Alexander Cockburn (COUNTERPUNCH, 1-26-05)
The CIA's New Spies on Campus
After disclosure of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's effort to set a
new and spectacularly unaccountable version of the CIA in the Pentagon,
the sprouting forest of secret intelligence operations set up in the
wake of 9/11 is at last coming under some scrutiny. Here's sinister one
in the academic field that one that that had escaped scrutiny until this
week.
Dr David Price, of St Martins College, in Olympia, Washington is an
anthropologist long interested in the intersections of his discipline
with the world of intelligence and national security, both the CIA and
the FBI. CounterPunchers know Price's work well. Now he's turned the
spotlight on a new test program, operating without detection or protest,
that is secretly placing CIA agents in American university classrooms.
With time these students who cannot admit to their true intentions will
inevitably pollute and discredit the universities in which they are now
enrolled. Subscribers to our CounterPunch newsletter are now receiving
the edition with Price's full investigation. Herewith a brief resume of
his expose.
Even before 9/11 government money was being sluiced into the academies
for covert subsidies for students. The National Security Education
Program (NSEP) siphoned off students from traditional foreign language
funding programs and offered graduate students good money, sometimes
$40,000 a year and up, to study "in demand" languages, but with pay-back
stipulations mandating that recipients later work for unspecified U.S.
national security agencies.
When the NSEP got off the ground in the early 1990s there was some huff
and puff from concerned academics about this breaching of the supposed
barrier between the desires of academia and the state. But there wasn't
even a watch-pup's yap about Congressional approval for section 318 of
the 2004 Intelligence Authorization Act which appropriated four million
dollars to fund a pilot program known as the Pat Roberts Intelligence
Scholars Program (PRISP), named after Senator Pat Roberts (R. Kansas,
Chair, Senate Select Committee on Intelligence).
PRISP is designed to train intelligence operatives and analysts in
American university classrooms for careers in the CIA and other
agencies. The program now operates on an undisclosed number of American
college and university campuses. Dr Price has discovered that if the
pilot phase of the program proves to be a useful means of recruiting and
training members of the intelligence community then the program will
expand to more campuses across the country.
PRISP participants must be American citizens who are enrolled fulltime
in graduate degree programs. They need to "complete at least one summer
internship at CIA or other agencies", and they must pass the same
background investigations as other CIA employees. PRISP students receive
financial stipends ranging up to $25,000 per year and they are required
to participate in closed meetings with other PRISP scholars and
individuals from their administering intelligence agency.
From his enquiries Dr Price has determined that less than 150 students a
year are currently authorized to receive funding during the pilot phase
as PRISP evaluates the program's initial outcomes. PRISP is apparently
administered not just by the CIA, but also through a variety of
individual intelligence agencies like the NSA, MID, or Naval Intelligence.
Secrecy is the root problem here, with the usual ill-based assumption
that good intelligence operates best in clandestine conditions. Of
course America needs good intelligence, but the most useful and
important intelligence can largely be gathered openly without the sort
of covert invasion of our campuses that PRISP silently brings.
Anyone doubting the superior merits of open intelligence has only to
study the sorry saga of the non-existent WMDs whose imagined threat in
vast stockpiles was ringingly affirmed by all the secret agencies, while
being contested by analysts unencumbered by bogus covert intelligence
estimates massaged by Iraqi disinformers and political placemen in
Langley and elsewhere.
Dr Price says, "The CIA makes sure we won't know which classrooms PRSIP
scholars attend, this being rationalized as a requirement for protecting
the identities of intelligence personnel." But this secrecy shapes PRISP
as it takes on the form of a covert operation in which PRISP students
study chemistry, biology, sociology, psychology, anthropology and
foreign languages without their fellow classmates, professors, advisors,
department chairs or presumably even research subjects (knowing that
they are working for the CIA, DIA, NSA or other intelligence agencies.
"In a decade and a half of Freedom of Information Act research," Dr
Price continues, " I have read too many FBI reports of students
detailing the 'deviant' political views of their professors." In one
instance elicited by Dr Price from files he acquired under FOIA, the FBI
arranged for a graduate student to guide topics of 'informal'
conversation with anthropologist Gene Weltfish that were later the focus
of an inquiry by Joseph McCarthy). Today, Dr Price maintains, "These
PRSIP students are also secretly compiling dossiers on their professors
and fellow students."
The confluence between academe and intelligence is long standing and
pervasive. In 1988 CIA spokeswoman Sharon Foster bragged that the CIA
then secretly employed enough university professors "to staff a large
university". Most experts estimate that this presence has grown since 2001.
But If the CIA can use PRISP to corral students, haul along to mandatory
internships and summer sessions, douse them in the ethos of CIA, then it
can surely shape their intellectual outlook even before their grasp of
cultural history develops in the relatively open environment of their
university.
Academic environments thrive on open disagreement, dissent, and
reformulation. As Dr Price writes," The presence of PRISP's secret
sharers brings hidden agendas that sabotage fundamental academic
processes. The Pat Roberts Intelligence Scholars Program infects all
academia with the viruses dishonesty and distrust as participant
scholars cloak their intentions and their ties to the cloaked masters
they serve."
********************************
List of members from http://homelandsecurity.osu.edu/NACHS/index.html
Air Force Institute of Technology
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-- Website: http://nateweb.info/ Blog: http://levvygotsky.blogspot.com/ Email: willthereallsvpleasespeakup who-is-at nateweb.info"The zone of proximal development defines those functions that have not yet matured but are in the process of maturation, functions that will mature tomorrow but are currently in an embryonic state. These functions could be termed the buds or flowers of development rather than the "fruits" of development. The actual developmental level characterizes mental development retrospectively, while the zone of proximal development characterizes mental development prospectively." - L.S.V.
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