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| Want to know why the CIA was broken? Read this. |
| 2005-07-26 |
| Meet Larry Johnson ON SATURDAY, former CIA analyst Larry Johnson gave the Democratic party's weekly radio address and excoriated President Bush for not having fired Karl Rove and others in connection with the leak of CIA officer Valerie Plame's name to the press. This followed Johnson's appearance before a panel of House and Senate Democrats on Friday, where he made similar criticisms of the president. On July 10, 2001--two months before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon--Johnson wrote an op-ed for the New York Times ("The Declining Terrorist Threat") in which he argued that Americans were "bedeviled by fantasies about terrorism" and, in truth, had "little to fear" from terrorism. And, in turn, he rebuked his former colleagues in the national security bureaucracy for using the "fiction" of the terrorist threat to pump up their budgets. According to Johnson, Americans had "tended to make Osama bin Laden sort of a superman in Muslim garb," when in reality he is "more of a symptom of a problem" than a looming threat. And while bin Laden "would like to kill Americans . . . wanting to is different from being able to, having the full capabilities in place." By Johnson's lights, "Osama bin Laden . . . has not been a very effective organizer or leader. He talks a great game." The Democratic party wants to use Larry Johnson as a seemingly safe mouthpiece to attack to the president. But, in doing so, they have adopted someone who fits perfectly the profile of the pre-9/11 CIA: see no evil, hear no evil. As documented in report after report, the CIA's directorate of operations had no assets in al Qaeda and CIA's analysts were asleep at the switch when it came to analyzing the scale of the threat posed by bin Laden. Its guys like this that came to the forefront during the Bush-I administration to s minor extend, and really came into ownership during Clinton's time in office. Triangulators, Empire builders. Political inspired, who bend the truth to their Ivy-league 0ld-boy liberal preconcetptions. Morons like the one shown here were the ones who effectively held the voice of the CIA and all intel during that timespan. |
| Posted by:OldSpook |
| #8 Pity, 3dc. Had you taken the bimbo up on her offer, you might've been able to avoid a lot of the mistakes of the last 20 years. Sorry. Just reflecting on my career - at 56 years old! Oh, well..... |
| Posted by: Bobby 2005-07-26 21:31 |
| #7 I still remember that interview in the early 80s at a ASM convention in St Louis... The job did not seem kosher. Too much money. Too thin a job story. Sounded like a patsy honeypot. At the cocktail interview room the lady kept going on about the benefits of working for the company. Red flags were flying in front of the mixed drinks... Me: "You keep refering to THE COMPANY. Are you, perhaps, refering to your firm in the same way that Philip Agee did in his book INSIDE THE COMPANY?" She: "Let's go in the other room and talk." She talks I ask questions but think... "damn their cover is thin and this woman has a BIG MOUTH and is STUPID. I wouldn't trust my life to her having any say in it! No damn way." Me: I am sorry MZ. I am just not ready to go in that career direction. Thanks for your time. |
| Posted by: 3dc 2005-07-26 21:03 |
| #6 The thing about intelligence capability, infrastructure, policy, personnel, is that it takes years to get into the hole that we find ourselves in. And it will take years to get us out of the hole that we dug ourselves into. But it has to start somewhere. OldSpook and CyberSarge: has it started yet? I have not seen major butt kicking so far. It is the same thing with cleaning up the Dept. of State. Has Condi made any progress. Bureaucratic inertia is a tough one to solve, with civil service types experts at outlasting administrations. Hey, I wanna know. |
| Posted by: Alaska Paul 2005-07-26 19:43 |
| #5 RIGHT ON PAPPY! You get it! |
| Posted by: Cyber Sarge 2005-07-26 18:56 |
| #4 OS, something you said kicked off a memory. Mid 80s I was a Grad student in Public Management (never completed)at an Ivy league school. Very left of center bunch. A few were going the NGO route (though it wasn't called that back then). Most were going into federal service of one form or another. Some (law degree)were going to Justice. A percentage were going to CIA. That didn't raise any eyebrows with the students or faculty. As somebody put it: if you want to change something, you do it from within. |
| Posted by: Pappy 2005-07-26 18:06 |
| #3 This attitude started during the Carter Administration and here is the fruition of those efforts. I worked in the community during the Reagan years and there I feared what would happen after a couple of decades when the people I worked with became the managers. It’s telling that all of the yappy counter-administration people are all retired. No criticism while in the employ of the government and no acceptance of culpability during their service. Johnson is a prime example of everything that went wrong in the intelligence community. These people relied EXCLUSIVELY on pictures taken from space to make critical policy/tactical decisions, such as where Iraq would store it’s WMDs and when they transported them. Where terrorists were and how many are in each camp. Their template was the Soviet Union and how they stored and moved equipment and personnel. Nobody ever told Mr. Johnson and rest of the idiots that game had changed and so had the rules. That is why (and how) terrorists were allowed to attack us on several different occasions with no warning or prevention. We are just damn lucky they didn’t hit us with a WMD or even a Nuke because Mr. Johnson and his ilk NEVER would have predicted, much less be able to stop the attack. But they sure as hell would be around to point the blame at someone else. Bush would do well to hand out a lot of pink slips and start over at the CIA. |
| Posted by: Cyber Sarge 2005-07-26 17:59 |
| #2 I feel the same way spook. The lack of on the ground intelligance assests in the 90s really hurt us. All the kewl orbital pictures in the world don't give us the info on two terrorists in a bazaar talking about blowing something up. The tea seller, who is a paid CIA informat can. But, the CIA cut the budget for the informant, since they are expensive, both in dollars and political cost if the tea seller is a slave dealer too and it gets put in front of a congressional jury. |
| Posted by: mmurray821 2005-07-26 15:25 |
| #1 And now you know why the CIA failed in the late 90's and early part of the 21st century: Idiots like Scheuer and Johnson were listned to, and those with contradictory positions were ignored, especially if they were talking about ramping up spending to improve surveillance capacity on terrorists. Especially if they were talking operations, not just desk-bound analysist or lobbing cruise missles. Especially if they were not being "all cultures are relative" Politically Correct - and instead seeing and saying the truth, revealing the SW-Asia/ME Islamist culture for what it is: crude, violent and disfunctional, filled with virulent hate of the west and the US. You want "Speaking the truth to power"? Look no furhter than the analysts whose opinions were discarded as not politically correct by people like Johnson. And the Dems run to these morons - and worse- the MSDM gives them an uncritical standing as "legit", when their own public words shows them to be incompetent boobs! When will the MSM uphold objective, fair, public reporting and editing standards on ALL sides, and become truly reporters of ALL the facts, instead of a mouthpiece for the left in the nation? Until they do, the Republic is in great danger - because the MSM is NOT doing its job: being an fair and impartial reporter of truth, not purveor of opinion and slanted news they are now. |
| Posted by: OldSpook 2005-07-26 14:43 |