Missing the wake-up calls

[struggle4progress]

By Ralph R. Reiland
Monday, July 26, 2004

<snip>
In installing the repressive regime of the Shah of Iran in 1953, a more or less fascist dictator with his own string of torture chambers, the CIA was fully asleep as to how this assault on Iran's sovereignty would in due course advance the Islamic revolution that brought the Ayatollah Khomeni to power in the 1970s, a revolution that caught the CIA by surprise.

Coming up short again, the CIA didn't quite foresee how giving training, weapons and financial support to Osama bin Laden to drive the Soviets out of Afghanistan could lend a helping hand in inciting much of the Arab world into a jihad against the entire "godless society of the West," Manhattan included.

In 1998, after 36 years of secrecy about exactly how the CIA bungled the Bay of Pigs invasion, a Freedom of Information Act request by the National Security Archive unearthed a report written by Lyman Kirkpatrick, the CIA's inspector general. Kirkpatrick's conclusion after a six-month investigation: "The agency became so wrapped up in the military operation that it failed to appraise the chances of success realistically. Furthermore, it failed to keep the national policymakers adequately informed."
<snip>

"For several years during the Reagan administration, I had access to many of our intelligence services' most closely held secrets," explains Meyer. "In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the CIA produced a stream of intelligence assessments whose key judgment was that the Soviet economy was growing at an annual rate of more than 3 percent. The implication of this steady growth was that the Soviet Union had the economic wherewithal to continue fighting the Cold War for as long as anyone could foresee. There was just one problem with the agency's key judgment: It couldn't possibly be right. If you understood how an economy works --- or if you just put on a pair of comfortable shoes and walked the streets of Moscow, or Leningrad, or Minsk with your eyes wide open --- it was obvious that the Soviet economy wasn't growing at 3 percent. It wasn't growing at all: It was starting to implode.
<snip>

http://pittsburghlive.com/x/tribune-review/opinion/columnists/reiland/s_204932.html

[PROGRESSIVE1]

1. ...

[indigobusiness]

2. A racket, a travesty, a sham, and a mockery.

A self-licking ice-cream cone, just like the Pentagon. (Who said that Again?). The black budget fiasco in govt is a scandal beyond all scandals. What a waste.