Accuracy.Org Home
  • News Releases
  • Blog
  • News Items
  • About Us
    • Board
    • Staff
  • Subscribe
  • ExposeFacts
  • Calendar
twitter facebook donate

Search Results

Your Search for: "homas Fingar" returned 2 items from across the site.

How Brennan’s CIA Plan Facilitates Future Wars Based on Lies

March 10, 2015
Share

On Friday afternoon — when stories are frequently put out to avoid scrutiny — a plan by CIA head John Brennan to restructure the agency was made public. Much of the major media portrayed it as a reform to make Americans safer: The New York Times headline read: “CIA to Be Overhauled to Fight Modern Threats.” However, many CIA veterans argue that it is a step toward further politicization of intelligence:

MELVIN GOODMAN, goody789 at verizon.net
Goodman is a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and a professor of government at Johns Hopkins University. A former CIA analyst, Goodman is the author of Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA and the forthcoming The Path to Dissent: A Whistleblower at CIA. Goodman is the national security columnist for CounterPunch.org.

He said today of Brennan’s plan: “Simply, it takes the CIA further from Truman’s concept and closer to the ability to politicize intelligence. Operations are part of the policy world and not the intelligence world. The Centers have made it too easy to provide the intelligence that the ‘masters’ desire, whether they are the masters on CIA’s 7th floor or the policy masters. Brennan’s world was the Center for Counterintelligence and Counterterrorism, and many of the intelligence errors and operational errors of the past 15 years have emanated from those centers. Organizationally, it makes no sense — what are the directorates of operations and analysis — they sound as if they are HR experts.”

Late last year, Goodman wrote the piece “The Latest Flawed Reorganization Scheme: The Decline of the CIA,” which anticipated and criticized many of Brennan’s proposals. Goodman just wrote the piece “David Petraeus and the Hypocrisies of National Security: The CIA’s Double Standard.”

The following are members of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, which just released a memo on Brennan’s plan:

RAY McGOVERN, rmcgovern at gmail.com, @raymcgovern
McGovern was a CIA analyst for 27 years, whose duties included preparing the President’s Daily Brief and chairing National Intelligence Estimates. He now works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington.

ELIZABETH MURRAY, emurray404 at aol.com, @elizabethmurra
Murray is available for a limited number of interviews. She served as deputy national intelligence officer for the Near East in the National Intelligence Council before retiring after a 27-year career in the U.S. government, where she specialized in Middle Eastern political and media analysis.

McGovern and Murray are among the signers to a just released, posted at ConsortiumNews.com: “U.S. Intel Vets Oppose Brennan’s Plan to Restructure CIA,” which takes the form of a memo to the President: “Mr. President, The CIA reorganization plan announced by Director John Brennan on Friday is a potentially deadly blow to the objective, fact-based intelligence needed to support fully informed decisions on foreign policy. We suggest turning this danger into an opportunity to create an independent entity for CIA intelligence analysis immune from the operational demands of the ‘war on terror.’

“On Feb. 5, 2003, immediately after Colin Powell’s address to the UN, members of VIPS sent our first VIPS memorandum, urging President George W. Bush to widen the policy debate ‘beyond the circle of those advisers clearly bent on a war for which we see no compelling reason and from which we believe the unintended consequences are likely to be catastrophic.’

“The ‘former senior officers’ whom Brennan asked for input on the restructuring plan are a similar closed, blinkered circle, as is the ‘outstanding group of officers from across the Agency’ picked by Brennan to look at the Agency’s mission and future. He did not include any of the intelligence community dissidents and alumni who fought against the disastrous politicization of intelligence before the attack on Iraq. Nor does Brennan’s plan reflect the lessons learned from that debacle. …

“President Harry Truman wanted an agency structure able to meet a president’s need for ‘the most accurate … information on what’s going on everywhere in the world, and particularly of the trends and developments in all the danger spots.’ In an op-ed appearing in the Washington Post exactly one month after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Truman added, ‘I have been disturbed by … the way CIA has been diverted from its original assignment … and has become an operational and at times policy-making arm of the Government.’ …

“You are fully aware, we trust, that our analysts’ vaunted ethos of speaking unvarnished truth to power was corrupted by Director George Tenet and Deputy Director John McLaughlin, who outdid themselves in carrying out the instructions of President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney. The new ethos boiled down to this: If the President wants to paint Iraq as a strategic threat, it is our job to come up with the ‘evidence’ — even if it needs to be manufactured out of whole cloth (or forged, as in ‘yellowcake uranium from Africa’ caper). …

“There is hope to be drawn from those occasions where senior intelligence officials with integrity can step in, show courageous example, and — despite multiple indignities and pitfalls in the system — can force the truth to the surface. We hope that you have been made aware that, after the no-WMD-anywhere debacle on Iraq, Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence Thomas Fingar did precisely that during 2007, supervising a watershed National Intelligence Estimate on Iran that concluded unanimously, ‘with high confidence,’ that Iran had stopped working on a nuclear weapon in 2003.

“President Bush concedes in his memoir that this put the kibosh on his and Dick Cheney’s earlier plan to attack Iran during their last year in office. So, character (as in Fingar) counts, and people of integrity can make a difference — and even help thwart plans for war — even in the most politicized of circumstances.”

 

Whilstleblowers Blast NSA Programs, Award Snowden

July 8, 2013
Share

Edward Snowden has been named recipient of this year’s “award for truth telling” given by Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence. The following are members of the group or past recipients of the award. The group’s statement is below.

DANIEL ELLSBERG, ellsbergd1 at gmail.com
Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers in 1971. He wrote an op-ed that was published today in the Washington Post, which notes that “for the whole two years I was under indictment, I was free to speak to the media and at rallies and public lectures. I was, after all, part of a movement against an ongoing war. … There is no chance that experience could be reproduced today, let alone that a trial could be terminated by the revelation of White House actions against a defendant that were clearly criminal in Richard Nixon’s era … There is zero chance that [Snowden] would be allowed out on bail if he returned now and close to no chance that, had he not left the country, he would have been granted bail. Instead, he would be in a prison cell like Bradley Manning, incommunicado….”

Ellsberg concludes: “What [Snowden] has given us is our best chance — if we respond to his information and his challenge — to rescue ourselves from out-of-control surveillance that shifts all practical power to the executive branch and its intelligence agencies: a United Stasi of America.”

RAY McGOVERN, rrmcgovern at gmail.com
McGovern is a veteran CIA analyst. He wrote an op-ed that was published today in the Baltimore Sun: “There is a way out for President Barack Obama as he attempts to cope with Edward Snowden’s disclosures about the National Security Agency’s overreaching eavesdropping, the turbulent world reaction, and the lack of truthfulness shown by National Intelligence Director James Clapper and NSA Director Keith Alexander. The President should seize the initiative by suggesting to both that they ‘spend more time with their families.'”

COLEEN ROWLEY, rowleyclan at earthlink.net
Rowley is a former FBI special agent and division counsel whose May 2002 memo described some of the FBI’s pre-9/11 failures and was named one of Time magazine’s “Persons of the Year” in 2002. She recently appeared on CNN and wrote a piece for their website, “Massive Spying on Americans is Outrageous.”

BILL BINNEY, williambinney0802 at comcast.net
Binney was with the NSA for decades and resigned shortly after 9/11. He was recently interviewed by “Democracy Now!”

DAVID MacMICHAEL, dmacm at political-dog.com
MacMichael is a former analyst for the CIA. See his “Former Commander of Headquarters Company at Quantico Objects to Treatment of Bradley Manning.”

THOMAS DRAKE, @Thomas_Drake1
Drake was a senior executive of the U.S. National Security Agency.

The following statement was released today by Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence:

Edward Snowden has been named recipient of this year’s award for truth telling given by Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence, the group announced today.

Most of the Sam Adams Associates are former senior national security officials who, with the other members, understand fully the need to keep legitimate secrets. Each of the U.S. members took a solemn oath “to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.”

When secrecy is misused to hide unconstitutional activities, fealty to that oath — and higher duty as citizens of conscience — dictate support for truth tellers who summon the courage to blow the whistle. Edward Snowden’s disclosures fit the classic definition of whistle blowing.

Former senior NSA executive Thomas Drake, who won the Sam Adams award in 2011, has called what Snowden did “an amazingly brave act of civil disobedience.” Drake knows whereof he speaks. As a whistleblower he reported waste, fraud, and abuse — as well as serious violations of the Fourth Amendment — through official channels and, subsequently, to a reporter. He wound up indicted under the Espionage Act.

After a lengthy, grueling pre-trial proceeding, he was exonerated of all ten felony charges and pleaded out to the misdemeanor of “exceeding authorized use of a government computer.” The presiding judge branded the four years of prosecutorial conduct against Drake “unconscionable.”

The invective hurled at Snowden by the corporate and government influenced media reflects understandable embarrassment that he would dare expose the collusion of all three branches of government in perpetrating and then covering up their abuse of the Constitution. This same collusion has thwarted all attempts to pass laws that would protect genuine truth tellers like Snowden who see and wish to stop unconstitutional activities.

“These are the times that try men’s souls,” warned Thomas Paine in 1776, adding that “The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.

It is in this spirit that Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence are proud to confer on Edward Snowden the Sam Adams Award for 2013.

The Sam Adams Award has been given in previous years to truth tellers Coleen Rowley of the FBI; Katharine Gun of British Intelligence; Sibel Edmonds of the FBI; Craig Murray, former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan; Sam Provance; former US Army Sgt. at Abu Ghraib; Maj. Frank Grevil of Danish Army Intelligence; Larry Wilkerson, Col., US Army (ret.), former chief of staff to Colin Powell at State; Julian Assange of WikiLeaks; Thomas Drake, former senior NSA official; Jesselyn Radack, Director of National Security and Human Rights, Government Accountability Project; and Thomas Fingar, former Assistant Secretary of State and Director, National Intelligence Council.

 

Search News Releases

Key term:

By Date Range:


Most Recent News ReleasesRSS

Haiti on Edge

Emergency Powers “Impeachable”: “All You Need is One Brave Member”

Sanders-Khanna Bill on Saudi Assault on Yemen and War Powers Clears House

U.S. Government Propaganda on Venezuela

Rep. Omar and the Truth About AIPAC

AIPAC: Power and Origins

You Paid More to Netflix Last Month Than It Paid in Taxes Last Year: $0

Shouldn’t Green New Deal Proposals Address Fossil Fuels?

Former UN Official on Venezuela: “Nothing More Undemocratic Than a Coup”

Trump’s Attack on Socialism

National Office
1714 Franklin Street #100-133
Oakland, CA 94612-3409
Voice 510-788-4541
ipa[at]accuracy.org
Washington Office (journalist contact)
915 National Press Building
Washington DC 20045
Voice 202-347-0020
Fax 615-849-5802
ipa[at]accuracy.org