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The Panetta Choice For CIA - 
Politicizing Intelligence
By Joel Skousen
Editor - World Affairs Brief 
1-9-9

 

Obama's choice of former Clinton Chief of Staff Leon Panetta for CIA chief is raising eyebrows all over Washington. The Obama team is claiming they want an outsider who can clean up the increasingly tainted reputation of the intelligence community, covering for and involved in torture, and thereby split apart by numerous factions and loyalties. Frankly, it is only natural that those tasked with mapping out threats to a nation are going to disagree. But the real problem is suppression of truth and falsification of intelligence for political purposes. This has been going on for years since the purge of CIA chief spook James Angleton in 1975, who was caught in the middle of various factions, some loyal to the dark side, other's loyal to the President's political appointees, and some loyal to actual US interests.   The latter are the ones who eventually get purged as they saw too much obstruction of truth and the falsification of data and sources justifying more foreign intervention. Anti-Communists like Angleton also saw too much but intelligence professionals were being pressured to be silent over US black operations that were aiding and abetting Communist takeovers around the world, silent over the growing Soviet threat, silent over the transfer of sensitive technology to Russia, and silent over the arming of terrorists that would eventually be let loose on America under the guiding hand of CIA and Mossad black operations specialists. This is all still going on, but we are only given side shows like this "Cleanup of the CIA" to divert our attention.   The NSA Spy bill which, in essence, granted the NSA authority to legally do what they have been illegally doing for years is just the tip of the iceberg. The Bourne Identity trilogy of films are correct in portraying the CIA and NSA capability to access and interface with all communications and surveillance cameras not only in the US but in every allied country in the world. In the movie the actual operators never question whether what they were asked to do was legal. They knew not to ask. These employees are total yes-men and yes-women to the government. They have been taught never to question. All the hand-wringing about illegalities was relegated to the higher ups--but that was pure Hollywood fiction. These are the ones who know the PTB above them will keep them from prosecution.   The technology of tracing and tracking people that was shown in the film was also fictional. It can't and happen as fast as shown--but they are working hard on making that a reality someday. All of the interfaces you saw with communications and cameras is real and is used all the time--without any legal authority until now. For decades it has operated under the "color of law" (meaning unlawful use of law) which states, "We, the real Powers That Be (PTB) can do anything we want that we can get away with." And, of course, they control all the key judges and Congressmen that could ever threaten them, so, there is no limit to what they can get away with.   As Nat Hentoff wrote in the latter part of December, "Thanks to Bush and Obama, the National Security Agency now knows more about you. Barack Obama will be in charge of the biggest domestic and international spying operation in history. Its prime engine is the National Security Agency (NSA)--located and guarded at Fort Meade, Maryland, about 10 miles northeast of Washington, D.C. A brief glimpse of its ever-expanding capacity was provided on October 26 by The Baltimore Sun's national security correspondent, David Wood: 'The NSA's colossal Cray supercomputer, code-named the 'Black Widow,' scans millions of domestic and international phone calls and e-mails every hour. . . . The Black Widow, performing hundreds of trillions of calculations per second, searches through and reassembles key words and patterns, across many languages.   "In July, George W. Bush signed into law the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, which gives the NSA even more power to look for patterns that suggest terrorism links in Americans' telephone and Internet communications. There's a lot more to come that we don't know about. Yet. In The Shadow Factory, James Bamford quotes Bush's Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell as saying that this wiretapping program was and is 'only one program of many highly secret programs approved by Bush following the attacks on 9/11'. McConnell also said of the NSA's nonstop wiretapping: 'This is the only aspect of those various activities whose existence has officially been acknowledged.'"   Reuters reports on the Obama pick from the establishment perspective. "President-elect Barack Obama has chosen former White House chief of staff Leon Panetta to lead the CIA, which has been widely criticized for harsh interrogation of terrorism suspects, Democratic officials said on Monday... Panetta has relatively little experience in national security matters. He is best known for imposing order on President Bill Clinton's White House during his 1994-1997 stint as chief of staff and taming budget deficits while there and during his prior 16-year tenure in Congress.   "He was a member of the Iraq Study Group, a bipartisan commission that was charged with assessing a way to end the Iraq war [always a telltale sign that this is a government apologist]... Panetta would succeed Michael Hayden, who has been criticized by some Democrats and human rights groups for his defense of Bush administration counterterrorism tactics [i.e. torture and "Extraordinary Rendition"]. Hayden has sought to restore stability at the spy agency [or at least the appearance thereof].   "Obama has vowed to 'put a clear end to torture' and restore a balance between security and constitutional protections [Pure rhetoric. The President only knows what he is told, and the CIA won't be admit to further torture even though it does continue]. Panetta's choice could appease some liberal activists who have said that Obama's other picks for key national-security posts are too hawkish and insufficiently antiwar [I'm not so sure. A lot of the anti-war Democrats are already skeptical of Obama's verbal commitments]. Sources say Obama has named retired Navy Adm. Dennis Blair to be the top U.S. intelligence official, who would oversee the CIA and other arms of the U.S. intelligence apparatus."   The choice of Blair is telling because he is a globalist who would actually be capable of running the CIA under the nominal leadership of Panetta. I think Panetta is there to manage the final output of the intelligence and make sure that Obama only gets what the globalist want him to have--to justify further intervention based on manufactured or provoked threats.   Laura Rozen's sources back up my analysis. "Early reaction to the news today that President-Elect Obama plans to name former congressman and Clinton White House chief of staff Leon Panetta to be his CIA director was greeted by intelligence watchers in town with something approaching mystification. 'Panetta???' came one e-mail. Panetta doesn't have an intelligence background. The latest word from some who had been informally advising the Obama campaign on intelligence matters the past few days was that the Obama people were going to let expected Director of National Intelligence nominee retired Adm. Dennis Blair have a big hand in picking the CIA director (and take responsibility for the decision).   "The Obama people, it was said, were inclined to pick someone 'not political' [Panetta is hardly 'not political' except in the sense that he is an outsider as to the CIA's internal turf battles] in order to avoid some of the unhappiness of, say, the Porter Goss period [Porter Goss was an insider within one of the factions of the CIA and was sent in to clean out the defectors who weren't following Cheney's political orders]. And given how the Obama team was hammered by the left for considering former senior intelligence official John Brennan to be CIA director [linked to covering for torture], Obama would be disinclined to pick someone closely associated with the intelligence controversies of the recent Bush-Tenet era. In the end, only that latter hunch proved correct.   "A former senior CIA manager said the message of the Panetta appointment was clear: 'The message is, 'I don't want to hear anything out of the CIA. Make it go away. No scandals. Keep it quiet,' the former officer told me. 'They put over there a guy who is a political loyalist, who will keep everything nice and quiet, but who won't know a good piece of intelligence from a sh--ty piece of intelligence, and wouldn't know a good intelligence officer' from a bad one.'" Well said.   World Affairs Brief - Commentary And Insights On A Troubled World   Copyright Joel Skousen. Partial quotations with attribution permitted.   Cite source as Joel Skousen's World Affairs Brief  http://www.worldaffairsbrief.com