Politicization and a potential Fifth Column in Obama’s CIA is disturbing by Miguel A. Faria, MD

No one can accuse me of being an inorderly harsh critic of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Quite the opposite. I have written at least two articles defending the CIA over the years, even when politically incorrect to do so. Truth be told, unlike the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), which has been relatively left unscathed by the political establishment and the mainstream media (MSM) — even and despite such atrocities as were committed by the FBI (with the connivance of the roguish Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms; ATF) at Ruby Ridge (1992) and Waco (1994) — the CIA has been a punching bag not only for left-wing conspiracy wackos but also the MSM (liberal) media.

The CIA has been the subject of much political bashing in the past, even when the agency during the cold war provided the intelligence and operative counterforce to the dreaded KGB, serving veritably as the defensive “sword and shield” of America and the free world. But since the days of Bill Clinton’s presidency, Janet Reno’s Justice Department, and George Tenet’s CIA (in office 1996-2004), the agency has had deplorably more than its fair share of myriad intelligence failures and political scandals, the latter mostly during Democrat administrations.

More recently and even more seriously in the Obama administration, the CIA has been acting as a partisan political agency and has even joined the liberal media in conducting an undeclared but open war against President-Elect Donald Trump, before and after his election. I don’t remember ever witnessing such political impertinence and atrocious partisanship by either the CIA or FBI in their entire histories!

Once upon a time in the intelligence agencies

In the not-so-distant past, the FBI and the CIA were largely non partisan agencies. The legendary First Director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, served from 1935 to his death in 1972 under six presidents, Republicans and Democrats, building the FBI into the premier domestic intelligence gathering and crime fighting agency in the free world. For her part, the CIA had a more stormy course, but not until the debacle of the Bay of Pigs in 1961 was the agency singled out for political finger pointing. It was then that CIA Director Allan Dulles, the longest serving CIA Director in the agency’s history (in office 1953-1961), was blamed for the disaster and summarily fired by President John F. Kennedy.

We should also recall that it was Bill Clinton in 1993 who helped the intelligence agencies turn partisan by firing William S. Sessions, the Director of the FBI (in office 1987-1993, an appointment by Ronald Reagan); Clinton was assisted in forcing the resignation by the most partisan Attorney General in U.S. history, Janet Reno. A few years later, Sessions’ successor FBI Director Louis Freeh (in office 1993-2001) would also come under fire, this time for insubordination in the same regime headed by the same Janet Reno. The Attorney General’s open political partisanship; her attempts to use the FBI as a Praetorian Guard for President Clinton; and most troubling, her heavy-handed modus operandi at the Department of Justice, persecuting the citizen “militia” and other political opponents of the Clinton administration — represent a dark period in U.S. history. So much so that if at any time in our American chronicles, we came close to instituting a reign of terror, the Clinton-Reno regime came closest to implementing one.

What should FBI and CIA Directors be doing for their country’s security in fighting all enemies, foreign (mostly by the CIA) and domestic (mostly by FBI)? Certainly, not meddle in domestic politics and not pose security risks to the nation they are supposed to serve.

For purposes of instruction, let’s consider the intelligence & counterintelligence services under Ronald Reagan. Reagan’s Director of the CIA, William J. Casey (in office 1981-1987) increased enormously the CIA’s foreign capabilities to counter the Soviet Union and helped Reagan plan and implement the strategic blows that led to the collapse of the Berlin Wall and with it the collapse of the Soviet Empire.

Reagan’s Director of the FBI, William H. Webster (in office 1978-1987), uncovered spies working for the Soviets against America and brought power, efficiency, decency, and prestige to the Bureau. He presided over the twin “Years of the Spy: 1984 & 1985,” when nearly more than a dozen major Soviet spies were rolled up by the FBI and arrested. After serving honorably and revamping the FBI, he moved to do the same for the CIA, after William Casey, who had served with equal ardor and success, succumbed to a fulminant illness. Webster became Director of the CIA (in office 1987-1991 until his retirement). Webster presently is Chairman of the Homeland Security Advisory Council.

In 1805 just before the Battle of Trafalgar, Admiral Horatio Nelson instructed his marines in the British fleet: “England expects every man to do his duty.” They did. We should have expected no less from both the FBI and CIA under the administrations of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama to also do their duty in protecting this nation from our enemies.

Obama’s FBI and CIA in contrast

Moving forward to 2016, we witnessed FBI Director James Comey’s (in office since 2013) clumsy efforts to exculpate Hillary, despite the evidence of malfeasance all around her. (We can imagine the pressure from Attorney General Loretta Lynch and the Obama administration.) But then Comey was not so sure. His political no-win situation worsened, and his subsequent desperate attempt at transparency shortly before the election came under fire by Attorney General Lynch when Comey, on his own initiative, revealed the ongoing FBI investigations into Hillary Clinton’s email scandal. Like President Clinton, Obama had turned to his accommodating Attorney General (photo, right) to sabotage Comey’s FBI investigation of Hillary’s unsecured emails just prior to the election. But compare this active measure of partisanship to the treatment of Obama’s CIA Director John Brennan (in office since 2013), who has been given a free ride by the administration and the crooked MSM, despite his communist past, his immense security risk, and his inappropriate, atrocious, and partisan attack against the President-Elect Trump.

But let’s be clear about this: My admiration, not only for the rank and file CIA officers but also for the senior career officials in the CIA, remains unaltered. My problem with the agency is the recent inappropriate and partisan political appointments that have been made at the very top of the agency, which in the case of Obama’s administration, has reached a crescendo of interference in the election process, immersion in political partisanship, and wanton disregard for possible security risks at the very top of the CIA. The case for this political corruption has been well made by Cliff Kincaid, Director of the AIM [Accuracy in the Media] Center for Investigative Journalism, in two well-referenced but disturbing columns.

In his article, “The CIA’s War on Trump,” Kincaid describes this inordinate, inappropriate, and furious attack of the CIA top officials on the President-Elect. The scandal goes to the very top in the CIA. His perceptive article almost immediately resulted in an intense debate on GOPUSA.com with 74 comments in next several hours. The beginning of the column, setting the tone for the article, deserves quoting:

You couldn’t fault Donald J. Trump for concluding that the CIA is out to get him even before he starts his presidency. Former CIA officials Michael Morell, Michael Hayden and Philip Mudd have all denounced him. Plus, former CIA operations officer Evan McMullin ran against him as an independent presidential candidate.

Obama’s director of the CIA is John Brennan, who recently disclosed that he voted for the Communist Party (CPUSA) ticket when he was in college. He was hired by the CIA anyway and quickly rose through the ranks, even though the CPUSA was funded by Moscow and known to provide cover for Soviet espionage activities. The liberal media haven’t made Brennan’s disclosure into a scandal and didn’t call for any investigations of Obama’s CIA.

From there the article gets hotter revealing also that Michael Hayden, a former director of both the  National Security Agency (NSA) and the CIA, and another Trump critic, was once photographed with former analyst and turncoat Edward Snowden. No revelations have come or are forthcoming from the MSM about the shenanigans of any of these Marxists or progressive characters or their potential for serving as a Fifth Column inside the CIA.

Kincaid’s other article on the subject, “Corrupt CIA Feeds Crooked Media” tells the other side of the unreported CIA scandal: the complicity of the media.

As a result, Kincaid calls for a congressional investigation to unravel these tentacles of politicization and corruption within the CIA. The investigation should also include the personalities involved in the recent past and present leadership, beginning with John Brennan, Obama’s CIA Director, whose “great” and only achievement in the CIA has been in bringing sexual “diversity” to the agency, and not in defending the United States against foreign enemies. He should be investigated along with the aforementioned culprits, for negligence, political corruption, or worse.

The WikiLeaks brouhaha, the crooked media, and the Russians

The WikiLeaks disclosures involved the publication of hacked emails from the Clinton campaign, and Kincaid admits that while WikiLeaks hacker Julian Assange worked for a Russian propaganda channel, he denies that this fact constitutes evidence the emails were stolen by the Russians and given to WikiLeaks because they wanted to help Trump win the election. In fact it is also evident that malfeasance and carelessness at the DNC had been noted by the FBI but warnings were ignored and were to no avail. Carelessness with confidential emails, negligence with intelligence, and the mishandling of classified information seems to be rampant by Democrat operatives beginning with Hillary Clinton and ending with her maid.

Kincaid’s articles go into details about the WikiLeaks controversy and the possible Russian involvement in the affair. He reveals that House Intelligence Committee chairman Rep. Devin Nunes sent a letter on November 17, 2016, to James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence in which he reminded Clapper that he had “told the Committee during an open hearing that the IC [Intelligence Community] lacked strong evidence connecting Russian government cyber-attacks and WikiLeaks disclosures, testifying that ‘as far as the WikiLeaks connection, the evidence there is not as strong and we don’t have good insight into the sequencing of the releases or when the data may have been provided.’ “  And yet shortly after, according to subsequent media reports, the CIA’s position had changed dramatically. Why?

The reason for that change in the CIA position was that CIA Director Brennan could not pass up the opportunity to attack Trump. Brennan leaked misleading information to the media, including the Washington Post, which was the newspaper that published the initial and unsubstantiated repeated allegation that “Russia was trying to help Trump win White House.” Be that as it may, it should have been the American media that should have blown the whistle on the malfeasance contained in the WikiLeaks emails. The MSM should have beeb the watchdog, just as when they pursued with relentless passion the Watergate affair in 1974 and Iran Contra in 1987, but of course those were against Republican presidents. Because of the lapdog and crooked media, we find ourselves in the paradoxical, if not absurd, situation that If indeed the Russians are the culprits as the source of the leaks, it is to them and not the liberal media that we owe the information about our own political affairs, Democrat Party transgressions, and other misadventures.

Yes, a congressional investigation is sorely and promptly needed to sort through the chaff and get to the bottom of this imbroglio, or rather sordid affair encompassing the CIA and the crooked liberal media, a sordid affair that is disconcerting to the citizenry and detrimental to the nation’s political and constitutional process. I agree with Kincaid that it may turn out to be the case that the real government meddling in our elections was not from the Russians but from Obama’s corrupt CIA in complicity with a willing and crooked liberal media. Trump needs to work with Congress to clean house in the CIA, revamp the intelligence agencies, and gear them to perform the task for which they were founded, to protect the nation from all enemies, foreign and domestic.

Written by Dr. Miguel Faria

Miguel A. Faria, M.D. is an Associate Editor in Chief and World Affairs Editor of Surgical Neurology International (SNI). He is President of Hacienda Publishing, a retired neurosurgeon, and the author of  Cuba in Revolution: Escape From a Lost Paradise (2002). His website is https://HaciendaPublishing.com.

This article may be cited as: Faria MA. Politicization and a potential Fifth Column in Obama’s CIA is disturbing. Haciendapublishing.com, December 16, 2016 Available from: https://haciendapublishing.com/politicization-and-a-potential-fifth-column-in-obamas-cia-is-disturbing-by-miguel-a-faria-md

Versions of this article were first published in GOPUSA.com and Haciendapub.com on December 16, 2016. It is republished on March 15, 2017 because of the relevance of the revelations remains high, as the biased liberal media and the intelligence services (preserving the Obama progressive view of the world) continue their attack on the newly installed Trump presidency.

Copyright ©2016  Miguel A. Faria, Jr., MD