Tomgram: Ellen Cantarow, "Little Revolution," Big Fracking Consequences

[unhappycamper]

http://smirkingchimp.com/thread/tom-engelhardt/46647/tomgram-ellen-cantarow-little-revolution-big-fracking-consequences


Tomgram: Ellen Cantarow, "Little Revolution," Big Fracking Consequences
by Tom Engelhardt | November 19, 2012 - 9:50am

To say the Central Intelligence Agency has had an uneven record over its 65 years would be kind. It found early “success” in plotting to overthrow the legitimate governments of Iran and Guatemala (even if it did fail to foresee the Soviet Union going nuclear in 1949). Then, it had a troubled adolescence. The Bay of Pigs. Vietnam. Laos. Spying on Americans. As the Agency matured, it managed to miss all signs of the oncoming Iranian revolution -- the natural endpoint of its glorious 1953 coup that brought the Shah to power -- and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. (It did, however, manage to arm America’s future enemies there, sowing the seeds of 9/11.) Then there was the Reagan era Iran-Contra affair, the failure to notice the fall of the Berlin Wall until it was on CNN, the WMD “intelligence” of the Iraqi leaker codenamed “Curveball,” the Iraq debacle that followed, and...

Well, you get the picture. Recently, however, things seemed to be looking up. The most popular general in a generation or two, a soldier-scholar-superman who could do no wrong, became its director. Just before that, the Agency helped take out America’s public enemy number one in a daring night raid about which Hollywood is soon to release a celebratory movie.

But just as things were looking up, the rock star general was caught with his pants down, resigning in disgrace after an extramarital affair became public. That titillating development overshadowed another more serious one: a cry for help about a looming threat from the Agency and its brethren in the American intelligence community (IC). In late October, the National Research Council was to issue a report commissioned by the CIA and the IC. Superstorm Sandy intervened and so it was only recently released, aptly titled “Climate and Social Stress: Implications for Security Analysis.” And what a dire picture it painted: security analysts should, it explained “expect climate surprises in the coming decade... and for them to become progressively more serious and more frequent thereafter, most likely at an accelerating rate... It is prudent to expect that over the course of a decade some climate events... will produce consequences that exceed the capacity of the affected societies or global systems to manage and that have global security implications serious enough to compel international response.”

Think failed states, water wars, forced mass migrations, famine, drought, and epidemics that will spill across borders, overwhelm national and international mitigation efforts, and leave the United States scrambling to provide disaster response, humanitarian relief, or being drawn into new conflicts. That’s bad news for everyone, including the intelligence community. Even worse, the 206-page report calls for more study, more analysis, and more action -- and yet none of that is likely to happen without the assent of Congress.



unhappycamper comment: So what has the CIA done since it's inception? -->