Sources For U.S. Spy Network: CNN? , Fox?

PoliticalChic

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1. Leon Panetta, head of the Central Intelligence Agency, says the U.S. has not been able to confirm that Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak is about to step down.

“We haven’t been able to confirm in fact that he is going to do that, so we are monitoring the situation,” CIA Director Leon Panetta told a Bloomberg reporter in Washington, following a House committee hearing on security threats. EGYPT: CIA's Leon Panetta says Hosni Mubarak exit not confirmed | Babylon & Beyond | Los Angeles Times

2. House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers of Michigan asked Panetta about news reports that Mubarak was poised to relinquish power.
"I got the same information you did, that there is a strong likelihood that Mubarak will step down this evening, which will be significant in terms of where the hopefully orderly transition in Egypt will take place," the CIA director said. Panetta did not say how the CIA reached that conclusion.
State TV said Mubarak will speak to the nation Thursday night from his palace in Cairo.
CIA Director Leon Panetta says it looks likely that Mubarak is out | Deseret News

Shouldn't the United States of America have a real 'spy' network? What the heck happened to it?

Answer: the Democrat Party...

3. During the 1970’s, as a result of Vietnam, Watergate and domestic spying, the Congress decided to gain control over the intelligence community.“…Congress moved in the mid-1970s to “reassert” its role in shaping American foreign policy, including the most controversial tool of that policy, covert action. Secrecy was seen as antithetical to the American way, and there was widespread agreement that “rogue” agencies such as the CIA were a threat to liberty.

a. [Democrat] Senator Frank Church and his allies claimed that an assertive legislative role would bring the United States “back to the genius of the Founding Fathers.” This assertion was made despite the fact that American presidents from 1789 to 1974 were given wide latitude to conduct clandestine operations they believed were in the national interest.

b. The damage done to the CIA by this congressional oversight regime (Democrat-controlled Pike and Church Committees) is quite extensive.

c. [A]s Henry Kissinger once observed about the Church Committee, that it is an illusion that “tranquility can be achieved by an abstract purity of motive for which history offers no example.” It is precisely this illusion which has prevailed in congressional circles since the heyday of Frank Church and Otis Pike. As Church himself once argued, the United States should not “fight fire with fire . . . evil with evil.”

d. [C]hairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Joseph Biden,…[t]he Delaware Democrat was one of seventeen Senators who voted in 1974 to ban all covert operations, and proudly noted during his 1988 campaign for president that he had threatened to “go public” with covert action plans by the Reagan administration, causing them to cancel the operations.
Congressional Oversight and the Crippling of the CIA

d. [Democrat] Senator Robert Torricelli of New Jersey, who led the charge in the mid-1990s to prevent the CIA from hiring unsavory characters. Ibid.

4. Here at home, the Obama administration has gravely impaired our capability to gather human intelligence by declassifying hundreds of pages of documents that explain our interrogation techniques—information that is now probably in al-Qaeda training manuals. https://www.hillsdale.edu/news/imprimis/archive/issue.asp?year=2009&month=10

5. On September 2, 2003, and again on October 2nd, [Democrat] Berger concealed and removed a total of five xerox copies of classified documents from the Archives. ...Berger took the documents to his office in Washington, D.C., where he destroyed three of the copies.
Sandy Berger - Conservapedia

6. [Democrat] Senator Pat Leahy was annoyed with the Reagan administration's war on terrorism in the 1980s. At the time he was vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. ....disclosed a top-secret communications intercept ...Leahy leaked secret information about a 1986 covert operation planned by the Reagan administration ...had to resign his Intelligence Committee post after he was caught leaking secret information ....
American Chronicle | Sen. Leahy to FBI Director: Give Me Secret Information

7. In 1983, [Democrat] Sen. Edward M. Kennedy offered to help the Soviets mount a public-relations offensive in the United States. Ted Kennedy sides with Soviets. Traitor [Archive] - Georgia Outdoor News Forum

8. Freeh: "Unfortunately, the [Clinton] White House was unable or unwilling to help the FBI gain access to these critical witnesses. The only direction from the Clinton administration regarding Iran was to order the FBI to stop photographing and fingerprinting official Iranian delegations entering the U.S. because it was adversely impacting our "relationship" with Tehran. "

BTW, Freeh: "I finally turned to the former President Bush, who immediately interceded with Crown Prince Abdullah on the FBI's behalf. Mr. Bush personally asked the Saudis to let the FBI do one-on-one interviews of the detained Khobar bombers. The Saudis immediately acceded."
Remember Khobar Towers by Louis J. Freeh
Michelle Malkin » KHOBAR TOWERS: 10 YEARS LATER


And, what has our 'spy network' become?

It is just the latest effort by Panetta to improve the efficiency and work environment at the agency. Panetta has also moved to make the super-secret agency a bit more accessible to the public to bolster the CIA's image. Just this week, for example, the agency announced that it was adding links on the CIA.gov homepage to social media sites like YouTube and Flickr. "The idea behind these improvements is to make more information about the agency available to more people, more easily," Panetta said. "The CIA wants the American people and the world to understand its mission and its vital role in keeping our country safe."
CIA's Panetta Shakes up His Spy Corps - Washington Whispers (usnews.com)
 
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I've given my opinion before of the bloated bureaucracy we call the Central Intelligence Agency or CIA and I ain't a supporter. Every major security incident in modern history was missed by the CIA from Korea to the Berlin Wall to the Missile Crisis to the JFK assassination by a defector who was allegedly a CIA informant to VietNam to the Iran hostage crisis to 9-11 to the Egyptian crisis. I actually heard a CIA spokesman whine about not having the sources in Egypt that they depend on. Panetta is a political hack as was almost every other CIA head in history. The CIA has become a tool of whatever administration is in power and is useless in gathering the intelligence we need for American security.
 
Our spy network told us Saddam had WMD's.

Thanks for supporting my point...the Democrats made sure that we don't have a network that has the ability to infiltrate enemy organizations...

they actually forbid dealing with 'bad guys'...who are exactly the kinds of individuals necessary to penetrate enemy aggregations....
 
Admiral Stansfield Turner did the most damage to the CIA and we have never really recovered from it. He thought that field agents were passé and eliminated 820 positions under the Carter regime. These were seasoned field agents who got real intelligence the old fashioned way. Technology works wonders and today it is giving us hard intelligence, but no matter what technology we have, human intent is something it cannot account for. Plus a lot of the "Hot spots" (not the commercial hot spots) are low tech countries and they rely on human to human contact. Everybody in the World knows a lot about our capabilities in the tech field so they know how to hide communications.
 
We need that screwball err curveball? dude back. he was spot on for Iraq.
He did say that Sadam was a bad guy and we should spread democracy there, right?
 
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Admiral Stansfield Turner did the most damage to the CIA and we have never really recovered from it. He thought that field agents were passé and eliminated 820 positions under the Carter regime. These were seasoned field agents who got real intelligence the old fashioned way. Technology works wonders and today it is giving us hard intelligence, but no matter what technology we have, human intent is something it cannot account for. Plus a lot of the "Hot spots" (not the commercial hot spots) are low tech countries and they rely on human to human contact. Everybody in the World knows a lot about our capabilities in the tech field so they know how to hide communications.

To be consistent with the import of this thread, that would be [Democrat] Stansfield Turner, appointed by [Democrat] President Jimmy Carter.
 
In case you missed it, Leon Panetta was called before Congress today and asked to explain exactly what in the world is going on over in Egypt. His answer was, essentially, “No worries, Mubarak will be stepping down by the end of the day.” As you may have noticed, that did not happen. This raised the rather obvious question of where the Director of the CIA got this thoroughly erroneous information that he gave to Congress. It turns out, he got it from the same place the rest of us got it: from watching his television.American officials said Mr. Panetta was basing his statement not on secret intelligence but on media broadcasts, which began circulating before he sat down before the House Intelligence Committee.
Leon Panetta Has Got Some Real Inside Info | RedState

Intelligence community....worth billions.

Cable TV...priceless.
 
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In case you missed it, Leon Panetta was called before Congress today and asked to explain exactly what in the world is going on over in Egypt. His answer was, essentially, “No worries, Mubarak will be stepping down by the end of the day.” As you may have noticed, that did not happen. This raised the rather obvious question of where the Director of the CIA got this thoroughly erroneous information that he gave to Congress. It turns out, he got it from the same place the rest of us got it: from watching his television.American officials said Mr. Panetta was basing his statement not on secret intelligence but on media broadcasts, which began circulating before he sat down before the House Intelligence Committee.
Leon Panetta Has Got Some Real Inside Info | RedState

Intelligence community....worth billions.

Cable TV...priceless.


The entire Obama Administration is like a three ring circus. A bunch of assclowns running around clueless. This Administration needs to keep their mouths shut and leave well enough alone.
 
Our spy network told us Saddam had WMD's.

Thanks for supporting my point...the Democrats made sure that we don't have a network that has the ability to infiltrate enemy organizations...

they actually forbid dealing with 'bad guys'...who are exactly the kinds of individuals necessary to penetrate enemy aggregations....

:eusa_whistle: what a crock of you know what, Pc.... Can you EVER discuss a situation WITHOUT pointing your manicured fingers at the Democrats? Honestly....can you?
 
Our spy network told us Saddam had WMD's.

Thanks for supporting my point...the Democrats made sure that we don't have a network that has the ability to infiltrate enemy organizations...

they actually forbid dealing with 'bad guys'...who are exactly the kinds of individuals necessary to penetrate enemy aggregations....

True, but to be fair...........eight years of Bush didn't really change anything did it? We are still where we were on faulty intelligence.
 
Actually, the CIA brought the whole oversight thing on themselves. The Company was pretty damn corrupt prior to the Church Commission, and was actively involved in overthrowing governments all over the world.

A fair amount of the mess we're facing in Iran can be traced back to the CIA in the 1950's and forward. From an Iranian perspective, they've been at war with us since then and the CIA fired the first shots after actively helping overthrow the government there. Nearly every single issue in Latin America and South America can be traced back to CIA operations.

I do agree we've screwed the pooch with the over reliance on electronic intelligence gathering. Fundamentalist terror groups of all stripes tend to be populated by folks that can barely turn on a computer and funded by handshake agreements that are untraceable electronically.

I'd point out though that even if the CIA were still actively in the people business, we'd have likely been screwed for at least a generation after the end of the Cold War. Actual human assests take time to identify, recruit, and train. Frequently you have to recruit them while they're low in the organization, and wait for them to rise to a position of usefullness. Post Cold War all three following Presidents underestimated the threat that Islamic Fundamentalism posed prior to 9/11. Even Reagan blew it in Lebanon.

It's likely that once the papers get declassified, we'll find out that following the Cold War we were gearing up heavily to take on the EU or China in terms of whatever human assests we had.
 
Our spy network told us Saddam had WMD's.

Thanks for supporting my point...the Democrats made sure that we don't have a network that has the ability to infiltrate enemy organizations...

they actually forbid dealing with 'bad guys'...who are exactly the kinds of individuals necessary to penetrate enemy aggregations....

:eusa_whistle: what a crock of you know what, Pc.... Can you EVER discuss a situation WITHOUT pointing your manicured fingers at the Democrats? Honestly....can you?

Care, can you find one teeny-weeny error in my thesis?

Every step documented, and the truth is evident, even in the offense you take at the overwhelming 'footprint' of the Democrats in the destruction of our intelligence network.

I look forward to the exposure of any lacunae you can find.
 
Our spy network told us Saddam had WMD's.

Thanks for supporting my point...the Democrats made sure that we don't have a network that has the ability to infiltrate enemy organizations...

they actually forbid dealing with 'bad guys'...who are exactly the kinds of individuals necessary to penetrate enemy aggregations....

True, but to be fair...........eight years of Bush didn't really change anything did it? We are still where we were on faulty intelligence.

I can't argue with that, as far as Bush changing the CIA, but I'm incensed that we have forgotten the importance of knowing what the enemy thinks or is planning.
 
Every step documented, and the truth is evident, even in the offense you take at the overwhelming 'footprint' of the Democrats in the destruction of our intelligence network.

The facts are indeed true. What is missing in context.

For example, fact 3. Congressional oversight was a pretty justifiable action once the full extent of what the CIA had been up to started to come to light You have coups, assasinations, illegal operations, collaborations with the mafia, undermining military authority in Vietnam, illegal operations inside the United States, etc coming to light prior to the Church commission.

Another issue is that in particular, 3c is a real debate that has yet to be settled in this country. Conservatives want to believe that the USA is a special nation, unique, and founded on morals and principles, while at the same time supporting a CIA that would engage in criminal activities and actual acts of war. Liberals tend to see the US on the world stage, but fail to understand the kind of Machievellian actions it takes to just survive on the world stage.

There is an internal contradiction there that runs very deep. Either the USA is just another nation, and as such should take any steps deemed necessary to survive, or the USA is an example of something unique and special, and as such should act that way.

3d. brings up another issue without context. There's a reason there was a push in the mid 90's to disallow the CIA from acting with "unsavory characters" and that was because by the 90's it was a commonly known fact that the CIA had been in collusion with drug dealers for years. Drug money helped fund several illegal operations all over the world. Worse, the CIA had been arming and dealing with groups that would form the seeds of the present day hot spots of the world.

4. is as a result, yet again, of the CIA and NSA crossing their legal charters and breaking the law. It's hard to be too sympathetic when it is their own actions that have brought renewed scruitiny down on them.

As for Berger and Kennedy and Leahy: Yeah, they're idiots who shouldn't have been let anywhere near top secret information. But Kennedy and Leahy are elected idiots, and the beauty of the Constitution is that the Military and Intelligence communities ultimately have to answer to elected idiots.
 
I can't argue with that, as far as Bush changing the CIA, but I'm incensed that we have forgotten the importance of knowing what the enemy thinks or is planning.
Human assets take time to recruit, and they take time to be useful. As I understand, the agency has tried post 9/11 to infiltrate, but it is very likely that we're only now getting to the point that any recruits are in actual useful positions in Al Queda.

And at this point, Al-Queda is pretty well toast (thanks to Bush). Most of the threat now comes from a different offshoot of Al-Queda meaning a fair amount of the post 9/11 work recruiting human assests is probably wasted.

I'd imagine there's probably a lot of attention at the CIA being paid to how the Police recruits and trains informants and undercover cops. It's a subtly different art than what the CIA and KGB were up to in the Cold War, but the War on Terror has a lot more in common with law enforcement than statecraft.
 
Thanks for supporting my point...the Democrats made sure that we don't have a network that has the ability to infiltrate enemy organizations...

they actually forbid dealing with 'bad guys'...who are exactly the kinds of individuals necessary to penetrate enemy aggregations....

True, but to be fair...........eight years of Bush didn't really change anything did it? We are still where we were on faulty intelligence.

I can't argue with that, as far as Bush changing the CIA, but I'm incensed that we have forgotten the importance of knowing what the enemy thinks or is planning.

The CIA is only there to help justify political goals.
 
The CIA is only there to help justify political goals.

The problem is that folks don't want to acknowledge why they're there:

to help ensure the survival of the United States.

I view the CIA like I view a handgun. If you're going to bother to own one, be damn sure you're ready to use it. I've been hard on the Agency in this thread because some of the stuff they've done is incompatible with the image that most of us have of America as a unique, special, nation founded on morals and principles superior to those many other nations were founded upon.

But at the same time, I understand why they exsist, and why they have to. I'm not immune to that central contradiction myself.
 
Actually, the CIA brought the whole oversight thing on themselves. The Company was pretty damn corrupt prior to the Church Commission, and was actively involved in overthrowing governments all over the world.

A fair amount of the mess we're facing in Iran can be traced back to the CIA in the 1950's and forward. From an Iranian perspective, they've been at war with us since then and the CIA fired the first shots after actively helping overthrow the government there. Nearly every single issue in Latin America and South America can be traced back to CIA operations.

I do agree we've screwed the pooch with the over reliance on electronic intelligence gathering. Fundamentalist terror groups of all stripes tend to be populated by folks that can barely turn on a computer and funded by handshake agreements that are untraceable electronically.

I'd point out though that even if the CIA were still actively in the people business, we'd have likely been screwed for at least a generation after the end of the Cold War. Actual human assests take time to identify, recruit, and train. Frequently you have to recruit them while they're low in the organization, and wait for them to rise to a position of usefullness. Post Cold War all three following Presidents underestimated the threat that Islamic Fundamentalism posed prior to 9/11. Even Reagan blew it in Lebanon.

It's likely that once the papers get declassified, we'll find out that following the Cold War we were gearing up heavily to take on the EU or China in terms of whatever human assests we had.

Sorry, Doc...you are totally wrong. "...pretty damn corrupt ...actively involved in overthrowing governments all over the world."

What you characterize as "actively involved in overthrowing governments all over the world" is, in actuality, behaving in just the manner that they should.

You see, the oppostite number is pushing said governments to behave in a manner inimical to the interests of the United States.

Again, where the interests of the Soviet Union were being advanced, i.e., South America...they had to be blunted. Clearly not the course chosen by the Democrat Party.

In Iran, Britain stopped that government from joining with the Germans prior to WWII.
Edwin Black, "The Farhud."

.
And the same for the US, which pursuaded Reza Palavi in performing his legal action in removing Mossedeq.Mohammed Mossadeq - Discussion and Encyclopedia Article. Who is Mohammed Mossadeq? What is Mohammed Mossadeq? Where is Mohammed Mossadeq? Definition of Mohammed Mossadeq. Meaning of Mohammed Mossadeq.

Doc, you need to understand the needs of sovereign nations are not necessarily overlapping.
 
True, but to be fair...........eight years of Bush didn't really change anything did it? We are still where we were on faulty intelligence.

I can't argue with that, as far as Bush changing the CIA, but I'm incensed that we have forgotten the importance of knowing what the enemy thinks or is planning.

The CIA is only there to help justify political goals.

Spy networks are the proxy army that wages war on a minimalist scale.
 

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