US policy elites have been disconnected from reality for 30 years.

[eridani]

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2008/040708.html

What the Founders did not anticipate, however, was how fragile truth could become in a modern age of excessive government secrecy, hired-gun public relations and big-money media. Sophisticated manipulation of information is what would do the Republic in.

That is the crucial lesson for understanding the arc of U.S. history over the past three decades. It is a central theme of a new book by former CIA analyst Melvin A. Goodman, Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA.

As a senior Kremlinologist in the CIA’s office of Soviet analysis, Goodman was on the front lines of the information war in the early 1980s when ideological right-wingers took control of the U.S. government under Ronald Reagan and began to gut the key institutions for assessing reality.

One of the target institutions was the national press corps, which came under sustained assault from the Right – with reporters facing accusations of disloyalty and “liberal bias” from both inside the Reagan administration and from well-financed right-wing attack groups.

Another key institution on the Right’s radar scope was the CIA’s analytical division, which was responsible for supplying objective information about the world’s dangers to senior government officials.

However, in the 1970s and early 1980s, CIA analysts were seeing evidence of an accelerating decline in the Soviet Union, especially in its technological capabilities and its economy. Thus, Moscow seemed genuinely interested in détente with the West, especially a winding down of the dangerous and expensive arms race, the analysts concluded.

[raccoon]

1. That's one thing that's never made sense to me.

"However, in the 1970s and early 1980s, CIA analysts were seeing evidence of an accelerating decline in the Soviet Union, especially in its technological capabilities and its economy."

If the USSR was a shambles, our spies SHOULD have known if they were doing their job.

Of course, it was in the interest of the military-industrial complex for the American public NOT to know that.

K&R.

[eridani]

2. The ones that did got marginalized or canned n/t

[Senator]

3. "Team B(ush)" Have Been Terrorizing Americans For Decades

With their Chicken-Little, chicken hawk lies:

It's Time to Bench "Team B"

Bush team sought to snuff CIA doubts

We've had 30 years of bomb scares about "mushroom clouds!" that were/are not coming.

Only impeachment can reassert reality, morality, and begin to Redeem Our National Soul.

---

[Lydia Leftcoast]

4. I knew a lot of people who studied and traveled in the USSR during the 1970s

Every last one of them said that the place was falling apart and the people were disgruntled--but afraid that the U.S. was going to launch a first nuclear strike.

Later, when I talked to Chinese emigres and visiting professors, they said the same thing. They feared that the U.S. would launch a first nuclear strike and they didn't know what their country had done to deserve it.

In other words, the major nuclear powers needed one another as bogeymen to scare their people with.