Text 11473, 95 rader
Skriven 2009-05-24 20:50:32 av JOHNJWILSON (1:123/140)
     Kommentar till en text av ROSS SAUER
Ärende: CIA lies to congress
============================
-> Oh right, we should all believe everything the CIA says...
-> 
-> In 1973, CIA director Richard Helms deceived the Senate Foreign
-> Relations Committee, refusing to acknowledge the role of the CIA in
-> overthrowing the elected government in Chile. Helms falsely testified
-> that the CIA had not passed money to the opposition movement in Chile,
-> and a grand jury was called to see if Helms should be indicted for
-> perjury.
-> 
-> In 1977, the Justice Department brought a lesser charge against Helms,
-> who pleaded nolo contendere; he was fined $2,000 and given a suspended
-> two-year prison sentence. Helms went from the courthouse to the CIA
-> where he was given a hero's welcome and a gift of $2,000 to cover the
-> fine. It was one of the saddest experiences in my 24 years at CIA.
-> 
-> In the new Ford administration, Secretary of State Kissinger, Secretary
-> of Defense Rumsfeld, and White House chief of staff Cheney orchestrated
-> phony intelligence for the Congress in order to get an endorsement for
-> covert arms shipments to anti-government forces in Angola.
-> 
-> The CIA lied to Senator Dick Clark, the chairman of the Senate Foreign
-> Relations Committee, who was a critic of the Agency's illegal
-> collaborations with the government of South Africa against Angola and
-> Mozambique. Agency briefers exaggerated the classification of their
-> materials so that Senate and House members could not publicize this
-> information. Agency shields of secrecy and falsehood were extremely
-> effective.
-> 
-> In the 1980s, CIA director William Casey and his deputy, Bob Gates,
-> consistently lied to the congressional oversight committees about their
-> knowledge of Iran-contra. Senator Daniel Moynihan (D-NY) believed that
-> Casey and Gates were running a disinformation campaign against the
-> Senate intelligence committee. Casey even managed to alienate Senator
-> Barry Goldwater (R-AZ), a pro-intelligence, conservative senator who
-> typically walked through barbed wire for the CIA.
-> 
-> Gates' lies on Iran-contra led to the Senate intelligence committee's
-> unwillingness to vote him out of the committee in 1985, when he was
-> nominated to be CIA director by President Ronald Reagan. Gates was
-> nominated again in 1991 and this time he was confirmed, but not before
-> the hearings produced rhyme and verse on Gates' tailoring of
-> intelligence to fit the biases of Bill Casey.
-> 
-> Throughout the 1980s and the early 1990s, Aldrich Ames performed as the
-> most destructive traitor in the history of the CIA, but CIA directors
-> Gates, William Webster, and Jim Woolsey failed to inform the
-> congressional oversight committees of the serious counter-intelligence
-> problems that had been created.
-> 
-> In the late 1980s, the CIA concealed from the Congress that Saddam
-> Hussein was diverting U.S. farm credits through an Atlanta bank to pay
-> for nuclear technology and sophisticated weapons. The chairman of the
-> Senate and House intelligence committees, Senator Dennis DeConcini (D-
-> AZ) and Representative Dan Glickman (D-KS) respectively, were furious
-> with the deception tactics of CIA briefers.
-> 
-> The greatest CIA disinformation campaign in the congress took place in
-> 2002-2003, when CIA director George Tenet and his deputy, John
-> McLaughlin, consistently lied about Iraqi training for al Qaeda members
-> on chemical and biological weapons as well as the existence of mobile
-> labs to manufacture such weapons.
-> 
-> Several days before the congressional vote on the authorization to use
-> force, CIA senior analyst Paul Pillar delivered an unclassified
-> memorandum to the Hill with a series of false charges about Iraqi
-> weapons of mass destruction. Pillar's memorandum and a national
-> intelligence estimate on the same subject were also used to develop
-> Secretary of State Colin Powell's address to the United Nations in
-> February 2003.
-> 
-> More recently, Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-MI), the ranking minority member
-> of the House intelligence committee, documented the dissembling of the
-> CIA to cover-up the Agency's involvement in a drug interdiction program
-> in Peru that led to the loss of innocent lives. Hoekstra accused CIA
-> director Tenet with misleading the Congress.
-> 
-> The CIA still has not addressed the serious procedural and institutional
-> problems that were exposed in a report from the Office of the Inspector
-> General on the Peru program, which concluded that Agency officials
-> deliberately misled Congress, the White House, and the Justice
-> Department.
-> 
-> In closing, Panetta emphasized that it was the CIA's task to "tell it
-> like it is, even if that's not what people always want to hear. Keep it
-> up. Our national security depends on it."
-> 
-> If only that were the case in the 1980s, when the CIA hid from the
-> congress the intelligence on the decline of the Soviet Union and the
-> Warsaw Pact or more recently when the CIA tailored intelligence on Iraqi
-> weapons of mass destruction and Iraqi ties to al Qaeda in order to give
-> the Bush administration an intelligence case to go to war.
-> 
Well, yeah, but other than THAT....
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