Intelligence Reform and the Death of the US Republic

Alternet today has a must-read article by the very well-informed Chalmers Johnson*.

The article looks at the current debate over intelligence reform in relation to previous actions and attitudes. A telling sign of the times is that the infamous US "military-industrial complex" ( a term beloved by "conspiracy theorists" of the 1960s) has now become - in Johnson's carelly chosen words - the "military-industrial-congressional complex" of the 21st Century. And it is no longer a conspiracy theory, it is stark, screaming reality. Johnson thinks that Bush's call for intelligence reform along the lines recommended by the 9/11 commission was just pretense:

The president and the Speaker of the House both said they favored enactment of the proposed legislation, but many experienced observers thought it was all Grand Kabuki by the Republican Party, intended to make it appear that the White House favored reform while ensuring that reform did not actually occur. In killing the reform bill, the Pentagon unambiguously displayed the raw political power of the military-industrial-congressional complex. During October 2004, Gen. Richard B. Myers, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, without the public approval of any civilian leader of the Defense Department, wrote to Congressman Hunter expressing his support for sabotaging change.

Johnson also has some revealing details about Porter Goss, Bush's new CIA head:

Goss represented the 14th district of Florida for some 16 years in the House of Representatives, but before that, between 1962 and 1971, he worked in the CIA's Directorate of Operations (DO). He was stationed primarily in Latin America, and rumors persist that he left the agency under a cloud. In 1995, he was appointed to the House's Intelligence Oversight Committee and in 1997 became its chairman. There is no evidence that he did anything at all in this position, including investigating the intelligence lapses that preceded 9/11 or the failure of the CIA to have placed a single spy anywhere within Saddam Hussein's regime...

Goss is a highly political bureaucrat, who raised eyebrows when he gave speeches earlier this year attacking John Kerry for slashing intelligence funding without mentioning that, in 1995, he himself had co-sponsored a measure calling for firing 20 percent of all CIA personnel over five years. Goss has also dismissed the efforts to find out who in the Bush administration identified, and so outed, undercover CIA operative Valerie Plame – wife of former ambassador Joseph Wilson who had embarrassed the administration over its Iraqi nuclear claims – to the press as "wild and unsubstantiated allegations."

Johnson claims that Goss has now been "ordered to make it appear that the agency misled the President (rather than the other way round, as actually happened). He is then supposed to shake up what he calls a "dysfunctional" organization." But it is hardly a good time to be playing at power-grabbing politics, as Johnson concludes:

With several wars underway (in Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel-Palestine, Colombia, Kashmir, Sudan, and Chechnya, to name only the most obvious), Iran and North Korea on the cusp of becoming nuclear powers, a looming possibility of a global flight from the dollar, the emergence of China as an economic powerhouse, and the polar ice caps melting, this is not exactly a good time to be blinding ourselves. The only groups who will profit from a crippling of what is left of the CIA's early warning and analytic capabilities will be the Bush-Cheney White House and Rumsfeld's Pentagon.
The present sorry chapter in the rise and fall of the CIA reflects trends in the U.S. that are bolstering an "imperial presidency" and its handmaiden, militarism. Although the CIA was created to help inform presidents about threats to the country, it is clear that the President and his top officials no longer want or need its intelligence functions...

The Agency may have become little more than a speed-bump for an imperial president who also dominates the Congress and the courts, but it is still part of the checks and balances of power within the executive branch of our government that make the U.S. a democratic republic and protect us from an imperial usurpation of power. With the re-election of President Bush and the appointment of Porter Goss to bring the CIA under White House control, it becomes increasingly hard to see how the republic will survive.

The main value in Johnson's article, I think, it the powerful reminder of just how corrupt and incompetent the CIA has been over the years (not to mention those charged with overseeing it). For example:

When Congressman Charlie Wilson (D-TX) became chairman of the House's Intelligence Oversight Committee, he wrote to his friends at the CIA, who were then secretly enlarging the supply of weapons to the mujahideen in Afghanistan, "Well, gentlemen, the fox is in the hen house. Do whatever you like."

There is no reason to imagine that the present incumbents are any better. In fact, there are a good number of reasons to believe they are far worse. Someone will pay the consequences for this, one day - will it the the Bush cartel or the US people, or suffering citizens around the globe dying every day to keep the "American Dream" alive?

* Chalmers Johnson's latest books Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire (Metropolitan, 2000) and The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (Metropolitan, 2004) are the first two volumes in a trilogy on American imperial policies. The final volume is now being written. Between 1967 and 1973 Johnson served as a consultant to the CIA's Office of National Estimates.