Posted on 11/29/2005 5:40:01 AM PST by jmc1969
WASHINGTON - CIA Director Porter Goss, saying his agency struggles to penetrate terrorist sanctuaries overseas, insists that "we know more than we're able to say publicly" about Osama bin Laden and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
In a rare television interview, Goss defended the CIA's track record, which has been tarnished by allegations ranging from erroneous or hyped intelligence leading to the war in Iraq to reports the agency runs secret prisons abroad for terrorism suspects and uses harsh interrogation techniques amounting to torture.
"What we do does not come close to torture," Goss said, though he declined to elaborate on the agency's interrogation techniques.
Al Qaida leaders Bin Laden and al-Zarqawi haven't been found "primarily because they don't want us to find them and they're going to great lengths to make sure we don't find them," Goss said in the interview broadcast Tuesday on ABC's "Good Morning America." "We're applying a lot of efforts to find out where they are." He insisted the CIA knows "a good deal more" about the men "than we're able to say publicly."
Goss said one of the hardest parts of the CIA's mission is to "penetrate into some of the sanctuary areas" - whether harsh terrain or "at the heart of a city, in a ghetto or slum area where people don't regularly go."
(Excerpt) Read more at kentucky.com ...
Like the restaurants no one goes to because they're too crowded?
Definite truth here -
I like what he says.
McCain is wrong - again - about torture. Call his office and tell them this is a dumb bill.
um... he doesn't say anything.
He needs to clean out his desk and leave.
" They also spend billions of dollars for which they are virtually unaccountable."
They are held accountable by Congress, which is as it should be. We do need to put better people in Congress, but that in itself is not a problem with the CIA.
"Above all, the CIA does not believe the American people, who employ them, have any right to know what they are doing. They act as if they are above being questioned."
Ok, from what do you deduct this insight?
The CIA is an intelligence agency. By nature they have to be secretive to protect their sources and to be able to find out information. They cannot be transparent with the public.
"For an agency who can spot dust on a grain of sand In the Gobi Desert from 200 miles in space, and listen in on the conversation of a yak-fat salesman in Ulan Bat or talking to his broker in Miami Beach, they have been monumentally wrong too many times."
You apparently know very little about our satalite survielence capabilities. We can't see every part of the world at the same time. We have a very limited number of satalites and their paths across the sky are well known. Our enemies know when they can be seen by them and when they cannot. We can change the orbits of those satalites slightly, but is uses fuel of which the satalites have a finite amount, and the satalites are too few to be dedicated to a single task, so changing their trajectory screws up a lot of different ongoing efforts.
We could use more satalites, but our real weakness is our lack of human intelligence gathering. After the cold war the first President Bush did some serious cutbacks in our intelligence spending.
Clinton followed those cuts with even more drastic cuts on top of them, and at the same time that administration enacted laws and regulations restricting our intelligence gathering.
The problems with our intelligence gathering became painfully obvious when we bombed the Chineese embasy in Kosovo. However, there were many other examples of how poor our intelligence was in that war, but nothing was done to fix the problem.
Now we're fighting a war in a different region. Our intelligence gathering is bad in areas where they speak languages our intelligence community is more familiar with, in Arab countries it's even worse.
Building up human intelligence will take many years, and it will be hard to tell if we are being successful at it or not.
"In the words of a long-forgotten British statesman, "You have been here far too long for any good you might do, for God's sake go.""
And what would you replace them with? How would you suggest we do things better?
There are definately people in the CIA that have been there too long and are part of the problem. However, the basic infrastructure itself isn't the problem.
...the hardest parts of the CIA's mission is to "penetrate into some of the sanctuary areas"
by sanctuary areas he means Iran and Syria...
I may be a little more jaded than most,but i simply don't trust the CIA.How can i be expected to believe anything i hear from an agency that's infiltrated(if not controled)by liberal elites aka socialists?
Your summation is absolutely spot-on! Congrats.
I would add only one thing to Bush 41's blame sheet - that with his defense cutbacks, he allowed to be killed expert systems we had used during the Cold War - thinking we'd never need them again. What short-sighted thinking.
Now that ASW is being brought back to life, they are putting our RFP's to create a system they killed 15 years ago. Have any idea what that system is going to cost when a defense contractor like TRW gets hold of it? Instead of the Million that it originally cost (and that includes not only the software, the hardware, but all of the salaries to develop, test, deploy and train), I'm sure it's qabillions these days, and the darn thing won't do half of what the system originally did.
"I would add only one thing to Bush 41's blame sheet - that with his defense cutbacks, he allowed to be killed expert systems we had used during the Cold War - thinking we'd never need them again. What short-sighted thinking."
Bush 41, like his son inherited an economy that was having some trouble.
Reagan won the cold war by building up military might in a way the USSR couldn't match. That effort left us with a very powerful but expensive military. The deficit was growing, and the public was loundly against allowing it to grow.
Bush made promises to not raise taxes. He made a lot of compramises to try and keep that promise with shrinking revenues due to the recession.
In the end he was not able to get congress enough and he supported raising taxes to avoid increasing the national debt. His inability to cut the government down to size when our economy was weak was the main issue that cost him reelection in my opinion. It drove a lot of conservative to Perot and let Clinton win the election with a minority even though the country had a clear conservative majority.
Clinton then rode the long term results of trickle-down economic policies to popularity and reelection despite tax increases and corruption.
Bush 41 made his share of mistakes, however I have a hard time blaming him for our intelligence failures. He was director of the CIA from 1976-77, and the CIA seems to do it's job well under his leadership.
He had hard budget choices to make. Long-sighted thinking is expensive, and he seems to concentrate on trying to keep critical people rather than programs that could be rebuilt when there was greater need.
"by sanctuary areas he means Iran and Syria..."
You forgot Saudi Arabia and Yemen....
Sorry to say this after commending you on an earlier post but you are dead wrong about Bush 41 and intelligence.
He got into trouble even more over the deficit in 1988-89 when he was supporting shipping in the straits of Oman, all of which US Naval support was unfunded.
First in an effort to stop the bleeding, the US Navy cut their "independent contractor" testing on major programs, allowing development programmers to do their own "testing" - an idea which has been proven wrong over and over again, every time it's tried.
Second, the budgetary constraints allowed the killing off of numerous expert systems I alluded to above, and sorry - I cannot get more specific than that as I am under security guidelines (despite what the Wash comPost prints) to the day I die.
It's true that the Military spending got even tighter under Slick Willy, but it had already started under Bush 41.
"First in an effort to stop the bleeding, the US Navy cut their "independent contractor" testing on major programs, allowing development programmers to do their own "testing" - an idea which has been proven wrong over and over again, every time it's tried."
Yes, the Navy pulled a boneheaded move when they were told to cut their costs.
However, costs did need to be cut. We did not need to sustain our military at that level. No administration can prevent beaucracies as large as the navy from doing some stupid things when they are told to cut their budgets.
I don't know the details of the independent contractor testing to which you're referring. However in my experience the Navy doesn't understand half of the things they specify, they're usually fed a good number by people trying to use bogus specifications to limit their competition.
They rarely have any clue how to throughly test products and therefore wouldn't know if a independent contractor tested the products well.
It doesn't really matter if the company developing a product performs tests or if a third party performs them. It's always going to come down to a good, testable specification. If the specification isn't good, then the Navy isn't going to get something that performs as they want it to perform and they're going to have to pay to have it fixed.
In my experience there are a number of contractors that have made a lot of money delivering what the government has asked for, and then charging them large sums of money to make it do what they wanted.
"Second, the budgetary constraints allowed the killing off of numerous expert systems I alluded to above, and sorry - I cannot get more specific than that as I am under security guidelines (despite what the Wash comPost prints) to the day I die."
Budgetary constraints allowed the killing off of the job I had interviewed for and was told I would be hired for as soon as the budget was approved. I had planned on working for the Air Force, though there would have been a bit of a wait before I would have been productive while they processed the ts clearance, but instead I got to join the ranks of the unemployed for a while.
I don't know if this expert system you describe was vital to our security, or merely one of many useful programs that simply had to go in order to get government spending a bit more under control.
Bush made some mistakes to be sure, but I don't think it's reasonable to fault him for all the problems that resulted from the military having to get used to working with less.
Maybe I'd feel differently if I knew the details about these "expert systems" you're talking about.
I watched the people I know that were working for the military show some concern about the budget cuts under Bush and how it placed some limitations on what they could do.
They were much, much more upset about the cuts under Clinton.
However, all I can really do is judge things by the reactions of other people who knew more than I did at the time.
as for McCain and torture...help me out here...I always thought we had those nifty drugs that made people spill their guts without all the beatings. What am I missing?
"we know more than we're able to say"
more like "We say more than we're able to know."
Remember Geoge "it's a slam dunk" Tenent? They need to clean out the senior management hierarchy at the CIA, so the younger guys and gals don't get disillusioned. Freaks like that Robert Clarke fella'.
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