Torture, Lies And Videotapes

Torture, Lies And Videotapes

By Richard Whalen | December 11, 2007 12:03 AM


In 1947, when the Central Intelligence Agency was created, President Harry S. Truman, who had seen first-hand the operations of OSS, the CIA’s precursor, condemned it as “the American Gestapo” and said it had no place in our nation’s life. He said the CIA would poison us and would have to be removed from our government.

The CIA is now actually only a small part of America’s overall intelligence community comprised of 16 spy agencies. Like an iceberg, most of the community’s budget is submerged, concealed within the Pentagon’s vast spending and under the control of the military services.

The late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York had a rare, sympathetic understanding of the fundamental difficulties of operating an effective intelligence and espionage community within a democratic government under the rule of law.

In his book, Secrecy, Moynihan tells how using unclassified information, he came independently to the view years in advance that Russia was falling apart. Yet, if the intel community’s armies of classified analyses had been published, reviewed and critiqued by outside peers and experts in academia, Moynihan speculated their misconceptions could have been challenged and corrected, to the nation’s benefit. As it was, they had a vested interest in supposing the Soviet Union was a permanent threat – and therefore they had a permanent career.

Moynihan understood that secrecy exerts all kinds of human appeal, separating the knowing few from the unknowing many. Secrecy prevents accountability. When the secrets at stake are of the highest national importance and urgency, as in efforts to head off terrorism, even very smart people can err and fail.

The 9/11/01 terror attacks on the U.S., according to informed senior insiders, ought to have been detected by the comprehensive “signals intelligence” (“SIGINT”) of the “ear in the sky” – the National Security Agency (NSA), which dwarfs the CIA. Prior to 9/11, the FBI and CIA also had “human intelligence” (“HUMINT”) clues, signs and potential warnings, but failed to connect the dots.

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http://blogs.cqpolitics.com/whalen/2007/12/torture-lies-and-videotapes.html

take over this function too? Boastful of being better equipped and better trained (so ex military employees have claimed on blogs), beyond the scrutiny of the law - a private mercenary army responsive only to fees paid: the industrial arm of the military/industrial nexus decisively gaining the upper hand, globally. Think of the "intelligence" they could cook up to order!