Creating a threat in intelligence agency 'mechanics'

Current manufactured threat: 'Russianism'

globinfo freexchange

CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou explains how intelligence agencies create artificial threats to justify their existence and draw more money from the government budget:

An intelligence agency has to have a threat around which to rally because that's how budgets are determined and that's how manpower is allocated. So, what good is an intelligence agency if there is no threat to counter?

In the United States we can go back even before the creation of CIA in 1947. From the beginning of 20th century we've always had to have an -ism, let's say to rally against, whether it was Anarchism, or Socialism, or Communism, or Islamism. Well, we're rallying against 'Russianism' right now.

Russia very easily could be a partner of the United States, whether it's a defence partner, or a counter-terrorism partner, or even an economic and trade partner. The United States has decided that it's better politically to rally against the Russians. It's a political decision it's been made rather than a long-term strategic decision.

We are in the midst of a new Cold War. The irony of this Cold War is that it's been backed and pushed by the Democrats rather than by the Republicans. We see this normally as a Republican or a conservative foreign policy point and indeed we've got a role reversal now where it's the Democrats leading the charge.

The CIA told us that there was no torture program. We know that, that was a lie. The CIA told us that there was no program for extraordinary rendition and kidnapping. That was a lie. The CIA told us that there was no archipelago of secret prisons around the world. We know that, that was a lie. The CIA said that it had not hacked into the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence's computer system. That was a lie.

Well, now they tell us that the Russians hacked into the Democratic National Committee email system, they offer no evidence and they tell us to take their word for it. Over the last decade and a half, the CIA has consistently lied to the American people. So, why in the world would we believe them on this?

Since 9/11 attacks we have transitioned into a full-time, wartime economy. A permanent wartime economy. It's no accident that the largest concentration of millionaires in the United States is in Washington DC and its suburbs. They used to be in Silicon Valley, which made sense. Now it's in Washington. Why? Because we have so many defense and intelligence contractors getting rich off of these boogeymen that we've set up around the world.

Recall that, William Binney (who is the central figure of the documentary A Good American), deconstructs the myth of an organization that is supposed to be pioneer in new technologies. He presents NSA - another top US intelligence agency - as an organization which had certain difficulties to follow the explosive progress of the computer technology during 1990s, in order to modernize its obsolete equipment as fast as possible.

But the most mind-blowing revelation comes from Binney's NSA colleague Thomas Drake. At one point, Drake recalls how a Senior Military Officer dismissed Osama bin Laden as “a raghead spouting off about a fatwa in the desert” in response to their intelligence reports on Al Qaeda in the late 90s. After the events of 9/11, Drake quotes his former NSA boss Maureen Baginski who reportedly said “9/11 was a gift to the NSA, we’re gonna get all the money we need and then some.”

So, the protection of citizens against terrorist attacks has become irrelevant in front of the big money targeted by the corrupted groups of interests inside the intelligence agencies. It seems that nothing has been remained unaffected from the rotten culture of "money and power above all and by all means" that dominates in today's societies.