Senator Who Helped Tie CIA’s Hands Now Castigating Agency for Intelligence Failures

New Jersey Senator Robert Torricelli, who is calling for an investigation of the CIA to pinpoint the responsibility for the agency's failure to predict the Sept. 11 disasters, was one of those directly responsible for that failure.

In an arrogant display of unmitigated gall, Torricelli told CNN that he wants to set up a special committee to learn just what went wrong with the CIA, when it was his own actions that helped emasculate the agency and thus guarantee future intelligence failures.

"It's not clear to me that unless we take a look at what went wrong and how our systems failed, we're going to succeed in preventing any future attacks," he told CNN.

What went wrong was the gutting of the CIA's ability to recruit reliable undercover agents in the field, and that inability was partly the result of Torricelli's meddling in the CIA's affairs.

As Newsmax.com's Washington correspondent Wes Vernon has reported, Torricelli led congressional efforts in the mid-1990s that handcuffed the CIA's abilities to recruit spies - a key policy that helped allow the attacks of Sept. 11 to take place with no intelligence warnings.

Vernon wrote that current and former CIA operatives say Clinton administration policies which forbade the CIA from recruiting known terrorists and other criminals left the U.S. government bereft of all intelligence about such terrorist groups.

In 1995 Robert Torricelli, D-N.J., then a member of the House of Representatives, made secrets public at the behest of left-wing activist Bianca Jagger, his girlfriend at the time, according to Newark Star-Ledger columnist Paul Mulshine in the January/February issue of Heterodoxy.

Mulshine's article showed how Torricelli's action in giving away the name of a CIA source in Guatemala was based not on fact, but on a conspiracy theory of "the loony left," as Heterodoxy later characterized it.

In its 1997 report, the House Intelligence Committee had this to say about the antics of Torricelli, by then a senator:

"None of the allegations raised by Rep. Torricelli in the March 22, 1995 letter to the president [Clinton] or subsequent public statements concerning the involvement of the CIA in the DeVine and Bamaca deaths in Guatemala have proved true."

Still, Torricelli's efforts paid off with the Clinton administration, which moved to ban the use of spies or the recruitment of spies that had any involvement with criminals or terrorists.

It was about the time of this well-publicized incident that the CIA's slide into a deteriorated human intelligence capability accelerated.

If the senator, now under investigation for alleged bribery schemes, wants to know what caused the intelligence lapses he has only to look in the mirror to find one of the prime culprits.

No, Hidy dear, the elimination or casterating of the CIA began many years ago. Even before the communist wall came down between the east and the west. The very intense effort to eliminate the CIA became evident during the conflict in Nicaragua, when some of the democRATS wanted the sandinistas (communists) to win over the country and eliminate the democratic form of government.

During the 90s a fervent effort began in earnest to do the same to the FBI. X42's administration began sending FBI people to Russia to train Russians in the ways of the FBI.

If my memory is correct, I think the CIA was to operate and investigate for us outside the borders of the US and the FBI inside our borders. There has been something about the FBI, during WWII, whereby the FBI was unoficially investigating in So. America.

If a single senator can, all by himself, overturn all the careful efforts of our spy network, then our spy network is not worth preserving.

He had lots of help evidently. They were over there making 'diversity quilts'!

I very much respect your work as CIA Director(George Tenet), and the concerns expressed in this letter are certainly not a reflection on your distinguished leadership or that of your predecessors. By word and by deed, you have demonstrated a welcome commitment to fighting bias within the CIA, including your initiative to institute a program of sensitivity training for CIA employees. If a problem exists anywhere within the CIA, I am confident you will take the necessary steps to address it. (letter by Mr. Abraham Foxman, Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, 13 April 1999)

Mr. Foxman has recognized these failings in the agency only because the CIA is now willing to pay the ADL for the organization's "sensitivity training."

According to Mr. Sher, the people at the CIA who "ruined the career in government of a promising attorney" don't need sensitivity training. "They need to learn to follow the law," said Mr. Sher. "Until Tenet resolves the Ciralsky case, everything else is window dressing." Change the Environment

While Mr. Foxman acknowledged that the ADL will receive funds from the CIA for the training program, he said the agency's participation in the program would help change the environment that permitted anti-Semitism to fester.

At CIA, Gay Pride Comes In From the Cold
Washington Post, June 9, 2000
By Vernon Loeb, Washington Post Staff Writer

While the terrorists and their sponsors were plotting to hijack airliners and crash them into Manhattan skyscrapers and the Pentagon, senior CIA officials were compelling analysts and operations officers to attend sensitivity-training classes and sew diversity quilts. That is a fact.

A current CIA manager, who requested anonymity, tells Insight that intelligence professionals are forced to attend sensitivity-training classes and do role-playing skits to conform to politically correct social themes. Another CIA official adds, “The management wasted countless thousands of hours by making all of us sit through workshops to make politically correct diversity quilts.” Pieces of fabric were distributed to CIA employees on which they were instructed to sew, draw or glue art, photographs and slogans reflecting “diversity” themes dictated during mandatory sensitivity seminars. “Can you imagine being a manager and having your staff say, ‘Sorry, I need to take off an hour to work on my diversity quilt?’ It just scalds me.” He estimates that the quilting workshops and seminars cost the CIA more than 20,000 hours of employee time. The diversity quilts are on display inside CIA headquarters.

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