From Larry Lambert over at Virtual Mirage:
(h/t Sam Fadis) Steve Witkoff called out CIA for providing him and Jared Kushner with completely faulty intelligence regarding Hamas and the negotiations to end the fighting in Gaza. And he did it on air on 60 Minutes.
The President himself is directly involved. Witkoff and Kushner are the President’s personal envoys. For CIA to get the intel picture completely wrong is a monumental failure and leads immediately to the next, and most important question: Why? Why was CIA so wide of the mark with its analysis? Two possibilities present themselves immediately. Either CIA’s intelligence was just that bad, or people in CIA and likely the broader Intelligence Community (IC) were deliberately feeding the President’s top men bad intel.
Today’s CIA quite frankly has little or no insight into the inner workings of groups like Hamas. That would require risk. That would require moxie. That would require leaving Northern Virginia and talking to foreigners. If you don’t want to risk it, you can take whatever intel the Israelis pass you on the subject and base your analysis on that. If the Israelis are telling the truth and have solid sources, you may be OK temporarily. If the Israelis, the guys who did not see a Hamas offensive building on the other side of a wall a couple of years ago, have bad intel, then we do too. Most alarming of all, of course, if the Israelis decide to lie to us for political reasons, we will not know it. We will be led around by the nose and steered in the wrong direction.
The Intelligence Community (in all its manifestations) has only one job. One. Provide truth to power. Clandestine activity (Covert Action) must stem from that, as does everything else. If you can’t provide the truth to power, you’re part of the problem, not part of the solution.
People within the IC are deliberately feeding the President and his key people bad intelligence. And, just as bad, they are refusing to pass on certain information to the policy makers in this administration. There remain people within the IC who oppose this President and his appointees and are using intelligence as a weapon to frustrate President Trump’s political objectives. They want him to fail. They don’t care about the consequences for American national security. They want to inflict political damage because they are laser-focused on putting a Democrat in the White House in 2028 who will guarantee the continued existence of the Deep State and prevent the American people from regaining control over the vast federal bureaucracy.
Since Trump sat down in the White House for the second time, there has been no real reorganization. No meaningful change of any kind has actually occurred. Director Ratcliffe sits atop an organization that remains structured essentially as John Brennan wanted and run by people who made rank and climbed the ladder under either Brennan or his surrogate, Gina Haspel. All of the people who thought it was appropriate to designate “crying spaces” where employees could retreat to compose themselves when Trump won in 2016 are still there. All the folks who looked the other way when the attack on the CIA base in Benghazi was blamed on a peaceful demonstration that got out of hand are still there. All the individuals who sat and watched while a slow-motion coup against Donald Trump went on year after year are still there, just in much more senior positions now.
I can only hope that President Trump and his leadership team are fully aware of all this (which I assume they are), and are doing something about it (of which I'm not so sure). One can't bring in complete outsiders to assume all intelligence agency leading positions without discarding literally generations worth of experience and insight. Outsiders simply can't have that depth of insight. However, if the existing leadership isn't using or providing that depth of insight, can we afford to keep them in place?
One has questions . . .
Peter
15 comments:
The CIA is, for the most part, worse than useless. I say this from personal, professional experience.
We have other people doing better work with far less drama, at a fraction of the budget.
Long ago I read the suggestion that CIA agents are extremely reluctant to work anywhere they may catch dysentery. I don't see how y'all can hope to manage a world-wide empire when you employ such cowards in key jobs.
The CIA/NSA/FBI etc. are ALL lying to us BIG TIME. And have been doing so for decades. They have their own agenda. And Freedom is NOT part of that agenda.
It is time to cut off all their money and fire the entire works, THEN reveal their names.
Hey Peter,
From what I have read, The "Church Commission" killed the CIA, it turned risk averse after that, To get the intel, you gotta have humint and the people in foggy bottom, langley, and the 5 sided puzzle palace rely on Sigint(Signal Intelligence), cleaner and you don't have to touch those nasty people like you would have to do with Humint(Human Intelligence), like original spycraft. And right now I have no faith in the intelligence community, remember the 51 intelligence officers that signed that letter saying that Hunter's laptop was "all the earmarks of a Russian disinformation campaign". They knew it was legit, but they wanted "their guy to win", so they betrayed their oath to country and LIED. So, no I don't believe a word they say.
This has been going on for a very long time. Remember how the CIA claimed that the Soviet Union was the world's 3rd largest economy the year before the Berlin Wall fell?
The only answer is to fire them all. If they're not doing what's required of the job, send them home. Shutter the agencies. The only thing worse than not having an intelligence agency is having one that seems to only pass on false information. I suspect their first order of business is to get dirt on every member of congress for blackmail. For job security, you know.
THIS. ALL THIS. !!!
And I recall that the Israeli IC was deeply involved in the protests against Netanyahu a few years ago, when he was trying to bring their courts under some reasonable control.
From the (few) reports I read from Israel, their Gaza border observation stations were ordered to stop reporting suspicious activity.
My suspicious nature reads this as having their IC inviting the attack, to sacrifice their own people to taint Netanyahu and remove him.
The Israeli government can not admit this, especially if true, as it would split the nation to know that their own government agents are traitors to their own people.
I think that the same concerns may apply here, in that if we had proof of the treasons committed by our IC, our .gov might collapse in the purge of our traitors.
John in Indy
The CIA has shown if the information they need doesn't exist, it's created for the current agenda. That concerns, if not terrifies, those that can do something about the problems associated with the organization. How to rectify that is not an easy task, and I don't think anyone with the power to change things has the cojones to do anything about it.
Fire them all. All of them have broken the oath they took to become spies.
Anyone else think that the CIA knew exactly where Osama Bin Ladin was during 2001-2009? And from 2009-2012, when, conveniently, Barky the Lightbringer got to add that to his 'credit' right before the election?
Yeah, the CIA has had issues since the Clinton years. Yes, before, too, but the Clinton Years were the true beginning of the fall of the US Intel Community.
Wasn't the CIA where skilled communists went post WW2? I think we see the results now.
Has the CIA ever told us the truth ? Have they ever done their job well ?
One book which describes the rot that set in a while ago is See No Evil by Robert Baer. He joined the CIA in the mid to late 70's and served for about 21 years, mainly in the near east (Lebanon, Iraq). He describes how the CIA increasingly relied on satellite photography and gave it greater credence than "boots on the ground eye witnesses" plus becoming increasingly politically correct and enforcing diversity hiring of people that had never been outside of the USA as "experts" on the various countries of interest.
It was published in 2002 and I very much doubt that the intervening 23 years have improved the situation.
Recommended.
Phil B
Is ICE the only government agency doing their job (besides the DOD) ?
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