Philosophy.Com

The CIA as the canary in the coal mine

An interesting article by Thomas Powers in the New York Review of Books on the role of CIA within the US national security state and the newly forming US empire.

Powers says:

"For the broader world watching the unfolding drama of the war on terror.... we might say that the CIA serves in some ways as the canary in the coal mine—when it shows sign of stress, we know something is wrong either with intelligence collection or with the policies it is intended to support. It's always one or the other—the evidence is thin or missing, or it points to conclusions that meet resistance......What brings any student of intelligence to a kind of shocked halt is the fact that CIA analysts did not get anything right—every claim about Saddam's WMD was wrong—completely wrong, flatly wrong, wrong by a country mile."

Powers says that it is unlikely that the United States had ever been more comprehensively and significantly wrong about anything, ever, than it was in identifying the reasons for going to war in Iraq. He then asks why did the director of central intelligence, George Tenet, go on repeating the White House formula for a year as well—insisting that it was too soon to reach conclusions, that the Iraq Survey Group was busy in the field and something might still be found? His answeris that Tenet did this because:

"....the obvious explanation for Tenet's faithful echoing of the President's tactics of delay [is that] Tenet was protecting the President—not from foreign enemies abroad, but from political opponents at home. Why did Tenet do this? Because he was part of the President's team.....This is where we find ourselves now—the CIA under George Tenet gradually abandoned its pretense of objectivity and joined the President's claque for war, but Congress has not yet decided how to describe or recognize this fact, or what to do about it."

What does this tell us about the integrity of American intelligence? That the intelligence services have become part of the operational arm of the national security state.

The working climate of intellignece agencies is now one in which they are expected to produce a stream of "intelligence" handcrafted to support an government's view of the world, or of its progress in the war on terror. As Powers says of the US :

"The CIA is turning by slow degrees into an operational arm of the White House, not only doing or attempting to do what presidents ask, but one increasingly willing to play a team role, to describe the world as the President sees it, and to lend its authority to "intelligence" the President can use to carry along Congress and the public."

He leaves us with a question: "What should Congress and the people do about an intelligence service they cannot trust?" We can ask a similar question in Australia.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at December 27, 2004 10:40 PM | TrackBack