http://www.antiwar.com/eland/?articleid=3981

Politics and the CIA

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/16/politics...dd4babe4aa06CIA

CIA Churning Continues as 2 Top Officials Resign

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=stor...worryincongress

CIA Tumult Causes Worry in Congress

http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/1116/p25s01-usgn.html

An internal war at the CIA

http://www.brownsvilleherald.com/ts_more.p...=62232_0_10_0_C

Government looking at military draft lists

http://www.indiadaily.com/breaking_news/12993.asp

Military force is last resort, Pope tells Baghdad

Porter Goss: another uniter...

http://www.counterpunch.org/whitney11162004.html

The Goss Purge at the CIA: Night of the Long Knives

http://fairuse.1accesshost.com/news2/killing-messenger.html

Killing the messenger
Porter Goss' purge at the CIA will ensure the agency is full of Bush yes men - but it will seriously damage US intelligence

Bush as "Pose"ident damages everyone's intelligence.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationw...nationworld-hed

New chief tells CIA its job is to 'support administration'

http://reuters.myway.com/article/20041118/...Y-QAEDA-DC.html

Clarke: CIA Had Low-Level Spies Inside Al Qaeda

This is a positive development in that the CIA doesn't see its role as killing the President! JFK should have been so lucky!!

http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?itemid=18096

The Peter Principle and the neocon coup
Administration gets dirtier as Bush cleans house

http://slate.msn.com/id/2109870/

Cooking with Goss
The new CIA chief's shakeups are bad news

Politics and the C.I.A.
The country deserves a C.I.A. where intelligence operatives
feel free to tell the administration that policies are
based on wrong or incomplete information.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/18/opinion/18thu2.html?th

CIA memo urging spies to support Bush provokes furore

Julian Borger in Washington
Thursday November 18, 2004
The Guardian

The new US director of central intelligence, Porter Goss, told CIA staff this week their job was "to support the Bush administration and its policies in our work", stirring a new controversy over the future of the agency.

The memorandum, circulated on Monday, was attacked by critics as an attempt to suppress dissent, particularly over Iraq, and ensure the agency only produces assessments the White House wants to hear.

But a CIA spokesman insisted yesterday that Mr Goss's note was not a call for partisan support but rather "intelli gence support" intended to help policy-makers in their decisions.

"The Central Intelligence Agency is not a policy organisation," the spokesman said.

The note comes at a raw time for the agency, in the wake of high-profile resignations and a campaign by Mr Goss to weed out leakers.

Michael Scheuer, a former head of the CIA's "Bin Laden station", who denounced the Iraq war, said: "I've never experienced this much anxiety and controversy."

Mr Sheuer, who resigned last week, added: "Suddenly political affiliation matters to some degree. The talk is that they're out to clean out Democrats and liberals.

"The administration doesn't seem to be able to come to grips with the reality that it was a stupid thing to do to invade Iraq... If it goes too far like this into the political realm our fortunes overseas are going to be hurt."

Mr Goss, a Bush appointee, is seeking to use the CIA's counterintelligence department to weed out leakers to the press, a controversial move that has triggered resignations by senior staff who argued it was an inappropriate use of the agency's mole hunters.

Mr Goss and a team of advisers, whom he brought from the House of Representatives where he was a Republican congressman, have also targeted CIA analysts, many of whom dissented from the administration's prewar certainty that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and al-Qaida links.

The directorate's chief, Jami Miscik, is rumoured to be the next on the Goss hitlist.

According to one intelligence source, the "president's daily brief", which the CIA delivers each morning, has already been "watered down" with the removal of controversial analysis about the counter-insurgency in Iraq or the "global war on terror".

The Goss memorandum, according to an official who had read it, said: "We support the administration and its policies in our work and as agency employees we do not identify with, support or champion opposition to the administration or its policies."

Asked to comment on the note, a CIA spokesman said: "Support means intelligence support. It does not mean taking a position on policy either pro or con."

But Vincent Cannistraro, a former head of the CIA's counter-terrorist centre, said: "It can only be interpreted one way - there will be no more dissenting opinions."

Mr Goss's order follows more than two years of veiled conflict between the CIA and the White House, which escalated when it became clear the administration was determined to go to war in Iraq. Disgruntled CIA officers fought their corner principally through leaks to the press.

When the head of counterintelligence - whose name cannot be published under US law - refused to pursue the leakers last week, the No 2 in the directorate of operations, Michael Sulick, was ordered to fire her, according to well-informed sources.

When he refused, his boss, Stephen Kappes, was ordered to step in. Mr Kappes refused and after a weekend showdown both he and Mr Sulick resigned on Monday.

Mr Kappes's departure was widely described as a serious loss."Kappes was a fine officer and he had done a lot of hard things in a lot of nasty places in the world. It's a shame to see him go," Mr Scheuer said.

He argued there should be a staff shakeout at the CIA but said the purge was aimed in the wrong direction - targeting dissidents rather than risk-averse leaders.

The 52-year-old former agent blamed some of the turmoil at the CIA on the abrupt management style of Mr Goss's new team. "There's nothing wrong with being a little bit gruff and a bit abrasive but I've heard these people have been real bastards," he said.

But another former agent, Robert Baer, argued that Mr Goss had no choice but to stop the leaks. "You can't have an intelligence agency operating in the open, writing books and leaking to the press. They lost the confidence of the president," he said.

He argued the CIA in its present state was "dysfunctional".

"Give Goss six months and see what he does. It could be a lot worse, or it could be a lot better," he said.

Can you give the link ?

Found it:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1353715,00.html

God help us all if it's a lot worse.

Whatever happened to government employees being loyal to those who pay their salaries???? Don't they work ultimately for the taxpayers??????

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=stor...essiveespionage

CIA Plans riskier, more aggressive espionage

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=stor...secleaningatcia

Goss Isn't Done With Housecleaning at CIA

http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/a...t_pe/cia_goss_1

CIA Director to Employees: Avoid Politics

The CIA's job should be to keep America safe, not blindly follow an ideological idiot.

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2004/111804.html

Bush's Perception Management Plan

Bush's 'Perception Management' Plan
By Robert Parry
November 18, 2004


George W. Bush has been criticized for disdaining fact in favor of faith in his own instincts. But he is savvy about the dangers that information can present to his authority over the government and the American people.

That is why the first priority of his second term has been the elimination of the few government sources of information that could challenge the images he wants to project to the public. Bush doesn’t want the State Department or the Central Intelligence Agency portraying his Iraq and other foreign policies as abject failures or reckless adventures.

So, by attacking these remaining pockets of analytical resistance, Bush is moving to ensure that his administration can keep much of the U.S. population seeing a near-empty cup as almost entirely full, a concept known in the intelligence world as “perception management.”

On a personal level, Bush appears to have found in his electoral victory a validation of his public-relations strategy of casting his foreign policy as a black-and-white war between good and evil. In this tough-talking approach, Bush has been helped immeasurably by the powerful conservative news media, ranging from AM talk radio to Fox News, from right-wing newspaper columnists to Internet bloggers.

Indeed, it is impossible to understand why Americans have grown so detached from reality without appreciating the combined impact of this conservative media – built over the past quarter century – and Bush’s personal insistence on loyalty over almost all other values. These two factors have made the United States a kind of ultimate test for the Orwellian intelligence theories of “perception management.”

Controlling Opinions

“Perception management” – also known as “public diplomacy” – is a propaganda strategy for controlling how a target population views political events. Refined by intelligence services as they tried to manipulate foreign populations, the practice eventually seeped into domestic U.S. politics as a way to manipulate post-Vietnam-War-era public opinion.

In the early 1980s, the Reagan-Bush administration saw the “Vietnam Syndrome” – a reluctance to commit military forces abroad – as a strategic threat to robust Cold War policies. So the administration launched an extraordinary effort to influence how the American people perceived overseas events, essentially by exaggerating threats from abroad and demonizing selected foreign leaders.

Psychological warfare experts from the CIA and Army Special Forces played key roles in implementing the strategy, which was carried out from offices in President Ronald Reagan’s National Security Council and a “public diplomacy” bureaucracy set up at the State Department.

The strategy, which included bullying the U.S. news media into line over issues such as the conflicts in Central America, proved remarkably successful. [For more on this history, see Robert Parry’s Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq or Parry’s Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press and ‘Project Truth.’]

These lessons were not lost on Dick Cheney and other Republicans who had lived through both the difficult post-Vietnam years and the Reagan-Bush era of the 1980s. With the second Bush administration, these experienced Republicans recognized that controlling the flow of government information – and the public’s perception of overseas reality – would again be vital in implementing their vision of a new American Empire for the 21st Century.

During the buildup to the Iraq War, Cheney even went to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, to bang heads with intelligence analysts who doubted White House claims about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. Many of these mid-level bureaucrats acquiesced to Cheney’s demands, but others resisted. After the Iraq invasion failed to find WMD, some of these suppressed CIA doubts began surfacing and causing Bush embarrassment, especially during Campaign 2004.

Four More Years

Now, however, with a fresh lease on four more years, Bush is inflicting payback on the CIA, especially its analytical division and its intelligence-gathering network, and on the State Department, whose analysts also questioned Bush’s Middle East policies.

Acting through new CIA Director Porter Goss, the Bush administration read the riot act to Langley’s intelligence professionals that they must get behind Bush’s policies or get out. The demands have led to an exodus of senior CIA officials, including deputy CIA chief John E. McLaughlin and deputy director of operations Stephen R. Kappes.

Bush then replaced Secretary of State Colin Powell, who was pliable but at least known for protecting the department’s bureaucracy. Powell’s successor is the famously compliant national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, Bush’s ultimate “yes” woman who is so cozy with her boss that she once slipped up at a dinner party and referred to Bush as “my husb…” before catching herself and replacing that with “President Bush.”

The end result will almost surely be that Bush will hear even fewer contradictions to his judgments, while Congress and the news media will be cut off from internal government sources of information that could be used to question Bush’s decisions.

The powerful conservative news media played an important role, too, in setting the stage for these ongoing purges. Conservative columnists, including Robert Novak and David Brooks, pushed the dubious claim that the CIA’s only rightful role is to serve the president. They accused the CIA of disloyalty in trying to sabotage Bush.

“Now that he’s been returned to office, President Bush is going to have to differentiate between his opponents and his enemies,” wrote Brooks in the New York Times. “His opponents are found in the Democratic Party. His enemies are in certain offices of the Central Intelligence Agency.”

To Brooks, the justification for Bush going after the CIA was the release of information that made Bush look bad.

“At the height of the campaign, CIA officials, who are supposed to serve the president and stay out of politics and policy, served up leak after leak to discredit the president’s Iraq policy,” Brooks wrote. “In mid-September, somebody leaked a CIA report predicting a gloomy or apocalyptic future for the region. Later that month, a senior CIA official, Paul Pillar, reportedly made comments saying he had long felt the decision to go to war would heighten anti-American animosity in the Arab world.” [NYT, Nov. 13, 2004]

Bush as Victim

In other words, conservative commentators were afraid that plainly accurate analyses by CIA officials represented a threat to Bush’s power and justified his exacting retribution against these out-of-step analysts. It seems that no matter how much power Bush and the Republicans amass, their media apologists always make them out to be the victims.

It’s also a misunderstanding of history to claim that the CIA exists to “serve the president.” While it may be true that the “operations directorate” was created as a secret paramilitary arm for the U.S. executive, the CIA’s analytical division was established to provide unvarnished information to both the president and other parts of the U.S. government, including Congress.

Even at the height of the Cold War in the 1950s and 1960s, the CIA’s analytical division took pride in telling presidents what they didn’t want to hear – such as debunking Eisenhower’s “bomber gap” or Kennedy’s “missile gap” or Johnson’s faith in the air war against North Vietnam.

Though never perfectly applied, the ethos of objective analysis continued through the mid-1970s. Then, CIA analysis began to come under sustained attack from conservatives and neoconservatives who insisted that the Soviet Union was a rapidly expanding military menace with its eye on world conquest. The CIA analytical division held a more nuanced view of the Soviet threat, viewing Moscow as a declining superpower struggling to keep pace with the West while coping with fissures inside its own empire.

This CIA analysis was the backdrop for the “détente strategy” followed by President Richard Nixon and his Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who sought to negotiate arms control agreements with the Soviet Union.

Reagan’s Emergence

Nixon’s ouster over the Watergate scandal and Ronald Reagan’s entrance on the national stage in 1976, however, altered the political dynamic. Scared by Reagan’s successes in the Republican primaries, President Gerald Ford ordered the word “détente” dropped from the White House lexicon and let then-CIA Director George H.W. Bush open up the CIA’s analytical division to an unprecedented challenge from right-wing intellectuals, known as “Team B.”

The “Team B” assessment, involving a young academic named Paul Wolfowitz, accused the CIA analytical division of systematically underestimating the growing Soviet threat. In late 1976, accommodating this conservative wing of the Republican Party, Bush adopted a more alarmist CIA estimate of Soviet power.

When Reagan became president in 1981, with Bush as his vice president, the assault on the CIA’s analytical division resumed in earnest. Analysts who balked at the new administration’s ideological vision of the Soviet Union as a 10-foot-tall behemoth were shunted aside or forced out of the CIA.

The CIA’s once proud Soviet division took the brunt of the attacks. The surviving analysts began ignoring the mounting evidence of a rapid Soviet decline, so as not to contradict the Reagan-Bush justification for an expanded U.S. military and for bloody interventions in Third World conflicts from Nicaragua to Afghanistan.

‘Perception Management’

Having fitted the CIA with these ideological blinders, the Reagan-Bush administration next turned to whipping the American people into line. There, the magic words were “perception management,” as propagandists developed “themes” to frighten American citizens about threats from leftist-ruled Nicaragua or from peasant rebellions in El Salvador and Guatemala.

Rather than internal civil wars against corrupt oligarchies, these conflicts were pitched as “beachheads” for a Soviet assault on the southern border of the United States.

In reality, Moscow couldn’t even keep control along its own borders. But the Reagan-Bush intimidation of the U.S. intelligence system proved so effective that CIA analysts wouldn’t dare let themselves see the signs of the Soviet crackup.

Ironically, when the Soviet Empire collapsed in the late 1980s, the CIA took the blame for “missing” one of the most important political events of the Twentieth Century. Ironically, too, Reagan, who was most responsible for building up the Soviet straw man, got the most credit when it fell down. [For details on this intelligence failure, see Parry’s Secrecy & Privilege.]

Since then, I have talked with CIA veterans who acknowledge that they overstated the Soviet threat despite valid intelligence from their own agents inside the Soviet bloc who were describing the internal problems. But this U.S. intelligence failure was not just one of misjudgments; it was one of ideological pressure that distorted the reality that then became the basis for U.S. government policies and was sold to the American people as how they should perceive the world.

That pattern is now recurring. Intelligence is being manipulated to justify policy, rather than letting objective analysis inform policy. Bush makes his decisions based on his “gut” instincts and then the evidence is compiled to justify his decisions.

The next step will be the continued management of the perceptions of the American people. As U.S. intelligence agencies sing along to Bush’s tune, the propaganda will be amplified through the vast conservative media echo chamber. The mainstream press can be counted on to join the chorus.

Reality was on the ballot on Nov. 2. It seems to have lost.


Robert Parry, who broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek, has written a new book, Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4022883.stm

CIA staff told to avoid politics

I read recently that many of them (AL Q) were British agents

http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/112004E.shtml

Feinstein Warns Goss agaianst CIA Reforms

http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/111904D.shtml

Partisan Spooks

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial...e_purge_at_cia/

The Purge at CIA

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6542350/site/newsweek/

Broken Furniture at the CIA

Michael Scheuer
A Monitor Breakfast with Michael Scheuer, who resigned Nov. 12 after
running the CIA office that tracked Osama bin Laden. By David T. Cook

http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/1122/p20s04-usmb.html?s=hns

Broken Furniture at the CIA

He arrived with a mandate for change. But have Porter Goss's early moves helped or hurt?

By Michael Isikoff and Daniel Klaidman
Newsweek
Updated: 4:14 a.m. ET Nov. 21, 2004

Nov. 29 issue - Until a few weeks ago, Patrick Murray was just another ambitious Capitol Hill staffer. As a top aide to Rep. Porter Goss, the Republican chairman of the House intelligence committee, Murray had a reputation as a sharp-tongued partisan lawyer. When Democrats on the committee asked the CIA for information, Murray would cut them off, reminding the agency that only requests backed by the Republican majority should be honored. "He was just impossible," says one staffer who dealt with him. "He was sarcastic, snide and had this uncanny ability to push people's buttons." One former CIA official told NEWSWEEK that Murray leaned on him more than once to declassify information so he could use it to "embarrass the Democrats." Murray was irritated when the agency declined. He regarded much of the CIA as a nest of obstructionist bureaucrats, time-servers who had schemed to undermine the administration's policies—especially in Iraq.

Now Murray is in a position to do something about it. When President George W. Bush appointed Goss as the new CIA director, the congressman brought along several trusted aides, including Murray. He also brought orders from the White House to overhaul the agency, which has yet to recover from a devastating series of 9/11 and Iraq intelligence failures. Goss was expected to break some furniture and hand out some pink slips. Even Bush's harshest critics agree that the hidebound intelligence agency is long overdue for a shake-up (late last week Congress failed to agree on a major intel overhaul). But so far the new team's aggressive—some say clumsy—efforts at cleaning house may have only thrown the spy agency into deeper turmoil. Several top officials have quit in anger, leaving key management positions unfilled at a critical time and prompting fears of a brain drain of experienced employees.

The hostilities began last month, when Goss tried to install a former CIA analyst named Michael Kostiw as the agency's executive director, the No. 3 spot. Someone—likely a CIA official who opposed Kostiw's appointment—leaked an embarrassing tidbit to The Washington Post: years earlier Kostiw had been accused of shoplifting. It was enough to derail Kostiw's appointment. The sabotage infuriated Murray, who stormed into the office of the CIA's chief of counterintelligence, a respected undercover official known as "Mary." According to two people familiar with the encounter, Murray told her the leaks had to stop, and put her in charge of making sure they did. If there were any more damaging leaks about future Goss appointments, Murray warned her, "I am going to hold you personally responsible." Mary's boss, Michael Sulick, and Sulick's boss, Stephen Kappes, confronted Murray. "Look, don't treat us like we're Democratic staffers on the Hill," Sulick told Murray, according to a source familiar with the meeting. Murray responded by ordering Kappes to fire Sulick. Kappes refused. Instead, both Sulick and Kappes resigned last week. The men received a five-minute standing ovation from CIA employees. Goss and Murray declined to comment, but people close to them say there are others at the agency who should fear for their jobs.

Goss has carefully distanced himself from the turmoil on the ground. Last week he tried to smooth the hurt feelings in an e-mail to agency employees. "We provide the intelligence as we see it and let the facts alone speak to the policymakers," he wrote. But another line in the e-mail made headlines and only increased the antagonism. "We support the administration and its policies in our work," it said.

Goss's supporters insist he was merely stating the obvious: the CIA does, after all, exist to serve the president. But critics seized on the language as proof of their suspicions: that Goss is a Bush loyalist who will bend the agency to meet the president's political agenda. Don't expect Murray, a man on a mission, to spend much time trying to prove them wrong.

With Mark Hosenball
© 2004 Newsweek, Inc.

URL: http://msnbc.msn.com/id/6542350/site/newsweek/

Whew........ things just get worse and worse. As if the CIA can afford to lose any of its well trained or seasoned personnel. Is there no end to this madness ?!

The CIA does need to be shaken up. Tenet leaving was a good start. Unfortunately the agency is being used for political purposes and good people will be out(ed) and replaced with head nodders.

The road is littered with Bush's scapegoats, and a lot of them are wearing CIA name tags and ID entry scanner cards.

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=stor..._paramilitaries

white House Asks for Study on CIA Forces

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory?id=274780

White House Asks for Study of CIA Forces

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory?id=274780

White House Asks for Study of CIA Forces

http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/20...ilitaries_x.htm

White House seeks study on whether to transfer CIA forces to Pentagon

http://www.washingtontimes.com/functions/p...22-122638-9413r

CIA memo hit for 'unfortunate' choice of words

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=stor...ligence_reforms

Bush Wants CIA to Offer Up 'Diverse Views'

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=stor..._weapons_report

CIA Worried Weapons Technology Spreading

http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/n...telligence_dc_6

Bush Orders Review of Covert Operations

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4036797.stm

Bush orders review of spy forces

http://www.cia.gov/cia/reports/721_reports/july_dec2003.htm

Attachment A
Unclassified Report to Congress on the Acquisition of Technology Relating to Weapons of Mass Destruction and Advanced Conventional Munitions
1 July through 31 December 2003

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commen...omment-opinions

Newcomers' Chokehold on the CIA

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/artic.../administration

Bush Orders the CIA To Hire More Spies
Goss Told to Build Up Other Staffs, Too

http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/n...telligence_dc_7

With Reforms Stalled, Bush Orders Steps by CIA, FBI

http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/n...curity_wmd_dc_1

CIA Says Iran, Qaeda Pursued Nuclear Weapons

http://www.channelnewsasia.com/stories/afp.../118770/1/.html

CIA warns 'dirty bomb' within Al-Qaeda's capabilities