Mel Goodman, afternoon remarks, July 22nd, 2005.

[reprehensor]

(Mods, this is my original transcript from a Congressional Briefing in the Public Domain, AFAIK, posting in full. -r.)

Mel Goodman, a fomer CIA analyst, is a co-author of "Bush League Diplomacy: How the Neoconservatives Are Putting the World at Risk", and is a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy.

Unofficial transcript of Mel Goodman’s afternoon statement at the July 22nd Congressional Briefing: The 9/11 Commission Report One Year Later: A Citizens’ Response – Did They Get It Right?

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This morning I argued that the 9/11 Commission was constructed basically for failure, so it should be no surprise that I also believe that the intelligence reforms are not only failures, but extremely counter-productive in any attempt to reform the intelligence community.

And I think basically, if you look at the approach that the 9/11 Commission took to look at organizations and structures and budget and oversight, they were destined to miss the real failures, which were personal failings… bureaucratic cowardice, and the lack of any accountability.

So all I really wanna do is march through the 6 or 7 reforms that the Commission agreed on, try to describe what was wrong with those reforms, and then get into the 6 or 7 points that I think need to be considered as genuine intelligence reform if we’re ever going to get the problem of intelligence, which now costs this country over $40 billion a year, we spend more than the entire world on intelligence matters.

The first reform obviously was the creation of a Director of National Intelligence. I’m not going to get into the major problem of the DNI because Ray McGovern is going to discuss that from the terms of politicization of intelligence. But, I just wanna say, that if you wanted to politicize intelligence, on any sensitive issue, I can’t think of a better way to do it, than to place the DNI inside the Executive Branch.

And I don’t want to talk a lot about John Negroponte, but given his history in Nicaragua and Honduras, and the cover-ups of the rapes and the murders that took place, and we know about the cover-ups, this was certainly a poor man to turn to if we’re gonna try to really tell truth to power, which is the job of the DNI.

So you’ve taken a step that is going to be vastly expensive, vastly disruptive, and we’ve already seen the kinds of problems it’s created in the intelligence community. This problem is further worsened by the fact that John Negroponte is on record as saying that he believes that intelligence is a service function, and that the job of intelligence is to “meet consumer demands”.

Well, anyone who believes that is halfway on the road to politicization.

The second reform was to weaken the role of the CIA, and the Director of Central Intelligence. Now, granted, the CIA has been a major problem in American National Security Policy for the past 30 or 40 years. And it clearly needs change. But I think we have to remember what Harry Truman kept in mind, that you do need a Central Intelligence Agency, outside the policy process, outside the political process, that can provide objective, and balanced information and intelligence assessments to policy makers and particularly to the White House and to the Congress.

By weakening the CIA, you’re eventually going to turn the CIA into nothing but a collection agency. That would be human intelligence, the so-called ‘humint’ issue. Because step-by-step what we have done is gradually taken away the CIA’s capabilities in Signals Intelligence in order of battle, and Military Intelligence in satellite imagery. And the important thing about that, (and I’ll address this later), is that all of these issues and all of these areas have been given over lock, stock and barrel to the Pentagon. So what you really have is the military’s control of the intelligence community.

If there is one institution in town that controls this $40 billion institution, it is the Pentagon. And something has to be done about that, and the 9/11 Commission didn’t even touch that problem.

The third reform that was addressed by the 9/11 Commission was the incentive for sharing intelligence. If the President of the United States wanted intelligence shared, all he had to do was bring in the major actors, the principals of all of these agencies, and lay it out on how intelligence should be shared, and if that isn’t done, then heads should roll.

This is not a hard thing to accomplish. But this has never been done because there has never been any real interest in sharing intelligence.

Secret intelligence is power to the intelligence community, and the FBI has not shared its sensitive sources and the NSA has not shared its sensitive intercepts. During the whole build-up to 9/11, one of the problems was they shared summaries of their communications that were intercepted but never full text assessments of what they intercepted.

So, of course intelligence has to be shared, all of the agencies of the intelligence community must see this intelligence, but this is something that the President could do very quickly.

The next reform I wanna discuss is the creation of a National Counter-Terrorism Center. Which a lot of people feel is a useful reform. Frankly, that’s a reform that worries me, because… in looking at the characteristics of a National Security State… the politicization of intelligence, and using intelligence to go to war is certainly a characteristic of a National Security State… if you… look at the role of the DNI and the power he has now over FBI domestic intelligence collection, and look at the role of the National Counter-Terrorism Center, which has joint operational planning in the security area, we really have the kind of joint operational structure that is not far from MI5, the very intelligence institution in Britain, that I think most members of Congress do not want to create in the United States.

So I think one of the things that needs to be debated in this country, are we introducing an MI5-type organization into the political process, and the intelligence process, through the reforms of the 9/11 Commission?

The fourth reform dealt with funding and public accountability. Now, this is an important reform. The Church Committee and the Pike Committee over 30 years ago called for an openly declassified figure for intelligence. To have a secret figure for intelligence violates the Constitution, you have to make a public accounting of funds.

But this had nothing really to do with the 9/11 disaster. The important issue about funding is the amount of money being spent by the intelligence community, and by the various Homeland Security initiatives. We have a Pentagon that is now spending over $420 billion dollars a year, Homeland Security is spending $40 billion a year, intelligence is spending over $40 billion a year, George Bush alone has doubled the CIA budget during his time in office and the public has no way of offering any assessment on any of these issues because a lot of these numbers are secret numbers.

So, it had nothing to do with 9/11, but this is a very important area, but there’s no sign whatsoever that this is a reform that’s being observed any other way but in the breach.

Finally, another problem that the 9/11 Commission talked about that had nothing to do with 9/11 but would be important is, we need to get back to a genuine oversight process. This is where the Congress has let down the people of the United States. The only way we have to get a handle on intelligence activities is through the Senate and the House Intelligence Committees.

Now the 9/11 Commission called for a joint Senate and House, a blue-ribbon commission that would clearly be non-partisan, which is what we need. The Senate would probably not allow that, and I’m not even sure the House favors it, but until we get back to a rigorous oversight process, there is no way for citizens to have a knowledgeable, informed way of offering opinions about the intelligence community.

And finally, the last reform which was totally ignored by the intelligence community and probably for the right reasons, was the idea of taking all of the paramilitary capabilities of the CIA, and placing them in the Pentagon, where we would have less access to the activities of the military over the conduct of paramilitary activities. This would be an extremely dangerous step. And I think that’s why both the CIA director and the Secretary of Defense have agreed to ignore this particular reform.

Now what kind of reform do we need?

One, the 9/11 Commission ‘centralized’ intelligence. That is very dangerous. We need to ‘de-centralize’ intelligence. You need redundancy in intelligence. No one institution, no one agency, no one bureaucracy, no single analyst or individual is going to have the final answer on any of these serious intelligence problems.

These intelligence issues deal with nuance, they deal with very gray areas, they deal with issues that you’re never going to have complete information on, and you need as much competitive analysis as possible. What this reform has done is place most intelligence analysis in the hands of the DNI, inside the executive branch, and I said earlier, this is just a recipe for politicization of intelligence. So somehow, we have to get back to de-centralization of intelligence.

We need to de-militarize intelligence. The Pentagon controls about 85 to 90 percent of the intelligence budget, and nearly 90 percent of the intelligence personnel. If you look at the major collection agencies that spend most of the $40 million, these are all Pentagon agencies; it’s in their charter. They’re called, “Combat Support Agencies”, they’re controlled by Donald Rumsfeld.

And even before the 9/11 Commission had done its work, Rumsfeld did a very clever thing; he created something that’s never existed before, an Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence. Now, that should have been vetted by the Senate Intelligence Committee. But Rumsfeld didn’t go there, he went to his buddy in the Senate, John Warner from Virginia, and John Warner chopped off on that immediately, now Rumsfeld has a tool to manipulate any reform that takes place in the intelligence community.

And the battle that Negroponte is going to have if he’s going to be successful, is dealing with the Pentagon, dealing with an Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence who has far more power than Negroponte, far more control over the personnel and the budget of the intelligence community.

Finally we have to get away from this idea that the only way to arrive at acceptable conclusions on intelligence and operational matters is ‘fusion centers’.

The National Counter-Terrorism Center, is a so-called fusion center. What a fusion center is, is to take people from the Directorate of Operations, people who work under cover, people who are operationally oriented, and to mix them with analytical people, analysts. Intelligence analysts, from the Directorate of Intelligence.

Whenever we’ve had a fusion center at the CIA, or any other part of the government, you had failure. Because the operations people have manipulated the analysts.

One thing to keep in mind. Operations is all about policy. Covert action is policy. Clandestine operations is about policy. Even the clandestine collection of intelligence is oriented toward supporting policy. It’s a service unit for policy makers. It’s become that way over the last 10 or 15 years.

If you’re going to do analysis fairly, and have some kind of objective voice, you can’t contaminate that process with the operational ethic, and operational personnel.

So, a fusion center failed at the CIA, which led to 9/11, which was the Counter-Terrorism Center, the immediate reform, the Terrorist Threat Integration Center was a failure, and now we even have a larger fusion center called the National Counter-Terrorism Center. These are formulas I think, for disaster, and also for politicization.

Finally I would say, even though we don’t like to use any work that deals with elitism in this country, we do need some kind of elite analytical cadre in this country. We need people who can think strategically. We need to be able to bring people in from the academic community, or from the think-tank community, to write national intelligence estimates, to do strategic analysis.

The CIA has gotten away from strategic analysis. They do very little of it. They’re essentially a wire-service for current intelligence, that’s what they do primarily. They don’t do deep-think pieces. And if you look at the major problems that we have around the world, our North Korean policy is a disaster, it’s strategically so conceptually flawed, that is one that is going to be hard to put back on the tracks…

If you look at proliferation problems, these are serious strategic issues that require deep thinking, and not the kind of constant seat-of-the-pants assessments they get from the various intelligence agencies in the intelligence community.

All of this could have been done without creating a DNI. All you had to do was re-write some of the executive orders, because frankly a DNI has the power to move money around, to move personnel around, to move programs around, to mandate collection priorities, President Carter did this for Admiral Stansfield Turner when Turner became DCIA, looked around as a good military man and wanted to know what his authority was, he felt it was insufficient, President Carter took care of that problem for him.

The problem with people like George Tenet, who was a political hack, he wanted to serve a master, that was the ‘slam-dunk’ thing. ‘Sure, Mr. President, that’s a slam-dunk, I can get that for you.’

He didn’t want to do the real grueling work of the intelligence business.

Now my final word is, we’re not going to get the problem of terrorism right… forget about a ‘War on Terrorism’, Terrorism is a tactic, you can’t conduct a war against a tactic. President Roosevelt didn’t declare war on the ‘blitzkrieg’, he declared war on Germany.

I don’t know what this war is all about. I don’t know how it could be won. It’s continuous, it’s global, it’s now at home, it’s going to be very hard to reverse. But you’re not going to get any of the terrorism struggle right, unless you get the intelligence right.

And you’re not going to get the intelligence right, unless you have more foreign liaisons. And I say that because the 9/11 Commission says that there’s too much dependence of the CIA on foreign liaison.

Well if you go back and look at all of the captives, the Al Qaeda captives and the various terrorist captives that we’ve had, virtually every one has been arranged with foreign liaison. Without the help of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia and Egypt, and Jordan, and even Syria, (which the White House doesn’t like to talk about), we would have done nothing in the world of trying to stop terrorism and to capture Al Qaeda captives.

Landing 160,000 troops in Iraq is just not going to do it.

We’ve created a safe haven and a sanctuary for terrorism. We created terrorism where it didn’t exist before.

So until we start to address these problems, and start to really confront the damage that the 9/11 Commission has done to us, it’s going to be very hard to get this policy back on the tracks.

Thank you.

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Mel Goodman - July 22nd, 2005 - (morning remarks)
http://reprehensor.gnn.tv/blogs/10410/Mel_Goodman_July_22nd_2005_morning_remarks

Also;

Cynthia McKinney – July 22nd, 2005
http://www.nowpublic.com/node/16470

Lorie Van Auken – July 22nd, 2005
http://www.nowpublic.com/node/16472

Anne Norton – July 22nd, 2005
http://www.nowpublic.com/node/16484

Peter Dale Scott – July 22nd, 2005
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=SCO20050729&articleId=759

Paul Thompson - July 22nd, 2005
http://reprehensor.gnn.tv/blogs/10677/Paul_Thompson_July_22nd_2005

Nafeez Mossadeq Ahmed - July 22nd, 2005
http://reprehensor.gnn.tv/blogs/10710/Nafeez_Mossadeq_Ahmed_July_22nd_2005

John Newman, Former Military Intelligence, July 22nd, 2005
http://reprehensor.gnn.tv/blogs/10734/John_Newman_Former_Military_Intelligence_July_22nd_2005