Nathan Miller Quotes

Responding to suggestions that with the demise of the Berlin Wall the spying business will come to a halt: John Moore Cornwell

When he became a candidate, he modified this position and stated that he would abolish both agencies spying on Americans activities but not necessarily abolish all the functions of the agency.

about Iraq possessing weapons or mass destruction This is the one of the kind of statements which many felt were prevarications to justify the President’s desire to invade Iraq. See {618461} for an example of the reaction that was generated.

The CIA did not have a long tradition. It was created after WWII when the OSS was are espionage organization had been disbanded In the early days of the Cold War, the CIA went rogue and engaged in covert activities without the knowledge and approval of the President and his cabinet. General Maxwell Taylor conducted a thorough investigation and the agency was brought under control. There hav been several more incidents since then and every few years there have been additional scandals of unauthorized operations which were harmful to American interests and values. In a democracy it is always hard to control a secret organization. Actually, at the beginning of WWII, we had almost no espionage capability and President Roosevelt had a series of friends who provided him with intelligence until William Donavan had time to establish the OSS which did such a wonderful job.

We tend to be hard on our intelligence agencies for a combination or reasons. Because much of their activity is secret and many of their successes are not known to the public. If they have a great success, the politicians generally take the credit. But if the intelligence agency makes a big error that causes a failure of some kind, a the politicians often violate the secrecy and blame the intelligence agencies. The Iraq Invasion of the George W, Bush administration was a good example. The President had received intelligence that Iraq was developing nuclear weapons. He invaded to prevent their being used. It turned ouit that there were no nuclear weapons at all, and the President and leaders of hs cabinet had misled, the people, the Congress, the UN and world opinion and started a war on false pretenses. The administration then went public about the intelligence failure. There was a great deal of intelligence that indicated that there were no Iraq nuclear program but these never reached the President, the military or the public. In addition, the intelligence agencies have missed some really major events, like the fall of the Soviet Union or the Chinese Communist victory in the Chinese Civil war. But intelligence is not an exact science; mistakes are inevitable, The politicians using the intelligence tend to think that intelligence estimates are more certaini than estimates can be. However the CIA in particular has had periods of rogue and illegal activities just which cause many citizens ro distrust them. They have illegally investigated Americans, actually conducted experiments with chemical weapons in American cities without any permission or authority, violated American law in the way they treat prisoners,and destroyed evidence, broken the law by conducting activities that Congress and the President had explicitly forbid. The FBI has also broken the law and spied on Americans who were critical of the government, and slandered the reputations of some Americans by “leaking” information that oftn was not even true. So the current intelligence have to bear the burden of their predecessors, but because of the secrecy, cannot take advantage of all the wonderful accomplishments and great sacrifices of many members of the intelligence agencies.

It is noteworthy that a U. S. President had such a harsh evaluation of our major intelligence agency. Even more important in this case is that this President justified his 2003 decision to invade Iraq and start the war on the intelligence he claimed was provided to him by the CIA that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. This quotation and the President’s view was not public at the time. I all fairness to the CIA staff, many of them had provided a number of caveats and warnings about the unreliability of the information. However, the CIA Director, George Tenant, advised Bush in a way that the caveats were sublimated. See {633093} for more detail.

He was the Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. The NSA had hacked into the servers of these firms and others that were located out of the country. (They would need to have a warrant if inside the country.) The companies had never known it until Edward Snowden made this practice public. The result was, the public was learning that there was no privacy in any of their e-mail, social media activity, exchange of photos or videos or anything else. The companies feared that this would then harm their business, and that the techniques NSA used to hack there servers would then be discovered and used by others to steal identities, credit cards and do such other damage to customers. Even if the particular hacking methods were not leaked to the bad guys, they, knowing that the servers were vulnerable, would be encouraged to work to figure it out.