Does The CIA Ever Tell Anyone In Government The Truth? About Anything?

Too bad she can't use it to smash up Langley and start over again

From polling data I've seen, those of us who are certain that the CIA assassinated JFK are almost as small a minority as those who identify themselves as members of the Republican Party-- 25% and 21% respectively. But even if you don't want to believe they'd actually kill an American president, you'd be foolish to believe that they're not an organization built on deceit and misdirection.

According to Russ Baker's latest book, Family of Secrets it's likely that the Watergate scandal was a CIA plot to removed Nixon! Take it for what it's worth-- judge for yourself-- but you may have noticed that in recent weeks they've tried to engineer a coup against House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Or maybe they were just firing a very loud warning shot over the bow of any Democrats who want to get too feisty that there will be no investigations or hearings that lead to any CIA personnel going to prison regardless of what crimes were committed. I'd say the message was received.

CQPolitics is about as vanilla and inoffensive a news source as you're going to find Inside-the-Beltway. Yesterday evening they featured a piece by Jeff Stein confirming-- from inside the secretive agency-- that the CIA lies to and misleads members of Congress as a matter of course. A 25 year veteran former deep-cover spy, who uses the name Ishmael Jones, and wrote the book The Human Factor: Inside the CIA's Dysfunctional Intelligence Culture, claims the CIA's congressional briefers "routinely" lie to members of Congress. He's no Pelosi fan and from reading his stuff I have to believe he's an extreme rightist. But, he does admit that its more likely than not that they lied to her.

Jones also charged that, contrary to beliefs that the agency has a political agenda, "In reality the CIA is loyal only to itself. As long as Mrs. Pelosi supported its bureaucratic lifestyle, it supported her, but when she attacked it, it fought back. The CIA may not be able to conduct efficient intelligence operations, but it knows how to survive."

Reports that CIA managers were outraged or demoralized by the water-boarding controversy are wrong, Jones also maintained. To the contrary, he said, they felt that revelations of their interrogators roughing up, or even torturing, detainees made them look tough.

"The interrogations controversy has served the CIA bureaucracy," Jones asserted. "A top goal of bureaucracy is to look busy, and whether one agrees with the interrogation methods or not, the impression given is that the CIA is both busy and aggressive."

Jones added: "It relishes this 'cowboy' image, and its greatest fear is that the taxpayer might figure out how little it actually is doing.

"Bans or restrictions on interrogations," he added, "would have the constructive effect of removing this smokescreen, this distraction, and redirecting focus to what exactly the CIA is doing to provide the foreign intelligence the president needs."

According to a review of "Jones'" book at ForeWord Magazine, the agent wasn't thrown out of the CIA "but was a highly regarded agent who resigned to write this book because he could no longer serve in this organization that had lost its sense of purpose and the capability to protect the United States from terrorist attacks." He sees the CIA as "a bloated, unresponsive bureaucracy that exists to serve itself and cannot fulfill its important intelligence-gathering role, which was the reason for its creation by President Harry Truman.