It is now clear that what passes for US foreign
policy is the product of loopy OODA loops [see for example,
511 & 513. The Washington
apparat, led by the congressional wing of Versailles on the Potomac,
seems about to "fix" the problem by reforming our broken intelligence
system with its favorite re-organization gimmick – create a Czar, in
this case, an Intelligence Czar – to oversee all the intelligence agencies.
One more layer of organization and perhaps another politically appointed
chair in the Cabinet will solve our problems, because a policy Czar
can force the different players in policy circus to perform in accordance
to the same sheet of politically correct music. But some veterans of
the US government – including me – believe playing from the same sheet
of music is the problem.
Will an appeal to the mystical authority of imperial
wisdom fix our government's loopy OODA loops? Let's see what one veteran
of the CIA has to say about this problem..
Reorganize the CIA?
Of Course, But Bad US Policies Will Outweigh Any Benefits
By BILL CHRISTISON (Former CIA analyst)
Counterpunch
July 15, 2004
[Re-printed with permission of the editors]
Bill Christison was a senior official of the CIA.
He served as a National Intelligence Officer and as Director
of the CIA's Office of Regional and Political Analysis. He can
be reached at mailto:christison@counterpunch.org.
Most of the suggestions proposed for reorganizing
the CIA ignore two serious problems –
-
the vital need to set up, somewhere in the
government, a group of intelligence analysts truly independent
of each and every administration, and
-
the equally important need for stricter
controls and limitations on covert operations directed by the
US government.
Let's start by accepting that George Tenet's
resignation was a good thing. He let himself be co-opted and too
often told the Bush administration what it wanted to hear. He gave
his superiors selective information that would strengthen their
existing desire to invade Iraq rather than a balanced picture of
the variety of analytical views within the intelligence community
on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs. He did not
do this all of the time, but he did do it too much of the time.
He got too close to the policymakers and tried too hard to please
them. His calling it a "slam-dunk" (as reported by Bob Woodward)
that Iraq did indeed possess WMD in the fall of 2002, is all the
evidence required to reach this conclusion. But there is more, much
more.
The best way to avoid the problems created by
such co-option of CIA directors in the future would be to split
off the Agency's analytical unit entirely from its covert operations
– that is, to create two separate agencies with different directors.
Having one person in charge of both analysis and operations creates
enormous conflicts, and it is impossible for any CIA director to
do both jobs equally well.
The covert operations carried out by the CIA,
both information collection and covert actions designed to influence
the policies of other governments, actually are and have to be part
of the US policymaking and policy-implementing establishment. The
intelligence analysis functions, on the other hand, should be separated
to the maximum degree possible from policymaking and should never
be distorted or falsified in order to support policies already desired
by any administration.
This is not a new problem. The CIA was established
in 1947, and pressures on it to provide analyses strengthening the
pre-existing views of policymakers go back at least to the early
1950s, on issues such as
-
the Sino-Soviet split and
-
the Korean war, and later
-
the bomber gap,
-
the missile gap,
-
the Vietnam war,
-
Soviet military and economic strengths,
and
-
even the reasons for the USSR's final collapse.
If the administration of George W. Bush introduced
anything new into the mix, it was only the intensity and ruthlessness
with which its ideologues bulldozed aside any opposition to their
own views and their own so-called "evidence" and "analysis."
All the other 14 agencies of the intelligence
community are part of one or another government department – most
of them are in the Defense Department. Their analyses inevitably
reflect the views of their departments and therefore have often
contained a degree, sometimes small but always significant, of distortion
and falsification. This sin of departmental intelligence is endemic
in bureaucracies. It can never be totally eradicated, only minimized.
Unfortunately, the Bush administration made the problem far worse
by setting up in the Defense Department a new office – the Office
of Special Plans, or OSP. The specific task of this office was to
search out and highlight only those bits and pieces of evidence,
fragmentary and unreliable though they might be, that would support
the case for war against Iraq and encourage the Congress and the
people of the US to support a war. Never before in US history has
there been such a blatant and concentrated – and successful – effort
to distort intelligence analysis. In its July 9 report on the intelligence
failures surrounding the Iraq debacle, the Senate Intelligence Committee
failed, incredibly, to discuss the role of the OSP in manufacturing
evidence justifying war.
The success of the OSP demonstrates more than
anything else the need for a new and separate analytical intelligence
agency, one having both great independence and high stature. The
director of this body should therefore be appointed to a ten-year
term. This would insulate him or her to an important degree from
control by any administration. The underlying requirement here should
be to provide the US government with an analytical intelligence
unit capable of acting as a powerful check or balance to any administration's
preconceived foreign policies. Other intelligence agencies should
continue to produce and disseminate any reports they wish, but the
new agency, having greater independence and access to all sources,
would have primary responsibility both for producing reports on
its own initiative and for answering requests for analyses from
the White House and Congress.
Let's move on to the second issue, US covert
operations. What is important, but is apparently not being seriously
addressed in Washington these days, is to make sure that the top
leaders of our government take explicit responsibility for all covert
operations that are carried out.
The principal guidelines should be that the
new covert operations organization established after the split-up
of the CIA would be under civilian, not military, control; and the
Defense Department should carry out no covert operations except
those that are integral parts of war-fighting activities and are
carried out as part of a war declared by the Congress.
All covert operations other than those defined
above as being allowed to the Defense Department should be carried
out only by the new organization. In addition, all operations should
be approved in writing by the president, by the chairmen and ranking
minority members of the three House and three Senate committees
on foreign affairs, military affairs, and intelligence, and by the
chief justice of the Supreme Court as well. Covert operations are
so important, and should be so exceptional, that henceforth all
three branches of government – executive, legislative, and judicial
– should be part of the approval process for such operations. If
assigning such a function to the Supreme Court could be achieved
only through a constitutional amendment, then we should seek such
an amendment.
When presuming to suggest how the United States
might change its intelligence apparatus, it is necessary to raise
a few more propositions for debate, propositions that go well beyond
the US intelligence structure into broader foreign policy issues.
Proposition One: No conceivable expansion
of our intelligence establishment is going to do much to reduce
the threat of terrorism against the US and its allies. Therefore,
Americans should oppose any such expansion.
Proposition Two: No conceivable reorganization
of the US intelligence establishment is going to reduce the threat
of terrorism against us more than marginally. Reorganizations may
or may not provide some benefits of greater efficiency or protect
us to some degree from rogue administrations, but meaningful contributions
toward a more peaceful planet are unlikely.
Proposition Three: The absolutely critical
reason that intelligence won't help much to stop terrorism is that
US foreign and military policies are wrong. These include, most
importantly, the various means employed by the US to extend and
strengthen its domination over the rest of the world. These foreign
policies have increased rather than decreased the threat of terrorism
against us and our allies. Other specifics of US policies, which
are related to the goal of global domination and also increase the
threat of terrorism, are
-
our one-sided support of Israel's occupation
of Palestinian territories,
-
the invasion and occupation of Iraq and
the preceding years of sanctions,
-
the large US military presence in many parts
of the Middle East and Central Asia, and
-
the pursuit of a US version of economic
globalization that is seen by many peoples of the world as a
weapon in our drive for global domination and is even today
continuing to widen the gap between rich and poor in many countries.
Proposition Four: Nothing we could do
in expanding or reorganizing the US intelligence apparatus would
have as much effect on reducing the terrorism threat as would changing
policies that intensify hatred of the US around the world. But the
striking similarities between Republicans and Democrats on foreign
policy issues work to prevent change.
Proposition Five: The fact that only
5 percent of the world's population resides in the US means that
we simply cannot dominate the rest of the world for long. The very
effort of the US to seek global domination is anti-democratic in
the eyes of most of the world's people, who do not want to be dominated
by the US In addition, the drive for global domination will over
time impoverish many average people here in the US, who see their
hopes for better healthcare and education, and for lifetime living
wages, fading farther and farther into a future they will never
live to see.
Proposition Six: To put it bluntly, US
foreign policies for far too long have been simply immoral, and
the US has been responsible for allowing, encouraging, and enabling
far too much torture and far too many deaths, deaths totaling in
the millions – in areas from Indochina to East Timor in the Far
East; to Chile and Central America in our own hemisphere; to the
Balkans, Turkey, and South Africa; to Palestine; to Iran, and now
to Afghanistan and Iraq.
In this context of misguided, shortsighted,
and unjust US foreign policies, let's take another, and final, look
at the role of intelligence in our system of government.
The real question with regard to intelligence
is this: Are the major additional expansions of this country's intelligence
apparatus that are already clearly on the drawing boards necessary
and proper because of what happened on September 11, 2001 and subsequently?
One side in the debate says of course they are. Aren't the increases
absolutely essential, given the threats we face? The answer, according
to this side, is clearly yes.
But there is another side – to which this writer
belongs – that says no. Events since September 11 so threaten our
own society that we should oppose such expansions and urge cutbacks
in intelligence spending instead. This side asks: Should not the
use of covert operations by the US be curtailed rather than expanded?
Don't covert operations usually wind up not staying covert, and
don't they often become a cause for more terrorism?
As intelligence and covert actions become increasingly
important as a separate and growing arm of US global policies, should
not questions be raised by Americans themselves about the ignoble
image of the US this trend presents to the world? Do we lack so
much confidence in our own overt policies – our alleged support
for democracy, for example – that we have to rely increasingly on
covert actions and military force to implement them?
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