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May 27th, 2009

This has only been standard operating procedure for about the last 62 years.

Via: Congressional Quarterly Politics:

A former deep-cover CIA operative says the spy agency’s congressional briefers routinely shade the truth or hide facts altogether from congressional overseers.

“They mumble, they dissemble, and there’s a lot of ‘on the one hand . . .'” said the retired official, who spent 25 years as a CIA operations officer but now writes blistering, unauthorized critiques of the spy agency using the pen name “Ishmael Jones.”

Jones denounced claims by Speaker Nancy Pelosi that the CIA kept her in the dark about water-boarding terrorist suspects, saying the California Democrat “has been using the interrogation issue as a political tool for years.”

But he said the spy agency’s congressional briefers are also experts at camouflaging classified programs.

“In Mrs. Pelosi’s defense, CIA managers do not give fist-pounding briefings,” Jones recently wrote for the conservative National Review in a blog that drew scant media interest.

“They mumble, they dissemble, and there’s a lot of ‘on the one hand …’,” Jones declared.

The CIA deploys so many briefers to the Hill it’s hard for both the agency and intelligence committee members to reconstruct who said what to whom, he added.

“Its enormous numbers of employees have led to briefings being handled by groups, with vague chains of command, so that it may have been difficult to pin down what was said, when it was said, and who was in charge,” Jones said of the CIA interrogation briefings.

Jones also charged that, contrary to beliefs that the agency has a political agenda, “In reality the CIA is loyal only to itself. As long as Mrs. Pelosi supported its bureaucratic lifestyle, it supported her, but when she attacked it, it fought back. The CIA may not be able to conduct efficient intelligence operations, but it knows how to survive.”

Reports that CIA managers were outraged or demoralized by the water-boarding controversy are wrong, Jones also maintained. To the contrary, he said, they felt that revelations of their interrogators roughing up, or even torturing, detainees made them look tough.

“The interrogations controversy has served the CIA bureaucracy,” Jones asserted. “A top goal of bureaucracy is to look busy, and whether one agrees with the interrogation methods or not, the impression given is that the CIA is both busy and aggressive.”

Jones added: “It relishes this ‘cowboy’ image, and its greatest fear is that the taxpayer might figure out how little it actually is doing.

“Bans or restrictions on interrogations,” he added, “would have the constructive effect of removing this smokescreen, this distraction, and redirecting focus to what exactly the CIA is doing to provide the foreign intelligence the president needs.”

A CIA spokesman said Jones didn’t know what he was talking about.

Research Credit: ltcolonelnemo