For some reason, the average American citizen is awed by the presence of high government officials, especially those reputed by executive department sources and the media to have been privy to state secrets as spies or intelligence agents. They are said to have such honest eyes and believable faces. I suppose that modern movies, which portray exaggerated and propagandized renditions of fictional federal intelligence operations and the heroic paramilitary agents who go about saving the world from disaster, are responsible in large part for the public's favorable impression of professional spies. Porter Goss is one of those individuals about whom a curriculum vitae has been officially written and circulated by highly talented government propagandists who have recently regaled the impressionable U.S hoi polloi with stories about Goss's forty-year service with the federal government. Little, however, is actually known about the real Porter Goss, and other people like him, who have done the clandestine bidding of the Central Intelligence Agency, the federal spy corps with the annual three billion dollar budget.
All we actually know about Goss is that he graduated from Yale in 1960, joined the U.S. Army, and was later recruited into the CIA in 1962. After that point, Mr. Goss became a shadowy professional prevaricator, in the ambiguous name of national security, and assumed a trail of pseudonyms and aliases which accompanied him on his exploits in espionage throughout the world. What Mr. Goss officially did as a CIA operative has been classified regardless of whether or not the particular operation was, or was not, sanctioned by Congress. If the covert operations were properly sanctioned by the House and Senate oversight committees, they, in most cases, were correctly classified as top-secret. If the operations weren't sanctioned, and were illegal rogue activities (which in many cases they was), they was conveniently classified in order to obfuscate the devastating truth.
One of the more curious aspects of Porter Goss' federal career was his continued under-cover employment with the CIA clandestine services during the time he was supposedly a newspaper publisher and a Florida congressman. Official sources say Goss retired from the CIA in 1970 due to health matters, but other much more reliable sources report that he didn't actually retire, but assumed cover as an ex-CIA member when he began publishing a Florida newspaper, The Island Reporter, with two other former agents.
In 1974, Goss was formally appointed to the City Council of Sanibel, Florida and was later elected as the city's mayor. Time passed while Goss assumed a prominent Republican Party status in Florida politics while still on the CIA payroll. In 1983, Goss was abruptly appointed by Florida's Governor, Bob Graham, to be on the Lee County Commissioner Board. By 1988, Goss had attained so much political popularity and leverage that he declared himself a candidate for Congress with Republican Party approval, and subsequently won a seat in the House of Representatives while still employed by the CIA. This premeditated failure to disclose his professional association and alignment with the CIA to the Florida electorate was in violation of federal election law. What Goss has done in Congress since 1988 to advance the conservative Republican and CIA-NSA agendas may only be a matter of speculation. Yet, his appointment by Dubya as CIA Director, in 2002, came as no surprise to those who were aware of Goss's continued association with the agency. His immediate confirmation by the U.S. Senate was quite laughable, with those senior committee Senators, who knew about Goss' ongoing association with the CIA, pretending that he actually retired in 1970. The truth about the Goss merger, of the intelligence community with the military and federal politics, is certainly appalling, and begs the question of how many more active spies have been elected to Congress as senators and representatives?
The stark reality about the CIA is frequently difficult to handle, especially by those who elevate its leaders to high positions on the morality pedestal. What we do know as facts about the CIA, after its inception in 1948, comprises a litany of corruption, deceit, and false representations to the American public. Remember that it was the CIA that covertly used American soldiers and marines in Vietnam, in 1968 and later, as guinea pigs in horrible experiments to determine the effects of LSD and other hallucinogenic chemicals on the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese regulars. As many as 200 young soldiers and marines unknowingly suffered permanent neurological damage as a result of the illicit experimentation, of which the Executive Branch has, of course, summarily denied any knowledge.
In 1947, after the Army's Office of Strategic Services was transformed into the CIA, there was a regular secret flow of Nazi scientists and Gestapo agents, genuine war criminals, into the ranks of the military Intelligence corps, which was the vanguard of the newly organized CIA. This utter hypocrisy practiced by the CIA, and the later-organized NSA, under the nose of Congress, was kept away from the American public through a thoroughly refined Executive Branch propaganda ministry. This well-oiled Machiavellian tax-financed government machine was the later means of keeping the facts about the illegal onset of Vietnam away from the American public. It was before, and after, 1962, that the CIA controlled most of the operational strategies used in Southeast Asia by the U.S. military commands.
It was the CIA that grossly misrepresented the general elections in Saigon, in 1964, in showing that American intervention was favored by a majority of the South Vietnamese people. The U.S. news media reflected in print, and on television, the manipulative efforts of the CIA and NSA to deceive the American voters. Lyndon B. Johnson knew, however, that the majority of the South Vietnamese wanted the American military to leave Vietnam, but exhibited unrestrained hubris and continued to escalate the fighting, which resulted in the eventual deaths of over 58,000 American warriors. In 1968, Porter Goss was among the CIA operatives who were ultimately responsible for the implementation of operational military policy in Laos, and Cambodia. In all likelihood, he was one of the prime movers of the political strategies that exacerbated the military confrontation against the North Vietnamese people, which lasted fourteen years and ended in humiliating defeat for the United States.
The diastrophic effect which has resulted from using military personnel to provide intelligence operations for the CIA and NSA, has proven to be almost fascist in nature. Any military service thrives on an austere implementation of an effective dictatorship, where the dogface GI is strictly required, at the threat of death or other severe punishment, to follow orders, whether or not the orders are moral and legal. The U.S. military is governed under such a set of regulations known as the Uniform Code of Military Justice, not the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
By enlisting in the U.S. military, a person, in most cases, unknowingly signs away his constitutional rights and becomes military property. Most military commanders will assert that the average enlisted soldier or marine does not have the mental capability of determining whether or not a direct order is lawful and moral. The subordinate warrior is expected to follow orders without asking questions. This factor is what makes the grunt warrior expendable when orders are issued requiring that immoral and illegal acts be committed in the amorphous name of national security. Therefore, by putting the military in charge of intelligence gathering and the implementation of subversive executive orders (which currently have all the force of statutes), the overall result is inevitably aversive to the maintenance of the constitutionally mandated separation of powers between the legislative and executive branches. Porter Goss is the perfect example of the many paramilitary GS-14 civilian spies who have routinely put on the uniforms of field grade military officers in order to deceive and manipulate military units into following their orders. A career spy officially impersonating a military officer is, to me, the height of ignominy.
In and of itself, the U.S. Armed Forces has become a self-perpetuating and autonomous system within a republic and under the total command of one executive official, the President. This is basically why the President, Secretary of Defense, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff totally resent constitutionally mandated congressional oversight. This condition has resulted not from the application of law, but, rather, from the indulgent allowances offered by the Congress to the chief executive ever since George Washington issued the first presidential decree without congressional consent. Though strange, unchallenged traditions can eventually be claimed to possess the effect of settled law, even if they clearly violates the letter of the U.S. Constitution. I personally believe that what is clearly unconstitutional cannot be made constitutional by capricious declarations of the U.S. Supreme Court. If this be so, a higher law should appropriately intervene to reverse such a ruling. And such a higher law should only be a vocally dissenting majority of the U.S voting age population, which unites to oppose and abolish such an illegality.
It may be presumed that George W. Bush's recent nomination of Michael Hayden, an Army general and former head of the NSA, to head the CIA as Director of Central Intelligence, is a major step toward a fascist military approach to intelligence gathering and covert unsanctioned operations. It is a matter of record that our sitting president has already, under a banner of national security, secretly ordered the establishment of secret foreign CIA prisons and an extensive program of spying on the American public. In an effort much more technologically sinister than J. Edgar Hoover's covert tape recording of public figures around the world, which the deranged man found sexually arousing, the NSA has spied on and recorded millions of American telephone conversations. Dubya has used clandestine executive orders since early 2001 to authorize the CIA and Department of Defense to engage in highly unscrupulous, if not illegal, activities. Case-in-point, a high-level CIA officer's secret meeting with Osama Bin Laden at a French hospital where Bin Laden was undergoing renal surgery. This meeting was in August 2001, immediately prior to 9/11, while an existing order for Bin Laden's arrest had been in effect since late 2000, signed by President Clinton. This particular CIA officer left Bin Laden resting comfortably after a suspicious two hour dialogue and immediately returned to Washington to report to his superiors at Langley. Why wasn't Bin Laden surveiled at the hospital and subsequently taken into custody? Was the CIA somehow involved in the subsequent 9/11 WTC and Pentagon bombings? These questions were not posed by the 9/11 Commission for investigation. Why do you suppose this was so?
From the dawn of recorded history, the failure of developing governments to heed the lessons taught by the mistakes of previously fallen regimes has invariably resulted in sad replays of calamities perpetrated by deviously conspiring men and women of political and financial means. Most of these mistakes have been derived from the misuse of the military in aggressive foreign policy entanglements. The tragic Iraq War debacle is but a replay of the awful Vietnam saga, and the prevailing illicit machinations of the Bush administration are but a revisiting of the deceitful Nixon and Reagon years multiplied by a thousand. So when will it all stop? When will our supposedly wise and intelligent leaders begin to learn from sad experience? By placing the military in charge of the already semi-fascist U.S. intelligence community, the resulting effect will be like putting the insatiable fox in the henhouse, and will only make existing matters worse. The American republic will be unable to continue withstanding the continued and resisted umbrage against its already wounded standard, the Constitution of the United States. As Thomas Jefferson sagaciously wrote in the Declaration of Independence, "That whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundations on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness." His words are as true now as they were then.
Norton R. Nowlin is a published free-lance writer and essayist residing in northern Virginia. Mr Nowlin holds M.A. and B.A. degrees in political science and psychology from the University of Texas at Tyler, completed a successful year of law school at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, in San Diego, California, and holds an ABA-approved advanced paralegal certification from Edmonds Community College, in Lynnwood, Washington.
No comments:
Post a Comment