In yet another utterly remarkable development the major media will never touch, 27 year CIA veteran Ray McGovern has unearthed and brought to light an op-ed by President Harry Truman which hints at why American foreign policy seems to be something predetermined at another level which the elected president can only ride like a tiger with a mind of its own. (Truthout.org: "Are Presidents Afraid of the CIA?")
In an op-ed in the morning edition of the Washington Post on December 22, 1963 entitled "Limit CIA Role To Intelligence," exactly one month after the Kennedy assassination, Truman, who created the CIA, wrote:
For some time I have been disturbed by the way CIA has been diverted from its original assignment. It has become an operational and at times a policy-making arm of the Government. This has led to trouble and may have compounded our difficulties in several explosive areas.
I never had any thought that when I set up the CIA that it would be injected into peacetime cloak and dagger operations. Some of the complications and embarrassment I think we have experienced are in part attributable to the fact that this quiet intelligence arm of the President has been so removed from its intended role that it is being interpreted as a symbol of sinister and mysterious foreign intrigue—and a subject for cold war enemy propaganda.
With all the nonsense put out by Communist propaganda about "Yankee imperialism," "exploitive capitalism," "war-mongering," "monopolists," in their name-calling assault on the West, the last thing we needed was for the CIA to be seized upon as something akin to a subverting influence in the affairs of other people.
The reason it is worth bothering to note that it was the morning edition of the Post, which at that time had 3 daily runs, is that in the subsequent editions that day, it disappeared. This is an op-ed by a former President of the United States. McGovern does not shy away from the obvious question of whether the timing of Truman's op-ed after the Kennedy assassination was accidental. McGovern, 27 year veteran of the CIA, writes:
Worst of all, evidence continues to build that the CIA was responsible, at least in part, for the assassination of President Kennedy.
At the end of Three Days of the Condor renegade CIA operative Robert Redford tells a shady superior "I'm going in there and I'm going to tell them everything!" He points across the street, it is the offices of the New York Times. The shady guy scoffs. "Who's going to listen to you?" Redford looks back at him dumbfounded, and the movie ends.
McGovern makes the case that US presidents going far back are afraid of the CIA, and know that when the military-industrial complex says it's war, it's war. We got a taste of this when General Stanley McChrystal went over the head of his boss to directly propagandize the American people, leaking that not giving the general the additional troops he wanted for Afghanistan "risked failure." McChrystal is the first regional commander to rise from the hub of assassination activity in the Army, the Special Operations command. McGovern suggested in a talk in DC last Thursday, Jan. 14th, that Obama, a hard-working civilian who has risen from US senator to president, is in fact afraid of McChrystal and all that he represents.
One month after the Kennedy assassination, Truman called outright for CIA's "operational duties [to] be terminated or properly used elsewhere." Uppermost in Truman's mind was the aborted CIA-sponsored Bay of Pigs invasion intended to topple Fidel Castro. McGovern writes:
In Truman's view, misuse of the CIA began in February 1953, when his successor, Dwight Eisenhower, named Allen Dulles CIA Director. Dulles' forte was overthrowing governments (in current parlance, "regime change"), and he was quite good at it. With coups in Iran (1953) and Guatemala (1954) under his belt, Dulles was riding high in the late Fifties and moved Cuba to the top of his to-do list.
Accustomed to the carte blanche given him by Eisenhower, Dulles was offended when young President Kennedy came on the scene and had the temerity to ask questions...Kennedy made it clear he would NOT approve the use of U.S. combat forces...
Coffee-stained notes handwritten by Allen Dulles were discovered after his death and reported by historian Lucien S. Vandenbroucke. They show how Dulles drew Kennedy into a plan that was virtually certain to require the use of U.S. combat forces. In his notes Dulles explains that, "when the chips were down," the new President would be forced by "the realities of the situation" to give whatever military support was necessary "rather than permit the enterprise to fail." Kennedy stuck to his guns, so to speak; fired Dulles and his co-conspirators a few months after the abortive invasion in April 1961; and told a friend that he wanted to "splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it into the winds."
McGovern brings up the Truman history in the context of the September 18, 2009 letter to President Obama from CIA Director Leon Panetta and 7 other former CIA directors to "reverse Attorney General Holder's August 24 decision to re-open the criminal investigation of CIA interrogations."
Three of the 7 --George Tenet, Porter Goss, and Michael Hayden--were themselves involved, in one way or another, in planning, conducting, or covering up illegal actions like torture, assassination, and illegal eavesdropping. McGovern writes:
In this light, the most transparent part of the letter may be the sentence in which they worry: "There is no reason to expect that the re-opened criminal investigation will remain narrowly focused."
Today is the day when Cindy Sheehan and activists will try to show Obama how not to be afraid of the CIA. The focus of their protest will be the CIA's "immoral, illegal, and inhumane" use of unmanned drones in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and the chilling future of the use of drones. From her press release:
Within the oration of the activists at this event the most frightening aspect of future drone programs will be explained and spelled out to attendees and to the press. The three most notable facts are (1) that drone programs currently under development will soon yield a series of UAV aircraft that will operate in a fully autonomous mode (meaning that no human will be controlling the craft remotely), (2) that the UAV program is destined to become the primary type of air power for the U.S. military which will also be tasked with the ability to carry out nuclear strikes, and (3) the use of drones will morph into rapid and various domestic roles as well (operating in, around and over cities of the United States).
Time: 1pm-4pm EST (Saturday, Jan. 16, 2009)
Location: Langley, VA – Route 123 (Dolley Madison Blvd) between Potomac School Rd & Savile Ln.
Google map is here.
Armed drones deployed or under development by Defense Department