fantasy world...

...if you think any modern nation can survive without some sort of intelligence apparatus.

No one would dare argue that the CIA has'nt made some major blunders- in my view because of the short term thinking of the administrations that have mishandled the agency- but they remain a vital part of our national defense. Having them report to Congress instead of being a tool of the Executive branch is an interesting suggestion.

My suggestion for fixing the CIA is to promote the academics within the Agency to oversight postions rather than political hacks and appointees.

However, from the strident nature of your post, obviously your mind is made up and I won't waste our collective time trying to change it. However I must say your diatribe that seems to lay the woes of the world at the CIA's feet is ridiculous in its disconnect from the real world.

Perhaps Solon, it's time for you to leave Athens for a while to see the rest of Greece; or change your name to Plato and continue to shoot for Utopia.

Edit: Content

[el_gato]

7. pull your head out of the sand

The CIA is not some benevolent bumbling entity.

I guess supporting corrupt dictators and destroying
democracies all across the planet is a good thing in your mind.

[Patriot_Spear]

9. Like I said, your mind is obviously made up...

...and immune to uncomfortable alternative views. I'd sooner be able to talk a Priest out of molesting young parishoners.

Peace.

[el_gato]

10. obviously yours is made up too

As well you don't seem interested in discussing the issue
and finding the truth.

[Eloriel]

11. Some more links

Generic Other posted the following in this thread:

Black Box: Enter THE CARLYLE GROUP
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=104&topic_id=271817#273226

<snip>
The Betrayal of The Patriots
The Halloween Crew had its genesis in Congress' Select Committee on Assassinations in the mid-1970s. In October of 1977, right at Halloween that year, President Carter's new Director of Central Intelligence, Stansfield Turner, fired almost a thousand veteran CIA covert-action agents and station chiefs, keeping a campaign promise to clean up the CIA. These fired agents had been involved in manipulating elections and maintaining dictatorships throughout the Third World for decades, and their expertise would have been shamefully lost if George W. Bush Sr.--who had run the CIA himself before Turner's "Halloween Massacre"--had not rounded them up to work for the GOP, leading up to the 1980 election season. Incensed at Carter, seeing themselves as patriots who had risked their lives for their country and then been foully betrayed, many of these disgruntled spooks volunteered outright to work for the incipient Bush campaign in å79. And when Ronald Reagan adopted Bush as his Vice Presidential candidate, they were happy to work for the great Reagan/Bush Leviathan of 1980.

http://www.voxfux.com/articles(closed)/00000015.htm

<snip>
In the middle 1970's, the CIA decided to increase its power. In retaliation for Turner's Halloween Massacre a decision was made to place CIA operatives in control of American Indian Reservations as a means of laundering money, transporting drugs, and controlling arms sales and biological weapons. In other words, the CIA wanted to build its own country within the United States and control its own government, not unlike the Vatican operates under the Pope in Italy. <snip>

http://www.newsmakingnews.com/vmoperationexodus.htm


<snip>
Many of the CIA operatives dismissed by Turner had experience with the manipulation of elections. As Professor Scott has said, such people were not likely to have shrugged off their dismissal and gone to open bookstores. Instead, they put their training to work for their popular former boss whom Turner had replaced.
They were angry and bitter, and many volunteered to work with the Reagan-Bush campaign, especially given the added attraction of a former CIA chief as the vice-presidential candidate. "There were Reagan-Bush posters, cut off in the middle with only the right side, i.e. the George Bush side, up all over the agency," recalled a former staff member who had frequently visited the headquarters at Langley.
Years later, Richard V. Allen, Reagan’s chief foreign-policy adviser during the campaign, condescendingly dismissed this group as a "plane load of disgruntled former CIA" officers who moved into the Reagan-Bush campaign headquarters in Arlington, Virginia . . .<snip>

http://www.memresearch.org/econ/Langley.htm