In my previous diary post I laid out facts pointing to CIA control of the media. Indistputable evidence from CIA documents, eyewitness accounts and the congressional record. Senate hearings on the matter in 1996 prove its existence even today, as of course nothing was done about it.
The CIA operates under the cover of being an intelligence gathering agency. This is not their only, and, some would say, not even their primary function:
McGehee soon returned to Langley, spending several years getting educated in the CIA's archives. He finally understood what communism meant to the communists, and realized that the Western view of communism was a fantasy to justify our violence against them. They were not trying to conquer the world. They sought freedom. For that crime, America murdered millions of them. McGehee retired after spending 25 years with the agency, accepting a career achievement medal so his future work could not be called that of a CIA employee with a failed career. He began his book's conclusion with:
"The CIA is not now nor has it ever been a central intelligence agency. It is the covert action arm of the President's foreign policy advisers. In that capacity it overthrows or supports foreign governments while reporting "intelligence" justifying those activities. (McGehee says he has never once seen a CIA official tell the truth to Congress. Instead comes a steady stream of lies. - ed.) It shapes its intelligence, even in such critical areas as Soviet nuclear weapon capability, to support presidential policy. Disinformation is a large part of its covert action responsibility, and the American people are the primary target of its lies.
"As noted in the Church Committee's final report, the Agency's task is to develop an international anti-communist ideology. The CIA then links every egalitarian (which means "all men are created equal" - ed.) political movement to the scourge of international communism. This then prepares the American people and many in the world community for the second stage, the destruction of those movements. For egalitarianism is the enemy and it must not be allowed to exist."
McGehee: Deadly Deceits
Interesting McGehee, an agent who developed a conscience in Vietnam and wrote about it in the seventies describes the very thing we see now in Iraq:
During the mid-1960s, communism was sweeping Southeast Asia. McGehee's job was saving Thai villages from communist insurgency. He viewed his career as a cross between "Peace Corps and missionary work." Building upon a British method used earlier in Thailand, McGehee developed an inexpensive method of intelligence gathering that identified communists and exposed their network. The strategy was partly intimidating the villagers through terror, such as holding a gun to a baby's head to get the mother to talk, yet was benign when compared to other "counterintelligence" methods of the time, among them torture and boiling suspected communists in oil.
The operation's goal was to make communists confess their "crimes," name their cohorts, return to the Thai government's fold and become "good peasants" again. Forgiveness was offered and given to those who talked, with escalating intimidation for those harder to crack. The Catholic Church successfully used a similar carrot-and-stick strategy during its Inquisition days. The Thailand strategy was effective and Machiavellian, something that McGehee crafted and believed in. It obtained a quality of intelligence the region had never seen before. It also reversed communist inroads. The Thai government's brute force response to "communist insurgency," backed by its U.S. sponsors, alienated the villagers, driving them into the communists' arms. McGehee's method was far more subtle and effective.
link above
but I digress ... The point here is not so much as to theorize about a conspiracy but to present fact. The CIA functions as something more than an intelligence gathering agency. The above quotes are provided to get you going. The research is easy to complete. Are we looking at failures in intelligence gathering and inter agency coordination, or are we looking at failed covert operations like we saw in Vietnam? Is the war on terror fueled by real concerns or by the creation of Manichean devil, like "communism?" Isn't it proper to ask these questions given the Historical fact of VIETNAM? The intelligence gathering cover story has been blown.
OK I promised something in the headline about WMD. Bush promised to the world over and over WMD. WMD was the cover story for war in Iraq, as 9-11 was for the invasion of Central Asia, an invasion that had been going covertly for years and most likely got too hot to handle? again see Vietnam. Now we know Bush is not a super genius, but, C'mon, don't you think he really expected to find the WMD? Do you really think he sent Joe Wilson to Niger to come back and destroy one of the major justifications for war? One that I believe Powell even asserted to the UN?
There was whistleblower reported by Al Martin in 2003:
From the Daily Times Monitor
http://educate-yourself.org/cn/triedtoplantwmds21mar04.shtml
March 21, 2004
According to a stunning report posted by a retired Navy Lt Commander and 28-year veteran of the DefenseDepartment (DoD), the Bush administration's assurance about finding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was based on a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) plan to "plant" WMDs inside the country. Nelda Rogers, the Pentagon whistleblower, claims the plan failed when the secret mission was mistakenly taken out by "friendly fire", the Environmentalists Against War report.
Nelda Rogers is a 28-year veteran debriefer for the DoD. She has become so concerned for her safety that she decided to tell the story about this latest CIA-military fiasco in Iraq. According to Al Martin Raw.com, "Ms Rogers is number two in the chain of command within this DoD special intelligence office. This is a ten-person debriefing unit within the central debriefing office for the Department of Defense."
The information that is being leaked out is information "obtained while she was in Germany heading up the debriefing of returning service personnel, involved in intelligence work in Iraq for the DoD and/or the CIA. "According to Ms Rogers, there was a covert military operation that took place both preceding and during the hostilities in Iraq," reports Al Martin Raw.com, an online subscriber-based news/analysis service which provides "Political, Economic and Financial Intelligence".
Al Martin is a retired Lt Commander (US Navy), the author of a memoir called "The Conspirators: Secrets of an Iran-Contra Insider," and is considered one of America's foremost experts on corporate and government fraud. Ms Rogers reports that this particular covert operation team was manned by former military personnel and "the unit was paid through the Department of Agriculture in order to hide it, which is also very commonplace".
According to Al Martin Raw.com, "the Agriculture Department has often been used as a paymaster on behalf of the CIA, DIA, NSA and others". According to the Al Martin Raw.com story, another aspect of Ms Rogers' report concerns a covert operation which was to locate the assets of Saddam Hussein and his family, including cash, gold bullion, jewelry and assorted valuable antiquities. The problem became evident when "the operation in Iraq involved 100 people, all of whom apparently are now dead, having succumbed to so-called 'friendly fire'. The scope of this operation included the penetration of the Central Bank of Iraq, other large commercial banks in Baghdad, the Iraqi National Museum and certain presidential palaces where monies and bullion were secreted."
Al Martin is kooky guy but he is who he says, and, he is saying quite a bit on his site.
Why do I post this kind of stuff? Am I whacko? Do I buy the Weekly World News? Am I Clinton's alien love child? No!
I just think we should face the problem so there can be a meaningful debate and decision. I don't like the fact that I am not allowed access to information my tax dollars paid for. If we all had been warned of the 9-11 attacks the alleged suspects wouldn't have made it past the sky caps at Logan. These operations were no secret to the Vietnamese peasants being burned alive, they knew what was happening, the American people did not. Sounds exactly like something we would expect from Stalinist Russia not the US of A.
I had to add these great quotes by Ashcroft:
“I will continue to maintain that Saddam Hussein aided Al Qaeda financially and materially despite the fact we now know he didn’t.”
-- John Ashcroft (2004)
“The administration categorically denies that it authorized the use of torture in Iraq, and I will refuse to release the Department of Justice’s letter of sanctioning the use of torture.”
-- John Ashcroft (2004)