by hanshan » Fri May 27, 2005 6:57 pm
...<br><br><br>excellent analysis; good links<br><br><!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>The Answer Is Fear</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END--><br>By Robert Parry<br>May 26, 2005<br><br><br><!--EZCODE ITALIC START--><em>It’s not fear of physical harm. That's not how it works in Washington. For the professionals in journalism and in intelligence, it’s a smaller, more corrosive fear – of lost status, of ridicule, of betrayal, of unemployment. It is the fear of getting blackballed from a community of colleagues or a profession that has given your life much of its meaning and its financial sustenance.<br><br>This strategy took shape in the latter half of the 1970s amid the ashes of the Watergate scandal and the U.S. defeat in Vietnam. Conservatives were determined that those twin disasters – getting caught in a major political scandal and seeing the U.S. population turn against a war effort – should never happen again.<br><br>The U.S. press was blamed for exposing President Richard Nixon’s dirty tricks and for spreading dissension that undermined morale in the Vietnam War. The CIA analysts had to be brought under control because the driving rationale for the conservative power grab was to be an exaggerated threat assessment of America’s enemies.<br><br>Dynamic of Fear<br><br>What the American conservative movement has done so effectively over the last three decades is to perfect a dynamic of fear and inject it into the key institutions for generating or disseminating information.<br><br>This strategy took shape in the latter half of the 1970s amid the ashes of the Watergate scandal and the U.S. defeat in Vietnam. Conservatives were determined that those twin disasters – getting caught in a major political scandal and seeing the U.S. population turn against a war effort – should never happen again.<br><br>As I describe in Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq, the initial targets of the Right's “war of ideas” were the national news media and the CIA’s analytical division – two vital sources of information at the national level.<br><br>The U.S. press was blamed for exposing President Richard Nixon’s dirty tricks and for spreading dissension that undermined morale in the Vietnam War. The CIA analysts had to be brought under control because the driving rationale for the conservative power grab was to be an exaggerated threat assessment of America’s enemies.<br><br>If the American people saw the Soviet Union as a leviathan coming to swallow the United States, then they would surrender their tax dollars, their civil liberties and their common sense. Conversely, if the CIA analysts offered a nuanced view of the Soviet Union as a rapidly declining power falling farther behind the West technologically and desperately trying to keep control of its disintegrating sphere of influence, then Americans might favor a shift in priorities away from foreign danger<br> to domestic needs. Negotiation – not confrontation – would make sense.<br><br>So, one of the first battles fought in this historic neocon conquest of the U.S. government occurred largely behind the walls of the CIA, beginning in 1976 (under George H.W. Bush’s directorship) with the so-called “Team B” assault on the CIA’s fabled Kremlinologists. In the 1980s, this attack on the professional objectivity of the CIA’s analytical division intensified under the watchful eye of CIA Director William J. Casey and his deputy, Robert Gates.<br><br>Through bureaucratic bullying and purges, the neoconservatives eventually silenced CIA analysts who were reporting evidence of Soviet decline. Instead, a “politicized” CIA analytical division adopted worst-case scenarios about Soviet capabilities and intentions, estimates that supported the Reagan administration’s costly arms buildup and covert wars in the Third World.</em><!--EZCODE ITALIC END-->.<br><br><!--EZCODE LINK START--><a href="http://www.consortiumnews.com/2005/052605.html" target="top">www.consortiumnews.com/2005/052605.html</a><!--EZCODE LINK END--><br><br><br><br> <p></p><i></i>