Why do many on this board hold the CIA & NSA in such high regard?

They give them the same respect that they would give to United States soldiers. There are arguments from "Oh, they are just doing their jobs." to "They are on the frontlines safeguarding this country from terrorist." Let me just tell people that would say such things that you are flat out wrong and you have been duped by the current fear mongering/social conditioning that is put out by the propaganda arm of Bush Co. One more thing, these current revelations about organizations within the U.S. intelligence community are nothing, torture, spying on U.S. citizens, etc. If you truly knew what these organizations were up to your stomach would churn, your hair would go white, and you would be reduced to cowering in the corner. You think you know even a fraction of the misdeeds the U.S. intelligence community has perpetrated? Think again!

Who do you think leaked the stories about secret prisons, torture and NSA spying?

Welcome to DU!! :toast:

:-)

Hopefully, many of them will find themselves in various courts dealing with human rights.

human face on the CIA researchers, and the rebellion last fall briefly gave
some of us the hope that the CIA was sufficiently pro-truth (and thus anti-Bush)
that its influence might help bring him down.

Of course maybe those two and others like them are part of a sophisticated PR
campaign to endear elements of the CIA to the left in case we should recapture
Washington someday.

man. Don't tar them all by a few.

that some one in the CIA and NSA leaked what they are doing so they all can't be bad people

...who worked for the CIA out of college. She spent maybe seven years there. Very decent person, brilliant, helpful, beautiful, very progressive and couldn't stand Bush. She left in 2001 shortly after he was selected. She's moved to another country and isn't coming back until he's gone.

You get out whatever you put in. If the executive is corrupt and/or evil, that's what you can expect from the national security apparatus. They're tools of the Administration.

of the most forceful speakers against GWB were retired (and possibly some current) CIA officials. They presented significant and credible info to senators (such as Pat Roberts), who then took no action and still haven't. I also think of Valerie Plame Wilson and the important job she was doing. (I still will not be surprised if I find out that she was outed because she was about to expose Cheney wrongdoings.)

Ever heard of VIPS - Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity? It's a group composed of ex-CIA professionals who staunchly criticize the Bush administration's handling of pre-Iraq invasion Intelligence.

Here's an introductory link:

http://www.motherjones.com/news/qa/2004/03/03_400.html

snip

The Skeptical Spy

Ray McGovern
Interviewed By Michael W. Robbins
March 10, 2004

When David Kay, the CIA's former chief weapons inspector in Iraq, announced earlier this year that his team had found no stockpiled weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, he touched off an explosion of blame, finger-pointing, denial, and hasty "clarifications" about the extent and accuracy of the intelligence that the Bush Administration used to buttress its decision to invade Iraq. Kay's startling conclusion, though, came as no surprise to many analysts in the U.S. intelligence community -- particularly the members of a self-described "movement" of some 35 retired and resigned high-level U.S. intelligence operatives.

The group, "Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity," has produced some of the most credible, and critical, analyses of the Bush Administration's handling of intelligence data in the run-up to the March, 2003 invasion of Iraq. Starting with a next-day analysis of Colin Powell's February 5, 2003 speech to the Security Council of the United Nations, the group's steering committee of a half-dozen intelligence veterans has published eleven detailed analytical memoranda directed to President Bush, Colin Powell, and Kofi Annan, among others, assessing what the Bush Administration knew about Iraq before, during, and after the war, and how that intelligence has been used--and misused.


For more info on the group, type "Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity" into your search engine.

forum (the "basement hearings") about the politicization of the CIA and how
back in the glory days the researchers wouldn't have stood for it.

Here's a more recent statement (as transcribed by a DU volunteer)about the politicization:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=125&topic_id=64440&mesg_id=64440


And here's his earlier statement:

http://www.downingstreetmemo.com/6-16-05hearingtext.html

All you need is chutzpa, a
2 very flexible attitude toward truth, slumbering
3 watch dog intelligence committees in the Congress,
4 and a supine press eager to accept official
5 explanations no matter how disingenuous.
6 Cheney played a superb role in fabricating
7 out of whole cloth a nuclear threat from Iraq,
8 putting wind behind all those mushroom clouds
9 conjured up by the President and Condoleezza Rice
10 to deceive you, the Congress, our elected
11 representatives.
12 In a 27-year career in intelligence, one
13 encounters many examples of attempts to trim the
14 truth or, as the British minutes put it, fix the
15 intelligence and facts around the policy. It's in
16 the woodwork. It's part of the political scene.
17 But I had never known fixing to include the Vice
18 President abrogating the right to turn a key piece
19 of intelligence on its head. Nor had I in all
20 those years ever known a sitting Vice President to
21 make multiple visits to CIA headquarters to make
22 sure the fix was in, and this is just one example.
23 There is no word to describe the reaction
24 of professional intelligence officers, active and
25 retired, to the reality that our intelligence

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1 community managers were eager to participate in
2 this deceit, and to this deliberate subversion of
3 the oath we all take--the oath we all take to
4 protect and defend the Constitution of the United
5 States of America.


Later, in response to a question from Rep. Maxine Waters, he offered this:

people ask me is this unusual, that a
2 vice president would be coming to CiA headquarters
3 and I say, no, it's not unusual, it's
4 unprecedented.
5 I was there for 27 years. Not once, not
6 even George Herbert Walker Bush, who had been
7 director of the CIA, not once did a vice president,
8 sitting vice president come on a working visit to
9 CIA headquarters.
10 Now we know that Cheney came eight or nine
11 times. Apparently the CIA officials can't get
12 their act together because they give a range. It's
13 between eight and twelve, I think they say, which
14 opens the possibility that he may have gone there
15 without so much as reference, making reference to
16 the people in charge. No, it's incredible that
17 that should be happening.
18 Now put yourself in the position of a
19 young analyst. You're trying to find out the
20 truth, right? and you're analyzing this, and you
21 have Cheney come in, he'd like a briefing, and
22 right over his shoulder is George Tenet, who

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1 everyone knew was cooking things to what he thought
2 the president wanted.
3 MS. WATERS: Excuse me. You're telling me
4 that he would ask for briefings, he would visit--
5 MR. McGOVERN: Yes.
6 MS. WATERS: --with analysts? He would be
7 given information and Tenet would be present?
8 MR. McGOVERN: Well, that's the normal
9 procedure. Now I wasn't there but the director
10 would normally be there, or the deputy director for
11 intelligence, and none of these folks protected
12 their people from this. Now this is the real
13 outrage. A head of an agency needs to protect his
14 people from this kind of outside pressure, at least
15 in the intelligence business, and he did not do
16 that. Tenet didn't do it and Jamie Misseck ,
17 the head of the Intelligence Directorate, she also
18 didn't do it. So these people, these young people
19 who were trying to make a career, were subject to
20 that kind of pressure.
21 And not only that, but George Tenet
22 decided that he'd like to see the president every

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1 morning and so he hitched a ride with the morning
2 briefer. Now, my experience in briefing people
3 downtown--vice presidents, secretaries of state and
4 defense and so forth--was it's a one-on-one deal.
5 Okay? You go down there, you're trusted, you've
6 been around for awhile, you can answer questions.
7 You know enough not to answer questions if you
8 don't know the answer. So you carry out this duty.
9 So here is your director standing behind you, over
10 your shoulder. And if this doesn't have an
11 inhibiting effect on your candor, when you know
12 your director is saying slam-dunk and things like
13 that, then nothing will.
14 So the bottom line here seems to be, and I
15 regret very much to have to say this, but that the
16 management of the Central Intelligence Agency has
17 been so corrupted, has been so politicized, that
18 there's a real question in my mind as to whether
19 they can come up with an objective view on
20 anything, given the fact that the administration
21 makes it very clear the answers that they want to
22 hear.



Ray McGovern has signed the 911Truth Statement:

http://www.911truth.org/article.php?story=20041026093059633

When things get personalized, it's much easier to see that most people are good, descent folks.
Some are even the good guys.

Just ask me anything.

Like it would do you any good.

just like the freepers that tout the war but the only shot they have ever fired in anger was at the neighbor's dog.

a pervasive theme with this administration is that the flaw lies with the civilian elected politicians and their appointees, and the policies they formulate and implement.

Iraq was invaded because the administration let PNAC cornhole it and write the administration's foreign policy platform wholesale. (The image of a bunch of Bible-believing conservatives letting themselves get schtupped by a Likud PAC is pretty funny, don't you think ?) To recite once again: the false intelligence about Iraqi WMDs was forced into the national intelligence information pipeline by administration operatives who were implementing an ideological agenda. The long-term bureaucracy of the intelligence community attempted in some cases to disagree, but were thwarted by the threat "do you want to lose your job ? this is your ultimate boss' orders".

Blaming the intel community for the failures the US has experienced under this administration is as wrong as calling returnees from Vietnam murderers and blaming them for US actions there. The problem lies squarely with the retardates this country elected, more or less, as its national leadership, and the policies they have chosen to implement. There are enough chest-thumping blowhards in the intel community (according to info available in the mainstream media, and as historical evidence like Bay of Pigs and COINTELPRO demonstrate), just like anywhere else in the United States. In the case of this administration however, those parties in those locations were not the source of the problem.

What the reality of the Intelligence business was, you'd be bored. It's NOTHING like the movies, or "Alias" or "24". It's a lot of slogging through tons and tons of crap to get one golden nugget, then connecting the dots. Then, trying to get the attention of some a**hole political appointee so that they'll know what's going on, instead of having their heads up their a**es.

Why do you have such a bug up your a** about the intelligence community? After all, the were just the people doing what they were told to do. It's the * adminstration that gave the orders.

Maybe I've got a problem with the assassinations of democratically elected officials in sovereign nations, secret prisons, torture and various other highly illegal activities. I'm funny like that.

flat out wrong? Duped? Don't even know a fraction?

I got news for you. DU is one of the most intelligent communities I've ever come across. Please try and avoid demeaning everybody as if they are so uninformed and you are so intellectually mighty and without you we just wouldn't have a clue... sheesh.

I understand the point of your thread, but think it could've been far better without all the tones of superiority, arrogance and preaching.

The ones closest can not speak, but others without a security pledge but with info that is not a security problem do share it with many folks - and the retired folks with their web sites and groups are straight shooters.

Info on the board is often old - because source contact may have ended years ago - and indeed may be misinformation because I doubt the top intel level writes a lot of posts on DU or elsewhere to straighten out errors.

CIA evil over the past 55 years is indeed well known and is a large amount, but unless there is a major amount of evil that is unkown, the total is not really as much as the original poster seems to be suggesting- and I hope the orginal poster is not trying to imply that the only place to find bad folk is in the CIA or other intel services.

Flat out wrong? Duped? Don't even know a fraction - seems to imply the original poster has access to unpublished data on the evil in this world. I sure would like the original poster to expose any such evil to the light of the sun so that it can be stopped.

It's not the state using a secret agency to spy on human beings, it's which human beings the state spies on after it goes through the motions.

I know we live in a world where every state protects itself with the CIA, MI6, Mossad, the KGB, etc, etc, etc. But that's the problem, to me.

And it only makes sense that an agency like the NSA turns inward eventually. Power doesn't stop because of laws. It pushes the envelope, gets caught, and laws are written. It pushes the new laws to the edge, gets caught, and more laws are written. It then pushes those new laws, gets caught...

It won't be the last time it happens.

I love the excuse of, "it's not the people in the NSA, it's the Bush administration telling them what to do." Alright, so you've established that the NSA is an arm of the state, and whoever happens to be in control of the state at any given moment can do this or that. How does that make it better?

>I love the excuse of, "it's not the people in the NSA, it's the Bush administration telling them
>what to do." Alright, so you've established that the NSA is an arm of the state, and whoever
>happens to be in control of the state at any given moment can do this or that. How does that make
>it better?

You're quite right, nothing will ever change as long as we don't come to terms with the central fact that policy does matter, that tools do not control all men, and that the apparatus does do what it's told. By elected civilian policymakers. If you're trying to advance the argument that the mechanism of the state corrupts what might otherwise be good pure men, stop. First, you might be able to point to examples in history or in the world right now where state power corrupts people who start out as reformers or otherwise worthwhile people (for example in South American governments). But this is not a nation of a patriarchal governmental family and provincial rubes who are anointed as el jefe. This is a nation with a 200-year old government which currently controls or influences most of the organizational structures on this planet - people don't achieve high office within it without knowing how the system works or in fact having advanced through it. Second, the general premise of helpless natural men who are corrupted by the evil of wisdom as contained in the apple (and henceforth expelled from paradise) is a crock of shit. Man has a more than healthy reserve of volition. Other men made the tools, and those who come in contact with them are quick to see their application and make use of them.

If you argue that the institutional culture of the national security community is not yet purged of the retardate perversions of J. Edgar Hoover and other bent products of the conformism of the last century, of the delusion that nationalism is sufficient justification for warmaking, then you're right. But if you proclaim that policy is not preeminent in government, and particularly in Washington, then you don't know what you're talking about. The effect of this is amplified in the current instance of a collection of fascist ideologue fanatics who have treated government as an enemy entity to be infiltrated and subdued - recall that the current administration arose from the reductionist fanatics of the Poot Gingrich/Contract on America/make government smaller crowd.

This administration analyzed the systems within the federal government, and then played them for their own ends. In the case of Iraq intelligence, this involved pressuring the analysis community to produce evaluations of raw intelligence which supported the preconceived policy of regime removal in Iraq, or better to simply bypass the analysis community and simply supply raw data directly to unqualified policymakers like Mr. Feith, who proceeded to prove that satellite photographs of semitrailers were equivalent to mobile chemical weapons labs. Accept the reality of a bureaucratic apparatus, where the upper echelon has an unprecedented level of arbitrary power over the lives and careers of its subordinates, and where the message "are you sure you want to say that ? the boss wants to say something else" has the power to instantly change results. Don't expect quality results from mediocre people and culture.

points!

:-)

"If Hitler invaded Hell I would at least make a favorable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons."