Dismantling the Empire

I believe that this is where we stand today: the CIA has failed badly, and it would be an important step toward a restoration of the checks and balances within our political system simply to abolish it. Some observers argue that this would be an inadequate remedy because what the government now ostentatiously calls “the U.S. Intelligence Community”—complete with its own website—is composed of sixteen discrete and competitive intelligence organizations ready to step into the CIA’s shoes. This, however, is a misunderstanding. Most of the members of the so-called intelligence community are bureaucratic appendages of well-established departments or belong to extremely technical units whose functions have nothing at all to do with either espionage or cloak-and-dagger adventures.

The sixteen entities include the intelligence organizations of each military service—the Air Force, Army, Coast Guard, Marine Corps, and Navy—and the Defense Intelligence Agency, which reflect interservice rivalries more than national needs or interests; the departments of Energy, Homeland Security, State, Treasury, and Drug Enforcement Administration, as well as the FBI and the National Security Agency; and the units devoted to satellites and reconnaissance (National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, National Reconnaissance Office). The only one of these units that could conceivably compete with the CIA is the one that I recommend to replace it: the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR). Interestingly enough, it had by far the best record of any U.S. intelligence entity in analyzing Iraq under Saddam Hussein and estimating what was likely to happen if we pursued the Bush administration’s misconceived scheme of invading his country. Its work was, of course, largely ignored by the Bush-Cheney White House.

Weiner does not cover every single aspect of the record of the CIA, but his book is one of the best possible places for a serious citizen to begin to understand the depths to which our government has sunk. It also brings home the lesson that an incompetent or unscrupulous intelligence agency can be as great a threat to national security as not having one at all.

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* In November 2009, an Italian court convicted twenty-two CIA operatives and a U.S. Air Force colonel on kidnapping charges related to the snatching of Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, a radical Egyptian imam also known as Abu Omar, off a Milan street in 2003. The Americans were all tried in absentia and each received a five-year prison term, with the exception of former Milan CIA station chief Robert Seldon Lady, who was sentenced to eight years for leading the kidnapping operation.

** After pleading guilty to wire fraud and acknowledging that he had conspired to swindle the government, Foggo was, in February 2009, sentenced to thirty-seven months in prison.

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AN IMPERIALIST COMEDY

January 6, 2008

I have some personal knowledge of congressmen like Charlie Wilson (D–2nd District, Texas, 1973–96) because, for close to twenty years, my representative in the 50th Congressional District of California was Republican Randy “Duke” Cunningham, now serving an eight-and-a-half-year prison sentence for soliciting and receiving bribes from defense contractors. Wilson and Cunningham held exactly the same plummy committee assignments in the House of Representatives—the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee plus the Intelligence Oversight Committee—from which they could dole out large sums of public money with little or no input from their colleagues or constituents.

Both men flagrantly abused their positions—but with radically different consequences. Cunningham went to jail because he was too stupid to know how to game the system by retiring and becoming a lobbyist, whereas Wilson received the Central Intelligence Agency Clandestine Service’s first “honored colleague” award ever given to an outsider and went on to become a $360,000 per annum lobbyist for Pakistan.

In a secret ceremony at CIA headquarters on June 9, 1993, James Woolsey, Bill Clinton’s first director of central intelligence and one of the agency’s least competent chiefs in its checkered history, said: “The defeat and breakup of the Soviet empire is one of the great events of world history. There were many heroes in this battle, but to Charlie Wilson must go a special recognition.” One important part of that recognition, studiously avoided by the CIA and most subsequent American writers on the subject, is that Wilson’s activities in Afghanistan led directly to a chain of blowback that culminated in the attacks of September 11, 2001, and to the United States’ current status as the most widely hated nation on earth.