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By: SilentPatriot on Saturday, April 28th, 2007 at 1:18 PM - PDT
Showing posts with label Intelligence. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Intelligence. Show all posts
Monday, April 30, 2007
Sen. Durbin Drops Bombshells on the Senate Floor
And they call this oversight....
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By: SilentPatriot on Saturday, April 28th, 2007 at 1:18 PM - PDT
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By: SilentPatriot on Saturday, April 28th, 2007 at 1:18 PM - PDT
Wednesday, April 25, 2007
Are Some of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence Members... SPIES?
Federal Probes Target Intelligence Lawmakers
April 24, 2007 9:18 AM
Since 2005, four sitting members of the House panel entrusted with the nation's deepest secrets have come under FBI scrutiny.
The committee, known formally as the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI, for short), reviews classified budgets and operational plans for the CIA, the NSA and other so-called three-letter agencies.
Unlike nearly everyone else who works with the nation's deepest national security secrets, lawmakers on intelligence committees undergo no background checks, no polygraphs and no lifestyle audits. They are automatically waived in to review everything from secret satellite data to nuclear weapons intelligence.
"That means the people who serve on that committee have to have the highest integrity possible," said Vince Cannistraro, a former senior CIA official and case officer.
Following the FBI's raid last week on the offices of an insurance company owned by his wife, Renzi stepped down from the intelligence panel.
Whether or not the FBI finds any evidence of wrongdoing, experts say the recent probes are troubling.
"Name the one committee you don't want any corruption on," said Keith Ashdown of Taxpayers for Common Sense, a Washington, D.C.-based group which watchdogs congressional spending.
"There's a special obligation that comes with [serving on] that committee," Cannistraro concurred.
At least two investigations into HPSCI members have involved allegations of bribes-for-contracts schemes between lawmakers and intelligence contractors. Former California GOP Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham is in jail for taking millions in bribes in exchange for funneling government contracts.
Newly-elected Nevada governor and former Rep. Jim Gibbons, R-Nev., currently faces an investigation into whether he improperly helped a friend's contracting firm get business, payments and favored treatment from national security agencies and officials.
Through his lawyer, Gibbons has said he is confident "that all of this is going to be favorably resolved."
In Arizona, Renzi is suspected of taking a $200,000 payment from his business partner for using the power of his office to force the purchase of his business partner's land at an unreasonable price. Renzi has denied the charges and said the FBI raid on his wife's insurance business as "the first step toward getting the truth out."
In 2005, the FBI reportedly opened an investigation into whether Rep. Jane Harman, D-Calif., then the senior Democrat on the committee, cut an improper deal with a powerful pro-Israel lobbying group in exchange for supporting her bid to head the committee. Harman has denied wrongdoing, and the probe has reportedly stalled since failing to find evidence of wrongdoing.
Cannistraro, who once served as a clandestine CIA case officer in the Middle East and elsewhere, said it's painful for those who make careers out of learning and keeping the nation's secrets to hear stories of the corruption, both proven and alleged, that have recently dogged the very lawmakers to whom they entrust their secrets.
"They get disturbed by it," the 27-year CIA veteran told ABC News. "They're not in a position to tell the committee they can't have [certain] intelligence. It's theirs by statute."
April 24, 2007 | Permalink | User Comments (11)
Tuesday, April 10, 2007
US soldier defends opening fire on Italian intelligence agent, journalist at checkpoint
By Agence France Presse (AFP)
Tuesday, April 10, 2007
NEW YORK: A US soldier facing trial in absentia in Italy for shooting dead an Italian hostage negotiator and wounding a reporter at a road block in Baghdad said Monday he had no choice but to open fire. Specialist Mario Lozano told the New York Post in his first major interview since the 2005 incident that when confronted with the vehicle moving at speed towards his checkpoint he did what any other soldier would have done.
"If you hesitate, you come home in a box - and I didn't want to come home in a box. I did what any soldier would do in my position," Lozano said.
"You have a warning line, you have a danger line, and you have a kill line," he explained. "Anyone inside 100 meters is already in the danger zone ... and you've got to take them out."
Italian reporter Giuliana Sgrena, who had just been freed by her kidnappers, and intelligence agent Nicola Calipari, who had negotiated her release, were among those in the vehicle when Lozano opened fire with a machine gun.
Sgrena and a police officer were shot and wounded while Calipari was killed.
Lozano, from New York City, is to be tried in absentia for involuntary homicide and attempted homicide by Italian justice officials next week.
Calipari, who shielded Sgrena during the shooting, was hailed as a hero, awarded Italy's top bravery award and given a state funeral.
http://www.dailystar.com.lb
A US inquiry exonerated Lozano, with US authorities saying that Calipari's car was traveling too fast, had not slowed down and that Italian officials had not told them of the operation to free Sgrena.
Italy said Calipari's death resulted from a mistake on the part of the US military and that the checkpoint was manned by inexperienced troops.
The vehicle had been racing to catch a plane from Baghdad airport when it came under fire.
Lozano told the Post he had done everything to try to make the vehicle stop, from flashing a searchlight - something he said made "every Iraqi slam on the brakes" - to shooting into the ground and then into the vehicle's engine.
Lozano blames Sgrena for the incident, saying the correspondent for the left-wing newspaper Il Manifesto had failed to ensure that US forces in the area knew about the vehicle's whereabouts.
"I'm sure her life isn't like mine," he said.
"She's famous. Meanwhile, I've got to live with the fact that a guy got killed because he didn't comply with orders and I was that guy who pulled the trigger." - AFP
Tuesday, April 10, 2007
NEW YORK: A US soldier facing trial in absentia in Italy for shooting dead an Italian hostage negotiator and wounding a reporter at a road block in Baghdad said Monday he had no choice but to open fire. Specialist Mario Lozano told the New York Post in his first major interview since the 2005 incident that when confronted with the vehicle moving at speed towards his checkpoint he did what any other soldier would have done.
"If you hesitate, you come home in a box - and I didn't want to come home in a box. I did what any soldier would do in my position," Lozano said.
"You have a warning line, you have a danger line, and you have a kill line," he explained. "Anyone inside 100 meters is already in the danger zone ... and you've got to take them out."
Italian reporter Giuliana Sgrena, who had just been freed by her kidnappers, and intelligence agent Nicola Calipari, who had negotiated her release, were among those in the vehicle when Lozano opened fire with a machine gun.
Sgrena and a police officer were shot and wounded while Calipari was killed.
Lozano, from New York City, is to be tried in absentia for involuntary homicide and attempted homicide by Italian justice officials next week.
Calipari, who shielded Sgrena during the shooting, was hailed as a hero, awarded Italy's top bravery award and given a state funeral.
http://www.dailystar.com.lb
A US inquiry exonerated Lozano, with US authorities saying that Calipari's car was traveling too fast, had not slowed down and that Italian officials had not told them of the operation to free Sgrena.
Italy said Calipari's death resulted from a mistake on the part of the US military and that the checkpoint was manned by inexperienced troops.
The vehicle had been racing to catch a plane from Baghdad airport when it came under fire.
Lozano told the Post he had done everything to try to make the vehicle stop, from flashing a searchlight - something he said made "every Iraqi slam on the brakes" - to shooting into the ground and then into the vehicle's engine.
Lozano blames Sgrena for the incident, saying the correspondent for the left-wing newspaper Il Manifesto had failed to ensure that US forces in the area knew about the vehicle's whereabouts.
"I'm sure her life isn't like mine," he said.
"She's famous. Meanwhile, I've got to live with the fact that a guy got killed because he didn't comply with orders and I was that guy who pulled the trigger." - AFP
Saturday, March 3, 2007
US expert on Russian intelligence shot in Washington
1 hour, 41 minutes ago
US authorities were Saturday investigating the shooting of a US expert on Russian intelligence who was shot outside his house in a Washington suburb, an FBI spokeswoman said.
Paul Joyal, 53, was hit several times as he returned home on Thursday evening, FBI spokeswoman Michelle Crnkovich told AFP.
The shooting came four days after Joyal alleged in a a major television network interview that the government of Russian President Vladimir Putin was involved in the radiation poisoning of a former KGB agent in London.
US media reported that Joyal was in a critical condition, but Crnkovich said she could not confirm his state of health although he was still alive.
"The Prince George's County Police Department is doing the investigation and the Baltimore FBI is just available to assist them if they need us to," she said, adding the case was so far being treated as an ordinary crime.
Joyal told NBC's Dateline program that he had struck up a friendship with former KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko during trips to London.
Litvinenko died in a London hospital on November 23 and was found to have high levels of the radioactive isotope polonium 210 in his body.
He and his associates have accused Russia of carrying out the poisoning because of his fierce opposition to Putin.
Joyal repeated the accusations in his interview saying: "A message has been communicated to anyone who wants to speak out against the Kremlin: 'If you do, no matter who you are, where you are, we will find you and we will silence you -- in the most horrible way possible.'"
A former police officer, Joyal set up a consultancy in the 1990s specializing in intelligence information for companies wishing to invest in the former Soviet republics. He is often interviewed by US media as an expert on the region.
Sunday, February 25, 2007
U.N. calls U.S. data on Iran's nuclear aims unreliable
Tips about supposed secret weapons sites and documents with missile designs haven't panned out, diplomats say.
By Bob Drogin and Kim MurphyTimes Staff Writers
February 25, 2007
VIENNA — Although international concern is growing about Iran's nuclear program and its regional ambitions, diplomats here say most U.S. intelligence shared with the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency has proved inaccurate and none has led to significant discoveries inside Iran.
The officials said the CIA and other Western spy services had provided sensitive information to the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency at least since 2002, when Iran's long-secret nuclear program was exposed. But none of the tips about supposed secret weapons sites provided clear evidence that the Islamic Republic was developing illicit weapons.
"Since 2002, pretty much all the intelligence that's come to us has proved to be wrong," a senior diplomat at the IAEA said. Another official here described the agency's intelligence stream as "very cold now" because "so little panned out."
The reliability of U.S. information and assessments on Iran is increasingly at issue as the Bush administration confronts the emerging regional power on several fronts: its expanding nuclear effort, its alleged support for insurgents in Iraq and its backing of Middle East militant groups.
The CIA still faces harsh criticism for its prewar intelligence errors on Iraq. No one here argues that U.S. intelligence officials have fallen this time for crudely forged documents or pushed shoddy analysis. IAEA officials, who openly challenged U.S. assessments that Saddam Hussein was developing a nuclear bomb, say the Americans are much more cautious in assessing Iran.
American officials privately acknowledge that much of their evidence on Iran's nuclear plans and programs remains ambiguous, fragmented and difficult to prove.
The IAEA has its own concerns about Iran's nuclear program, although agency officials say they have found no proof that nuclear material has been diverted to a weapons program.
Iran's Islamist government began enriching uranium in small amounts in August in a program it says will provide fuel only for civilian power stations, not nuclear weapons.
Information withheld
On Thursday, the IAEA released a report declaring that Iran had expanded uranium enrichment and defied a Security Council deadline to suspend nuclear activities. In the meantime, the agency is locked in a dispute with Tehran over additional information and access to determine whether the program is peaceful.
In November 2005, U.N. inspectors leafing through papers in Tehran discovered a 15-page document that showed how to form highly enriched uranium into the configuration needed for the core of a nuclear bomb. Iran said the paper came from Pakistan, but has rebuffed IAEA requests to let inspectors take or copy it for further analysis.
Diplomats here were less convinced by documents recovered by U.S. intelligence from a laptop computer apparently stolen from Iran. American analysts first briefed senior IAEA officials on the contents of the hard drive at the U.S. mission here in mid-2005.
The documents included detailed designs to upgrade ballistic missiles to carry nuclear warheads, drawings for subterranean testing of high explosives, and two pages describing research on uranium tetrafluoride, known as "green salt," which is used during uranium enrichment. IAEA officials remain suspicious of the information in part because most of the papers are in English rather than Persian, the Iranian language.
"We don't know. Are they genuine, are they real?" asked a senior U.N. official here. Another official who was briefed on the documents said he was "very unconvinced."
Iran's representative to the IAEA, Ali Asghar Soltanieh, dismissed the laptop documents as "fabricated information." Iran, he said, has produced 170 tons of "green salt" at a uranium conversion facility in Esfahan that is monitored by the IAEA.
"We are not hiding it," he said in an interview. "We make tons of it. These documents are all nonsense."
Testy relations
The U.S. government is not required to share intelligence with the IAEA, and relations between Washington and the U.N. agency are at times testy. In March 2003, IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei embarrassed the White House when he told the U.N. Security Council that documents indicating Hussein's government in Iraq had sought to purchase uranium in Niger were forged. The Bush administration subsequently opposed ElBaradei's reappointment to his post.
While it confronts Iran's nuclear ambitions, the Bush administration also has tried to implicate Iran as a supplier of munitions and training for insurgent groups in neighboring Iraq.
But the quality of its information has limited this effort too.
U.S. officials recently compiled evidence purporting to show that the Iranian Quds Force, an elite unit of the Revolutionary Guard, had supplied Iranian-made weapons to Shiite militias that have attacked U.S. forces in Iraq.
After U.S. officials unveiled the evidence to reporters in Baghdad two weeks ago, however, Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates and other Pentagon officials scrambled to retreat from the incendiary claim that the "highest levels" of the Tehran government were directly involved.
"I don't know if it goes to the highest levels of the government," Army Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, the officer in charge of daily operations in Iraq, told Pentagon reporters Thursday. "What we do know is that the Quds Force has had involvement with some extremist groups in Iraq."
Washington has sought to pressure Tehran into halting the supply of "explosively formed projectiles" that are able to penetrate heavily armored vehicles. The projectiles represent only a small percentage of roadside bomb attacks in Iraq, but they are far more lethal than ordinary explosives.
Administration officials also cite a growing effort by the militant group Hezbollah, an Iranian protege and ally based in Lebanon, to aid anti-American Shiite forces in Iraq.
U.S. military officials contend that Hezbollah has provided training in Lebanon to hundreds of members of the Al Mahdi militia, which is controlled by radical anti-American cleric Muqtada Sadr. A smaller number of Hezbollah forces reportedly have entered Iraq through Syria to provide such training.
The administration has ordered a second aircraft carrier group into the Persian Gulf, a reminder that President Bush could order an airstrike on Iran's nuclear sites even while U.S. forces are tied down in Iraq. But White House officials have denied that an attack is imminent.
Given the lack of clear evidence, Iran's strategic goals in Iraq are a matter of debate, and concern has spread about its growing influence there. Although Iran is mostly Persian and Iraq is mostly Arab, both have majority Shiite populations that have kept close religious, economic and cultural ties for centuries. Iran's rulers view the U.S. as meddling in their backyard, or at least in their sphere of influence.
Some outside experts think the Islamic Republic seeks to keep the United States tied down indefinitely in Iraq and will actively resist a settlement there for fear that Washington will next turn its guns on Iran.
Ali Ansari, an expert on Iran at St. Andrews University in Scotland and author of "Confronting Iran," counters that Iran and America share some interests.
Iran is "looking for a stable Iraq," he said. "They want an Iraq that is not fragmented. But the difference would be that they don't want an Iraq that is militarily strong. They want an Iraqi government that is elected democratically, which means a Shia Iraq."
But Sunni-dominated governments in Egypt, Jordan and especially Saudi Arabia have pushed the U.S. to expand Sunni representation in Iraq's leadership as a way of countering Tehran. Some experts fear that a nuclear-armed Iran would spark a regional arms race.
John D. Negroponte, former director of national intelligence, told a House committee last month that Iran had extended its "shadow in the region" since the U.S. ousted hostile regimes on its borders: the Taliban in Afghanistan and Hussein's government in Baghdad.
Iran also has increased regional political leverage, he said, because of increased oil revenues, electoral victories by Hamas in the Palestinian territories and Hezbollah's "perceived recent success in fighting Israel" in Lebanon.
Iran and Syria since have resupplied arms to Hezbollah, including stocks of long-range missiles that could reach deep into Israel, U.S. officials contend.
Washington lists both Hamas and Hezbollah as terrorist organizations.
The administration has also become alarmed by Iran's increasing efforts to support Hamas after the group's victory in Palestinian elections in January 2006. That worry lies behind an $86-million U.S. plan to build up Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas' Presidential Guard and national security forces, rivals to Hamas.
Confrontation exploited
Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has successfully exploited the growing confrontation with Washington to gain much needed political support at home. Nationalist sentiments run deep in Iran and the claim that Tehran has the same right to nuclear power as other nations has become a rallying cry that undermines the government's domestic critics.
"None of us can accept the suspension of these activities because people consider this our legal right," said Akbar Alami, an independent lawmaker. "All the political parties agree with this. We cannot stop."
Ahmadinejad's fiery rhetoric and defiance of the West also have burnished his credentials as a populist leader in other Islamic nations. That has raised alarms in Sunni governments around the region that Iran's brand of militant political Islam, potentially backed by the prestige of being a nuclear power, is on the march.
"The Americans are worried about enriched uranium, and the Arabs are worried about enriched Shiism," said Mamoun Fandy, senior fellow for Persian Gulf security at the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies. Iran's growing power, he said, "threatens every existing political order in the region."
bob.drogin@latimes.com
Drogin reported from Vienna and Murphy from London. Times staff writers Paul Richter and Peter Spiegel in Washington contributed to this report.
Friday, February 23, 2007
Blix Blasts Bush’s Policy in Iran
Related
US intelligence 'wrong' on Iran
Much information given to UN was unfounded, Vienna sources say.
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US intelligence 'wrong' on Iran
Much information given to UN was unfounded, Vienna sources say.
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The former U.N. weapons inspector thinks the government is playing with fire.
By Niall Stanage
2/26/2007
copyright © 2006 the new york observer, llc | all rights reservedHans Blix believes the Bush administration is courting catastrophe in its handling of Iran. “It is playing at very high stakes,” Mr. Blix said. “The risk is that a spark could fly and that things could happen unexpectedly.” Mr. Blix’s dark warnings come at a time of particularly high tension. The United Nations is grappling this week with what to do about the recalcitrant regime in Tehran, with the government of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad virtually certain to breach a Wednesday deadline for suspending its uranium-enrichment program. What will the world body do next? The U.S. is insistent that the pressure on Iran must be intensified. Other permanent members of the U.N. Security Council—notably Russia and China—are much less enthusiastic about such a course. Meanwhile, Mr. Ahmadinejad told a crowd in northern Iran on Feb. 20 that his country would stop enrichment and enter talks—so long as Western nations also closed down their own “nuclear-fuel-cycle program.” “Then we can hold dialogue under a fair atmosphere,” the Iranian president said. Mr. Blix, who led U.N. weapons inspectors in Iraq in the run-up to war—and who earned the deep enmity of Washington hawks for his circumspection—spoke by telephone from his home in Sweden. He is now removed from U.N. politics, plying his trade for the Weapons of Mass Destruction Commission, a body funded primarily by the Swedish government. Liberated from the constraints of forced diplomacy, he is scathing about the U.S.’s refusal to negotiate with Tehran, in particular its demand that Iran must suspend its uranium-enrichment program before such talks begin. “The U.S. is sitting down with North Korea while they are making plutonium! Yet they are refusing to sit down with the Iranians,” he said. “A big part of it seems to be about humiliating the Iranians. It’s like, ‘Say uncle!’ The U.S. wants the Iranians to say uncle before it will sit down. “The West has painted itself into a corner with Iran,” Mr. Blix continued. “The Iranians are willing to talk about anything. All they have said is that they are not willing to close enrichment before the talks begin. Well, that is just like playing poker. Who gives away their trump card before you start to play?” Mr. Blix earlier this week wrote a syndicated column that appeared in the International Herald Tribune and on the MaximsNews.com Web site. Headlined “Will The U.S. Attack Iran?”, it noted that two U.S. aircraft carriers are now in the Persian Gulf. “The military build-up is either to scare Iran or to prepare for attacks on Iran,” he wrote. In his interview with The Observer, Mr. Blix said that he was not yet convinced an attack on Iran was imminent. But he believes that that has more to do with the realities of American politics than any lack of bellicosity on the part of the Bush administration. “On balance, I think it is unlikely they will do it. The U.S. public seems averse to more military adventures,” he said. He also cautioned that belligerence towards Iran would be likely to have effects that would be counterproductive from an American perspective. “The hardliners inside Iran would be strengthened by an attack,” he said. “The Iranians are clearly divided,” he added, referring to increasing domestic dissatisfaction with the presidency of Mr. Ahmadinejad. “But if the country was to be attacked from abroad, I think you would very quickly see a return of nationalistic fervor. If they were attacked, the argument about why they should have a weapon would also become even stronger.” For Mr. Blix, full negotiations with Tehran are by far the best option. And he believes in the carrot as well as the stick. “Iran has never been offered any security guarantees,” he asserted. He again drew a contrast with the negotiations with North Korea, which have long incorporated a U.S. pledge not to attack or invade in return, essentially, for good behavior from Pyongyang. “In negotiations, it is always the same: If you think the other fellow is terribly anxious, you can make use of it—but if you don’t, you can’t extract anything,” he said. “With North Korea, it was the U.S. which was anxious to get talks going. The North Koreans wouldn’t concede anything in advance.” Mr. Blix said he was aware of the domestic difficulties the U.S. might have in negotiating directly with Mr. Ahmadinejad or his representatives, but he argued that the potential benefits would far outweigh the costs. “Of course, it might be more politically difficult for the U.S. to sit down with Iran—I realize that. “But,” he added dryly, “it might also be less unpleasant than another war.” Mr. Blix was equally critical about other aspects of U.S. foreign policy. In his syndicated article, he described the situation in Iraq as a “debacle.” Asked if he saw any hope of circumstances improving there, he answered, “No, I don’t see any.” He added: “The Iraqis are not empowered, whatever the U.S. says about it being a sovereign nation. For, so long as the U.S. is there, the various Iraqi groups will not finally come together. Only when the U.S. says, ‘We are leaving and we will have no bases there,’ will the Iraqis say, ‘We have to get our act together.’” To Mr. Blix, the fundamental first step is obvious. Referring to American withdrawal, he said: “A timetable is desirable.” Turning his attention back to Iran, the former weapons inspector expressed horror at the notion of a supposedly “surgical” strike on Iranian nuclear facilities. “It would be absolutely catastrophic,” he said. “It would be an entirely new game if anyone started to bomb nuclear-power plants. I’m altogether against it. It is the worst possible option, aside from attacking civilian centers.” Mr. Blix believes that more time for inspections and negotiations could have helped to avert war in Iraq. He is insistent that the same mistake should not be made again. “There is time with Iran. The C.I.A. says they are five to 10 years away from having a bomb. The Israelis, they will probably say one or two years,” he said. “But there is time.”
Monday, February 19, 2007
Oh What a Malleable War: FRANK RICH - Bush's 'real aim is to provoke war with Iran'
REPOSTED
THE COMPLETE ARTICLE WITH ALL HYPERLINKS
***
Even if the White House still had its touch for spinning fiction, it’s hard to imagine how it could create new lies brilliant enough to top the sorry truth. When you have a president making a big show of berating Iran while simultaneously empowering it, you’ve got another remake of “The Manchurian Candidate,” this time played for keeps.
--MORE--
THE COMPLETE ARTICLE WITH ALL HYPERLINKS
The New York Times
OP-ED COLUMNIST
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Oh What a Malleable War
By FRANK RICHPublished: February 18, 2007
The team that once sold the country smoking guns in the shape of mushroom clouds has completely lost its mojo.
MAYBE the Bush White House can’t conduct a war, but no one has ever impugned its ability to lie about its conduct of a war. Now even that well-earned reputation for flawless fictionalizing is coming undone. Watching the administration try to get its story straight about Iran’s role in Iraq last week was like watching third graders try to sidestep blame for misbehaving while the substitute teacher was on a bathroom break. The team that once sold the country smoking guns in the shape of mushroom clouds has completely lost its mojo.
Surely these guys can do better than this. No sooner did unnamed military officials unveil their melodramatically secretive briefing in Baghdad last Sunday than Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, blew the whole charade. General Pace said he didn’t know about the briefing and couldn’t endorse its contention that the Iranian government’s highest echelons were complicit in anti-American hostilities in Iraq. Public-relations pandemonium ensued as Tony Snow, the State Department and finally the president tried to revise the story line on the fly. Back when Karl Rove ruled, everyone read verbatim from the same script. Last week’s frantic improvisations were vintage Scooter Libby, at best the ur-text for a future perjury trial.
Yet for all the sloppy internal contradictions, the most incriminating indictment of the new White House disinformation campaign is to be found in official assertions made more than a year ago. The press and everyone else seems to have forgotten that the administration has twice sounded the same alarms about Iranian weaponry in Iraq that it did last week.
In August 2005, NBC News, CBS News and The Times cited unnamed military and intelligence officials when reporting, as CBS put it, that “U.S. forces intercepted a shipment from Iran containing professionally made explosive devices specifically designed to penetrate the armor which protects American vehicles.” Then, as now, those devices were the devastating roadside bombs currently called E.F.P.’s (explosively formed penetrators). Then, as now, they were thought to have been brought into Iraq by members of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard. Then, as now, there was no evidence that the Iranian government was directly involved. In February 2006, administration officials delivered the same warning yet again, before the Senate Intelligence Committee.
Timing is everything in propaganda, as in all showmanship. So why would the White House pick this particular moment to mount such an extravagant rerun of old news, complete with photos and props reminiscent of Colin Powell’s infamous presentation of prewar intelligence?***
Even if the White House still had its touch for spinning fiction, it’s hard to imagine how it could create new lies brilliant enough to top the sorry truth. When you have a president making a big show of berating Iran while simultaneously empowering it, you’ve got another remake of “The Manchurian Candidate,” this time played for keeps.
--MORE--
Sunday, February 18, 2007
Oh What a Malleable War: FRANK RICH - Bush's 'real aim is to provoke war with Iran'
THE COMPLETE ARTICLE WITH ALL HYPERLINKS
The New York Times
OP-ED COLUMNIST
The New York Times
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Oh What a Malleable War
By FRANK RICHPublished: February 18, 2007
The team that once sold the country smoking guns in the shape of mushroom clouds has completely lost its mojo.
MAYBE the Bush White House can’t conduct a war, but no one has ever impugned its ability to lie about its conduct of a war. Now even that well-earned reputation for flawless fictionalizing is coming undone. Watching the administration try to get its story straight about Iran’s role in Iraq last week was like watching third graders try to sidestep blame for misbehaving while the substitute teacher was on a bathroom break. The team that once sold the country smoking guns in the shape of mushroom clouds has completely lost its mojo.
Surely these guys can do better than this. No sooner did unnamed military officials unveil their melodramatically secretive briefing in Baghdad last Sunday than Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, blew the whole charade. General Pace said he didn’t know about the briefing and couldn’t endorse its contention that the Iranian government’s highest echelons were complicit in anti-American hostilities in Iraq. Public-relations pandemonium ensued as Tony Snow, the State Department and finally the president tried to revise the story line on the fly. Back when Karl Rove ruled, everyone read verbatim from the same script. Last week’s frantic improvisations were vintage Scooter Libby, at best the ur-text for a future perjury trial.
Yet for all the sloppy internal contradictions, the most incriminating indictment of the new White House disinformation campaign is to be found in official assertions made more than a year ago. The press and everyone else seems to have forgotten that the administration has twice sounded the same alarms about Iranian weaponry in Iraq that it did last week.
In August 2005, NBC News, CBS News and The Times cited unnamed military and intelligence officials when reporting, as CBS put it, that “U.S. forces intercepted a shipment from Iran containing professionally made explosive devices specifically designed to penetrate the armor which protects American vehicles.” Then, as now, those devices were the devastating roadside bombs currently called E.F.P.’s (explosively formed penetrators). Then, as now, they were thought to have been brought into Iraq by members of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard. Then, as now, there was no evidence that the Iranian government was directly involved. In February 2006, administration officials delivered the same warning yet again, before the Senate Intelligence Committee.
Timing is everything in propaganda, as in all showmanship. So why would the White House pick this particular moment to mount such an extravagant rerun of old news, complete with photos and props reminiscent of Colin Powell’s infamous presentation of prewar intelligence?***
Even if the White House still had its touch for spinning fiction, it’s hard to imagine how it could create new lies brilliant enough to top the sorry truth. When you have a president making a big show of berating Iran while simultaneously empowering it, you’ve got another remake of “The Manchurian Candidate,” this time played for keeps.
--MORE--
Tuesday, February 13, 2007
The Douglas Feith lawyers up and talks, the guiltier Wolfowitz & Co. look
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The more Douglas Feith lawyers up his rhetoric about the faults of the CIA, and continues to rectify his approach in cherry picking (critiquing) intelligence, the guiltier Wolfowitz & Co. look.
The New York Times is now putting out the word, George Tenent is the guy with the false intelligence, he’s the one to blame for Iraq. For the NY Times this might be the best strategy, it’s better than not reporting about Feith & Co. at all, which is what they’re doing.
But what is in a defense that puts Tenent at the helm?
He’s CIA.
Feith has been on a lecture/education tour explaining how the CIA was getting it wrong and that Bush needed a go between, a B-team, to get it right. Its what Feith calls good government, groups that critique it all! Sounds good, coming from a guy within a group, that was never critiqued! Untill now.
Feith blames Tenent for the bad intelligence that Bush sold to the public, which in turn forced Congress’ hand in going after Saddam. How can Feith blame the CIA? It was his Iraq think tank, with the power to critique information, by using power-point presentations that make the ultimate decision maker (Bush), get it wrong!
Or did they?
Wolfowitz & Co. were this countries last defense against faulty intelligence, at least this is how they sold it. This cast of well-known Zionists got it right for Israel and wrong for America. And now they (Eric Edelman & Co) expect the us, the Americans, to thank these traitors for their service? Lets leave that to Israel and the Bush team.
How long can BAE, Britain's biggest arms company, run a secret service and trump the armed forces?
The parallel universe of BAE: covert, dangerous and beyond the rule of law
How long can Britain's biggest arms company run a secret service and trump the armed forces in political influence?George Monbiot
Tuesday February 13, 2007
The Guardian
There is a state within a state in the United Kingdom, a small but untouchable domain that appears to be subject to a different set of laws. We have heard quite a bit about it over the past two months, but hardly anyone knows just how far its writ runs. The state is BAE Systems, Britain's biggest arms company. It seems, among other advantages, to be able to run its own secret service.
This week, Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT) hopes to obtain a court order against BAE. The order would allow it to discover how the arms company obtained one of its confidential documents. CAAT instructed its lawyers, Leigh Day & Co, to seek a judicial review of the government's decision to drop the corruption case against BAE, which is alleged to have paid massive bribes to members of the Saudi royal family. Leigh Day sent CAAT an email containing advice on costs and tactics. The email ended up in the hands of the arms company.
How? Correspondence between a plaintiff and his lawyers couldn't be more private. The last people you would show it to are the defendants in the case. But somehow the letter found its way to BAE's offices.
The arms company argues that it was the unwitting and unwilling recipient of the email. So why does it refuse to tell CAAT who sent it? Why, far from assisting CAAT's attempt to explain this mystery, has it threatened the group with costs for seeking to reveal BAE's source?
CAAT has good reason to be suspicious. In 2003, the Sunday Times revealed that BAE had carried out a "widespread spying operation" on its critics. "Bank accounts were accessed, computer files downloaded and private correspondence with members of parliament and ministers secretly copied and passed on." The paper said the arms company made use of a network run by a former consultant for the Ministry of Defence called Evelyn Le Chene. "Le Chene recruited at least half a dozen agents to infiltrate CAAT's headquarters at Finsbury Park, north London, and a number of regional offices." They provided BAE with advanced intelligence on CAAT's campaign against the sale of its Hawk aircraft to the Suharto dictatorship in Indonesia. The arms company also obtained CAAT's membership list, its bank account details, the identity of its donors, its letters to ministers, even the contents of private diaries belonging to its staff.
After the story was published, CAAT asked a team of investigators to examine the messages sent from its offices. They found that one of the group's most senior members of staff, the national campaigns and events coordinator, had sent 181 emails to an unfamiliar address. Many of them contained extremely sensitive information.
The coordinator, Martin Hogbin, denied that he was an agent of Le Chene's. He claimed that the mysterious email address belonged to a former CAAT volunteer, and that he had been sending him this information because he might find it interesting.
The investigators contacted the former volunteer, who told them that he had not received any messages from Hogbin, and did not recognise the address. CAAT took the case to the United Kingdom's Information Commissioner, who found that the email address belonged to "a company with links to Evelyn Le Chene". Both Le Chene and Hogbin refused to assist the investigations. If it was true that Hogbin was working for Le Chene, it would be a tremendous coup for her and her clients. As campaigns and events coordinator, he knew more than anyone else about CAAT's plans. If BAE were to obtain and make use of such intelligence, it could anticipate and outmanoeuvre the Campaign's attempts to expose or embarrass it.
BAE's spying operations represent just one way in which the company looks like a parallel state. It also appears to enjoy crown immunity. Last August, this column suggested that the Saudi corruption case might be dropped, in order to protect a new order for 72 BAE jets. It was not a hard prediction to make - Saudi Arabia had made the new deal conditional on the abandonment of the case. But I could not have guessed that both the attorney general and the prime minister would make such a show of squashing the investigation. They seemed to go out of their way to demonstrate to BAE's clients that they would do whatever it took to protect the new order, even if it meant exposing themselves to allegations of collusion.
The prime minister has never taken such a risk on behalf of one of his departments, let alone his ministers or officials (witness how Lord Levy and Ruth Turner have been left to swing). There are just two friends for whom he will put his legacy on the line: George Bush and BAE.
In 2001, Blair overruled Clare Short and Gordon Brown to grant an export licence for BAE's sale of a military air-traffic control system to one of the world's poorest countries, Tanzania. The World Bank had pointed out that the contract was ridiculously expensive - Tanzania could have bought a better system elsewhere for a quarter of the price. In January the Guardian revealed that BAE Systems allegedly paid a $12m (£6.2m) "commission" to an agent who brokered the deal.
In 2005, Blair made a secret visit to Riyadh to expedite BAE's deal with the Saudi princes. He then sent both John Reid and Des Browne to clinch the order. Ministers in the UK have always acted as unpaid salesmen for the arms companies, but seldom has a prime minister muddied his hands this much. Blair pushed the order through by promising the Saudis that they could have the first 24 planes ahead of schedule. How? By selling them the jets already allotted to the RAF. BAE's interests, in other words, trump the requirements of our own armed forces.
Blair has also broken his government's pledge to publish the report by the National Audit Office on BAE's dealings in Saudi Arabia. It remains the only NAO report never to have been made public. We can only guess why the prime minister needs to protect it.
It could be argued, with some force, that this government has always had a special relationship with big business, rather like its special relationship with George Bush (it gets beaten up and thanks him for it). But the special favours it grants BAE are deeply resented by other corporations. After the suppression of the Saudi case, F&C Asset Management, a very large institutional investor, wrote to the government to complain that its decision undermined the rule of law and the predictability of the investment climate. Hermes, Britain's biggest pension fund, said that it threatened the UK's reputation as a leading financial centre, and the chairman of Anglo-American wrote that the abandonment of the case "damaged the reputation of Britain".
At what point does the government conclude that this company has got out of control? That it presents a danger to national interests, to the reputation of the prime minister, to the privacy and civil liberties of its opponents? Why does it appear to be above the law? For how much longer will it be permitted to run what looks like a parallel secret service? Of all the questions we might ask of our ministers, these are the least likely to be answered.George Monbiot is the author of the bestselling books The Age of Consent: A Manifesto for a New World Order and Captive State: The Corporate Takeover of Britain, as well as the investigative travel books Poisoned Arrows, Amazon Watershed and No Man’s Land.
He has held visiting fellowships or professorships at the universities of Oxford (environmental policy), Bristol (philosophy), Keele (politics) and East London (environmental science). He is currently visiting professor of planning at Oxford Brookes University. In 1995 Nelson Mandela presented him with a United Nations Global 500 Award for outstanding environmental achievement. He has also won the Lloyds National Screenwriting Prize for his screenplay The Norwegian, a Sony Award for radio production, the Sir Peter Kent Award and the OneWorld National Press Award. A full archive of his articles, with references, is available at www.monbiot.com.More inquiries into the intelligence activities of Feith's office coming?
More to Come?
The Defense Department Inspector General's report may only spell the beginning of inquiries into the intelligence activities of Douglas Feith's office.
The Defense Department Inspector General's report may only spell the beginning of inquiries into the intelligence activities of Douglas Feith's office.
Web Exclusive: 02.12.07
By Laura Rozen
This writer has reported extensively on a 2001 meeting in Rome between two then-members of the office of Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith, Iranian arms dealer Manucher Ghorbanifar, Iranian intelligence operatives, and the Italian intelligence service. Reading the DoD IG (Defense Department Inspector General) report on its investigation into the activities of Feith's office, and watching Friday's Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on the report, were, therefore, somewhat surreal experiences. What was surreal was their narrow focus on the question of the Pentagon policy shop's alternative intelligence analysis alleging Iraq-al-Qaeda links, when few dispute that the array of activities engaged in by Feith's shop was broader than that and hardly limited to alternative intelligence analysis.
Both the hearing and the unclassified two-page DoD IG report (with an accompanying PowerPoint presentation) were narrowly focused on the question of whether members of Feith's policy shop were in fact conducting intelligence activities regarding Iraq that should have been reported to Congress; they determined that they were. The IG also determined that the policy shop behaved inappropriately but not without authorization or illegally when in 2002 it presented to then-vice presidential chief of staff I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby and then-deputy national security advisor Stephen Hadley a slide presentation asserting links between al-Qaeda and Iraq. The policy office's presentation to the White House disagreed with the judgment of the U.S. intelligence community in several key respects, and was not cleared in advance with then-Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet.
But even given the report's narrow focus on these questions, it was the subject of intense, heated, and politicized jockeying by Senator Armed Services Committee members grilling acting DoD Inspector General Thomas Gimble in the Russell Senate office building on February 9. Gimble, a 35-year veteran of the DoD IG's office, seemed desperate not to get drawn into the partisan fray. As the questioning intensified, he appeared unsure of how to respond to queries that seemed to demand he offer his opinion about issues that went far beyond the scope of his office’s purview.
For instance, Republican Jeff Sessions of Alabama, a former prosecutor, seemed to believe that Feith's office was perfectly within its rights to make an end run around the CIA to inform the White House that it had found evidence -- deemed unreliable by the intelligence community -- that 9/11 hijacker Mohammad Atta allegedly had a meeting with an Iraqi intelligence agent in Prague in 2001. The CIA had early on determined that the source on the Prague meeting was unreliable, and the Czech intelligence service -- the United States' original source -- later fully recanted the claim. But listening to Sessions bear into Gimble, you might have thought that such facts were still in dispute.
The hearing also revealed seeming holes in the IG's powers to investigate even the narrow question of what Feith's shop channeled to the White House beyond the CIA's judgment on the Iraq-al-Qaeda matter. For instance, Gimble revealed under questioning, current national security advisor Stephen Hadley declined his office’s request to be interviewed. The IG interviewed more than 70 people as part of its review, but only Defense Department employees are apparently required to answer interview requests.
But what was most frustrating about the hearing was that the IG and the senators seemed to ignore instances -- such as the December 2001 Rome meeting involving Feith staff members, Ghorbanifar, and a foreign intelligence service -- that look far more like an intelligence collection operation -- even a covert action -- than the alternative intelligence analysis the IG report focused on. The Rome meeting was never mentioned in three hours of hearings at all, but it would certainly seem to be at the crux of a possible instance of an intelligence operation not reported to Congress -- although the meeting was authorized by the White House. While that meeting concerned Iran policy rather than Iraq, the IG has the ability to look at all intelligence issues pursued by Feith's office; the meeting's absence as a subject of investigation was mystifying.
At the hearing, Armed Services Committee Chairman Levin and Vice Chairman John Warner both made statements indicating that their committee would pursue the matter of Feith's shop further, calling witnesses that the DoD IG could not get to testify. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence may also pursue the matter. But one possibility to keep in mind is that the DoD IG’s office may have other ongoing investigations related to Pentagon activities that may not have been reported to Congress. An office spokesman, Gary Comerford, wouldn't confirm or deny any other specific reviews. But it's worth noting that members of Congress have requested that the Defense Department Inspector General investigate other, related questions -- such as connections between the Iraqi National Congress and U.S. persons, and what work the Rendon Group did for the Office of the Secretary of Defense.
Other possible IG reviews notwithstanding, one is still left with the sense that the Defense Department internal review did not deliver what Congress needs to serve the public -- especially entering a fourth year of public agonizing over the war in Iraq. Across town, at the Libby trial, so much has been revealed that belies the central narrative of the Defense Department review -- that a Pentagon office that evaded congressional oversight and made end runs around the CIA to channel its alternative intelligence analysis to the White House is a phenomenon rising merely to the level of inappropriate, and that U.S. bureaucratic processes are resilient enough to filter out corrupted intelligence from the policymakers consuming it. The task of challenging that narrative with the truth has ever greater urgency as we now see signs of similar patterns leading towards an escalation with Iran.
Monday, February 12, 2007
Scary Movie 2: PAUL KRUGMAN - Attacking Iran
THE COMPLETE ARTICLE
The New York Times
OP-ED COLUMNIST
The New York Times
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Scary Movie 2
By PAUL KRUGMANPublished: February 12, 2007
Attacking Iran wouldn’t be the first catastrophic mistake this administration has made, and there are indications that, at the very least, a powerful faction in the administration is spoiling for a fight.
Attacking Iran would be a catastrophic mistake, even if all the allegations now being made about Iranian actions in Iraq are true.
But it wouldn’t be the first catastrophic mistake this administration has made, and there are indications that, at the very least, a powerful faction in the administration is spoiling for a fight.
Before we get to the apparent war-mongering, let’s talk about the basics. Are there people in Iran providing aid to factions in Iraq, factions that sometimes kill Americans as well as other Iraqis? Yes, probably. But you can say the same about Saudi Arabia, which is believed to be a major source of financial support for Sunni insurgents — and Sunnis, not Iranian-backed Shiites, are still responsible for most American combat deaths.
The Bush administration, however, with its close personal and financial ties to the Saudis, has always downplayed Saudi connections to America’s enemies. Iran, on the other hand, which had no connection to 9/11, and was actually quite helpful to the United States in the months after the terrorist attack, somehow found itself linked with its bitter enemy Saddam Hussein as part of the “axis of evil.”
So the administration has always had it in for the Iranian regime. Now, let’s do an O. J. Simpson: if you were determined to start a war with Iran, how would you do it?
***
"... last year Donald Rumsfeld set up a new “Iranian directorate” inside the Pentagon’s policy shop. And last September Warren Strobel and John Walcott of McClatchy Newspapers — who were among the few journalists to warn that the administration was hyping evidence on Iraqi W.M.D. — reported that “current and former officials said the Pentagon’s Iranian directorate has been headed by Abram Shulsky.”"
RelatedUS Sending Third Carrier Strike Group to Persian Gulf
Right Web | Profile | Abram Shulsky
Right Web | Analysis | Leo Strauss and Intelligence Strategy
Abram N. Shulsky - SourceWatch
Office of Special Plans - SourceWatch
EXPORTING DEATH AND VIOLENCE TO THE FOUR CORNERS OF THE EARTH: See Comments
Sunday, February 11, 2007
Republic or Empire: A National Intelligence Estimate on the United States
Republic or Empire
A National Intelligence Estimate on the United States [1]
By Chalmers Johnson [2]KEY JUDGMENTS
The United States remains, for the moment, the most powerful nation in history, but it faces a violent contradiction between its long republican tradition and its more recent imperial ambitions.
The fate of previous democratic empires suggests that such a conflict is unsustainable and will be resolved in one of two ways. Rome attempted to keep its empire and lost its democracy. Britain chose to remain democratic and in the process let go its empire. Intentionally or not, the people of the United States already are well embarked upon the course of non-democratic empire.
Several factors, however, indicate that this course will be a brief one, which most likely will end in economic and political collapse.
Military Keynesianism: The imperial project is expensive. The flow of the nation's wealth—from taxpayers and (increasingly) foreign lenders through the government to military contractors and (decreasingly) back to the taxpayers—has created a form of “military Keynesianism,” in which the domestic economy requires sustained military ambition in order to avoid recession or collapse.
The Unitary Presidency: Sustained military ambition is inherently anti-republican, in that it tends to concentrate power in the executive branch. In the United States, President George W. Bush subscribes to an esoteric interpretation of the Constitution called the theory of the unitary executive, which holds, in effect, that the president has the authority to ignore the separation of powers written into the Constitution, creating a feedback loop in which permanent war and the unitary presidency are mutually reinforcing.
Failed Checks on Executive Ambition: The U.S. legislature and judiciary appear to be incapable of restraining the president and therefore restraining imperial ambition. Direct opposition from the people, in the form of democratic action or violent uprising, is unlikely because the television and print media have by and large found it unprofitable to inform the public about the actions of the country's leaders. Nor is it likely that the military will attempt to take over the executive branch by way of a coup.
Bankruptcy and Collapse: Confronted by the limits of its own vast but nonetheless finite financial resources and lacking the political check on spending provided by a functioning democracy, the United States will within a very short time face financial or even political collapse at home and a significantly diminished ability to project force abroad.
DISCUSSION
Military Keynesianism
The ongoing U.S. militarization of its foreign affairs has spiked precipitously in recent years, with increasingly expensive commitments in Afghanistan and Iraq. These commitments grew from many specific political factors, including the ideological predilections of the current regime, the growing need for material access to the oil-rich regions of the Middle East, and a long-term bipartisan emphasis on hegemony as a basis for national security. The domestic economic basis for these commitments, however, is consistently overlooked. Indeed, America's hegemonic policy is in many ways most accurately understood as the inevitable result of its decades-long policy of military Keynesianism.
During the Depression that preceded World War II, the English economist John Maynard Keynes, a liberal capitalist, proposed a form of governance that would mitigate the boom-and-bust cycles inherent in capitalist economies. To prevent the economy from contracting, a development typically accompanied by social unrest, Keynes thought the government should take on debt in order to put people back to work. Some of these deficit-financed government jobs might be socially useful, but Keynes was not averse to creating make-work tasks if necessary. During periods of prosperity, the government would cut spending and rebuild the treasury. Such countercyclical planning was called “pump-priming.”
Upon taking office in 1933, U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt, with the assistance of Congress, put several Keynesian measures into effect, including socialized retirement plans, minimum wages for all workers, and government-financed jobs on massive projects, including the Triborough Bridge in New York City, the Grand Coulee Dam in Washington, and the Tennessee Valley Authority, a flood-control and electric-power-generation complex covering seven states. Conservative capitalists feared that this degree of government intervention would delegitimate capitalism—which they understood as an economic system of quasi-natural laws—and shift the balance of power from the capitalist class to the working class and its unions. For these reasons, establishment figures tried to hold back countercyclical spending.
The onset of World War II, however, made possible a significantly modified form of state socialism. The exiled Polish economist Michal Kalecki attributed Germany's success in overcoming the global Depression to a phenomenon that has come to be known as “military Keynesianism.” Government spending on arms increased manufacturing and also had a multiplier effect on general consumer spending by raising worker incomes. Both of these points are in accordance with general Keynesian doctrine. In addition, the enlargement of standing armies absorbed many workers, often young males with few skills and less education. The military thus becomes an employer of last resort, like Roosevelt's Civilian Conservation Corps, but on a much larger scale.
Rather than make bridges and dams, however, workers would make bullets, tanks, and fighter planes. This made all the difference. Although Adolf Hitler did not undertake rearmament for purely economic reasons, the fact that he advocated governmental support for arms production made him acceptable not only to the German industrialists, who might otherwise have opposed his destabilizing expansionist policies, but also to many around the world who celebrated his achievement of a “German economic miracle.”
In the United States, Keynesian policies continued to benefit workers, but, as in Germany, they also increasingly benefited wealthy manufacturers and other capitalists. By the end of the war, the United States had seen a massive shift. Dwight Eisenhower, who helped win that war and later became president, described this shift in his 1961 presidential farewell address:
Our military organization today bears little relation to that known by any of my predecessors in peacetime, or indeed by the fighting men of World War II or Korea.
Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security alone more than the net income of all United States corporations.
This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence—economic, political, even spiritual—is felt in every city, every statehouse, every office of the federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.
Eisenhower went on to suggest that such an arrangement, which he called the “military-industrial complex,” could be perilous to American ideals. The short-term economic benefits were clear, but the very nature of those benefits—which were all too carefully distributed among workers and owners in “every city, every statehouse, every office of the federal government”—tended to short-circuit Keynes's insistence that government spending be cut back in good times. The prosperity of the United States came increasingly to depend upon the construction and continual maintenance of a vast war machine, and so military supremacy and economic security became increasingly intertwined in the minds of voters. No one wanted to turn off the pump.
Between 1940 and 1996, for instance, the United States spent nearly $4.5 trillion on the development, testing, and construction of nuclear weapons alone. By 1967, the peak year of its nuclear stockpile, the United States possessed some 32,000 deliverable bombs. None of them was ever used, which illustrates perfectly Keynes's observation that, in order to create jobs, the government might as well decide to bury money in old mines and “leave them to private enterprise on the well-tried principles of laissez faire to dig them up again.” Nuclear bombs were not just America's secret weapon; they were also a secret economic weapon.
Such spending helped create economic growth that lasted until the 1973 oil crisis. In the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan once again brought the tools of military Keynesianism to bear, with a policy of significant tax cuts and massive deficit spending on military projects, allegedly to combat a new threat from Communism. Reagan's military expenditures accounted for 5.9 percent of the gross domestic product in 1984, which in turn fueled a 7 percent growth rate for the economy as a whole and helped reelect Reagan by a landslide.
During the Clinton years military spending fell to about 3 percent of GDP, but the economy rallied strongly in Clinton's second term due to the boom in information technologies, weakness in the previously competitive Japanese economy, and—paradoxically—serious efforts to reduce the national debt.[3] With the coming to power of George W. Bush, however, military Keynesianism returned once again. Indeed, after he began his war with Iraq, the once-erratic relationship between defense spending and economic growth became nearly parallel. A spike in defense spending in one quarter would see a spike in GDP, and a drop in defense spending would likewise see a drop in GDP.
To understand the real weight of military Keynesianism in the American economy today, however, one must approach official defense statistics with great care. The “defense” budget of the United States—that is, the reported budget of the Department of Defense—does not include: the Department of Energy's spending on nuclear weapons ($16.4 billion slated for fiscal 2006), the Department of Homeland Security's outlays for the actual “defense” of the United States ($41 billion), or the Department of Veterans Affairs' responsibilities for the lifetime care of the seriously wounded ($68 billion). Nor does it include the billions of dollars the Department of State spends each year to finance foreign arms sales and militarily related development or the Treasury Department's payments of pensions to military retirees and widows and their families (an amount not fully disclosed by official statistics). Still to be added are interest payments by the Treasury to cover past debt-financed defense outlays. The economist Robert Higgs estimates that in 2002 such interest payments amounted to $138.7 billion.
Even when all these things are included, Enron-style accounting makes it hard to obtain an accurate understanding of U.S. dependency on military spending. In 2005, the Government Accountability Office reported to Congress that “neither DOD nor Congress can reliably know how much the war is costing” or “details on how the appropriated funds are being spent.” Indeed, the GAO found that, lacking a reliable method for tracking military costs, the Army had taken to simply inserting into its accounts figures that matched the available budget. Such actions seem absurd in terms of military logic. But they are perfectly logical responses to the requirements of military Keynesianism, which places its emphasis not on the demand for defense but rather on the available supply of money.
The Unitary Presidency
Military Keynesianism may be economic development by other means, but it does very often lead to real war, or, if not real war, then a significantly warlike political environment. This creates a feedback loop: American presidents know that military Keynesianism tends to concentrate power in the executive branch, and so presidents who seek greater power have a natural inducement to encourage further growth of the military-industrial complex. As the phenomena feed on each other, the usual outcome is a real war, based not on the needs of national defense but rather on the domestic political logic of military Keynesianism. As U.S. Senator Robert La Follette Sr. observed, “In times of peace, the war party insists on making preparation for war. As soon as prepared for war, it insists on making war.”
George W. Bush has taken this natural political phenomenon to an extreme never before experienced by the American electorate. Every president has sought greater authority, but Bush—whose father lost his position as forty-first president in a fair and open election—appears to believe that increasing presidential authority is both a birthright and a central component of his historical legacy. He is supported in this belief by his vice president and chief adviser, Dick Cheney.
In pursuit of more power, Bush and Cheney have unilaterally authorized preventive war against nations they designate as needing “regime change,” directed American soldiers to torture persons they have seized and imprisoned in various countries, ordered the National Security Agency to carry out illegal “data mining” surveillance of the American people, and done everything they could to prevent Congress from outlawing “cruel, inhumane, or degrading” treatment of people detained by the United States. Each of these actions has been undertaken for specific ideological, tactical, or practical rea-sons, but also as part of a general campaign of power concentration.
Cheney complained in 2002 that, since he had served as Gerald Ford's chief of staff, he had seen a significant erosion in executive power as post-Watergate presidents were forced to “cough up and compromise on important principles.” He was referring to such reforms as the War Powers Act of 1973, which requires that the president obtain congressional approval within ninety days of ordering troops into combat; the Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974, which was designed to stop Nixon from impounding funds for programs he did not like; the Freedom of Information Act of 1966, which Congress strengthened in 1974; President Ford's Executive Order 11905 of 1976, which outlawed political assassination; and the Intelligence Oversight Act of 1980, which gave more power to the House and Senate select committees on intelligence. Cheney said that these reforms were “unwise” because they “weaken the presidency and the vice presidency,” and added that he and the president felt an obligation “to pass on our offices in better shape than we found them.”
No president, however, has ever acknowledged the legitimacy of the War Powers Act, and most of these so-called limitations on presidential power had been gutted, ignored, or violated long before Cheney became vice president. Republican Senator John Sununu of New Hampshire said, “The vice president may be the only person I know of that believes the executive has somehow lost power over the last thirty years.”
Bush and Cheney have made it a primary goal of their terms in office, nonetheless, to carve executive power into the law, and the war has been the primary vehicle for such actions. John Yoo, Bush's deputy assistant attorney general from 2001 to 2003, writes in his book War By Other Means, “We are used to a peacetime system in which Congress enacts laws, the President enforces them, and the courts interpret them. In wartime, the gravity shifts to the executive branch.” Bush has claimed that he is “the commander” and “the decider” and that therefore he does not “owe anybody an explanation” for anything.[4]
Similarly, in a September 2006 press conference, White House spokesman Tony Snow engaged in this dialogue:
Q: Isn't it the Supreme Court that's supposed to decide whether laws are unconstitutional or not?
A: No, as a matter of fact the president has an obligation to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States. That is an obligation that presidents have enacted through signing statements going back to Jefferson. So, while the Supreme Court can be an arbiter of the Constitution, the fact is the president is the one, the only person who, by the Constitution, is given the responsibility to preserve, protect, and defend that document, so it is perfectly consistent with presidential authority under the Constitution itself.
Snow was referring to the president's habit of signing bills into law accompanied by “statements” that, according to the American Bar Association, “assert President Bush's authority to disregard or decline to enforce laws adopted by Congress.” All forty-two previous U.S. presidents combined have signed statements exempting themselves from the provisions of 568 new laws, whereas Bush has, to date, exempted himself from more than 1,000.
Failed Checks on Executive Ambition
The current administration's perspective on political power is far from unique. Few, if any, presidents have refused the increased executive authority that is the natural byproduct of military Keynesianism. Moreover, the division of power between the president, the Congress, and the judiciary—often described as the bedrock of American democracy—has eroded significantly in recent years. The people, the press, and the military, too, seem anxious to cede power to a “wartime” president, leaving Bush, or those who follow him, almost entirely unobstructed in pursuing the imperial project.
Congress: Corrupt and indifferent, Congress, which the Founders believed would be the leading branch of government, has already entirely forfeited the power to declare war. More recently, it gave the president the legal right to detain anyone, even American citizens, without warrant, and to detain non-citizens without recourse to habeas corpus, as well as to use a variety of interrogation methods that he could define, at his sole discretion, to be or not be torture.
The Courts: The judicial branch is hardly more effective in restraining presidential ambition. The Supreme Court was active in the installation of the current president, and the lower courts increasingly are packed with judges who believe they should defer to his wishes. In 2006, for instance, U.S. District Judge David Trager dismissed a suit by a thirty-five-year-old Canadian citizen, Maher Arar, who in 2002 was seized by U.S. government agents at John F. Kennedy Airport and delivered to Syria, where he was tortured for ten months before being released. No charges were filed against Arar, and his torturers eventually admitted he had no links to any crime. In explaining his dismissal, Trager noted with approval an earlier Supreme Court finding that such judgment would “threaten ‘our customary policy of deference to the President in matters of foreign affairs.’”
The Military: It is possible that the U.S. military could take over the government and declare a dictatorship.[5] That is how the Roman republic ended. For the military voluntarily to move toward direct rule, however, its leaders would have to ignore their ties to civilian society, where the symbolic importance of constitutional legitimacy remains potent. Rebellious officers may well worry about how the American people would react to such a move. Moreover, prosecutions of low-level military torturers from Abu Ghraib prison and killers of civilians in Iraq have demonstrated to enlisted ranks that obedience to illegal orders can result in their being punished, whereas officers go free. No one knows whether ordinary American soldiers would obey clearly illegal orders to oust an elected government or whether the officer corps has sufficient confidence to issue such orders. In addition, the present system already offers the military high command so much—in funds, prestige, and future employment via the military-industrial revolving door—that a perilous transition to anything resembling direct military rule would make little sense under reasonably normal conditions.
The People: Could the people themselves restore constitutional government? A grassroots movement to break the hold of the military-industrial complex and establish public financing of elections is conceivable. But, given the conglomerate control of the mass media and the difficulties of mobilizing the United States' large and diffuse population, it is unlikely. Moreover, the people themselves have enjoyed the Keynesian benefits of the U.S. imperial project and—in all but a few cases—have not yet suffered any of its consequences.[6]
Bankruptcy and Collapse
The more likely check on presidential power, and on U.S. military ambition, will be the economic failure that is the inevitable consequence of military Keynesianism. Traditional Keynesianism is a stable two-part system composed of deficit spending in bad times and debt payment in good times. Military Keynesianism is an unstable one-part system. With no political check, debt accrues until it reaches a crisis point.
In the fiscal 2006 budget, the Congressional Research Service estimates that Pentagon spending on Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom will be about $10 billion per month, or an extra $120.3 billion for the year. As of mid-2006, the overall cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan since their inception stood at more than $400 billion. Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel Prize‒winning economist, and his colleague, Linda Bilmes, have tried to put together an estimate of the real costs of the Iraq war. They calculate that it will cost about $2 trillion by 2015. The conservative American Enterprise Institute suggests a figure at the opposite end of the spectrum—$1 trillion. Both figures are an order of magnitude larger than what the Bush Administration publicly acknowledges.
At the same time, the U.S. trade deficit, the largest component of the current account deficit, soared to an all-time high in 2005 of $782.7 billion, the fourth consecutive year that America's trade debts set records. The trade deficit with China alone rose to $201.5 billion, the highest imbalance ever recorded with any country. Meanwhile, since mid-2000, the country has lost nearly 3 million manufacturing jobs. To try to cope with these imbalances, on March 16, 2006, Congress raised the national debt limit from $8.2 trillion to $9 trillion. This was the fourth time since George W. Bush took office that the limit had to be raised. Had Congress not raised it, the U.S. government would not have been able to borrow more money and would have had to default on its massive debts.
Among the creditors that finance this unprecedented sum, two of the largest are the central banks of China ($854 billion in reserves of dollars and other foreign currencies) and Japan ($850 billion), both of which are the managers of the huge trade surpluses these countries enjoy with the United States. This helps explain why the United States' debt burden has not yet triggered what standard economic theory would predict, which is a steep decline in the value of the U.S. dollar followed by a severe contraction of the American economy—the Chinese and Japanese governments continue to be willing to be paid in dollars in order to sustain American demand for their exports. For the sake of domestic employment, both countries lend huge amounts to the American treasury, but there is no guarantee how long they will want or be able to do so.
CONFIDENCE IN KEY JUDGMENTS
It is difficult to predict the course of a democracy, and perhaps even more so when that democracy is as corrupt as that of the United States. With a new opposition party in the majority in the House, the country could begin a difficult withdrawal from military Keynesianism. Like the British after World War II, the United States could choose to keep its democracy by giving up its empire. The British did not do a particularly brilliant job of liquidating their empire, and there were several clear cases in which British imperialists defied their nation's commitment to democracy in order to keep their foreign privileges—Kenya in the 1950s is a particularly savage example—but the people of the British Isles did choose democracy over imperialism, and that nation continues to thrive as a nation, if not as an empire.
It appears for the moment, however, that the people of the United States prefer the Roman approach and so will abet their government in maintaining a facade of constitutional democracy until the nation drifts into bankruptcy.
Of course, bankruptcy will not mean the literal end of the United States any more than it did for Germany in 1923, China in 1948, or Argentina in 2001. It might, in fact, open the way for an unexpected restoration of the American system, or for military rule, revolution, or simply some new development we cannot yet imagine. Certainly, such a bankruptcy would mean a drastic lowering of the current American standard of living, a loss of control over international affairs, a process of adjusting to the rise of other powers, including China and India, and a further discrediting of the notion that the United States is somehow exceptional compared with other nations. The American people will be forced to learn what it means to be a far poorer nation and the attitudes and manners that go with it.[7]
About the Author
Chalmers Johnson is the author of Blowback, The Sorrows of Empire, and, most recently, Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic, which will be published in February by Metropolitan Books. His last article for Harper's Magazine, “The War Business: Squeezing a Profit from the Wreckage in Iraq,” appeared in the November 2003 issue.
Notes
1. The CIA's website defines a National Intelligence Estimate as “the most authoritative written judgment concerning a national security issue prepared by the Director of Central Intelligence.” These forecasts of “future developments” and “their implications for the United States” seldom are made public, but there are exceptions. One was the NIE of September 2002, “Iraq's Continuing Programs for Weapons of Mass Destruction,” which became notorious because virtually every word in it was false. Another, an April 2006 NIE entitled “Trends in Global Terrorism: Implications for the United States,” was partly declassified by President Bush because its main conclusion—that “activists identifying themselves as jihadists” are “increasing in both number and geographic dispersion”—had already been leaked to the press. [Back]
2. The CIA is prohibited from writing an NIE on the United States, and so I have here attempted to do so myself, using the standard format for such estimates. I have some personal knowledge of NIEs because from 1967 to 1973 I served as an outside consultant to the CIA's Office of National Estimates. I was one of about a dozen so-called experts invited to read draft NIEs in order to provide quality control and prevent bureaucratic logrolling. [Back]
3. Military Keynesianism, it turns out, is not the only way to boost an economy. [Back]
4. In a January 2006 debate, Yoo was asked if any law could stop the president, if he “deems that he's got to torture somebody,” from, say, “crushing the testicles of the person's child.” Yoo's response: “I think it depends on why the president thinks he needs to do that.” [Back]
5. Though they undoubtedly would find a more user-friendly name for it. [Back]
6. In 2003, when the Iraq war began, the citizens of the United States could at least claim that it was the work of an administration that had lost the popular vote. But in 2004, Bush won that vote by more than 3 million ballots, making his war ours. [Back]
7. National Intelligence Estimates seldom contain startling new data. To me they always read like magazine articles or well-researched and footnoted graduate seminar papers. When my wife once asked me what was so secret about them, I answered that perhaps it was the fact that this was the best we could do. [Back]
'Anonymous sources' show 'evidence' of 'Iranian' IEDs
Feb 11, 2007
Well, after yesterday's atrocious Gordon/NYT piece, somebody in the "coalition" forces seem to have laid it out their "evidence", and it sounds pretty weak, and of course very anonymous. From Reuters:
Well, after yesterday's atrocious Gordon/NYT piece, somebody in the "coalition" forces seem to have laid it out their "evidence", and it sounds pretty weak, and of course very anonymous. From Reuters:
U.S.-led forces in Iraq presented on Sunday what officials said was "a growing body" of evidence of Iranian weapons being used to kill their soldiers, as U.S. anger at Tehran's alleged involvement in the war rises.
A senior defence official from the U.S.-led Multinational Force in Baghdad told a briefing that 170 coalition forces had been killed by Iranian-made roadside bombs known as explosively formed penetrators (EFPs) that he said were smuggled into Iraq.
I see nothing in this that directly links to Iran:
Officials showed journalists fragments of what they said were Iranian-manufactured weapons, including one part of an EFP -- which is strong enough to penetrate the armour of an Abrams tank -- and tail fins from 81 mm and 60 mm mortar bombs.
Hmm...old mortar shells, eh? how about THESE?
HERE WE HAVE EVIDENCE?????:
"The weapons had characteristics unique to being manfactured in Iran ... Iran is the only country in the region that produces these weapons," the senior defence official said in Baghdad, briefing reporters on condition of anonymity.
The officials said they were showing the evidence now out of concern about the "vast increase" in sophisticated weapons used by Iraqi militants against U.S. forces in 2006...."We assess these activities are coming from the highest levels of the Iranian government," said one of the officials, a senior defence analyst, referring to the training and funding of Iraqi militant groups.
Tehran denies the charge and blames American soldiers for the violence and for inflaming tensions between Shi'ites and once-dominant Sunni Arabs.
"We are a friend of Iraq. We have common culture and history, and Iraq's stability, security and integrity, means Iran's stability, security and integrity," Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad told a rally in Tehran on Sunday marking the 28th anniversary of the 1979 Islamic revolution.
...
SURROGATESThe officials also said Iran had several surrogate groups operating in Iraq using the EFPs, among them rogue elements of radical Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr's Mehdi Army, to whom Iran was supplying weapons and guerrilla warfare training.
The Pentagon calls the Mehdi Army the biggest threat to peace in Iraq. Al Sadr, who is a key political ally of the Iraqi prime minister, denies any involvement in attacks to troops.
Juan Cole today repeats his cricisms and expands somewhat; to suggest that the Shiites and particularly Iranians are the cause of much of the violence against the US is ridiculous.
This claim is one hundred percent wrong. Because 25 percent of US troops were not killed fighting Shiites in those three months. Day after day, the casualty reports specify al-Anbar Province or Diyala or Salahuddin or Babil, or Baghdad districts such as al-Dura, Ghaziliyah, Amiriyah, etc.--and the enemy fighting is clearly Sunni Arab guerrillas. And, Iran is not giving high tech weapons to Baathists and Salafi Shiite-killers. ....
So the unnamed sources at the Pentagon are reduced to implying that Iran is giving sophisticated bombs to its sworn enemies and the very groups that are killing its Shiite Iraqi allies every day. Get real!
Very clever of "them" to continue to cloak it in secrecy, and avoid any questioning, have this little "dog and pony" show over in Baghdad, with selected reporters, I would imagine. Now there are two days worth of stories going around the world, without serious rebuttal. Makes me see red. Main stream media are prepared to blare it out on the Sunday talk shows, I'm sure, with the usual array of ignorant but never hesitant pundits.
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