CIA Is Becoming Wedded
To The Bush Administration

By William Finucane & Michael Bradley

As Americans, we may be watching our nation make itself a pariah state without knowing that it’s happening, and in the process we may be re-creating a governmental agency that can turn on us as quickly as any other perceived enemy.

America is – right this minute – building a super intelligence program, and if the effort is successful it could permanently undermine the separation of powers between the executive, legislative and judicial branches. This could render the Constitution moot.

After shuddering at the absolute lack of real material in the run up on the Iraq war, and the hijacking of jet planes on Sept. 11, 2001, Americans are apparently now willing to put forth an effort to put some true teeth in their intelligence gathering.

But what might have happened differently if President George W. Bush had the truth about lack of Iraqi weapons, one wonders? Would the outcome be different? The answer of course will never be known, save to Mr. Bush and his inner circle.

The current problem, however, is that the nation’s leadership is willing to put its patriotism behind a black curtain, and so far the public is accepting this position. Nothing will be known.

Americans are being made to feel comfortable that instead of 15 separate intelligence systems, each with its own chain of command, they will now have a chief intelligence officer who gets all the information from the agencies, sifts it all out and gives it to the president.

Secretly.

This was, of course, the hope of the original creators of the CIA, among them the Dulles brothers, Alan and John Foster, who had worked tirelessly behind the post WWII scenes in the hope that Thomas E. Dewey would oust Harry Truman and be elected president in 1948. They had great expectations for the new agency, which they envisioned becoming an intelligence overlord essentially overnight, stripping away the long-standing and entrenched power of the military intelligence agencies.

These Ivy League alumni of the WWII Office of Strategic Services not only wanted to continue the clandestine manipulations of the war years, but they wanted to control the flow of secret information to the president.

Of course, they were frustrated by the Truman upset of 1948, but they quickly regrouped and the Dulles brothers, in particular, made themselves valuable to Pres. Truman. In the end, Truman accepted the omnibus bill that developed the U.S. Air Force from the U.S. Army Air Force and created the Defense Department from the WWII War Department, plus, as a tagline, created a Central Intelligence Agency.

But Truman only accepted the new CIA as a collating agency, where information from the other established intelligence agencies would be organized and presented to him as the chief executive. The Dulles brothers ingratiated themselves with Truman in order to pursue their goals, but they and their associates ultimately had to wait patiently until Dwight D. Eisenhower was elected president in 1952, after which they were able to achieve their operation goal.

The goal was quickly attained. One of "Ike’s" first Executive Orders made the CIA operational, and Alan Dulles became its director, with John Foster as Secretary of State. In the eight years that followed, America undermined Latin American governments on the behalf of United Fruit, and was involved in the Guatemala upheaval as well as in Greek politics, and it was instrumental in the removal of the publicly chosen head of the Iranian government in the mid-1950’s, replacing him with the Shah.

There were many other similar actions by the CIA during that period, all of which stood to change, within little more than a decade, the world’s perception of the United States. America went from being the acclaimed WWII defender of democracy against fascist totalitarianism to a Superpower to be feared as much as its nemesis, Russia, only for different reasons. The climax of the Dulles brothers machinations came with the ill-fated Bay of Pigs invasion against Cuba.

John F. Kennedy stood up and took the blame for that bloody fiasco, but it wasn’t his imbroglio; politically it belonged wholly to Pres. Eisenhower and his direct CIA liaison, then Vice President Richard M. Nixon, but administratively it belonged to CIA Director Alan Dulles and his brother, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles.

Pres. Kennedy severely reigned in the CIA after that, and gained the undying enmity of its top executives and many of its operations officers and their right-wing political supporters. After Kennedy’s was assassinated, Lyndon Johnson gave the CIA greater freedom, and it proceeded to again show what could be accomplished when government money and power can be used with secrecy and little accountability.

Air America was but one company that acted as a private commercial enterprise but was a wholly owned subsidiary of the CIA. But perhaps even more dramatically, the CIA became enmeshed with Richard Nixon when he became president after Johnson. The Watergate revelations were so stark that even Congress, loath as its members have shown themselves to be in curtailing the secret agency, finally acted to limit the CIA’s capabilities and to enforce oversight. And even then, in the early 1970’s, this would not have happened if the public outcry over revelations of the CIA’s activities inside the United States had not been so strong.

So until now, the dream of the Dulles brothers and their associates for an unrestricted and all-powerful CIA, as the dominant intelligence agency with full operational capacity, has been hard to fully attain. But in 2005 it appears that George W. Bush is going to make the Dulles brother’s dream a reality.

Opportunities for this ‘super intelligence chief,’ otherwise known as the current CIA Director Porter Goss, to go wrong are immeasurable. He can be a presidential boot licker, passing on purely what the White House wants, and unquestioningly taking on tasks for the executive branch. He could also be the ultimate repository of all top-secret information in America, becoming a virtually untouchable official rivaling the president in power, and making J. Edgar Hoover’s attempt to cloak himself in political invincibility seem like the efforts of an amateur.

Even his capture could be disaster, so his person will have to be guarded religiously, perhaps even after retirement.

What does this sound like?

Secret police comes to mind; a secret empire with its own leaders and guards and its own right to do whatever it takes to reach the final goal – destroying terrorists, or whomever or whatever else is considered in the American interest of the moment, or what is in the interests of the entrenched and powerful, all to be done in the name of the American public, and all of which will be decided upon outside of public discourse.

Of course there are those who will say this is already the case, but that is not so; there has been oversight, albeit lax in recent years under Presidents Reagan, Bush and Bush the second. But what the current Mr. Bush seems to be moving towards is different; he appears to be preparing to make the CIA self-perpetuating. He has much insight to draw upon in this effort, since his father, former president George H.W. Bush was involved with the CIA for many years, and also served as its director.

There seems to be little question that such CIA dominance will eventually happen. It will take a few years, but at this point it appears inevitable. There does not seem to be any force capable of thwarting the Bush Administration’s approach.

All the pieces are in place: self-righteousness, secrecy, secret budgets, secret plans, information fed to a single man or woman, no disclosure to the Legislative or Judicial branches of government, all to save the ‘Homeland.’

What makes the Bush Administration approach different is the way the change is being conducted. This is not the old school of seasoned intelligence agents being asked to make a change. It is a new crop of people at the top. And they are being backed up by hundreds of other new people coming into the service.

This means that the historical background of oversight and restraint that has been in place since the 1970’s, and only loosened but not eliminated during the Reagan/Bush years, will be completely absent; techniques will be newly forged for the youthful recruits. And that forging will likely take the form of a holy-war version for them, a new crusade, where the given ends may justify whatever means.

Defeat terrorists first, worry about consequences later.

This sort of thing is showing up already.

The Central Intelligence Agency is flatly refusing to give up any information about prisoners captured in Afghanistan and interned at the United States Naval Base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. What they use to justify their refusal is a 1970s law allowing billionaire Howard Hughes to recover a Soviet submarine with one of his deep-sea machines. A bit of 007 James Bond with a dash of real life mega-money and – poof – an instant law to keep all the torture techniques and unsavory rendition policies tightly wrapped up and out of public view and discussion.

It’s deliciously nefarious.

But it should not, of course, work as policy in a democracy.

Other agencies have been asked about various facets of this material and have answered: the Pentagon and the Federal Bureau of Investigations being two who responded. American Civil Liberties Union has called for this material in its court case relating to the detainees.

Back in the 1970s the CIA was allowed to draw a curtain of secrecy over the Soviet submarine retrieval effort and its study. It could neither say whether there was a study or not. Same for any photographs or written recounts; just can’t say.

In answer to the new Freedom of Information Act being pressed by the civil liberties people, the CIA said: "CIA … asserts that is not able to confirm or deny whether it has any records relating to its purported involvement in these specific activities related to the treatment, death, or rendition of detainees in US custody because to do so would tend to reveal classified information and intelligence sources and methods that are protected from disclosure."

This is masterful doubletalk.

Basically it says the CIA doesn’t want Americans and others to know what laws have been broken, so it simply shuts up.

It is, says the CIA, the law: no secrets may be revealed.

Well, maybe it is, but maybe it isn’t.

CIA is using this Howard Hughes defense, called the Glomar response, because the Glomar Explorer was Howard’s vessel that could do the job of retrieving a Russian nuclear submarine. Because the mission was so sensitive, the court allowed details of the Glomar Explorer activities to stay secret.

But that is hardly the equal of asking the CIA about its techniques in the war in Afghanistan. How the judiciary branch of government handles the executive branch of government in this argument may be crucial.

The results might have an effect on how the executive branch has to handle classified documents in the future; it is unfortunately possible that the judiciary, currently dominated by conservatives, might turn over all the power regarding state secrets to the executive branch, which can likely be trusted to keep all the information for itself.

In the latter scenario, it is reasonable to assume that would end America’s basic trust in government, because it will no longer be a three-part structure – executive, judicial and legislative branches. And Americans will no longer be free citizens.

Ridiculous?

No, not at all.

Being an American means – fundamentally – that one has three equal branches of government to rely upon. A balance of powers.

Bush has tested this concept already, and failed.

Executive orders would have allowed America-captured prisoners be jailed in some other country; one where torture would be allowed because the judiciary would not be involved. This is euphemistically called ‘rendition.’

No, said the courts here, the executive branch cannot do that, even though it has been done recently. And so it is clear that the actions of the judicial branch are crucial here; the balance could be maintained.

The law and its application is the last hope against an executive branch that would usurp so much power. The law must cut through the mysteries of doubletalk, fear mongering and gobbledygook surrounding the CIA and its policies and procedures.

Straight talk is what Americans want: very few Americans want to see an all-powerful, super-secret clandestine agency attached solely to the executive branch of government. This is a formula for Constitutional disaster, yet it seems to be what Mr. Bush desires.

January 12, 2005