Reply #86: Really you don't have to use your imagination too much

[nolabels]

The evidence is out there and often gets to point of slapping people in the face. People need to wise up on the function of agencies like this. The sole function of a lot of them is to protect empire, everything else is secondary and negotiable. They are really getting bald face and stupid as of late but that is because they are letting their hubris and intellect work against the mission they are assigned to. (Secret Dicks forays into getting his way probably is not helping either)

http://www.counterpunch.org/valentine05082004.html

Torture, the CIA and the Press
Who Let the Dogs Out?

By DOUGLAS VALENTINE

"O, pardon me, thou bleeding piece of earth,
That I am meek and gentle with these butchers!"

Julius Caesar, Act III, Scene I.

Finally, a period of re-evaluation. Too bad it took a war crimes scandal to bring it about, and that the entire Iraqi misadventure was a criminal fraud to begin with.
(snip)
As we were told in Hersh's October 1991 article, Bill Clinton's CIA Director, John Deutch, was the villain who had castrated the CIA. In 1995, when a CIA employee was linked to the murder of "an American innkeeper and the Guatemalan husband of an American lawyer," Deutch issued a "scrub order" that prevented the CIA from hiring murderers. After 9/11, this "scrub order" seemed absurd. If it takes a thief to catch a thief, then it takes a killer to kill a killer. The logic was irrefutable, and suddenly the corporate media was begging the military and the CIA to adopt the torture, detention, and assassination techniques of the Israelis ­ and as early as October 2001, Hersh, for some reason, was helping to provide a pretext for doing exactly that.

"Today's C.I.A. is not up to the job," Hersh alerted us. It had "become increasingly bureaucratic and unwilling to take risks," and under Clinton, it "promoted officers who shared such values."

We were at risk and unable to strike back against terrorists, because the CIA had stopped putting tough agents in the field, Hersh reported, and was relying on technology and friendly foreign services to do the dirty work. He said that in the new war on terror, it was no longer feasible to assign CIA agents undercover as diplomats or cultural attaches at American embassies in major cities. Having said that, he drew a blueprint of exactly what was to come: "in Afghanistan," he said, "or anywhere in the Middle East or South Asia, a C.I.A. operative would have to speak the local language and be able to blend in. The operative should seemingly have nothing to do with any Americans, or with the American embassy, if there is one. The status is known inside the agency as "nonofficial cover," or NOC. Exposure could mean death."

Is this not a recipe for the type of "contractors" who flooded Iraq after the invasion and occupation? The only difference is that a CIA agent under "non-official cover" is no longer referred to as a NOC, but as an OGA, for Other Government Agency.

Before I continue to put in context the persuasive impact of what Hersh said two and half years ago, when he was prodding America to unleash its dogs of war, let me remind you that the agents who drew the CIA into the line of fire over the systematic use of torture at Abu Ghoryab prison ­ as a result, ironically, of Hersh's most recent "explosive" article in The New Yorker ­ were two individuals who fit the "nonofficial cover" bill exactly: Mr. John Israel, a contract US civilian interpreter, working for the company CACI, and ostensibly attached to the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade; and Mr. Steven Stephanowicz, a contract US civilian interrogator, also working for CACI, but not attached to Military Intelligence, and certainly working for the CIA.

The whereabouts of Messrs. Stephanowicz and Israel are currently unknown, and CACI doesn't have to tell, because: 1) as we are told by Hersh, "Exposure could mean death," and 2) because, their trail leads to the CIA people who hired them; and the one thing Bush cannot accept, is having heroic a CIA agent brought up on a murder rap.
(snip)

Denial rather than personal defense mechanism for most is actually their M.O. :shrug: