Earlier this month we learned that the Obama
Administration is significantly expanding the number of covert Defense
Intelligence Agency (DIA) agents overseas. From just a few hundred DIA
agents overseas today, the administration intends to eventually deploy
some 1,600 covert agents. The nature of their work will also shift, away
from intelligence collection and more toward covert actions. This move
signals a major change in how the administration intends to conduct
military and paramilitary operations overseas. Unfortunately it is not a
shift toward peace, but rather to an even more deadly and disturbing
phase in the “war on terror.”
Surely attacks on foreign countries will increase as a result of
this move, but more and more the strikes will take place under cover of
darkness and outside the knowledge of Congress or the American people.
The move also represents a further blurring of the lines between the
military and intelligence services, with the CIA becoming more like a
secret military unto itself. This is a very troubling development.
In
2010, I said in a speech that there had been a CIA coup in this
country. The CIA runs the military, the drone program, and they are in
drug trafficking. The CIA is a secretive government all on its own. With
this new expanded Defense Intelligence Agency presence overseas it will
be even worse. Because the DIA is operationally under control of the
Pentagon, direct Congressional oversight of the program will be more
difficult. Perhaps this is as intended. The CIA will be training the DIA
in its facilities to conduct operations overseas. Much of this will
include developing targeting data for the president’s expanding drone
warfare program.
Already the president has demonstrated his preference for ever more drone attacks overseas. In Pakistan,
for example, President Obama has in his first four years authorized six
times more drone strikes than under all eight years of the Bush
Administration. Nearly three thousand individuals have been killed by
these drones, many of those non-combatants.
President Obama said recently of Israel’s strikes against the Palestinians in Gaza,
"No country on Earth would tolerate missiles raining down on its
citizens from outside its borders.” This announcement by the
administration amounts to precisely that: the US intends to rain down ever more missiles on citizens overseas. I believe what the president says about Israel is true everywhere, so what about those overseas who live in fear of our raining missiles? How will they feel about the United States? Is it not possible that we may be inviting more blowback by expanding the covert war overseas? Does that make us safer?
An exhaustive study earlier this year by Stanford and New YorkUniversity law schools found that US drone strikes on Pakistan
are “damaging and counterproductive,” potentially creating more
terrorists than they kill. Its recommendations of a radical re-appraisal
of the program obviously fell on deaf ears in the administration.
Thousands
of new DIA spies are to be hired and placed undercover alongside their
CIA counterparts to help foment ever more covert wars and coups in
foreign lands. Congress is silent. Where will it all end?
