CIA’s Former Man In Central America: Assad Didn’t Do It !

• “There is not a shred of intelligence to substantiate that this attack that occurred was carried out by the Syrian government, and in fact I am told by a good friend who’s still at senior levels inside the CIA that we know for a fact that Assad didn’t do it.” – Larry C. Johnson
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• CIA’s Former Man In Central America: Assad Didn’t Do It ! 
  by Olivia Nuzzi, https://www.nsfwcorp.com/
  On Tuesday, I spoke to Larry C. Johnson – a veteran of both the Central Intelligence Agency and the State Department’s Office of Counterterrorism. In an astonishingly candid exchange, Johnson castigated the Obama Administration for its alleged use of fabricated intelligence as it made the case to attack Syria, and he scathingly referred to intelligence agencies as a way to “put white people to work.”
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  Johnson was the CIA’s “regional analyst for Central America”, working “directly on the Contra Issues,” meaning, “I covered both the Guerrilla War in Salvador and Guatemala.” Intelligence back then, he told me, would have been comprehensive in the wake of a high-profile attack, such as the one involving chemical weapons in Syria.
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  “Immediately, as an analyst, you would have intelligence available through either imagery, through liaison reporting [reporting from other intelligence services], through signal intercepts, things from the National Security Agency. [You would be] able to piece together a picture of what happens. You’d be able to say, ‘These particular military units are involved.’ You’d be able to describe the types of weapons those units had. You’d be able to give some account of casualties; where those casualties occurred; what time the attack occurred; what direction the attack came from. What we’ve had with respect to Syria? None of that.
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  “Either the intelligence community is incompetent, [it] has the information and is sitting on it, or what the administration is claiming happened did not really happen,” Johnson says. “I know for a fact that the latter is the case.”
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  Asked if he could elaborate, Johnson said “I cannot.”  However he did say that he has “seen the intelligence, or the lack thereof. There is not a shred of intelligence to substantiate that this attack that occurred was carried out by the Syrian government, and in fact I am told by a good friend who’s still at senior levels inside the CIA that we know for a fact that Assad didn’t do it… I think it’s the administration putting pressure on the intelligence community to not do its job. [Syria’s] an example where you see nothing from the U.S. intelligence community to corroborate the administration’s case. It’s been extremely misleading.
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  “I am impressed by [the administration’s] incompetence. This was really amateur hour, the way they carried it out. They were following the George W. Bush playbook for going to war in Iraq, but they couldn’t get a consistent message and they didn’t have the benefit of 9/11 and 3,000 bodies laying around to use to persuade Americans that they needed to go to war. George W. Bush and company effectively played that hand.”
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  Although many problems with intelligence are actually problems with politics, Johnson believes that there are only a small number of intelligence organizations that are truly necessary. They are departments that either collect their own intelligence or perform their own, original intelligence analysis. The rest, he explained, “are just people repeating what they’ve heard…for their own bureaucratic purpose.”
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  “If you think of intelligence agencies like a daily newspaper or magazine, who puts out a daily publication? Well, the CIA is a principle publisher. The DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency) is a principle publisher. The FBI will put out information dealing with threats. The NSA will polish a digest, but it doesn’t really do an analytical summary piece… A lot of people get lumped into the intelligence community [when] all they do is regurgitate. They’re considered part of it because they bureaucratically fall under it, but they do second-hand stuff. You could eliminate them, and nobody would ever notice they were gone except for the folks who were sucking off the hind tit.”
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