Monday, November 30, 2009

Obama's Weak Report Card on the CIA

By Melvin A. Goodman
November 30, 2009

President Obama has had nearly a year to make necessary changes in the intelligence community and the Central Intelligence Agency.

Read on.
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5 comments:

Anonymous said...

you start off like you have something of value to say and after I waste my time reading it you say nothing. you point out what people did, not what god intended. my suggestion to you is as you suggested to those coming to the table, is that you both read and more importantly study your bible. then trash your myopic politically correct opinion.

Mon Nov 30, 01:17:00 PM 2009
Anonymous said...

President Obama has reversed the efforts of the Bush administration to weaken the external oversight responsibilities of the President's Intelligence Advisory Board (PIAB) and the Intelligence Oversight Board (IOB), which are designed to ensure that the intelligence agencies obey federal laws and follow presidential directives.

What about this:

Rockefeller created some 230 public-benefit authorities like the Urban Development Corporation. They were often used to issue bonds in order to avoid the requirement of a vote of the people for the issuance of a bond; such authority-issued bonds bore higher interest than if they had been issued directly by the state. The state budget went from $2.04 billion in 1959-60 to $8.8 billion in his last year, 1973-74. “Rockefeller sought and obtained eight tax increases during his fifteen years in office.”[41] “During his administration, the tax burden rose to a higher level than in any other state, and the incidence of taxation shifted, with a greater share being borne by the individual taxpayer.”

Despite an inability to hide his personal disdain for Richard Nixon, Rockefeller campaigned for Nixon in both 1968 and 1972. He admired Nixon's tough stands in Vietnam and Cambodia—shaped by National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger, who originally had served as Rockefeller's foreign policy adviser. Nixon appointed Rockefeller to serve on the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board to oversee CIA activities. Meanwhile, Rockefeller's own politics were shifting toward the right, partly to make peace with conservative Republicans who had vilified him, and partly in response to the so-called "conservative backlash" of the late 1960s.

Mon Nov 30, 09:42:00 PM 2009
Anonymous said...

Some board.

And this:

• Most of President Clinton's first term cabinet officers were CFR members including Secretary of State, Deputy Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense, National Security Advisor, Deputy National Security Advisor, CIA Director, Chairman of the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, Secretary of Treasury, Deputy Secretary of the Treasury, Secretary of Health and Human Services, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Secretary of the Interior, Under Secretary for Political Affairs, Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, Aid Coordinator to the Commonwealth of Independent States, Deputy Director, Office of Management and Budget, Chairman, Council of Economic Advisors, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations (Madeleine Albright who was responsible for foreign policy legislation during the Carter years and was Director of the world-government-promoting Atlantic Council, now Secretary of State under Clinton.) (Wardner, op. cit., pp. 51-52.)



Really INDEPENDENT.

Mon Nov 30, 09:43:00 PM 2009
Anonymous said...

Then there's this:

The wealthy have always used many methods to accumulate wealth, but it was not until the mid-1970s that these methods coalesced into a superbly organized, cohesive and efficient machine. After 1975, it became greater than the sum of its parts, a smooth flowing organization of advocacy groups, lobbyists, think tanks, conservative foundations, and PR firms that hurtled the richest 1 percent into the stratosphere.
The origins of this machine, interestingly enough, can be traced back to the CIA. This is not to say the machine is a formal CIA operation, complete with code name and signed documents. (Although such evidence may yet surface — and previously unthinkable domestic operations such as MK-ULTRA, CHAOS and MOCKINGBIRD show this to be a distinct possibility.) But what we do know already indicts the CIA strongly enough. Its principle creators were Irving Kristol, Paul Weyrich, William Simon, Richard Mellon Scaife, Frank Shakespeare, William F. Buckley, Jr., the Rockefeller family, and more. Almost all the machine's creators had CIA backgrounds.
During the 1970s, these men would take the propaganda and operational techniques they had learned in the Cold War and apply them to the Class War. Therefore it is no surprise that the American version of the machine bears an uncanny resemblance to the foreign versions designed to fight communism. The CIA's expert and comprehensive organization of the business class would succeed beyond their wildest dreams. In 1975, the richest 1 percent owned 22 percent of America’s wealth. By 1992, they would nearly double that, to 42 percent — the highest level of inequality in the 20th century.
How did this alliance start? The CIA has always recruited the nation’s elite: millionaire businessmen, Wall Street brokers, members of the national news media, and Ivy League scholars. During World War II, General "Wild Bill" Donovan became chief of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner of the CIA. Donovan recruited so exclusively from the nation’s rich and powerful that members eventually came to joke that "OSS" stood for "Oh, so social!"
Another early elite was Allen Dulles, who served as Director of the CIA from 1953 to 1961. Dulles was a senior partner at the Wall Street firm of Sullivan and Cromwell, which represented the Rockefeller empire and other mammoth trusts, corporations and cartels. He was also a board member of the J. Henry Schroeder Bank, with offices in Wall Street, London, Zurich and Hamburg. His financial interests across the world would become a conflict of interest when he became head of the CIA. Like Donavan, he would recruit exclusively from society’s elite.
1 of 20 11/24/09 4:31 PM
The Origins of the Overclass http://www.huppi.com/kangaroo/L-overclass.html
By the 1950s, the CIA had riddled the nation’s businesses, media and universities with tens of thousands of part-time, on-call operatives. Their employment with the agency took a variety of forms, which included:
Leaving one's profession to work for the CIA in a formal, official capacity. Staying in one's profession, using the job as cover for CIA activity. This undercover activity could be full-time, part-time, or on-call. Staying in one's profession, occasionally passing along information useful to the CIA. Passing through the revolving door that has always existed between the agency and the business world.

Mon Nov 30, 09:44:00 PM 2009
Anonymous said...

Historically, the CIA and society’s elite have been one and the same people. This means that their interests and goals are one and the same as well. Perhaps the most frequent description of the intelligence community is the "old boy network," where members socialize, talk shop, conduct business and tap each other for favors well outside the formal halls of government.
Many common traits made it inevitable that the CIA and Corporate America would become allies. Both share an intense dislike of democracy, and feel they should be liberated from democratic regulations and oversight. Both share a culture of secrecy, either hiding their actions from the American public or lying about them to present the best public image. And both are in a perfect position to help each other.
How? International businesses give CIA agents cover, secret funding, top-quality resources and important contacts in foreign lands. In return, the CIA gives corporations billion-dollar federal contracts (for spy planes, satellites and other hi-tech spycraft). Businessmen also enjoy the romantic thrill of participating in spy operations. The CIA also gives businesses a certain amount of protection and privacy from the media and government watchdogs, under the guise of "national security." Finally, the CIA helps American corporations remain dominant in foreign markets, by overthrowing governments hostile to unregulated capitalism and installing puppet regimes whose policies favor American corporations at the expense of their people.
The CIA’s alliance with the elite turned out to be an unholy one. Each enabled the other to rise above the law. Indeed, a review of the CIA’s history is one of such crime and atrocity that no one can reasonably defend it, even in the name of anticommunism. Before reviewing this alliance in detail, it is useful to know the CIA’s history of atrocity first.


As to the religious nut-job who posted before me, I just hope he doesn't own a gun but I'm pretty sure he does.

Mon Nov 30, 09:44:00 PM 2009

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