Victor Davis Hanson: Culture of arrogance hampers CIA

The CIA needs to be dismantled and rebuilt from the ground up.

Maybe that's what General Hayden plans to do? Or, maybe, he plans to carve it into pieces and hand the pieces over to the other 15 or so intelligence organizations?

I second that. Too many CIA employees in positions of too much trust have agendas other than the mission of the agency.

But intelligence analysts should never undermine the policy of their elected governments, either through unlawful leaks or posing as in-the-know loud public critics privy to classified information.

I always assumed that this was the raison de etre for having an intelligence service in the first place.
I suppose that only made sense until the concept of treason and sedition became a useless historic artifact.

Moreover, the CIA is not the only agency which has degenerated into a liability rather than an asset; the premium foreign agency, the State Department, is equally rotten from the inside out. Ms. Rice is the only SOS in my experience (and I'm a lot older than I look) to act in her official capacity as if her first and foremost role is to represent her country, albeit somewhat lukewarmly.

Not being particularly interested in the Macchiavelian workings of government, I am not sure that our UN ambassador works under the State Department also, being a cabinet post and all, but here we have a different story, that in the last 40 years we have had some excellent professional representatives of the interests of the United States of America: Stevenson, Moynihan, Kirkpatric and now Bolton. Professionals all, and bearing the full weight of knowing what country the represent (and work for).

Yes, the CIA must be rebuilt from the ground up, but why?

At first, I thought that it was a simple question of left wing, anti-war conspirators out to undermine the administration - and so posted. But what if the problem is really a revolt against the neo-cons and the Israeli lobby? Hanson goes in that direction but abandons the chase.

March 22, 2005

Toward a Sensible Israel Policy

by Michael Scheuer

http://www.antiwar.com/orig/scheuer.php?articleid=5281

There is probably too much of a tie between State Department and academe. I know that when I contrast what I hear about Latin Anerica in Miami with what comes out of Washington, the government officials sound very bookish. Think Fitzpatrick, Albright, Rice all academics. If Condi succeeds with her Cornell type model and integrates some practical people into foreign missions that could change.

Take what the Army is doing in Afghanistan. Sending hundreds to the Defense Language School, hiring hundreds of local scouts/interps, running their own SF out in Indian territory, flying it's own air observation, buying out the enemy with cash or killing them. Where does the donut eaters of CIA fit in? They don't.

save

Victor Davis Hanson Ping !

Let me know if you want in or out.

Links: FR Index of his articles: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/keyword?k=victordavishanson
His website: http://victorhanson.com/ NRO archive: http://www.nationalreview.com/hanson/hanson-archive.asp

Im afraid I agree with you.

Paul Pillar, a national intelligence officer at the CIA from 2000 to 2005, publicly insisted that counter-terrorism should not be a matter of war. Indeed, he wrote prolifically in the middle of the ongoing Iraq war that it was all a colossal mistake.

Colossal mistake?......I don't think so

Saddam's chambers of horrors

By MARGARET WENTE

Toronto Globe and Mail Saturday, November 23, 2002
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1419920/posts

Abu Ghraib, 30 kilometres west of Baghdad, is Iraq's biggest prison. Until recently, it held perhaps 50,000 people, perhaps more. No one knows for sure. No one knows how many people were taken there through the years and never came out.

For a generation, Abu Ghraib was the centrepiece of Saddam Hussein's reign of torture and death. Yahya al-Jaiyashy is one of the survivors.

Mr. Jaiyashy is an animated, bearded man of 49 whose words can scarcely keep up with the torrent of his memories. Today he lives in Toronto with his second wife, Sahar. This week, he sat down with me to relate his story. With him were his wife, a lovely Iraqi woman in her mid-30s, and a friend, Haithem al-Hassan, who helped me with Mr. Jaiyashy's mixture of Arabic and rapid English.

"Nineteen seventy-seven was the first time I went to jail," he says. "I was not tortured that much."

He was in his mid-20s then, from an intellectual family that lived in a town south of Baghdad. He had been a student of Islamic history, language and religion in the holy city of Najaf, but was forced to quit his studies after he refused to join the ruling Ba'ath party. His ambition was to write books that would show how Islam could open itself up to modernism.

In Saddam's Iraq, this was a dangerous occupation, especially for a Shiite. Shia Muslims are the majority in Iraq, but Saddam and his inner circle are Sunni. Many Shiites were under suspicion as enemies of the state.

"My father was scared for me," says Mr. Jaiyashy. " 'You know how dangerous this regime is,' he told me. 'You know how many people they kill.' "

Mr. Jaiyashy continued his studies on his own. But, eventually, he was picked up, along with a dozen acquaintances who had been involved in political activity against the regime. They were sent to Abu Ghraib. The others did not get off as lightly as he did. One was killed by immersion into a vat of acid. Ten others, he recalls, were put into a room and torn apart by wild dogs. Several prominent religious leaders were also executed. One was a university dean, someone Mr. Jaiyashy remembers as "a great man." They drove a nail through his skull.

For three decades, the most vicious war Saddam has waged has been the one against his own people. Iraq's most devastating weapon of mass destruction is Saddam himself. And the most powerful case for regime change is their suffering.

Sometimes, it is almost impossible to believe the accounts of people who survived Saddam's chamber of horrors. They seem like twisted nightmares, or perhaps crude propaganda. But there are too many survivors who have escaped Iraq, too many credible witnesses. And Mr. Jaiyashy's story, horrible as it is, is not unusual.

Saddam personally enjoyed inflicting torture in the early years of his career, and he has modelled his police state after that of his hero, Stalin. According to Kenneth Pollack, a leading U.S. expert on Iraq, the regime employs as many as half a million people in its various intelligence, security and police organizations. Hundreds of thousands of others serve as informants. Neighbour is encouraged to inform on neighbour, children on their parents. Saddam has made Iraq into a self-policing totalitarian state, where everyone is afraid of everybody else.

"Being in Iraq is like creeping around inside someone else's migraine," says veteran BBC correspondent John Sweeney. "The fear is so omnipresent, you could almost eat it."

To Stalin's methods of arbitrary arrests and forced confessions, Saddam has added an element of sadism: the torture of children to extract information from their parents.

In northern Iraq -- the only place in the country where people can speak relatively freely -- Mr. Sweeney interviewed several people who had direct experience of child torture. He also met one of the victims -- a four-year-old girl, the daughter of a man who had worked for Saddam's psychopathic son Uday. When the man fell under suspicion, he fled to the Kurdish safe haven in the north. The police came for his wife and tortured her to reveal his whereabouts; when she didn't break, they took his daughter and crushed her feet. She was 2 then. Today, she wears metal braces on her legs, and can only hobble.

"This is a regime that will gouge out the eyes of children to force confessions from their parents and grandparents," writes Mr. Pollack in his new book, The Threatening Storm. "This is a regime that will hold a nursing baby at arm's length from its mother and allow the child to starve to death to force the mother to confess. This is a regime that will burn a person's limbs off to force him to confess or comply. This is a regime that will slowly lower its victims into huge vats of acid. . . .

"This is a regime that practises systematic rape against the female victims. This is a regime that will drag in a man's wife, daughter or other female relative and repeatedly rape her in front of him." And if he has fled the country, it will send him the video.

After nearly two years in prison, Mr. Jaiyashy was released and sent to do military service in the north. Then the security police decided to round up the followers of one of the executed clerics. In 1980, Mr. Jaiyashy was arrested again, along with 20 friends, and taken to a military prison. He was interrogated about criticisms he was supposed to have made of the regime, and urged to sign a confession. During one session, his wrists were tied to a ceiling fan. Then they turned on the fan. Then they added weights onto his body and did it again. Then somebody climbed on him to add more weight. "It was 20 minutes, but it seemed like 20 years," he recalls.

He was beaten with a water hose filled with stones. When he passed out, he was shocked back into consciousness with an electric cable. They hung him by his legs, pulled out a fingernail with pliers, and drove an electric drill through his foot.

Mr. Jaiyashy took off his right shoe and sock to show me his foot. It is grotesquely mutilated, with a huge swelling over the arch. There is an Amnesty International report on human-rights abuses in Iraq with a photo of a mutilated foot that looks identical to his. The baby finger on his left hand is also mutilated.

He didn't sign the confession. He knew that, if he did, they would eventually kill him.

They put him in solitary confinement, in a cell measuring two metres by two and a half, without windows or light. Every few weeks, they would bring him the confession again, but he refused to sign. He stayed there for a year.

In 1981, he was sent to trial, where he persuaded a sympathetic judge not to impose the death sentence. He got 10 years instead, and was sent back to Abu Ghraib. "They put me in a cell with 50 people. It was three and a half by three and a half metres. Some stood, some sat. They took turns."

There was a small window in the cell, with a view of a tree. It was the only living thing the prisoners could see. The tree was cut down. There were informants in the cells and, every morning, guards would come and take someone and beat him till he died. "This is your breakfast!" they would say.

Mr. Jaiyashy spent the next six years in that cell. His parents were told he was dead.

Abu Ghraib contained many intellectuals and professional people. Among them was the scientist Hussein Shahristani, a University of Toronto alumnus who became a leading nuclear scientist in Iraq. He was imprisoned after he refused to work on Saddam's nuclear program. He spent 10 years in Abu Ghraib, most of them in solitary confinement, until he escaped in 1991.

Saddam has reduced his people to abject poverty. He wiped out families, villages, cities and cultures, and drove four million people into exile. He killed between 100,000 and 200,000 Kurds. He killed as many as 300,000 Shiites in the uprising after the Persian Gulf war. He killed or displaced 200,000 of the 250,000 marsh Arabs who had created a unique, centuries-old culture in the south. He drained the marshes, an environmental treasure, and turned them into a desert.

In a recent Frontline documentary, a woman who fled Iraq recounted how she and others had been forced to witness the public beheadings of 15 women who had been rounded up for prostitution and other crimes against the state. One of the women was a doctor who had been misreported as speaking against the regime. "They put her head in a trash can," she said.

In 1987, Mr. Jaiyashy and a thousand other inmates were transferred to an outdoor prison camp. There, they were allowed a visit with their relatives, so long as they said nothing of their lives in prison. Mr. Jaiyashy's parents came, hoping he might still be alive. He remembers the day all the families came. "There was so much crying. We called it the crying day."

In 1989, he was finally released from prison. Then came the gulf war and, after that, the uprising, which he joined. It was quickly crushed. He fled with 150,000 refugees toward the Saudi border. But the Saudis didn't want them. "They are Wahhabis," he says. "They consider the Shia as infidels." The United Nations set up a refugee camp, where Mr. Jaiyashy spent the next six years. He began to paint and write again.

Finally, he was accepted as an immigrant to Canada. He arrived in Toronto in 1996, and is now a Canadian citizen.

Mr. Jaiyashy has a deep sense of gratitude toward his adoptive country. Canada, he says, has given him back his freedom and his dignity. He paints prolifically, and has taken courses at the art college, and is the author of three plays about the Saddam regime. He makes his living stocking shelves in a fabric store. "I'm a porter," he says. "No problem. I'm happy."

But Saddam's spies are everywhere. After one of his plays was produced here, his father was imprisoned. His first wife and three children are still in Iraq. He hasn't seen them since his youngest, now 12, was a baby. He talks with them on the phone from time to time, but it is very dangerous. One of his brothers is in Jordan, another still in Iraq.

Sahar, his second wife, is soft-spoken. She covers her head and dresses modestly, without makeup. Her face is unlined. She arrived in Canada with her two daughters the same year as Mr. Jaiyashy; they were introduced by friends.

She, too, has a story. I learned only the smallest part of it. "I was a widow," she told me. "My husband was a doctor in Iraq. He wanted to continue his education and have a specialty. But they didn't allow him. He deserted the military service to continue his education on his own. They beat him till he died."

Today, her daughters are in high school and she teaches at a daycare centre. Her new husband pushed her to study hard here. "ESL, ESL," she says affectionately.

Like many Iraqis, they are conflicted about the prospect of war. They want Saddam gone. But they do not want more harm inflicted on their country. "I want Saddam gone -- only him," says Mr. Jaiyashy.

A few weeks ago, Saddam threw open the doors of Abu Ghraib and freed the prisoners there. Many families rejoiced, and many others, who did not find their loved ones, mounted a brief, unheard-of protest against the regime. The prison is a ghost camp now. Nothing is left but piles of human excrement that cake the razor wire.

Saddam's Iraq is a rebuke to anyone who may doubt that absolute evil dwells among us. No one has put it better than Mr. Sweeney, the BBC reporter. "When I hear the word Iraq, I hear a tortured child screaming."

I don't know what Mr. Pilar's specific critique of the Iraq operation is. I do know a number of non-leftists who are contemptuously dismissive of US action in Iraq. These people range from blue collar workers to self employed professionals and businessmen (and two retired Army officers). Their critique basically is 'who cares what Arabs do to each other.' Some do recognize that there might have been some national interest in getting rid of Saddam's regime. Their approach is 'find another general to be the new tyrant. Put him in office and remind him if he annoys us what happened to his predecessor. Then leave and let him introduce the sort of order Arabs understand and we can be out of the wretched country.' Underlying all of this is a basic belief that 'Arabs will revert to form as soon as we leave. Some new thug or religious fanatic will emerge from the chaos and install a new dictatorship. We are squandering huge amounts of tax payer dollars and getting Americans killed and maimed for a fool's errand. '

I think all these ex-CIA morons have watched too many James Bond and Oliver Stone movies and think they have saved the world dozens of times and think themselves above any law as long as they speak "truth to power".

The CIA needs to be dismantled and rebuilt from the ground up.

Absolutely. The CIA, FBI, military, LEOs, all have a sacred trust. Because of the special powers granted to them, it is necessary for them to remain impartial in politics.

Once an organization has been corrupted by politics, it is impossible to uncorrupt it.

They should relocate the CIA to a red state, like Texas or Oklahoma. Massive attrition would be immediate, and the new hires would probably be people who actually think the U.S. deserves to win the War on Terror.