This Week on
the Right
A Bad Choice for Good
Intelligence
By Tom Barry
Two times over the past four years the U.S. Senate has
confirmed John Negroponte for key foreign policy positions—four years ago as UN
ambassador and last year as ambassador to Iraq. This week it’s likely that the
Senate will approve Negroponte’s appointment to be the country’s first director
of national intelligence.
The senators have supported Negroponte despite testimony
that in the 1980s, as ambassador to Honduras and subsequently as National
Security Council member, Negroponte misled Congress about death squad and drug
trafficking operations by the Honduran military and Nicaraguan contras. They
ignored his role in misleading UN Security Council members about Iraq’s alleged
ties to the al Qaida terrorists and its weapons program.
As Washington’s top official in Iraq, Negroponte over the
past year has ignored the human rights abuse and corporate scandals. Instead,
he contributed to the delusion that the U.S. military occupation is proceeding
as planned.
If approved a third time for a high position in the Bush
administration, Negroponte will surely continue deceiving the U.S. public and
Congress as he has done repeatedly since he was an embassy official in Saigon
in the late 1960s.
The Negroponte nomination signals the end of the CIA’s
dominant position among the government’s 15 intelligence agencies. It was
preceded by the appointment of Porter Goss (R-FL), the former chairman of the
House Intelligence Committee and a longtime ally of Vice President Cheney, to
head the CIA and direct its reform. As a result of the Intelligence Reform and
Terrorist Prevention Act passed by Congress in late 2004, the newly created
office of DNI--with a staff of 500--will exercise oversight over the budgets
of the diverse intelligence agencies.
For more than five decades, hawks and right-wing ideologues
have charged that the U.S. government’s intelligence apparatus, led by the CIA,
has downplayed the national security threats posed by the Soviet Union, China,
and “rogue states” such as Iraq, Iran, Cuba, North Korea, Libya, and Syria.
Through the decades of the Cold War and into the 1990s and
first Bush administration, the militarists and conservative ideologues have
complained that the CIA and other intelligence agencies, along with the State
Department, are bureaucracies overrun, variously, with liberals, “pinkos,”
communists, anti-American internationalists, and Arabists.
According to the hawks, the CIA and other liberal
strongholds in government have distorted their “threat assessments” of U.S.
real and potential enemies. In the view of the right-wing’s intelligence
reformers, the goal of intelligence is “not truth but victory.” What high
administration officials and leading Republicans in Congress consider to be
“good intelligence” is what the intelligence hawks call “strategic
intelligence.”
Since the mid-1960s Negroponte has moved around the globe
doing whatever is required to further what successive U.S. administrations have
defined as U.S. economic interests and national security--including such
diverse roles as advising the puppet U.S. government in South Vietnam during
the war, supervising the Reagan administration use of Honduras as its
logistical center for the counterinsurgency and counterrevolutionary campaigns
in Central America, and managing relations with UN Security Council members in
the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq.
Melvin Goodman, a former CIA official, warned: “Negroponte
is tough enough. The question is: Is he independent enough?” Referring to his
history of covering up human rights abuses in Honduras, Goodman said: “I think
the role of intelligence is telling truth to power” and then Negroponte’s appointment
“doesn't fit.”
As a practitioner of “strategic intelligence,” Negroponte
for four decades has focused not on truth but on victory. Typical of other
hawks, Negroponte blames the defeat of South Vietnam on the liberals and
moderates in Washington--not on any misguided notion of U.S. national security
or self-deception by the “war party” in U.S. government.
But Negroponte has presided over numerous short-term
victories, such as deceiving the world about Iraq’s purported ties with
terrorism and its mass destruction weapons, crushing the leftist guerrilla and
popular movements in Central America in the 1980s, and implementing NAFTA and
the “Washington Consensus” in Mexico.
Problem is that they were Pyrrhic victories at best. Any
intelligence worth its name would better describe Negroponte’s history of
representing U.S. interests as a series of wrong turns, dead ends, and deadly
collisions.
If Americans want good intelligence, not manipulated or
“strategic intelligence,” then Negroponte is the wrong choice to lead a
reformed national intelligence apparatus.
For more information about intelligence reform, see:
Basic Instincts, "Not the Truth: Iraq War Product of
Neocon Philosophy of Intelligence"
http://rightweb.irc-online.org/analysis/2004/0402pi.php
A Philosophy of Intelligence: Leo Strauss and Intelligence
Strategy
http://rightweb.irc-online.org/analysis/2004/0402nsai.php
Right Web of Intelligence Reformers
http://rightweb.irc-online.org/analysis/2004/0402rwoir.php
A History of Threat Escalation: Remembering Team B
http://rightweb.irc-online.org/analysis/2004/0402teamb.php
Decentralizing U.S. Intelligence: Office of Special Plans
http://rightweb.irc-online.org/analysis/2004/0402osp.php
John Negroponte: Policy Hack or Intelligence Reformer
http://rightweb.irc-online.org/analysis/2005/0503negroponte.php
Right Web Profile: John
Negroponte: http://rightweb.irc-online.org/ind/negroponte/negroponte.php
Featured
Analysis
· History
to Make Us Proud Bush says we must stay
the course in Iraq, and he promises to continue during his second
administration the radical foreign and domestic policies laid out during his
first term. We believe it is time to change course. But can the course of U.S. foreign policy ever
truly be altered? The Good Neighbor Policy of the Franklin D. Roosevelt
presidency in the pre-World War II period marked a dramatic turn in U.S. foreign affairs.
The new policy constituted a public repudiation of imperialism, cultural and
racial stereotyping, and military interventions and occupations. FDR's Good
Neighbor Policy demonstrated that it was possible to alter the course of
international relations and U.S. foreign policy. As in 1932, it is time once again to
change course, and the model of the Good Neighbor policy is a good one to
follow.
IRC Analysis The Good
Neighbor Policy—A History to Make Us Proud
· Right
Politicking The religious right tries to derail
women's rights both in the U.S. and internationally. When Americans ponder why the
rest of the world regards it with less respect, they could turn to the recent
controversy created by the U.S. delegation at the March meeting in New York of the UN Commission
on the Status of Women. At the two-week meeting, attended by 6,000 women from
130 countries, the U.S. delegation created a furor when it refused to sign a
declaration reaffirming the Beijing Platform for Action. Signed by the U.S. and 184 other countries
in 1995, the Platform included resolutions asserting the fundamental rights of
women and called for ending discrimination against women in 12 important areas.
Before signing a reaffirmation of the Beijing Platform, the U.S. delegation demanded
that an amendment rejecting abortion be inserted. Meeting with widespread
opposition from international women's organizations and supported only by Egypt and Qatar, the leader of the
U.S.
delegation, Ambassador Ellen R. Sauerbrey, eventually relented and signed the
declaration.
Right Web Analysis The Religious Right Determining U.S. Foreign Policy
· Negroponte's
Failures and Victories The U.S. Senate
should be prepared to accept responsibility for future foreign policy defeats
if it confirms Negroponte as the director of national intelligence.
Right Web Analysis Negroponte and the CIA’s Eclipse: Rest Assured--We Will Now
Have “Good Intelligence”
· Bolton's
Baggage This new IRC Special Report
is the most comprehensive look at the legal sleaze, foreign ties, radical
ideology, and the overseas filibustering of John R. Bolton, UN Ambassador
Designate--the man who Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice says "gets
things done" and North Korea calls "human scum."
Bolton's Baggage underscores the accuracy of both
assessments.
Featured
Profiles
·
Move America Backward: If
you believe that immigrants are destroying our country, free speech is
anti-American, and the UN should be kicked out of the United States, then Move
America Forward is your kind of group. Move America Forward (MAF), a
California-based advocacy group, believes that moving the country forward
requires kicking the United Nations out of the United States, recalling liberal
governors like Gray Davis, banning films like Fahrenheit 911, sending
"illegal aliens" back to where they came from, and having a rabid
anti-UN rightist John Bolton serve as our representative to the United Nations.
Move America Forward has mounted media-saturation campaigns to advance its
radical ideas, including leading the recent pro-Bolton campaign. MAF bills
itself as a nonpartisan nonprofit organization that is “committed to supporting
America’s efforts to defeat terrorism and supporting the brave men and women of
our Armed Forces.” As an advocacy organization, MAF disseminates its
information mostly through radio and television ads. It has also engaged in
online petitions, organized rallies on a variety of topics, and sent gourmet
coffee to U.S. troops stationed in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Right Web Profile Move America Forward
· Hardliner Gets Top Pentagon Job
Gordon England, nominated to replace Wolfowitz as deputy secretary of defense,
has no military experience—and has like other foreign policy officials been
criticized as a “chicken hawk.” He is not a neoconservative but rather a
creature of the military-industrial complex. In 2001 England received the
Distinguished Service award from the Jewish Institute for National Security
Affairs, a policy institute closely associated with the Likud party and the
Israeli military as well as with the U.S. neoconservative camp and U.S.
military contractors.
Right Web Profile Gordon England
Letters
From Our Readers
(Editors Note: We encourage feedback and comments, which can be sent for
publication through our feedback page, at: http://rightweb.irc-online.org/form_feedback.html.
Thank you.)
Re: Bolton’s Baggage http://www.irc-online.org/content/commentary/2005/0503bolton.php
Is Bolton the best choice to the UN? When the USA needs to
improve their relationships with the world in order to get back their
confidence and to be seen again as saviors, is Bolton the man to win that
confidence? I don't think so. He's too conservative to be in a high rank at UN;
you must be open-minded and he isn't! Bush is shooting his own foot and killing
his efforts to be "friend of the world." Bolton might be a good
diplomat, but he isn't an open-mindeed diplomat. So he isn't suitable to be at
the UN! Or else he might be, but only if he is on one of those 10 stories
that he says could disappear.
- Jão Pedro Português
Re: Negroponte and the CIA s Eclipse http://rightweb.irc-online.org/analysis/2005/0504negroponte.php
What the hell are you talking about? You show either
that you are a CIA press agent, or you show that you know nothing about the
CIA's history and the obscured facts within that history. Either way, shut the
hell up and sit in the corner!
- Richard Storey
Re: Lost in the Right Web
Thanks guys for performing such a noble role in making the
world a scarier, more hostile and threatening place than it might have been
otherwise. Following the questionable tenets of Leo Strauss, your organization
has perpetuated the myth of the might of the Soviet threat and has done the
same for the cause of radical Islamists, dragging the world into Gulf War 2.
Neo cons you may be, entrenched in the heart of the industrial-military complex
but you can't con all of the people all of the time.
- Phil Wilkinson
