The CIA Insults Our Intelligence by Claiming Whistleblowers Facilitate Terrorism
As Glenn Greenwald pointed out in an incisive article on The Intercept today, the claims CIA Director John Brennan made this week, stating that whistleblowers and civil libertarians are keeping the US from stopping terrorist attacks, are insidious and duplicitous.
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Brennan's history of thuggish lying on behalf of the military-industrial-intelligence complex is so blatant that, as Greenwald notes, even The New York Times Editorial Board took Brennan to task on November 17. As Greenwald writes, the editorial "mercilessly shames the despicable effort by U.S. government officials to shamelessly exploit the Paris attacks to advance long-standing agendas."
The New York Times editorial excoriated Brennan:
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It’s a wretched yet predictable ritual after each new terrorist attack: Certain politicians and government officials waste no time exploiting the tragedy for their own ends. The remarks on Monday by John Brennan, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, took that to a new and disgraceful low....
It is hard to believe anything Mr. Brennan says. Last year, he bluntly denied that the C.I.A. had illegally hacked into the computers of Senate staff members conducting an investigation into the agency’s detention and torture programs when, in fact, it did. In 2011, when he was President Obama’s top counterterrorism adviser, he claimed that American drone strikes had not killed any civilians, despite clear evidence that they had...
As one French counterterrorism expert and former defense official said, this shows that “our intelligence is actually pretty good, but our ability to act on it is limited by the sheer numbers.” In other words, the problem in this case was not a lack of data, but a failure to act on information authorities already had.
It is hard to believe anything Mr. Brennan says. Last year, he bluntly denied that the C.I.A. had illegally hacked into the computers of Senate staff members conducting an investigation into the agency’s detention and torture programs when, in fact, it did. In 2011, when he was President Obama’s top counterterrorism adviser, he claimed that American drone strikes had not killed any civilians, despite clear evidence that they had...
As one French counterterrorism expert and former defense official said, this shows that “our intelligence is actually pretty good, but our ability to act on it is limited by the sheer numbers.” In other words, the problem in this case was not a lack of data, but a failure to act on information authorities already had.
Greenwald presciently and conclusively shredded the accusation that whistleblowers undercut "national security" in an Intercept article on November 15. His main point: Past terrorist attacks and the intelligence community's own narrative on terrorists avoiding technological detection conflict with Brennan's allegations.
Brennan is defending spending billions upon billions of dollars - and encroaching even further into our privacy. However, a recent history of terrorist attacks proves that the approach of the military-industrial-intelligence complex has largely failed. This profiteering, career-building, power-amassing behemoth that Brennan represents is more interested in expanding its authority and profitability than actually succeeding in the so-called war on terror.
In a crushing rebuke of Brennan's assertion that electronic monitoring is being hampered by whistleblowers, Greenwald offered a partial list of the major terrorist attacks of this century in which the terrorists assumed that they were being electronically monitored and, therefore, evaded detection:
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This is a glaring case where propagandists can’t keep their stories straight. The implicit premise of this accusation is that The Terrorists didn’t know to avoid telephones or how to use effective encryption until Snowden came along and told them. Yet we’ve been warned for years and years before Snowden that The Terrorists are so diabolical and sophisticated that they engage in all sorts of complex techniques to evade electronic surveillance.
By itself, the glorious mythology of How the U.S. Tracked Osama bin Laden should make anyone embarrassed to make these claims. After all, the central premise of that storyline is that bin Laden only used trusted couriers to communicate because al Qaeda knew for decades to avoid electronic means of communication because the U.S. and others could spy on those communications. Remember all that? Zero Dark Thirty and the “harsh but effective” interrogation of bin Laden’s “official messenger”?
By itself, the glorious mythology of How the U.S. Tracked Osama bin Laden should make anyone embarrassed to make these claims. After all, the central premise of that storyline is that bin Laden only used trusted couriers to communicate because al Qaeda knew for decades to avoid electronic means of communication because the U.S. and others could spy on those communications. Remember all that? Zero Dark Thirty and the “harsh but effective” interrogation of bin Laden’s “official messenger”?
As a poem often mistakenly attributed to Shakespeare, but written by Sir Walter Scott, observes: "Oh what a tangled web we weave, When first we practise to deceive!"
The solutions to terrorism are complex and nuanced. The degree to which terror is used as a non-state assertion of power needs to be considered, as do many other contextual issues regarding terrorism with origins in the Middle East - a region in which the US has wrought massive destruction in recent years. We must also fracture the simplistic, prejudicial and factually incorrect notion of a unified religious "enemy."
Moreover, with the exponential acceleration in high-technology advancements, US militarization and intelligence operations around the world have become more and more dependent upon technology to assert world dominance and "fight terror."
There is a historical trend in intelligence that Brennan and the CIA are on the wrong side of - again.
In the predecessor to the CIA - the OSS during World War II - there was an emphasis on HUMINT (human intelligence): intelligence that can be gathered from human sources. Due to the limited technology monitoring available at that time, HUMINT played a major role - as it did in the Cold War - in the gathering of intelligence. This involved espionage, placing agents undercover and recruiting double agents, among other practices. Yes, the breaking of the Enigma code during World War II was of enormous importance to the Allied war effort, but that was because the Germans were unaware that the code had been broken and so were still broadcasting through Enigma.
In the past 20-30 years - and particularly since 9/11 - as technological advancement has soared, the CIA, NSA and all the other agencies involved in intelligence gathering have held up their efforts as unsurpassable breakthroughs. However, as Greenwald points out in his November 15 Intercept article, terrorists plotting attacks have been circumventing electronic surveillance for years.
The reality is that Brennan et al. have diminished the importance of HUMINT in favor of massive expenditures on what is called SIGINT (signals intelligence) that doesn't require HUMINT. This is in large part due to the US cultural inability to connect with non-Western cultures in the Middle East and to crack terrorist cells through agents. It is facile for Brennan to claim that SIGINT would be able to stop terrorist attacks if only it had no restraints whatsoever.
As Greenwald notes, SIGINT frequently doesn't work - despite massive spending - because terrorists communicate through evasive non-technological interactions (as bin Laden did). Yes, some terrorists appear to use encryption - but if the encryption codes were revealed to the CIA or NSA, the terrorists would simply stop using encryption. Meanwhile, the revelation of the codes - opening a backdoor to such software - may in fact make encryption used by intelligence agencies themselves more vulnerable to hacking.
Brennan's blustery, scornful championing of electronic intelligence that violates privacy rights is reminiscent of the US military's fondness for the use of drones, avoiding any human contact with the direct infliction of death. (It's important to remember that intelligence information plays a role in killing: It pinpoints "targets" for drone assassinations and bombings.) Ultimately, the CIA's emphasis on electronic intelligence is another attempt to avoid human involvement in the messy, person-to-person work of defusing terrorism - which would necessarily involve confronting the role of the US in igniting terrorism.
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http://www.truth-out.org/buzzflash/commentary/shouldn-t-the-us-military-industrial-complex-be-renamed-the-department-of-blowback/19638-shouldn-t-the-us-military-industrial-complex-be-renamed-the-department-of-blowback