Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Pastimes : Kosovo -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: goldsnow who wrote (17199)	10/23/2000 4:30:44 AM
From: GUSTAVE JAEGER	Respond to of 17770

LOL! Note, however, that you've raised a very topical issue in your joke.... Remember that CIA mouthpiece Gentry? I exposed his pro-CIA leanings in my CIA/NSA comments on this thread. Now, here's what that Gentry has to say about Affirmative Action & CIA: Exempt Intelligence From Affirmative Action The Congress should enact legislation to exempt the Intelligence Community--and particularly agencies' subcomponents that operate abroad--from affirmative action policies and laws. I do not suggest elimination of fair employment treatment or equal opportunity. However, the now major preoccupation with sexual and racial percentages has cast a pall throughout CIA and reduced sharply the once-strong sense of fraternity and unity of purpose. In my experience, it is now becoming a problem in the military as well. Just as in society as a whole, promotions are seen in the context of quotas, leading to suspicions about the fairness of promotions and reverse discrimination. Age and sex discrimination suits by CIA personnel are now with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission or recently have been settled. An age grievance in the DS&T had origins in the dismissal of older white men to make managerial room for young blacks. Recall that former station chief Jeanine Brookner won a rare $410,000 settlement in late 1994 and another suit by women DO officers was resolved by a cash settlement and retroactive promotions in March 1995. Unhappiness with management remains pervasive, suggesting that the Agency will continue to be torn by allegations of discrimination unless there is significant remedial action--in both leadership and appeals arenas. However well motivated, affirmative action has become a national curse--creating competing groups that alternately feel discriminated against and want remedial discrimination at someone else's expense--that is particularly ill-suited to international intelligence work. It may make little operational sense to send a woman, for example, to try to recruit agents in an Islamic state that prohibits women from traveling alone or freely. (Or to establish a station of blacks in Scandinavia. Or to send six foot six inch blond weight lifters to southeast Asia.) We can assuage some moral national sense by sending women into such operational environments anyway. But foreigners are under no such real or imagined obligation to accept our moral codes; they will behave as their cultures tell them to behave. If women case officers are likely to be ineffective in such operational environments, the CIA effort will be damaged with uncertain impact on national security; the women's presence there also would be a waste of government resources. Moreover, poor performance--in terms of the usual criteria of recruitments made and reports submitted--is likely to show up at promotion time. The result may be low aggregate promotion figures for women--ostensibly evidence of actually non-existent sex bias. The point is simply to recognize that efficient field work requires operations in accordance with foreign cultural norms. We foolishly spit into the wind--as sailors might say--by demanding that CIA operations managers make assignments in accordance with domestic American standards of "fairness." This is not to say that CIA managers are fair--or that there is not a need for substantial improvement. The needed improvements are for all aspects of personnel management, however. I vividly recall a senior DO officer--a white male--who visibly shook at the mere discussion of crossing the executive who headed DO operations in Europe in the late 1980s. White men are treated poorly, too. They just do not have sex or race so often to hang claims of bias upon. Reforms need to be in at least three areas: selection of better managers; improved internal grievance mechanisms; and, a more effective Office of the Inspector General. There can be no healing of the breaches caused by affirmative action until the Intelligence Community, and CIA in particularly, accept a policy of genuine equality of opportunity consistent with mission requirements and the operational environment. The latter may be important for the DO and the DS&T, but is virtually irrelevant for the primarily U.S.-based Directorate of Intelligence. The Congress thus should give the agencies authority to act as common sense and operational efficiency dictate--and to keep social engineering out of U.S. intelligence. [snip] Excerpted from the same Gentry file referred to in: Message 14479275 Well, Goldsnow, the crux of the matter is the bold paragraph exposing how Gentry is obliquely advancing his conservative, prejudiced agenda as regards the management of CIA's human resource. Nobody, to be sure, has ever railed againt the CIA because it didn't open a "station of blacks in Scandinavia" or didn't appoint a female case officer in Saudi Arabia. Yet, Gentry insinuates that black and minority CIA agents don't share such a basic common sense with their WASP fellows.... As if the whole point was about a black field officer sueing the CIA over discrimination because (s)he's been turned down for the Beijing station! Indeed Gentry's aversion to affirmative action goes deeper than the above cheap debunking: it's actually aimed not so much at the CIA's fieldwork as at the CIA's back office. What Gentry's shiftily hinting at is a potential "culture clash" that might arise from a growing number of colored analysts with a different worldview.... I mean, it's one thing to have your good ol'days CIA with a WASP guy heading the "Africa department", quite another to have your revamped agency with a black guy instead. If you look for an example, just recall the '98 bombing of the US embassies in Eastern Africa --hey, most of the 272 casualties were niggers, anyway! And Deutch has so many French friends..... Get the picture? Gus.