{"id":181545,"date":"2021-03-29T12:00:12","date_gmt":"2021-03-29T11:00:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=181545"},"modified":"2021-03-23T07:26:24","modified_gmt":"2021-03-23T07:26:24","slug":"dirty-business-as-usual-new-cia-director-burns-confirmed-by-unanimous-vote-in-senate","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2021\/03\/dirty-business-as-usual-new-cia-director-burns-confirmed-by-unanimous-vote-in-senate\/","title":{"rendered":"Dirty Business as Usual: New CIA Director Burns Confirmed by Unanimous Vote in Senate"},"content":{"rendered":"

William J. Burns\u2019 appointment offers little more than an image makeover for the agency. As a diplomat, Burns supported U.S. military interventions in Iraq, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria and is now stoking the coals against Russia and China.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a>

William J. Burns, President Biden\u2019s nominee to run the CIA, speaks at his confirmation hearing on February 23rd.
[Source: nytimes.com]<\/p><\/div>\n

22 Mar 2021 – <\/em>William J. Burns was confirmed by a unanimous vote in the Senate on Thursday, March 18th, becoming the first former diplomat to become CIA director.<\/p>\n

At his confirmation hearing on February 26th<\/sup>, Burns continued a long agency tradition of playing up the threat from Russia and China along with North Korea, and said that Iran should not be allowed to get a nuclear weapon.<\/p>\n

Burns\u2019s testimony signaled a continuation of business as usual for the agency in its promotion of alarmist rhetoric and ruthless geopolitical competition and political skullduggery.<\/p>\n

As one of America\u2019s top diplomats, Burns offers the opportunity for a public relations makeover for an agency that has engaged in widespread criminal activity over decades<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The Senate Intelligence Committee hearing was more of a coronation than a confrontational question-and-answer session<\/a>, reflecting the deferential attitude of Congress toward the CIA.<\/p>\n

Vowing to improve spying on China, Burns described the Chinese government as adversarial and predatory at the hearing.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have to buckle up for the long haul, I think, in competition with China<\/a>,\u201d he said. \u201cThis is not like the competition with the Soviet Union in the Cold War, which was primarily in security and ideological terms. This is an adversary that is extraordinarily ambitious with technology and capable in economic terms as well.\u201d<\/p>\n

To meet the threat, Burns advocated for more China specialists and Mandarin-language training for CIA employees, along with investment in new technologies to help improve intelligence collection and analysis.<\/p>\n

Burns also highlighted ways that Russia could make trouble, including with cyberoperations like\u00a0the SolarWinds hacking<\/a>\u00a0that allowed it to steal secrets from nine federal agencies.<\/p>\n

\u201cPutin\u2019s Russia continues to demonstrate that declining powers can be just as disruptive as rising ones and can make use of asymmetrical tools, especially cybertools, to do that,\u201d Mr. Burns said. \u201cWe can\u2019t afford to underestimate them.\u201d<\/p>\n

A Sterling Choice?<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Writing in the normally iconoclastic CounterPunch <\/em>magazine, Melvin Goodman, a former CIA analyst (1966-1990), asserted that Burns was a \u201csterling choice\u201d<\/a> to head the CIA, and that his selection will \u201creverse the decades of lackluster and mediocre CIA directors.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n
\"\"
Melvin Goodman [Source: risingupwithsonali.com<\/a>]<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

Goodman suggested that Burns possessed the leadership qualities and experience which pointed to the \u201ckind of strategic vision that has been missing within the militarized intelligence community, particularly the CIA.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n

He added that Burns was \u201ccut from the same cloth as such outstanding foreign service officers as George Kennan and Chip Bohlen.\u201d <\/a>Kennan\u2019s containment policy made up the basis of the U.S. approach to fighting the Cold War and Bohlen helped develop the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe after World War II.<\/p>\n

Goodman\u2019s celebration of the Cold War\u2019s key architects is disturbing in considering that the Cold War ensured the perpetuation of gargantuan military budgets after World War II and resulted in millions of deaths and unprecedented domestic repression.<\/p>\n

Former Secretary of State John Kerry also compared Burns favorably to Kennan and Bohlen, stating that Burns had \u201cearned his place on a very short list of American diplomatic legends.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"
George Kennan, second from right and Chip Bohlen (far right) meet with President Harry Truman in the White House in 1947. Robert Lovett sits next to Truman.
\n[Source: nytimes.com<\/a>]<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

A similar view was promoted by CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou, who wrote in Consortium News<\/em> that, \u201cif there must be a CIA, I feel better with Bill Burns being in charge of it.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n

Kiriakou continued: \u201cBurns is one of the most highly respected senior U.S. diplomats of the past three decades. He has ably served presidents of both parties and is known as a reformer and supporter of human rights.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n

The message, according to Kiriakou, with Burns\u2019s appointment is clear:<\/p>\n

\n

The agency will not be led by a political hack like Mike Pompeo, a CIA insider like John Brennan, or someone associated with the crimes of torture, secret prisons or international renditions like Gina Haspel. Instead it will be led by someone with experience engaging across a negotiating table with America\u2019s enemies, someone experienced in solving problems, rather than creating new ones, someone who has dedicated much of his career to promoting peace, rather than to creating war.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n

A critical scrutiny of Burns\u2019s past, however, shows that his record is not as sterling as Goodman and Kiriakou suggest.<\/p>\n

Burns helped forge close U.S. relations with oppressive leaders, supported subversion operations against Russia and Ukraine, and helped build support for wars ranging from the Persian Gulf to Afghanistan to Libya to Ukraine.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"
Burns greets Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi\u2014a right-wing Hindu nationalist\u2014at Joint Base Andrews in September 2014. [Source: afsa.org]<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

A clue about Burns was offered at his confirmation hearing where it was revealed that, as Director of the Carnegie Endowment for international Peace in 2018, he was given free tickets to the Super Bowl by the Saudi government<\/a>, one of the most brutal regimes in the world.<\/p>\n

Burns served as Deputy Secretary of State in an administration that provided the Saudis with record arms sales, amounting to more than $115 billion<\/a>.<\/p>\n

A major fallacy to which Goodman and Kiriakou subscribe is that the work of diplomats is separate from that of the military and CIA when, in fact, they are usually intertwined.<\/p>\n

Ex-CIA Director John Brennan (2012-2017) noted that the agency had a long experience working with Burns during his ambassadorial and senior State Department posts<\/a>.<\/p>\n

A Man Who Sold His Soul for Power<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Burns\u2019s memoir, entitled The Back Channel<\/em> (2019), indicates a man who has sold his soul for the trappings of power.<\/p>\n

\"\"
[Source: powells.com<\/a>]<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In the prologue, Burns reminisces nostalgically about the heady days of the early 1990s when he witnessed first-hand \u201cAmerican diplomacy and power at their peak\u201d\u2014a time when \u201chistory seemed to flow inexorably in America\u2019s direction, the power of its ideas driving the rest of the world in a slow but irresistible surge towards democracy and free-markets.\u201d[1]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

Burns wrote that<\/p>\n

\n

the liberal order that the United States had built and led after World War II was in the process of drawing into its embrace the former Soviet empire as well as the post-colonial world for which we had competed. Great power rivalry had rarely seemed so quiescent. Russia was flat on its back, China was still turned inward, and the United States and its key European and Asian allies faced few regional threats and even fewer economic rivals.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n

Burns continued:<\/p>\n

\n

Globalization was gathering pace, with the American economy propelling greater openness in trade and investment. With only a single website and eleven million cellphones in use around the world, the promise of the information revolution was tantalizing, as was that of remarkable medical and scientific breakthrough. The reality that a profoundly important era of human progress was unfolding only reinforced a sense of permanence for the nascent Pax Americana.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n

Described by his boss Hillary Clinton as a \u201csteady hand\u201d and \u201cvery effective firefighter,\u201d<\/a> Burns joined the foreign service in the early 1980s after completing a doctorate at Oxford University with a dissertation on U.S. economic programs in Egypt during the Cold War.<\/p>\n

TO CONTINUE READING THE STORY Go to Original – covertactionmagazine.com<\/a><\/h3>\n

_____________________________________________<\/p>\n

CovertAction Magazine —> <\/em>About us<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

22 Mar 2021 – William J. Burns became the first former diplomat to become CIA director. As a diplomat, he supported U.S. military interventions in Iraq, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria and is now stoking the coals against Russia and China.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":181547,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[867,133,485,70],"class_list":["post-181545","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-anglo-america","tag-anglo-america","tag-cia","tag-diplomacy","tag-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181545","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=181545"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181545\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/181547"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=181545"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=181545"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=181545"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}