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April 7, 2008 at 20:59:16
by Robert Parry Page 1 of 5 page(s) |
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When future historians look back at the sharp decline of the United States in the early 21st Century, they might identify the Achilles heel of this seemingly omnipotent nation as its lost ability to recognize reality and to fashion policies to face the real world. Like the legendary Greek warrior – whose sea-nymph mother dipped him in protective waters except for his heel – the United States was blessed with institutional safeguards devised by wise Founders who translated lessons from the Age of Reason into a brilliant constitutional framework of checks and balances. What the Founders did not anticipate, however, was how fragile truth could become in a modern age of excessive government secrecy, hired-gun public relations and big-money media. Sophisticated manipulation of information is what would do the Republic in. That is the crucial lesson for understanding the arc of U.S. history over the past three decades. It is a central theme of a new book by former CIA analyst Melvin A. Goodman, Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA.
As a senior Kremlinologist in the CIA’s office of Soviet analysis, Goodman was on the front lines of the information war in the early 1980s when ideological right-wingers took control of the U.S. government under Ronald Reagan and began to gut the key institutions for assessing reality.
One of the target institutions was the national press corps, which came under sustained assault from the Right – with reporters facing accusations of disloyalty and “liberal bias” from both inside the Reagan administration and from well-financed right-wing attack groups. [For details, see Robert Parry’s Lost History or Secrecy & Privilege.]
Another key institution on the Right’s radar scope was the CIA’s analytical division, which was responsible for supplying objective information about the world’s dangers to senior government officials.
However, in the 1970s and early 1980s, CIA analysts were seeing evidence of an accelerating decline in the Soviet Union, especially in its technological capabilities and its economy. Thus, Moscow seemed genuinely interested in détente with the West, especially a winding down of the dangerous and expensive arms race, the analysts concluded.
“A CIA paper warning of the Soviet Union’s impending descent into economic stagnation, ‘Soviet Economic Problems and Prospects,’ was issued in 1977, setting out the reasons why the Soviet economy was in trouble and why its future was so grim,” wrote Goodman in his book.
While many Americans might have thought the Soviet decline would be good news, it wasn’t welcomed by the U.S. right-wing or inside the military industry. They preferred that the American people still perceive an ascendant and implacable communist enemy, all the better to justify brush-fire wars and higher spending on weapons systems.
So, when Reagan captured the White House in 1980, his followers set their sights on purging the CIA’s analytical division of its historical commitment to objectivity, to be replaced by a submissive readiness to deliver politically desirable data.
Robert Gates’s Role
As Goodman’s book explains in impressive detail, the key action officer for carrying out this reversal of the CIA’s analytical role was a young bureaucrat named Robert Gates, who is now George W. Bush’s Secretary of Defense.
Goodman recalls the CIA’s analytical tradition of honest scholarship, which was established in the early days of the Cold War by the likes of Harvard professor William Langer, a former intelligence analyst in World War II.
“Langer and his successor, Yale professor Sherman Kent, were keen analysts in their own right and merciless in criticizing the work of their colleagues,” Goodman wrote. “Both Langer and Kent were independent, tenacious, and tough-minded. They made sure that analysts ‘told it like it was,’ even if the conclusions of the estimates were not consistent with favored policy.
“Kent emphasized that he wanted intelligence delivered with the ‘bark on,’ no matter how unpopular the message was to policymakers.”
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lost moral compass?
by Rady Ananda (182 articles, 374 quicklinks, 49 diaries, 1718 comments [201 recommended, 2 rejected]) on Monday, Apr 7, 2008 at 11:20:49 PM  (0+)
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Despite my great respect for Robt Parry, I take issue with
the thesis expressed here (basically a summary of former CIA agent Melvin Goodman's new book) that the CIA (more properly, its analytical division) only began to be seriously corrupted in the mid 1970's. I think it was probably always fairly corrupt. Its corruption results not so much from purging individual employees blessed with personal integrity, as from its intrinsic institutional nature: it's a private army of the executive branch, that has no accountability to the public, in law or even in principle. There were the coups in Guatemala (1954) & Iran ('53). There were countless attempts to kill Castro. They killed Lumumba in 1960. They overthrew Allende in 1973, & had been working on that one for years. They infiltrated the US media decades ago. They may well have been involved in the assassinations of JFK, RFK, & MLK. And the whole Cold War was based on the very biggest of Big Lies, which the analytical division must have known. The law that created the CIA created an unaccountable monster. The fact that they purged any employees who had integrity is an inevitable consequence of the organization's fundamental conception. by Richard Mynick (2 articles, 4 quicklinks, 1 diaries, 1552 comments [255 recommended, 5 rejected]) on Tuesday, Apr 8, 2008 at 12:17:34 AM (0+)
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Reply: They don't hire people with integrity
in the first instance. An agency of climbers. The only person that I know who was EVER approached to be in the CIA out of all the radicals I know from 1960's was me. We were smart, patritiotici in a very very fundamental way. But we already knew about the infiltration of the CIA by naZis, we knew how bent US middle east policy was by then, and we were not afriad to tell the truth. Ergo, an entire generation of people in the US who could have provided TRUTH within the US intel community was thrown in a garbage can. And history will bear me out. As the US empire crumbles, much will come to light. Academics still writing revisionist history will be shown to be a BIG PART of the problem, sticking as they do to ONLY telling you what White Guys do - as that is all there is to history. The soviet union actually fell because Women got FED UP with the soviets after Chernobyl and figured they might as well die fighting back in Lithuanian and Lativia and the movement spread. Could the US have identified that resistance movement? NO. Absolutely not. Because the analysts go into looking at a situation as the White Guy supervisers tell them to look at it. Now as the US DoD is spread out over a vast area of bases (750? over 1000?) and there is also a vast archipelago of dark sites to look after as well, when the US fall comes it will also come in the "twinkling of an eye". How can the US maintain supplies (food, water, other necessities) in all those places when most have a staff of around 1200 on them? The US is relying on a phoney premises of FULL SPECTRUM DOMINANCE that is going to be found falling FAR SHORT Of what is required to defeat the human drive for survival around the globe. Debstalization and balkanization ideas be damned, they are just not going to work. Assassination, torture, disapperances, genocide, the creation of millions of refugees, concentration camps as large scale as Gaza -- all these and other tactics ensure that the US cannot count on their alliances with rich rulers "to keep America safe"!!! I believe that the lynchpin to all the changes that are going to occur, and the outting of the truth about all the bad things about American intel will occur very soon - as NATO is really on its last legs. THEN we will see some rather different reality and a marked changed in books that come out such as this. And all the dirty little secrets about the CIA (and the 16 new alphabet soup agencies) will come to light in all its gruesome awfulness. Until then, someone like me who as stayed informed for 40 years will continue to yawn when reading these analysis of what went wrong. Meanwhile, I spend my time trying to figure out WHAT IS TO DONE to make it RIGHT. A good book for people to read is DISMANTLING TYRANNY. I think it is more worth the effort than picking up this TOME which will only lead to more confusion. Reality isn't ONLY for those with White Guy mentality. by ladybroadoak (39 articles, 20 quicklinks, 12 diaries, 394 comments) on Tuesday, Apr 8, 2008 at 10:56:36 AM (0+)
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Reply: CIA Campus Recruitment
My first quarter on campus, school officials let everyone know the CIA was recruiting. It just so happened I took an honors linguistics class and got an A. I think I got a pure 4.0 that quarter (except for the university orientation class which I continually missed - one credit). Anyway, school officials also advised that a survey was being sent to a portion of the freshman class. I got one. The first 5 of about 100 questions related to campus life. ALL the remaining questions were a psych profile. Maybe 20 different questions asked 4 or 5 different ways. I suspect it was from the CIA, and that I qualified for an interview because of that linguistics grade. The subject is really code-breaking. I tossed the survey out. Then I got 3 emails from some campus official asking for me to return the survey. I wouldn't even answer the emails, it scared me so bad. lol later on I met someone who admitted working for the CIA. That knowledge chilled my relationship... totally. All I knew back then was that the CIA ran drugs - heroin from Viet Nam and Cocaine from South America. But I like the analysis above that the law creating the CIA - a secret unaccountable spy agency of the federal gov - is what is flawed, so naturally, those with integrity won't survive in it. by Rady Ananda (182 articles, 374 quicklinks, 49 diaries, 1718 comments [201 recommended, 2 rejected]) on Tuesday, Apr 8, 2008 at 1:50:18 PM (0+)
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IMPUNITY IS PRAISED
I saw the film on the shooting of Jesse James made a few years back with Brad Pitt. That film shows that impunity for murderers is part of U.S. history. However, it is the other side of history, like those of the Catonville 9 who need to be lifted up as do the brave folks who staged the recent hearings on Iraq War in Maryland. We need to retake history from the mediocre guides and guidelines--not to relativize it but to make sure that the world spins in the right direction. by ALONE (196 articles, 1 quicklinks, 7 diaries, 557 comments [5 recommended, 0 rejected]) on Tuesday, Apr 8, 2008 at 7:05:18 AM (0+)
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Reply: We need to stop praising impunity in legends and history
This can be done via the web and by further sidelining corporate media across the country and making links across nation states. Let's not give up on the mess built in MADE IN AMERICA over the last decade(s) in terms of skewed memories of American and World history. Shave off the bad wood and build anew on better soil. One way to start is to keep pressure on children's textbooks which have been improving even if only in spite of the bad media and U.S. government trends controlled by extremist spinners of skewed doctrines. by ALONE (196 articles, 1 quicklinks, 7 diaries, 557 comments [5 recommended, 0 rejected]) on Tuesday, Apr 8, 2008 at 7:06:46 AM (0+)
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Reply: well, not really better textbooks
Center for Inquiry Raises Concerns over Civics Textbook Stoda's article is important - check out the OEN discussion on this article (Blackwater contract renewal not approved by Iraq) that shows the Iraqi Gov is rejecting Blackwater's continued use in Iraq. by Rady Ananda (182 articles, 374 quicklinks, 49 diaries, 1718 comments [201 recommended, 2 rejected]) on Tuesday, Apr 8, 2008 at 1:25:30 PM (0+)
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Surprise/Surprise
I've always had concerns since reading this: Letters to the Editor Portland Press Herald P.O. Box 1460 Portland ME 04104-5009 Dear Editor: Arthur Whitman Lberty Alliance P.O. Box 586 Auburn ME 04212 783-7865 I've wondered if by chance these rag bombs got to Hezbollah through this connection. It really kinda makes me wonder. "Blessed Are The Peacemakers" 10/23/1983. "They Came In Peace." Is this the Reality of Robert Gates, Dick Cheney, & George H.W. Bush? by Sleeper (1 articles, 1 quicklinks, 14 diaries, 312 comments [6 recommended, 0 rejected]) on Wednesday, Apr 9, 2008 at 6:50:42 PM (0+)
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