In article <vnmiuhs9g4r6e5@corp.supernews.com>, Harry says...

You might want to give Wholeflapper a bit of a
break.  He is a confirmed alcoholic...

I have "outted" Borsch-Belt as a registered
spOOk!!

Ralph McGehee wrote:

CIA Covert Operations

The CIA has overthrown popularly elected governments and
imposed military dictatorships from its earliest days.  It has
supported death squads for those dictatorships. It has ignored
drug traffickers when they were part of its operations. It has stimulated
mass killings -- the Phoenix program in Vietnam and the near genocide in
Indonesia. It has violated its own rules and operated here when such were
illegal; and, it conducts propaganda operations that it frequently echoes
in its intelligence.

The Agency is a covert action agency which in all cases relating
to its major covert actions, slants, creates, and adjusts its
information to support its covert goals. The recent Director, John Deutch,
following the practice of some of his predecessors, sent the CIA off on an
intelligence-supported, covert action binge.

The Agency's inability's and intelligence failures are legend. My
own experience was the 1968 Tet Offensive in Vietnam.  To me this,
in the history of the world, is its most egregious intelligence failure.
Also the United States stayed in the war for over 25 years and never once did
the CIA predict the inevitability of our defeat.

Vietnam was by no means the only major intelligence disaster. The CIA was
one of the last government institutions to accept the collapse of the Soviet
Union. Robert Gates, the Director of Intelligence and later the Director
of the CIA, traveled the U.S. exhorting all not to be fooled by the USSR's
apparent collapse.

The list of CIA intelligence failures is massive. A list of slanted
intelligence in support policy is even longer. As just one example, the
House Pike Committee report of the mid 1970s examined six major world
events and retroactively evaluated CIA intelligence against those events.
The Committee concluded that CIA intelligence over the extended period of
those events was either completely non-existent or totally inaccurate.

The recent examination of the CIA by the Commission on the Roles and
Capabilities of the U.S. Intelligence Community took note of part
of the problem and said: there is ``arrogance, parochialism, disdain for
oversight, lack of diversity, and tolerance of inadequate professional
performance'' in the CIA's Directorate of Operations (DO).

Even John Deutch said he was shocked by DO's "inability to
formulate solutions."  Deutch indicated that the deep rot of the DO
in Guatemala is a core sample of the deep rot of the overall DO. The curse
of old boys is the patrimony of an elite secret society that degenerated
into an elitist bureaucracy, an inbred tribal culture. Rules and laws
were not for them.

The problem is not solely that of the Directorate of Operations - in many
cases the Directorate of Intelligence (DI) is just as bad.  The DI is so
bureaucratized that legitimate intelligence cannot survive or cannot survive
intact. The other major problem is the politicization of intelligence. John
Gentry's incisive review of those problems are recorded in his book, "Lost
Promise: How CIA Analysis Misserves the Nation."

Since the United States leads the world community it needs the best
intelligence.  It needs it for itself -- and also hopefully so that it will
curtail mistaken impulses to destroy governments it does not agree with
or accept. I am not the only former member of the intelligence establishment
to feel this way.  One well-connected academician with a past in the highest
levels of national security apparatuses holds similar views.

Samuel P. Huntington [one of the fiercest hawks re Vietnam] says in his
1996 book, THE CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS AND THE REMAKING OF THE WORLD ORDER, that
the war of ideologies and interests was over. The war of cultures --
Western, Eastern Orthodox, Latin America, Islamic, Japanese, Chinese, Hindu
and (possibly) African, had begun. He said Jews lined up with Judeo-Christian
heritage of the West. These were the real actors to now watch. Realist
analysts of international affairs had neglected these deeply buried religious
allegiances during the Cold War. Now, "Western intervention in the affairs
of other civilizations is probably the single most dangerous source of
instability and potential global conflict in a multi-civilizational world."
Western intervention is also useless -- problems, for example, between Islam
and Orthodoxy aren't susceptible to Western mediation (differences have
existed for centuries).

"Core states [must] abstain from intervention in conflicts in other
civilizations." Huntington's argument that the West should stop intervening
in civilizational conflicts it doesn't understand makes a powerful claim
that internationalists cannot easily ignore.

If Huntington's arguments are valid them the reasons for the CIA's
covert operations cease. This of course will be vigorously resisted
by the CIA's Operations Directorate that will continue to justify
itself on the basis of its [extremely biased and flawed] perceptions
of the world -- many consciously or subconsciously manufactured to
ensure its continued existence.

The CIA in its 1980s covert action in Afghanistan supported, over the
objections of its Pakistani implementers, radical Islamic fundamentalists
-- that flocked in droves from all over the Middle East to receive CIA
weapons, training and financing.  After the war, these groups disbanded and
returned to their various homelands where they now lead wars to impose
their wills over those who resist. The CIA justifies its continued existence,
to a large degree, by fighting the Frankenstein monster of its own making.
It now sponsors counter-terrorists to fight its former Afghanistan-based
radical Islamic fundamentalists. Another generation may see the CIA fighting
its present day counter-terrorists.

The CIA has declared a new holy crusade on these radical Islamic
fundamentalists and some other Arab states, calling them the more explosive
"International Terrorists." The CIA now directs paramilitary operations
against Iraq, Libya, and Sudan. (The former Director of the CIA,
Robert Gates said the CIA picks on the weaker Islamic countries to avoid
the consequences of attacking the more powerful nations.)

The CIA today runs political action operations in many other states.
It uses its surrogate, the National Endowment for Democracy, to conduct
political action operations in about 70 countries from Africa to Latin
America.  The potential consequences of all this interventionism could
be devastating.

I cannot think of more powerful arguments for abolishing the covert
operations of the CIA than those presented by the current state of
the world, and, its nearly fifty years history of misunderstanding
world events while exacerbating them with its covert operations.

Ralph McGehee
CIABASE