Targeted Individuals Canada: Victor Marchetti

"The real reason for the official secrecy, in most instances, is not to keep the opposition (the CIA's euphemistic term for the enemy) from knowing what is going on; the enemy usually does know. The basic reason for governmental secrecy is to keep you, the American public, from knowing - for you, too, are considered the opposition, or enemy – so that you cannot interfere. When the public does not know what the government or the CIA is doing, it cannot voice its approval or disapproval of their actions. In fact, they can even lie to your about what they are doing or have done, and you will not know it. As for the second advantage, despite frequent suggestion that the CIA is a rogue elephant, the truth is that the agency functions at the direction of and in response to the office of the president. All of its major clandestine operations are carried out with the direct approval of or on direct orders from the White House. The CIA is a secret tool of the president – every president. And every president since Truman has lied to the American people in order to protect the agency. When lies have failed, it has been the duty of the CIA to take the blame for the president, thus protecting him. This is known in the business as "plausible denial." The CIA, functioning as a secret instrument of the U.S. government and the presidency, has long misused and abused history and continues to do so." - Victor Marchetti

the subversion of our democratic process - "...Marchetti describes himself as a person whose "intelligence expertise and well-placed contacts have provided me with a unique insight into the subversion of our democratic process and foreign policy by those who would put the interests of Israel above those of America and Americans." Marchetti is also the publisher of a Japanese-language book ADL and Zionism, written by LaRouche followers Paul Goldstein and Jeffrey Steinberg. Marchetti was co-publisher of the Zionist Watch newsletter when it was endorsed in direct mail appeals on Liberty Lobby stationery by the now deceased Lois Petersen, who for many years was the influential secretary of the Liberty Lobby board of directors. The October 5, 1987 Spotlight reported that Mark Lane had been named associate editor of Zionist Watch, which at the time was housed in the same small converted Capitol Hill townhouse as Liberty Lobby/Spotlight. Zionist Watch featured a conspiracist critique which saw Israel controlling U.S. foreign policy..." (Populist Party/Liberty Lobby Recruitment of Anti-CIA Critics)

CIA memo - "...In August, 1978, Marchetti published an article about the assassination of John F. Kennedy in the liberty Lobby newspaper, Spotlight. In the article Marchetti argued that the House Special Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) had obtained a 1966 CIA memo that revealed E. Howard Hunt, Frank Sturgis and Gerry Patrick Hemming had been involved in the plot to kill Kennedy. Marchetti's article also included a story that Marita Lorenz had provided information on this plot. Later that month Joseph Trento and Jacquie Powers wrote a similar story for the Sunday News Journal. The HSCA did not publish this CIA memo linking its agents to the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Hunt now decided to take legal action against the Liberty Lobby and in December, 1981, he was awarded $650,000 in damages. Liberty Lobby appealed to the United States Court of Appeals. It was claimed that Hunt's attorney, Ellis Rubin, had offered a clearly erroneous instruction as to the law of defamation. The three-judge panel agreed and the case was retried. This time Mark Lane defended the Liberty Lobby against Hunt's action..." (spartacus)

grown into a monster - "...Well, for one thing, the intelligence community has gotten much too big. It's grown into a monster. And it's become very much of a bureaucracy, in the worst sense of the word. It really needs to be, not only reorganized, it needs to be cut down, pared down, and I don't know that they're going to do any of that. But at least they're going to reorganize it, by making John Negroponte the new Director of National Intelligence [DNI]. This is a good thing: Because the old days, when CIA, essentially, was the main producer of finished intelligence for the policymakers and the White House, are gone. Everybody got into the act. Now, even back in the old days, the State Department was always very important. And the Pentagon was, too, but not so much in an intelligence sense, but in an interpretive sense, interpreting what the intelligence meant, in looking down the road as to what could happen in the future. It was kind of a tight little world. And everybody knew what the pecking order was. For the National Intelligence Estimates, the CIA had control of that. But they did it very deftly, and included everybody in State Department, Pentagon, National Security Agency [NSA]; and everybody contributed to it; everybody had a say in the final version; and everybody had a say in approving it. But CIA was basically in control. They wrote the Estimates—at one point in time, that's what I used to do, is to write National Intelligence Estimates. They wrote the Estimates, and then this was after they were coordinated with the other agencies, then it was approved by what was then called the U.S. Intelligence Board (USIB). The director, was the chairman. And the heads of the other agencies participated. That exercise of National Intelligence Estimates has grown all out of proportion. In the old days, you might get a request, say, from LBJ—you know, directly from his office—saying that he'd like to know what is the status of Soviet intercontinental ballistic missiles; or, what would the Soviets do, if we did that; or, what are the Vietnamese likely to do, if we bomb Hanoi? These Estimates would then be prepared by the Agency, with all the other agencies contributing in that, and be sent over to the White House—where it might be read, or it might not be read. And even if it was read, it might be thrown in the wastebasket, or it might be put aside for future reference. Intelligence was an input. And everybody knew this, that intelligence was an input, into the policymakers' decision process. It didn't control anything. And there were many times, when the President and Secretary of Defense, like Robert McNamara, and State Department, Dean Rusk, would request Estimates. And so then, nobody got their nose out of joint, if the President, or McNamara, or the other policymakers didn't take what seemed to be the obvious advice—you couldn't give advice, you could only imply it by the way the Estimate was written—that was their prerogative. And everybody understood it: That intelligence was just one of the things that went into making a policy decision..." (Intelligence Reorganization Is a Tough, Uphill Battle)

Victor Marchetti (born 1930) is a former special assistant to the Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency and a prominent paleoconservative critic of the United States Intelligence Community and the Israel lobby in the United States. While serving as an active-duty American soldier, Marchetti was recruited into the intelligence agencies in 1952 during the Cold War to engage in espionage against East Germany. Marchetti joined the Central Intelligence Agency in 1955, working as a specialist on the USSR. He was a leading CIA expert on Third World aid, with a focus on USSR military supplies to Cuba after the end of the Kennedy administration. In 1966 Marchetti was promoted to the office of special assistant to the Chief of Planning, Programming, and Budgeting, and a special assistant to CIA Director Richard Helms. Within three years Marchetti became disillusioned with the policies and practices of the CIA, and resigned in 1969, writing an exposé of the CIA in a book published in 1971 entitled The Rope Dancer. Later Marchetti published books critical of the CIA with author John D. Marks. The books included, The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence (1973).[3] Before this book was published, the CIA demanded that Marchetti remove 399 passages, but Marchetti stood firm and only 168 passages were censored. It is the first book the federal government of the United States ever went to court to censor before its publication (Wikepedia).

RELATED READING:

Pages

Thursday, July 21, 2011

Victor Marchetti