Vice President Cheney Interviewed�by Fox News: "Transcript
Vice President Cheney Interviewed by Fox News
Source: Office of the Vice President
Wednesday, February 15, 2006; 6:03 PM
INTERVIEW OF THE VICE PRESIDENT BY BRIT HUME, FOX NEWS
Vice President's Ceremonial Office
This photo provided by the White House shows Vice President Dick Cheney, left, talking with Brit Hume of Fox News in his office in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building in Washington, Wednesday, Feb. 15, 2006. The vice president talked about the accidental shooting of friend and fellow hunter Harry Whittington on the Armstrong Ranch in Armstrong, Texas. (AP Photo/David Bohrer, White House) (David Bohrer - AP)
Eisenhower Executive Office Building 2:01 P.M. EST
Q Mr. Vice President, how is Mr. Whittington?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, the good news is he's doing very well today. I talked to him yesterday after they discovered the heart problem, but it appears now to have been pretty well resolved and the reporting today is very good.
Q How did you feel when you heard about that?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, it's a great relief. But I won't be, obviously, totally at ease until he's home. He's going to be in the hospital, apparently, for a few more days, and the problem, obviously, is that there's always the possibility of complications in somebody who is 78-79 years old. But he's a great man, he's in great shape, good friend, and our thoughts and prayers go out to he and his family.
Q How long have you known him?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: I first met him in Vail, Colorado, when I worked for Gerry Ford about 30 years ago, and it was the first time I'd ever hunted with him.
Q Would you describe him as a close friend, friendly acquaintance, what --
THE VICE PRESIDENT: No, an acquaintance.
Q Tell me what happened?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, basically, we were hunting quail late in the day --
Q Describe the setting.
THE VICE PRESIDENT: It's in south Texas, wide-open spaces, a lot of brush cover, fairly shallow. But it's wild quail. It's some of the best quail hunting anyplace in the country. I've gone there, to the Armstrong ranch, for years. The Armstrongs have been friends for over 30 years. And a group of us had hunted all day on Saturday --
Q How many?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Oh, probably 10 people. We weren't all together, but about 10 guests at the ranch. There were three of us who had gotten out of the vehicle and walked up on a covey of quail that had been pointed by the dogs. Covey is flushed, we've shot, and each of us got a bird. Harry couldn't find his, it had gone down in some deep cover, and so he went off to look for it. The other hunter and I then turned and walked about a hundred yards in another direction --
Q Away from him?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Away from him -- where another covey had been spotted by an outrider. I was on the far right --
Q There was just two of you then?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Just two of us at that point. The guide or outrider between us, and of course, there's this entourage behind us, all the cars and so forth that follow me around when I'm out there -- but bird flushed and went to my right, off to the west. I turned and shot at the bird, and at that second, saw Harry standing there. Didn't know he was there --
Q You had pulled the trigger and you saw him?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, I saw him fall, basically. It had happened so fast.
Q What was he wearing?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: He was dressed in orange, he was dressed properly, but he was also -- there was a little bit of a gully there, so he was down a little ways before land level, although I could see the upper part of his body when -- I didn't see it at the time I shot, until after I'd fired. And the sun was directly behind him -- that affected the vision, too, I'm sure.
But the image of him falling is something I'll never be able to get out of my mind. I fired, and there's Harry falling. And it was, I'd have to say, one of the worst days of my life, at that moment.
Q Then what?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, we went over to him, obviously, right away --
Q How far away from you was he?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: I'm guessing about 30 yards, which was a good thing. If he'd been closer, obviously, the damage from the shot would have been greater.
Q Now, is it clear that -- he had caught part of the shot, is that right?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: -- part of the shot. He was struck in the right side of his face, his neck and his upper torso on the right side of his body.
Q And you -- and I take it, you missed the bird.
THE VICE PRESIDENT: I have no idea. I mean, you focused on the bird, but as soon as I fired and saw Harry there, everything else went out of my mind. I don't know whether the bird went down, or didn't.
Q So did you run over to him or --
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Ran over to him and --
Q And what did you see? He's lying there --
THE VICE PRESIDENT: He was laying there on his back, obviously bleeding. You could see where the shot had struck him. And one of the fortunate things was that I've always got a medical team, in effect, covering me wherever I go. I had a physician's assistant with me that day. Within a minute or two he was on the scene administering first-aid. And --
Q And Mr. Whittington was conscious, unconscious, what?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: He was conscious --
Q What did you say?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, I said, "Harry, I had no idea you were there." And --
Q What did he say?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: He didn't respond. He was -- he was breathing, conscious at that point, but he didn't -- he was, I'm sure, stunned, obviously, still trying to figure out what had happened to him. The doc was fantastic --
Q What did you think when you saw the injuries? How serious did they appear to you to be?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: I had no idea how serious it was going to be. I mean, it could have been extraordinarily serious. You just don't know at that moment. You know he's been struck, that there's a lot of shot that had hit him. But you don't know -- you think about his eyes. Fortunately, he was wearing hunting glasses, and that protected his eyes. You -- you just don't know. And the key thing, as I say, initially, was that the physician's assistant was right there. We also had an ambulance at the ranch, because one always follows me around wherever I go. And they were able to get the ambulance there, and within about 30 minutes we had him on his way to the hospital.
Q And what did you do then? Did you get up and did you go with him, or did you go to the hospital?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: No, I had -- I told my physician's assistant to go with him, but the ambulance is crowded and they didn't need another body in there. And so we loaded up and went back to ranch headquarters, basically. By then, it's about 7:00 p.m. at night. And Harry --
Q Did you have a sense then of how he was doing?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, we're getting reports, but they were confusing. Early reports are always wrong. The initial reports that came back from the ambulance were that he was doing well, his eyes were open. They got him into the emergency room at Kingsville --
Q His eyes were open when you found him, then, right?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Yes. One eye was open. But they got him in the emergency room in the small hospital at Kingsville, checked him out further there, then lifted him by helicopter from there into Corpus Christi, which has a big city hospital and all of the equipment.
Q So by now what time is it?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: I don't have an exact time line, although he got there sometime that evening, 8:00 p.m., 9:00 p.m.
Q So this is several hours after the incident?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, I would say he was in Kingsville in the emergency room probably within, oh, less than an hour after they left the ranch.
Q Now, you're a seasoned hunter --
THE VICE PRESIDENT: I am, well, for the last 12, 15 years.
Q Right, and so you know all the procedures and how to maintain the proper line and distance between you and other hunters, and all that. So how, in your judgment, did this happen? Who -- what caused this? What was the responsibility here?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, ultimately, I'm the guy who pulled the trigger that fired the round that hit Harry. And you can talk about all of the other conditions that existed at the time, but that's the bottom line. And there's no -- it was not Harry's fault. You can't blame anybody else. I'm the guy who pulled the trigger and shot my friend. And I say that is something I'll never forget.
Q Now, what about this -- it was said you were hunting out of vehicles. Was that because you have to have the vehicles, or was that because that's your -- the way you chose to hunt that day?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: No, the way -- this is a big ranch, about 50,000 acres. You cover a lot of territory on a quail hunt. Birds are oftentimes -- you're looking for coveys. And these are wild quail, they're not pen-raised. And you hunt them -- basically, you have people out on horseback, what we call outriders, who are looking for the quail. And when they spot them, they've got radios, you'll go over, and say, get down and flush the quail. So you need --
Q So you could be a distance of a miles from where you spot quail until the next place you may find them?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, usually you'll be, you know, maybe a few hundred yards. Might be farther than that; could be a quarter of a mile.
Q Does that kind of hunting only go forward on foot, or is it mostly --
THE VICE PRESIDENT: No, you always -- in that part of the country, you always are on vehicles, until you get up to where the covey is. Then you get off -- there will be dogs down, put down; the dogs will point to covey. And then you walk up on the covey. And as the covey flushes, that's when you shoot.
Q Was anybody drinking in this party?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: No. You don't hunt with people who drink. That's not a good idea. We had --
Q So he wasn't, and you weren't?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Correct. We'd taken a break at lunch -- go down under an old -- ancient oak tree there on the place, and have a barbecue. I had a beer at lunch. After lunch we take a break, go back to ranch headquarters. Then we took about an hour-long tour of ranch, with a ranch hand driving the vehicle, looking at game. We didn't go back into the field to hunt quail until about, oh, sometime after 3:00 p.m.
The five of us who were in that party were together all afternoon. Nobody was drinking, nobody was under the influence.
Q Now, what thought did you give, then, to how -- you must have known that this was -- whether it was a matter of state, or not, was news. What thought did you give that evening to how this news should be transmitted?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, my first reaction, Brit, was not to think: I need to call the press. My first reaction is: My friend, Harry, has been shot and we've got to take care of him. That evening there were other considerations. We wanted to make sure his family was taken care of. His wife was on the ranch. She wasn't with us when it happened, but we got her hooked up with the ambulance on the way to the hospital with Harry. He has grown children; we wanted to make sure they were notified, so they didn't hear on television that their father had been shot. And that was important, too.
But we also didn't know what the outcome here was going to be. We didn't know for sure what kind of shape Harry was in. We had preliminary reports, but they wanted to do a CAT scan, for example, to see how -- whether or not there was any internal damage, whether or not any vital organ had been penetrated by any of the shot. We did not know until Sunday morning that we could be confident that everything was probably going to be okay.
Q When did the family -- when had the family been informed? About what time?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, his wife -- his wife knew as he was leaving the ranch --
Q Right, what about his children?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: I didn't make the calls to his children, so I don't know exactly when those contacts were made. One of his daughters had made it to the hospital by the next day when I visited. But one of the things I'd learned over the years was first reports are often wrong and you need to really wait and nail it down. And there was enough variation in the reports we were getting from the hospital, and so forth -- a couple of people who had been guests at the ranch went up to the hospital that evening; one of them was a doctor, so he obviously had some professional capabilities in terms of being able to relay messages. But we really didn't know until Sunday morning that Harry was probably going to be okay, that it looked like there hadn't been any serious damage to any vital organ. And that's when we began the process of notifying the press.
Q Well, what -- you must have recognized, though, with all your experience in Washington, that this was going to be a big story.
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, true, it was unprecedented. I've been in the business for a long time and never seen a situation quite like this. We've had experiences where the President has been shot; we've never had a situation where the Vice President shot somebody.
Q Not since Aaron Burr.
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Not since Aaron Burr --
Q Different circumstances.
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Different circumstances.
Q Well, did it occur to you that sooner was -- I mean, the one thing that we've all kind of learned over the last several decades is that if something like this happens, as a rule sooner is better.
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, if it's accurate. If it's accurate. And this is a complicated story.
Q But there were some things you knew. I mean, you knew the man had been shot, you knew he was injured, you knew he was in the hospital, and you knew you'd shot him.
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Correct.
Q And you knew certainly by sometime that evening that the relevant members of his family had been called. I realize you didn't know the outcome, and you could argue that you don't know the outcome today, really, finally.
THE VICE PRESIDENT: As we saw, if we'd put out a report Saturday night on what we heard then -- one report came in that said, superficial injuries. If we'd gone with a statement at that point, we'd have been wrong. And it was also important, I thought, to get the story out as accurately as possible, and this is a complicated story that, frankly, most reporters would never have dealt with before, so --
Q Had you discussed this with colleagues in the White House, with the President, and so on?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: I did not. The White House was notified, but I did not discuss it directly, myself. I talked to Andy Card, I guess it was Sunday morning.
Q Not until Sunday morning? Was that the first conversation you'd had with anybody in the -- at the White House?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Yes.
Q And did you discuss this with Karl Rove at any time, as has been reported?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: No, Karl talks to -- I don't recall talking to Karl. Karl did talk with Katherine Armstrong, who is a good mutual friend to both of us. Karl hunts at the Armstrong, as well --
Q Say that again?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: I said Karl has hunted at the Armstrong, as well, and we're both good friends of the Armstrongs and of Katherine Armstrong. And Katherine suggested, and I agreed, that she would go make the announcement, that is that she'd put the story out. And I thought that made good sense for several reasons. First of all, she was an eye-witness. She'd seen the whole thing. Secondly, she'd grown up on the ranch, she'd hunted there all of her life. Third, she was the immediate past head of the Texas Wildlife and Parks Department, the game control commission in the state of Texas, an acknowledged expert in all of this.
And she wanted to go to the Corpus Christi Caller-Times, which is the local newspaper, covers that area, to reporters she knew. And I thought that made good sense because you can get as accurate a story as possible from somebody who knew and understood hunting. And then it would immediately go up to the wires and be posted on the website, which is the way it went out. And I thought that was the right call.
Q What do you think now?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, I still do. I still think that the accuracy was enormously important. I had no press person with me, I didn't have any press people with me. I was there on a private weekend with friends on a private ranch. In terms of who I would contact to have somebody who would understand what we're even talking about, the first person that we talked with at one point, when Katherine first called the desk to get hold of a reporter didn't know the difference between a bullet and a shotgun -- a rifle bullet and a shotgun. And there are a lot of basic important parts of the story that required some degree of understanding. And so we were confident that Katherine was the right one, especially because she was an eye-witness and she could speak authoritatively on it. She probably knew better than I did what had happened since I'd only seen one piece of it.
Q By the next morning, had you spoken again to Mr. Whittington?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: The next morning I talked to his wife. And then I went to the hospital in Corpus Christi and visited with him.
Q When was that?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Oh, it was shortly after noon on Sunday.
Q Now, by that time had the word gone out to the newspaper?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: I believe it had. I can't remember what time Katherine actually talked to the reporter. She had trouble that morning actually finding a reporter. But they finally got connected with the reporter, and that's when the story then went out.
Q Now, it strikes me that you must have known that this was going to be a national story --
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Oh, sure.
Q -- and it does raise the question of whether you couldn't have headed off this beltway firestorm if you had put out the word to the national media, as well as to the local newspaper so that it could post it on its website. I mean, in retrospect, wouldn't that have been the wise course --
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, who is going to do that? Are they going to take my word for what happened? There is obviously --
Q Well, obviously, you could have put the statement out in the name of whoever you wanted. You could put it out in the name of Mrs. Armstrong, if you wanted to. Obviously, that's -- she's the one who made the statement.
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Exactly. That's what we did. We went with Mrs. Armstrong. We had -- she's the one who put out the statement. And she was the most credible one to do it because she was a witness. It wasn't me in terms of saying, here's what happened, it was --
Q Right, understood. Now, the suspicion grows in some quarters that you -- that this was an attempt to minimize it, by having it first appear in a little paper and appear like a little hunting incident down in a remote corner of Texas.
THE VICE PRESIDENT: There wasn't any way this was going to be minimized, Brit; but it was important that it be accurate. I do think what I've experienced over the years here in Washington is as the media outlets have proliferated, speed has become sort of a driving force, lots of time at the expense of accuracy. And I wanted to make sure we got it as accurate as possible, and I think Katherine was an excellent choice. I don't know who you could get better as the basic source for the story than the witness who saw the whole thing.
Q When did you first speak to -- if you spoke to Andy Card at, what, mid-day, you said, on Sunday?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Sometime Sunday morning.
Q And what about -- when did you first -- when, if ever, have you discussed it with the President?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: I talked to him about it yesterday, or Monday -- first on Monday, and then on Tuesday, too.
Q There is reporting to the effect that some in the White House feel you kind of -- well, look at what Scott McClellan went through the last couple days. There's some sense -- and perhaps not unfairly so -- that you kind of hung him out to dry. How do you feel about that?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, Scott does a great job and it's a tough job. It's especially a tough job under these conditions and circumstances. I had a bit of the feeling that the press corps was upset because, to some extent, it was about them -- they didn't like the idea that we called the Corpus Christi Caller-Times instead of The New York Times. But it strikes me that the Corpus Christi Caller-Times is just as valid a news outlet as The New York Times is, especially for covering a major story in south Texas.
Q Well, perhaps so, but isn't there an institution here present at the White House that has long-established itself as the vehicle through which White House news gets out, and that's the pool?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: I had no press person with me, no coverage with me, no White House reporters with me. I'm comfortable with the way we did it, obviously. You can disagree with that, and some of the White House press corps clearly do. But, no, I've got nothing but good things to say about Scott McClellan and Dan Bartlett. They've got a tough job to do and they do it well. They urged us to get the story out. The decision about how it got out, basically, was my responsibility.
Q That was your call.
THE VICE PRESIDENT: That was my call.
Q All the way.
THE VICE PRESIDENT: All the way. It was recommended to me -- Katherine Armstrong wanted to do it, as she said, and I concurred in that; I thought it made good sense.
Q Now, you're talking to me today -- this is, what, Wednesday?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Wednesday.
Q What about just coming out yourself Monday/Tuesday -- how come?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, part of it obviously has to do with the status of Harry Whittington. And it's a difficult subject to talk about, frankly, Brit. But most especially I've been very concerned about him and focused on him and feel more comfortable coming out today because of the fact that his circumstances have improved, he's gotten by what was a potential crisis yesterday, with respect to the developments concerning his heart. I think this decision we made, that this was the right way to do it.
Q Describe if you can your conversations with him, what you've said to him and the attitude he's shown toward you in the aftermath of this.
THE VICE PRESIDENT: He's been fantastic. He's a gentleman in every respect. He oftentimes expressed more concern about me than about himself. He's been in good spirits, unfailingly cheerful --
Q What did he say about that? You said, "expressed concern" about you -- what did he say?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, when I first saw him in the hospital, for example, he said, look, he said, I don't want this to create problems for you. He literally was more concerned about me and the impact on me than he was on the fact that he'd been shot. He's a -- I guess I'd describe him as a true Texas gentleman, a very successful attorney, successful businessman in Austin; a gentleman in every respect of the word. And he's been superb.
Q For you, personally, how would you -- you said this was one of the worst days of your life. How so?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: What happened to my friend as a result of my actions, it's part of this sudden, you know, in less than a second, less time than it takes to tell, going from what is a very happy, pleasant day with great friends in a beautiful part of the country, doing something I love -- to, my gosh, I've shot my friend. I've never experienced anything quite like that before.
Q Will it affect your attitude toward this pastime you so love in the future?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: I can't say that. You know, we canceled the Sunday hunt. I said, look I'm not -- we were scheduled to go out again on Sunday and I said I'm not going to go on Sunday, I want to focus on Harry. I'll have to think about it.
Q Some organizations have said they hoped you would find a less violent pastime.
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, it's brought me great pleasure over the years. I love the people that I've hunted with and do hunt with; love the outdoors, it's part of my heritage, growing up in Wyoming. It's part of who I am. But as I say, the season is ending, I'm going to let some time pass over it and think about the future.
Q On another subject, court filings have indicated that Scooter Libby has suggested that his superiors -- unidentified -- authorized the release of some classified information. What do you know about that?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: It's nothing I can talk about, Brit. This is an issue that's been under investigation for a couple of years. I've cooperated fully, including being interviewed, as well, by a special prosecutor. All of it is now going to trial. Scooter is entitled to the presumption of innocence. He's a great guy. I've worked with him for a long time, have enormous regard for him. I may well be called as a witness at some point in the case and it's, therefore, inappropriate for me to comment on any facet of the case.
Q Let me ask you another question. Is it your view that a Vice President has the authority to declassify information?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: There is an executive order to that effect.
Q There is.
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Yes.
Q Have you done it?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, I've certainly advocated declassification and participated in declassification decisions. The executive order --
Q You ever done it unilaterally?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: I don't want to get into that. There is an executive order that specifies who has classification authority, and obviously focuses first and foremost on the President, but also includes the Vice President.
Q There have been two leaks, one that pertained to possible facilities in Europe; and another that pertained to this NSA matter. There are officials who have had various characterizations of the degree of damage done by those. How would you characterize the damage done by those two reports?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: There clearly has been damage done.
Q Which has been the more harmful, in your view?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: I don't want to get into just sort of ranking them, then you get into why is one more damaging than the other. One of the problems we have as a government is our inability to keep secrets. And it costs us, in terms of our relationship with other governments, in terms of the willingness of other intelligence services to work with us, in terms of revealing sources and methods. And all of those elements enter into some of these leaks.
Q Mr. Vice President, thank you very much for doing this.
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Thank you, Brit.
END 2:28 P.M. EST"
Thursday, February 16, 2006
Gary Wasserman Argues That Israeli Sying Is A Good Thing - in the Washington Post
Plugging Leaks, Chilling Debate: "Plugging Leaks, Chilling Debate
By Gary Wasserman
Thursday, February 16, 2006; Page A27
"Persons who have unauthorized possession, who come into unauthorized possession of classified information, must abide by the law. That applies to academics, lawyers, journalists, professors, whatever."
-- Judge T.S. Ellis III
The judge was speaking last month after sentencing a former Pentagon desk officer for Iran to prison for sharing classified information too widely. It didn't seem to matter that Lawrence Franklin was a conservative former Air Force colonel who was using contacts outside of government to lobby for a harder line on Iran. In a week when an American soldier was given no more than a reprimand for smothering an Iraqi general to death, Franklin's 12 1/2 -year sentence was a reminder that this is an administration more horrified by leaks than torture.
The judge's comments were directed to a related trial that he will oversee on April 25 of two former staffers for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC): Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman. They face the possibility of 10 years in prison for allegedly having classified information verbally leaked by Franklin and others and passing it along to reporters and diplomats.
Not content with jailing an employee for mishandling classified material, the government is applying to private citizens a never-used part of the 1917 Espionage Act. Its expanding secrecy powers threaten to paralyze public participation in making foreign policy. The experts, lobbyists and journalists who, in the normal routines of their jobs, discuss confidential information could now become criminals.
No one disputes that verbal leaks occurred; two years of FBI wiretaps on AIPAC recorded them. But despite all this wiretap evidence, the government felt it necessary to add a "sting" operation, which was engineered with Franklin's help in the summer of 2004. Having "flipped" Franklin after finding confidential documents that he had carelessly brought home to work on, the government had him call the AIPAC lobbyists -- whom he hadn't spoken to in a year -- on a supposedly life-or-death matter. He claimed that Iran was planning to kidnap and kill Americans and Israelis working in Iraq. Franklin said he wanted to warn the White House, something that he, as a mid-level analyst, didn't have the clout to do himself.
The lobbyists fell for the appeal to save lives. They contacted a Post reporter and an Israeli diplomat and tried, unsuccessfully, to reach the National Security Council. Months afterward, under what former staffers say was considerable pressure from the government, AIPAC fired them. A year after the sting they were indicted. U.S. Attorney Paul McNulty announced the indictments last August, declaring that "when it comes to classified information, there is a clear line in the law." Alas, nothing could be less clear.
Information is the lifeblood of policymaking. Expanding restrictions on information adds greatly to the power of the executive; criminalizing citizens' contact with that information adds even greater uncertainty. Any Washington power lunch touching on national security issues -- between Reporter A or Lobbyist B and Official C -- inevitably contains something that someone has classified. Who's to know what's legal? Are "classified" White House discussions about Hurricane Katrina to be treated the same as troop movements? Even if the information is classified, is the official authorized to disclose it? In a long conversation, where is the "clear line"? For some leaks Bob Woodward gets a bestseller; Steve Rosen may get jail.
Officials have their own uses for leaks. In the past AIPAC has provided an informal back channel to the Israeli government. Giving a lobbyist details about illegal Israeli settlements is a diplomatic warning to Jerusalem, but only if he passes them on. How is he to know the difference between an authorized official and an FBI sting?
For better or worse, the rules of this game have traditionally been enforced by the players. Reporters receiving national security leaks have shown them to officials for confirmation and comment. Advocates and experts who spread information meant only for their ears were cut off from further briefings. This rough-and-ready marketplace lasted throughout the Cold War. Now a more fearful leadership finds such practices intolerable.
One argument for why autocratic regimes such as pre-World War II Germany and Japan have engaged in risky foreign adventures is that these narrow elites are not subject to the kind of outside review by knowledgeable people that exists in democracies. The run-up to the Iraq war has raised questions about whether America's marketplace of ideas in foreign policy is still viable. Did the Bush administration's success in gaining public approval for its invasion of Iraq have something to do with its ability to control secret information in a way that muted doubts about inflated claims of Iraqi threats?
Judge Ellis has it backward. A democratic government does not, in general, "authorize" the information citizens are allowed. Given enough information, citizens authorize and control their government. Or at least we used to.
The writer teaches lobbying at Georgetown University, where he is an adjunct professor of government."
By Gary Wasserman
Thursday, February 16, 2006; Page A27
"Persons who have unauthorized possession, who come into unauthorized possession of classified information, must abide by the law. That applies to academics, lawyers, journalists, professors, whatever."
-- Judge T.S. Ellis III
The judge was speaking last month after sentencing a former Pentagon desk officer for Iran to prison for sharing classified information too widely. It didn't seem to matter that Lawrence Franklin was a conservative former Air Force colonel who was using contacts outside of government to lobby for a harder line on Iran. In a week when an American soldier was given no more than a reprimand for smothering an Iraqi general to death, Franklin's 12 1/2 -year sentence was a reminder that this is an administration more horrified by leaks than torture.
The judge's comments were directed to a related trial that he will oversee on April 25 of two former staffers for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC): Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman. They face the possibility of 10 years in prison for allegedly having classified information verbally leaked by Franklin and others and passing it along to reporters and diplomats.
Not content with jailing an employee for mishandling classified material, the government is applying to private citizens a never-used part of the 1917 Espionage Act. Its expanding secrecy powers threaten to paralyze public participation in making foreign policy. The experts, lobbyists and journalists who, in the normal routines of their jobs, discuss confidential information could now become criminals.
No one disputes that verbal leaks occurred; two years of FBI wiretaps on AIPAC recorded them. But despite all this wiretap evidence, the government felt it necessary to add a "sting" operation, which was engineered with Franklin's help in the summer of 2004. Having "flipped" Franklin after finding confidential documents that he had carelessly brought home to work on, the government had him call the AIPAC lobbyists -- whom he hadn't spoken to in a year -- on a supposedly life-or-death matter. He claimed that Iran was planning to kidnap and kill Americans and Israelis working in Iraq. Franklin said he wanted to warn the White House, something that he, as a mid-level analyst, didn't have the clout to do himself.
The lobbyists fell for the appeal to save lives. They contacted a Post reporter and an Israeli diplomat and tried, unsuccessfully, to reach the National Security Council. Months afterward, under what former staffers say was considerable pressure from the government, AIPAC fired them. A year after the sting they were indicted. U.S. Attorney Paul McNulty announced the indictments last August, declaring that "when it comes to classified information, there is a clear line in the law." Alas, nothing could be less clear.
Information is the lifeblood of policymaking. Expanding restrictions on information adds greatly to the power of the executive; criminalizing citizens' contact with that information adds even greater uncertainty. Any Washington power lunch touching on national security issues -- between Reporter A or Lobbyist B and Official C -- inevitably contains something that someone has classified. Who's to know what's legal? Are "classified" White House discussions about Hurricane Katrina to be treated the same as troop movements? Even if the information is classified, is the official authorized to disclose it? In a long conversation, where is the "clear line"? For some leaks Bob Woodward gets a bestseller; Steve Rosen may get jail.
Officials have their own uses for leaks. In the past AIPAC has provided an informal back channel to the Israeli government. Giving a lobbyist details about illegal Israeli settlements is a diplomatic warning to Jerusalem, but only if he passes them on. How is he to know the difference between an authorized official and an FBI sting?
For better or worse, the rules of this game have traditionally been enforced by the players. Reporters receiving national security leaks have shown them to officials for confirmation and comment. Advocates and experts who spread information meant only for their ears were cut off from further briefings. This rough-and-ready marketplace lasted throughout the Cold War. Now a more fearful leadership finds such practices intolerable.
One argument for why autocratic regimes such as pre-World War II Germany and Japan have engaged in risky foreign adventures is that these narrow elites are not subject to the kind of outside review by knowledgeable people that exists in democracies. The run-up to the Iraq war has raised questions about whether America's marketplace of ideas in foreign policy is still viable. Did the Bush administration's success in gaining public approval for its invasion of Iraq have something to do with its ability to control secret information in a way that muted doubts about inflated claims of Iraqi threats?
Judge Ellis has it backward. A democratic government does not, in general, "authorize" the information citizens are allowed. Given enough information, citizens authorize and control their government. Or at least we used to.
The writer teaches lobbying at Georgetown University, where he is an adjunct professor of government."
Wednesday, February 15, 2006
Cheney Says He Has OK to Declassify Info - Yahoo! News
Cheney Says He Has OK to Declassify Info - Yahoo! News: "Cheney Says He Has OK to Declassify Info By PETE YOST, Associated Press Writer
44 minutes ago
WASHINGTON - Vice President Dick Cheney disclosed Wednesday that he has the power to declassify sensitive government information, authority that could set up a criminal defense for his former chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby.
Cheney's disclosure comes a week after reports that Libby testified under oath he was authorized by superiors in 2003 to disclose highly sensitive prewar information to reporters. The information, about Iraq and alleged weapons of mass destruction, was used by the Bush administration to bolster its case for invading Iraq.
At the time of Libby's contacts with reporters in June and July 2003, the administration including Cheney, who was among the war's most ardent proponents, faced growing criticism. No weapons of mass destruction had been found in Iraq, and Bush supporters were anxious to show that the White House had relied on prewar intelligence projecting a strong threat from such weapons.
When Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald revealed Libby's assertions to a grand jury that he had been authorized by his superiors to spread sensitive information, the prosecutor did not specify which superiors.
But in an interview on Fox News Channel, Cheney said there is an executive order that gives the vice president, along with the president, the authority to declassify information.
"I have certainly advocated declassification. I have participated in declassification decisions," Cheney said, while refusing to elaborate.
A legal expert said Cheney's TV appearance could foreshadow a Libby defense.
Former Whitewater independent counsel Robert Ray said Cheney's ex-chief of staff could point to authorization from his superiors as part of his strategy at trial.
"If it turns out that Cheney was actively involved in decisions related to the disclosure of a CIA officer's identity and if the truth of it is that he was orchestrating the disclosure of information to the media, it seems to me that's a fundamentally different case than one centered around the activities of Libby," said Ray.
On Oct. 28 of last year, Libby was indicted on five counts of perjury, obstruction and lying to the FBI about how he learned of the identity of undercover CIA officer Valerie Plame and what he told reporters about it.
In July 2003, Plame's CIA identity was published by columnist Robert Novak eight days after Plame's husband, former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson, accused the administration of twisting prewar intelligence to exaggerate the Iraqi threat. Wilson concluded that it was highly doubtful that a purported sale of uranium yellowcake by Niger to Iraq in the late 1990s had ever taken place.
A defense that Libby was authorized by superiors to leak sensitive data about Iraq would not appear to provide any help to the former Cheney aide for making false statements.
But some lawyers point out that setting up defenses before a jury involves more than simply constructing legal arguments.
"You're trying to present a persuasive case that your client should not be found guilty," said Ray, the former Whitewater prosecutor. "You're saying that even if my client did it, this is not a case that warrants conviction."
An authorization defense in the CIA leak case would mean that "much of what Libby was trying to do was aid and protect his boss Cheney," Ray suggested. The downside to employing such a approach is that it "almost comes with a defense that I did it.""
44 minutes ago
WASHINGTON - Vice President Dick Cheney disclosed Wednesday that he has the power to declassify sensitive government information, authority that could set up a criminal defense for his former chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby.
Cheney's disclosure comes a week after reports that Libby testified under oath he was authorized by superiors in 2003 to disclose highly sensitive prewar information to reporters. The information, about Iraq and alleged weapons of mass destruction, was used by the Bush administration to bolster its case for invading Iraq.
At the time of Libby's contacts with reporters in June and July 2003, the administration including Cheney, who was among the war's most ardent proponents, faced growing criticism. No weapons of mass destruction had been found in Iraq, and Bush supporters were anxious to show that the White House had relied on prewar intelligence projecting a strong threat from such weapons.
When Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald revealed Libby's assertions to a grand jury that he had been authorized by his superiors to spread sensitive information, the prosecutor did not specify which superiors.
But in an interview on Fox News Channel, Cheney said there is an executive order that gives the vice president, along with the president, the authority to declassify information.
"I have certainly advocated declassification. I have participated in declassification decisions," Cheney said, while refusing to elaborate.
A legal expert said Cheney's TV appearance could foreshadow a Libby defense.
Former Whitewater independent counsel Robert Ray said Cheney's ex-chief of staff could point to authorization from his superiors as part of his strategy at trial.
"If it turns out that Cheney was actively involved in decisions related to the disclosure of a CIA officer's identity and if the truth of it is that he was orchestrating the disclosure of information to the media, it seems to me that's a fundamentally different case than one centered around the activities of Libby," said Ray.
On Oct. 28 of last year, Libby was indicted on five counts of perjury, obstruction and lying to the FBI about how he learned of the identity of undercover CIA officer Valerie Plame and what he told reporters about it.
In July 2003, Plame's CIA identity was published by columnist Robert Novak eight days after Plame's husband, former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson, accused the administration of twisting prewar intelligence to exaggerate the Iraqi threat. Wilson concluded that it was highly doubtful that a purported sale of uranium yellowcake by Niger to Iraq in the late 1990s had ever taken place.
A defense that Libby was authorized by superiors to leak sensitive data about Iraq would not appear to provide any help to the former Cheney aide for making false statements.
But some lawyers point out that setting up defenses before a jury involves more than simply constructing legal arguments.
"You're trying to present a persuasive case that your client should not be found guilty," said Ray, the former Whitewater prosecutor. "You're saying that even if my client did it, this is not a case that warrants conviction."
An authorization defense in the CIA leak case would mean that "much of what Libby was trying to do was aid and protect his boss Cheney," Ray suggested. The downside to employing such a approach is that it "almost comes with a defense that I did it.""
Why U.S. Intelligence Failed, Redux By Robert Parry
Consortiumnews.com: "Why U.S. Intelligence Failed, Redux
By Robert Parry
February 13, 2006
Paul Pillar, the CIA's senior intelligence analyst for the Middle East from 2000 to 2005, has written a critique of the Bush administration's handling of pre-war intelligence on Iraq that, in effect, corroborates the British “Downing Street Memo” in accusing the Bush administration of rigging the evidence to justify the invasion.
The British memo recounted a July 23, 2002, meeting in which Richard Dearlove, chief of the British intelligence agency MI6, told Prime Minister Tony Blair about discussions in Washington with George W. Bush's top national security officials. “Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy,” Dearlove said, according to the minutes.
After the “Downing Street Memo” was revealed in Great Britain in 2005, Bush's spokesmen heatedly denied its claims and major U.S. news outlets dismissed its significance. But in the upcoming issue of Foreign Affairs magazine, Pillar offers a matching account. He wrote that the administration didn't just play games with the traditional notion that objective analysis should inform responsible policy, but “turned the entire model upside down.”
“The administration used intelligence not to inform decision-making, but to justify a decision already made,” Pillar wrote. “The Bush administration deviated from the professional standard not only in using policy to drive intelligence, but also in aggressively using intelligence to win public support for its decision to go to war. This meant selectively adducing data -- 'cherry-picking' -- rather than using the intelligence community's own analytic judgments.”
These two accounts -- which are further bolstered by first-hand statements from former counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke, former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill and Colin Powell's former chief of staff Lawrence Wilkerson -- reveal an administration long determined to invade Iraq and assembling reasons that would scare the American people into supporting an unprovoked war.
Yet, while the American public has a right to be furious about getting tricked into a war that has killed nearly 2,300 U.S. soldiers and tens of thousands of Iraqis, there are other concerns about why the U.S. intelligence community let itself be so manipulated, staying silent when a strong protest to Congress might have derailed Bush's scheme.
On Oct. 23, 2003, Consortiumnews.com addressed this longer-range question of why U.S. intelligence failed. That story, which is reprinted in an updated form below, shows that the politicization of intelligence has been a goal of neoconservative operatives for three decades. They have long understood the value of turning the principle of objective analysis on its head:
In Tom Clancy’s political thriller “Sum of All Fears,” the United States and Russia are being pushed to the brink of nuclear war by neo-Nazi terrorists who have detonated a nuclear explosion in Baltimore and want the Americans to blame the Russians.
CIA analysts have pieced together the real story but can’t get it to the president. “The president is basing his decisions on some really bad information,” analyst Jack Ryan (Ben Affleck) pleads to a U.S. general. “My orders are to get the right information to the people who make the decisions.”
Though a bit corny, Ryan’s dialogue captures the credo of professional intelligence analysts. Solid information, they believe, must be the foundation for sound decisions, especially when lives and the national security are at stake. The battle over that principle is the real back story to the dispute over Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction. It is a story of how the CIA’s vaunted analytical division has been corrupted – or “politicized” – by right-wing ideologues over the past quarter century.
Some key officials in George W. Bush’s administration – from former Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz to Vice President Dick Cheney – have long been part of this trend toward seeing intelligence as an ideological weapon, rather than a way to inform a full debate. Other figures in Bush’s circle of advisers, including his father, the former president and CIA director, have played perhaps even more central roles in this transformation. [More on this below. Also see Robert Parry's Secrecy & Privilege.]
For his part, the younger George Bush has shown little but disdain for any information that puts his policies or “gut” judgments in a negative light. In that sense, Bush’s thin skin toward contradiction can’t be separated from the White House campaign, beginning in July 2003, to discredit retired Ambassador Joseph Wilson for publicly debunking the Bush administration’s claim that Iraq had tried to buy yellowcake uranium from Niger. That retaliation included the exposure of Wilson’s wife as an undercover CIA officer.
Dating Back to Watergate
Though one cost of corrupting U.S. intelligence can now be counted in the growing U.S. death toll in Iraq, the origins of the current problem can be traced back to the mid-1970s, when conservatives were engaged in fierce rear-guard defenses after the twin debacles of the Vietnam War and Watergate. In 1974, after Republican President Richard Nixon was driven from office over the Watergate political-spying scandal, the Republicans suffered heavy losses in congressional races. The next year, the U.S. –backed government in South Vietnam fell.
At this crucial juncture, a group of influential conservatives coalesced around a strategy of accusing the CIA’s analytical division of growing soft on communism. These conservatives – led by the likes of Richard Pipes, Paul Nitze, William Van Cleave, Max Kampelman, Eugene Rostow, Elmo Zumwalt and Richard Allen – claimed that the CIA’s Soviet analysts were ignoring Moscow’s aggressive strategy for world domination. This political assault put in play one of the CIA’s founding principles – objective analysis.
Since its creation in 1947, the CIA had taken pride in maintaining an analytical division that stayed above the political fray. The CIA analysts – confident if not arrogant about their intellectual skills – prided themselves in bringing unwanted news to the president’s door. Those reports included an analysis of Soviet missile strength that contradicted John F. Kennedy’s “missile gap” rhetoric or the debunking of Lyndon Johnson’s assumptions about the effectiveness of bombing in Vietnam. While the CIA’s operational division got itself into trouble with risky schemes, the analytical division maintained a fairly good record of scholarship and objectivity.
But that tradition came under attack in 1976 when conservative outsiders demanded and were granted access to the CIA’s strategic intelligence on the Soviet Union. Their goal was to contest the analytical division’s assessments of Soviet capabilities and intentions. The conservatives saw the CIA’s tempered analysis of Soviet behavior as the underpinning of then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s strategy of détente, the gradual normalizing of relations with the Soviet Union. Détente was, in effect, a plan to negotiate an end to the Cold War or at least its most dangerous elements.
This CIA view of a tamer Soviet Union had enemies inside Gerald Ford’s administration. Hard-liners, such as William J. Casey, John Connally, Clare Booth Luce and Edward Teller, sat on the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. Another young hard-liner, Dick Cheney, was Ford’s chief of staff. Donald Rumsfeld was then – as he is today – the secretary of defense.
Team B
The concept of a conservative counter-analysis, which became known as “Team B,” had been opposed by the previous CIA director, William Colby, as in inappropriate intrusion into the integrity of the CIA’s analytical product. But the new CIA director, a politically ambitious George H.W. Bush, was ready to acquiesce to the right-wing pressure.
“Although his top analysts argued against such an undertaking, Bush checked with the White House, obtained an O.K., and by May 26 [1976] signed off on the experiment with the notation, ‘Let her fly!!,” wrote Anne Hessing Cahn after reviewing “Team B” documents that were released more than a decade ago. [See “Team B: The Trillion Dollar Experiment,” The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.]
The senior George Bush offered the rationale that Team B would simply be an intellectual challenge to the CIA’s official assessments. The elder Bush’s rationale, however, assumed that Team B didn’t have a pre-set agenda to fashion a worst-case scenario for launching a new and intensified Cold War. What was sometimes called Cold War II would demand hundreds of billions of dollars in taxpayers’ money for military projects, including big-ticket items like a missile-defense system. [One member of Team B, retired Lt. Gen. Daniel Graham, would become the father of Ronald Reagan “Star Wars” missile defense system.]
Not surprisingly, Team B did produce a worst-case scenario of Soviet power and intentions. Gaining credibility from its access to secret CIA data, Team B challenged the assessment of the CIA’s professional analysts who held a less alarmist view of Moscow’s capabilities and intentions. “The principal threat to our nation, to world peace and to the cause of human freedom is the Soviet drive for dominance based upon an unparalleled military buildup,” wrote three Team B members Pipes, Nitze and Van Cleave.
Team B also brought to prominence another young neo-conservative, Paul Wolfowitz. A quarter century later, Wolfowitz would pioneer the post-Cold War strategy of U.S. preemptive wars against countries deemed potential threats by using the same technique of filtering the available intelligence to build a worst-case scenario. In 2001, George W. Bush made Wolfowitz deputy secretary of defense under Rumsfeld.
Though Team B’s analysis of the Soviet Union as a rising power on the verge of overwhelming the United States is now recognized by intelligence professionals and many historians as a ludicrous fantasy, it helped shape the national security debate in the late 1970s. American conservatives and neo-conservatives wielded the analysis like a club to bludgeon more moderate Republicans and Democrats, who saw a declining Soviet Union desperate for arms control and other negotiations.
Reagan's Rise
Scary assessments of Soviet power and U.S. weakness also fueled Ronald Reagan’s campaign in 1980, and after his election, the Team B hard-liners had the keys to power. As Reagan and his vice presidential running mate, George H.W. Bush, prepared to take office, the hard-liners wrote Reagan’s transition team report, which suggested that the CIA analytical division was not simply obtuse in its supposed failure to perceive Soviet ascendancy, but treasonous.
“These failures are of such enormity,” the transition team report said, “that they cannot help but suggest to any objective observer that the agency itself is compromised to an unprecedented extent and that its paralysis is attributable to causes more sinister than incompetence.” [For details, see Mark Perry’s Eclipse.]
With Reagan in power, the Team B analysis of Soviet capabilities and intentions became the basis for a massive U.S. military buildup. It also was the justification for U.S. support of brutal right-wing governments in Central America and elsewhere.
Since Soviet power was supposedly on the rise and rapidly eclipsing the United States, it followed that even peasant uprisings against “death squad” regimes in El Salvador or Guatemala must be part of a larger Soviet strategy of world conquest, an assault on the “soft underbelly” of the U.S. southern border. Any analysis of these civil wars as primarily local conflicts arising from long-standing social grievances was dismissed as fuzzy thinking or worse.
In the first few months of the Reagan administration, the hard-liners’ animosity toward the CIA’s analytical division intensified as it resisted a series of accusations against the Soviet Union. The CIA analysts were obstacles to the administration’s campaign to depict Moscow as responsible for virtually all acts of international terrorism, including the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II in Rome in 1981.
With William Casey installed as CIA director and also serving in Reagan’s Cabinet, the assault on the analytical division moved into high gear. Casey put the analytical division under the control of his protégé, Robert Gates, who had made his name as an anti-Soviet hard-liner. Gates then installed a new bureaucracy within the DI, or Directorate of Intelligence, with his loyalists in key positions.
“The CIA’s objectivity on the Soviet Union ended abruptly in 1981, when Casey became the DCI [director of central intelligence] – and the first one to be a member of the president’s Cabinet. Gates became Casey’s deputy director for intelligence in 1982 and chaired the National Intelligence Council,” wrote former CIA senior analyst Melvyn Goodman. [See Foreign Policy magazine, summer 1997.]
Analysts Under Fire
Under Gates, CIA intelligence analysts found themselves the victims of bureaucratic pummeling. According to several former CIA analysts whom I interviewed, analysts faced job threats; some were berated or even had their analytical papers thrown in their faces; some were subjected to allegations of psychiatric unfitness.
The Gates leadership team proved itself responsive to White House demands, giving serious attention to right-wing press reports from around the world. The Reagan administration, for instance, wanted evidence to support right-wing media claims that pinned European terrorism on the Soviets. The CIA analysts, however, knew the charges were bogus partly because they were based on “black” or false propaganda that the CIA's operations division had been planting in the European media.
The attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II in 1981 was viewed as another opportunity to make propaganda points against what Reagan called the “evil empire.” Though the attack had been carried out by a neo-fascist extremist from Turkey, conservative U.S. writers and journalists began to promote allegations of a secret KGB role. In this case, CIA analysts knew the charges were false because of the CIA’s penetration of East Bloc intelligence services.
But responding to White House pressure in 1985, Gates closeted a special team to push through an administration-desired paper linking the KGB to the attack. Though the analysts opposed what they believed to be a dishonest intelligence report, they couldn’t stop the paper from leaving CIA and being circulated around Washington.
As the CIA’s traditions of analytical objectivity continued to erode in the 1980s, analysts who raised unwelcome questions in politically sensitive areas found their jobs on the line.
For instance, analysts were pressured to back off an assessment that Pakistan was violating nuclear proliferation safeguards with the goal of building an atomic bomb. At the time, Pakistan was assisting the Reagan administration’s covert operation in Afghanistan, which was considered a higher priority than stopping the spread of nuclear weapons. In Afghanistan, the CIA’s operations division and the Pakistani intelligence service were helping Islamic fundamentalists, including Osama bin Laden, battle Soviet troops.
One analyst involved in the Pakistan nuclear-bomb assessment told me that the CIA higher-ups applied almost the opposite standards that were used two decades later in alleging an Iraqi nuclear program. In the Pakistani case, the Reagan administration blocked warnings about a Pakistani bomb “until the last bolt was turned” while more recently on Iraq, speculative worst-case scenarios were applied, the analyst said.
One consequence of giving Pakistan a pass on proliferation was that Pakistan did succeed in developing nuclear weapons, which have contributed to an escalating arms race with India in South Asia. It also has created the potential for Islamic extremists to gain control of the Bomb by taking power in Pakistan.
Missing the Fall
The politicization of intelligence in the 1980s had other effects. Under pressure always to exaggerate the Soviet threat, analysts had no incentive to point out the truth, which was that the Soviet Union was a decaying, corrupt and inefficient regime tottering on the brink of collapse. To justify soaring military budgets and interventions in Third World conflicts, the Reagan administration wanted the Soviets always to be depicted as 10 feet tall.
Ironically, this systematic distortion of the CIA’s Soviet intelligence assessments turned out to be a political win-win for Reagan and his supporters.
Not only did Congress appropriate hundreds of billions of dollars for military projects favored by the conservatives, the U.S. news media largely gave Reagan the credit when the Soviet Union “suddenly” collapsed in 1991. The CIA did take some lumps for “missing” one of the most significant political events of the century, but Reagan’s success in “winning the Cold War” is now enshrined as conventional wisdom.
The accepted version of events goes this way: the Soviets were on the ascendance before Reagan took office, but thanks to Reagan’s strategic missile defense program and his support for right-wing insurgencies, such as arming contra rebels in Nicaragua and Islamic fundamentalists in Afghanistan, the Soviet Union fell apart.
A more realistic assessment would point out that the Soviets had been in decline for decades, largely from the devastation caused by World War II and the effective containment strategies followed by presidents from Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower to Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter. The rapid development of technology in the West and the lure of Western consumer goods accelerated this Soviet collapse.
But the U.S. news media never mounted a serious assessment of how the Cold War really was won. The conservative press corps naturally pressed its favored theme of Reagan turning the tide, while a complacent mainstream press offered little additional context.
'Politicization'
The plight of the CIA analysts in the 1980s also received little attention in Washington amid the triumphalism of the early 1990s. The story did surface briefly in 1991 during Gates’s confirmation hearings to become President George H.W. Bush’s CIA director. Then, a group of CIA analysts braved the administration’s wrath by protesting the “politicization of intelligence.”
Led by Soviet specialist Mel Goodman, the dissidents fingered Gates as the key “politicization” culprit. Their testimony added to doubts about Gates, who was under a cloud for his dubious testimony on the Iran-Contra scandal and allegations that he had played a role in another covert scheme to assist Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. But the elder George Bush lined up solid Republican backing and enough accommodating Democrats – particularly Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman David Boren – to push Gates through.
Boren’s key staff aide who limited the investigation of Gates was George Tenet, whose behind-the-scenes maneuvering on Gates’s behalf won the personal appreciation of the senior George Bush. Those political chits would serve Tenet well a decade later when the younger George Bush protected Tenet as his own CIA director, even after the intelligence failure of Sept. 11, 2001, and embarrassing revelations about faulty intelligence on Iraq’s WMD.
In the early 1990s. with the Cold War over, the need for objective intelligence also seemed less pressing. Political leaders apparently didn’t grasp the potential danger of allowing a corrupted U.S. intelligence process to remain in place. There was a brief window for action with Bill Clinton’s election in 1992, but the incoming Democrats lacked the political will to demand serious reform.
The “politicization” issue was put squarely before Clinton’s incoming national security team by former CIA analyst Peter Dickson, who wrote a two-page memo on Dec. 10, 1992, to Samuel “Sandy” Berger, a top Clinton national security aide. Dickson was an analyst who suffered retaliation after refusing to rewrite a 1983 assessment that noted Soviet restraint on nuclear proliferation. His CIA superiors didn’t want to give the Soviets any credit for demonstrating caution on the nuclear technology front. When Dickson stood by his evidence, he soon found himself facing accusations about his psychological fitness.
Dickson urged Clinton to appoint a new CIA director who understood “the deeper internal problems relating to the politicization of intelligence and the festering morale problem within the CIA.” In urging a housecleaning, Dickson wrote, “This problem of intellectual corruption will not disappear overnight, even with vigorous remedial action. However, the new CIA director will be wise if he realizes from the start the dangers in relying on advice of senior CIA office managers who during the past 12 years advanced and prospered in their careers precisely because they had no qualms about suppressing intelligence or slanting analysis to suit the interest of Casey and Gates.”
The appeals from Dickson and other CIA veterans were largely ignored by Clinton and his top aides, who were more interested in turning around the U.S. economy and enacting some modest social programs. Although Gates was removed as CIA director, Clinton appointed James Woolsey, a neo-conservative Democrat who had worked closely with the Reagan-Bush administrations. Under Woolsey and Clinton’s subsequent CIA directors, the Gates team sans Gates consolidated its bureaucratic power.
The old ideal of intelligence analysis free from political taint was never restored. Clinton’s final CIA director was George Tenet, who was kept on by George W. Bush in 2001. In violation of the CIA’s long-standing tradition of avoiding even the appearance of partisanship, Tenet happily presided over the ceremony that renamed the CIA’s Langley, Va., headquarters the George Bush Center for Intelligence, after George Bush senior.
The Iraq Debacle
Tenet also has proved himself a loyal bureaucrat to the second Bush administration. For instance, in February 2003 when Secretary of State Colin Powell addressed the United Nations Security Council about Iraq’s alleged WMD program, Tenet was prominently seated behind Powell, giving the CIA’s imprimatur to Powell’s assertions that turned out to be a mixture of unproved assertions, exaggerations and outright lies. At one point in his speech, Powell even altered the text of intercepted conversations between Iraqi officials to make their comments appear incriminating. [For details, see Consortiumnews.com’s "Bush's Alderaan."]
“If one goes back to that very long presentation [by Powell], point by point, one finds that this was not a very honest explanation,” said Greg Thielmann, a former senior official in the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, in an interview with PBS Frontline. “I have to conclude Secretary Powell was being a loyal secretary of state, a ‘good soldier’ as it were, building the administration’s case before the international community.” [For details, see Frontline’s “Truth, War and Consequences.”]
In the Foreign Affairs article, Pillar noted that Powell's U.N. speech also compromised the objectivity of the CIA on Iraq because “the intelligence community was pulled over the line into policy advocacy -- not so much by what it said as by its conspicuous role in the administration's public case for war. This was especially true when the intelligence community was made highly visible (with the director of central intelligence literally in the camera frame) in [Powell's] intelligence-laden presentation.”
Pillar added that the CIA also was compromised “in the fall of 2002, when, at the administration's behest, the intelligence community published a white paper on Iraq's WMD programs -- but without including any of the community's judgments about the likelihood of those weapons' being used.”
Though Tenet’s primary responsibility should have been to the integrity of the intelligence product, he was helping Powell and the White House present a largely bogus case before the U.N.
After the March 2003 invasion, as the case for Iraq’s possession of trigger-ready WMD fell apart, the Washington debate turned to who was at fault for the shoddy intelligence.
In testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee on June 25, 2003, Army Lt. Gen. John Abizaid offered a clue when he compared the accuracy of tactical intelligence in the Iraq war versus the faulty strategic intelligence.
“Intelligence was the most accurate that I have ever seen on the tactical level, probably the best I’ve ever seen on the operational level, and perplexingly incomplete on the strategic level with regard to weapons of mass destruction,” said Abizaid, who heads the U.S. Central Command, which is responsible for Iraq.
In other words, the intelligence handled by low-level personnel was excellent. It was the intelligence that went through senior levels of the Bush administration that failed.
The WMD issue really came down to two questions: Was the CIA’s intelligence analysis that bad or did the White House cherry-pick the intelligence that it wanted to march the country off to war? The answer appears to be that both points were true. A thoroughly politicized CIA slanted the intelligence in the direction that Bush wanted and the White House then trimmed off any caveats the CIA may have included.
The CIA’s internal complaint that it was just the victim of administration ideologues was undercut by its own analytical products, including a post-invasion report claiming that two captured Iraqi trailers were labs to produce chemical or biological weapons. That claim later collapsed as evidence emerged to show that the labs were for making hydrogen for artillery weather balloons. [For an early critique of this CIA report, see Consortiumnews.com’s "America's Matrix."]
Plus, while Tenet and other CIA officials noted that they objected to other bogus administration claims, such as the assertion that Iraq was seeking yellowcake uranium from Niger, those protests were mostly half-hearted and made behind closed doors. Bush was only forced to back off the yellowcake claim, which he cited in his 2003 State of the Union Address, after former Ambassador Wilson went public with evidence that the allegation was a fraud.
'Stovepipe'
Yet it's also true that the Bush administration didn't want to chance having its Iraqi WMD allegations vetted by any serious intelligence professionals. So, at the State Department, Pentagon and White House, senior political officials created their own channels for accessing raw or untested intelligence that was then used to buttress the charges.
In a New Yorker article about CIA analysts on the defensive, journalist Seymour Hersh described this “stovepiping” process of sending raw intelligence to the top. Intelligence agencies have historically objected to this technique because policy makers will tend to select unvetted information that serves their purposes and use it to discredit the more measured assessments of intelligence professionals.
“The analysts at the CIA were beaten down defending their assessments,” a former CIA official told Hersh. “And they blame Tenet for not protecting them. I’ve never seen a government like this.” [See Hersh’s “The Stovepipe,” The New Yorker, Oct. 27, 2003]
Pillar wrote that the battle between the intelligence analysts and the policymakers came to a head over the White House desire to assert that Saddam Hussein was connected to al-Qaeda, a claim that the intelligence analysts had rejected despite repetitious demands from Vice President Cheney's office that the CIA corroborate the supposed link.
“The administration's rejection of the intelligence community's judgments became especially clear with the formation of a special Pentagon unit, the Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group,” Pillar wrote. “The unit, which reported to Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith, was dedicated to finding every possible link between Saddam and al-Qaeda, and its briefing accused the intelligence community of faulty analysis for failing to see the supposed alliance.”
But the intelligence analysts weren’t the only ones coming under attack for pointing out evidence that didn’t conform to the Bush administration’s propaganda. From the start of its drive to invade Iraq, the administration treated going to war like a giant public relations game, with the goal of manufacturing consent or at least silencing any meaningful opposition.
Evidence that undermined Bush’s conclusions was minimized or discarded. People who revealed unwanted evidence were personally discredited or intimidated. When former Ambassador Wilson reported that he had been assigned by the CIA to investigate the Niger yellowcake claims and found them bogus, administration officials leaked the fact that Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, was an undercover CIA officer. The leak destroyed Plame's career and may have put at risk agents who worked with her.
'Slime and Defend'
Though Bush publicly denounced the leak, an unnamed Republican aide on Capitol Hill told the New York Times that the underlying White House strategy was to “slime and defend,” that is to “slime” Wilson and “defend” Bush. [NYT, Oct. 2, 2003]
The “slime and defend” strategy has been carried forward by conservative news outlets with the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s Washington Times attacking Wilson's motives, even as Wilson’s debunking of the Niger allegations has been borne out by other investigations.
“Joseph C. Wilson IV, the man accusing the White House of a vendetta against his wife, is an ex-diplomat turned Democratic partisan,” declared a front-page article in the Washington Times. “Mr. Wilson told the Washington Post he and his wife are already discussing who will play them in the movie.” [Washington Times, Oct. 2, 2003]
The Washington Times returned to its anti-Wilson campaign several days later. “As for Mr. Wilson himself, his hatred of Mr. Bush’s policies borders on the pathological,” wrote Washington Times columnist Donald Lambro on Oct. 6, 2003. “This is a far-left Democrat who has been relentlessly bashing the president’s Iraq war policies. … The mystery behind this dubious investigation is why this Bush-hater was chosen for so sensitive a mission.”
The Wall Street Journal also raised questions about Wilson’s motives. “Joe Wilson (Ms. Plame’s husband) has made no secret of his broad disagreement with Bush policy since outing himself with an op-ed,” the Journal wrote in a lead editorial on Oct. 3, 2003.
Strangely, these attacks on Wilson’s alleged bias (which he denies) continued even as Bush’s hand-picked Iraqi weapons inspector David Kay was confirming Wilson’s findings. In his report to the CIA and Congress, Kay acknowledged that no evidence has been found to support the stories about Iraq seeking African uranium.
“To date we have not uncovered evidence that Iraq undertook significant post-1998 steps to actually build nuclear weapons or produce fissile material,” Kay said.
The disconnect between fact and spin apparently has grown so complete among Bush’s allies that they can’t stop attacking Wilson’s findings as biased even when the facts he uncovered are being confirmed by one of Bush’s own investigators.
The clumsy attempt to discredit or punish Wilson eventually led to disclosures that Bush's chief political adviser Karl Rove and Cheney's chief of staff Lewis Libby took part in revealing Plame's identity to reporters. In 2005, Libby was indicted on charges of obstructing justice and lying to investigators about the leak. Rove apparently remains under investigation.
'Freedom Fries'
But the attacks on Wilson do not stand alone. In the drive to limit debate about Bush’s case for war, his allies ostracized virtually all major critics of the administration’s WMD claims, including the U.N.’s chief weapons inspector Hans Blix and former U.N. weapons inspector Scott Ritter.
Blacklisting campaigns also were mounted against celebrities, such as actor Sean Penn and the music group Dixie Chicks, for criticizing Bush’s rush to war. When France urged more time for U.N. weapons inspections, Bush’s supporters organized boycotts of French products, poured French wine in gutters and renamed “French fries” as “Freedom Fries.”
As with the Wilson case, Bush and his supporters didn't let the failure to find the alleged trigger-ready WMD stop their efforts to discredit these critics. Instead of apologies, for instance, Ritter continued to suffer from conservative smears about his patriotism.
In one particularly smarmy performance on June 12, 2003, Fox News anchor Bill O’Reilly teamed up with Rep. Mike Pence, R-Ind., to air suspicions that Ritter had been bribed by the Iraqis to help them cover up their illegal weapons. Neither O’Reilly nor Pence had any evidence that Ritter accepted a bribe, so they framed the segment as a demand that the FBI investigate Ritter with the purported goal of clearing him of any suspicion of treason.
The segment noted that a London newspaper reporter had found Iraqi documents showing that Ritter had been offered some gold as gifts for his family. “I turned down the gifts and reported it to the FBI when I came back,” Ritter said in an interview with Fox News.
Though Ritter’s statement stood uncontradicted, O’Reilly and Pence demanded that the FBI disclose what it knew about Ritter’s denial. “Now, we want to know whether that was true,” said O’Reilly about whether Ritter had reported the alleged bribe. “The FBI wouldn’t tell us.” O’Reilly then asked Pence what he had done to get the FBI to investigate Ritter.
“After that report in the British newspaper, many of us on Capitol Hill were very concerned,” Pence said. “Candidly, Bill, there’s no one who’s done more damage to the argument of the United States that Iraq was in possession of large stores of weapons of mass destruction leading up to Operation Iraqi Freedom other than Scott Ritter, and so the very suggestion that … there’s evidence of treasonous activity or even bribery, I believe, merits an investigation. I contacted the attorney general about that directly.”
Pence’s point was clear – that Ritter’s role as a skeptic about Bush’s WMD claims made him an appropriate target for a treason investigation. [Fox News’ “The O’Reilly Factor,” June 12, 2003]
Backward Filter
Time and again, Bush and his administration have replaced the principle that good intelligence makes for good policy with the near-opposite approach: you start with a conclusion and then distort all available information to sell the pre-ordained policy to a gullible, ill-informed or frightened public.
The WMD intelligence was pushed through a kind of backward filter. Instead of removing the imprecision that comes with raw intelligence, the Bush administration’s intelligence process shoved through the dross as long as it fit with Bush’s goal of bolstering political support for the war and removed the refined intelligence that undercut his desired actions.
Unlike the fictional president in Tom Clancy's “Sum of All Fears” – who was tricked into that “really bad information” – Bush and his team have actively sought out the bad information and assembled it as justification for going to war. This administration, which can sometimes act in a manner stranger-than-fiction, didn't just peer into the fog of war. It set up the fog machine.
Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq, can be ordered at secrecyandprivilege.com. It's also available at Amazon.com, as is his 1999 book, Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth.'"
By Robert Parry
February 13, 2006
Paul Pillar, the CIA's senior intelligence analyst for the Middle East from 2000 to 2005, has written a critique of the Bush administration's handling of pre-war intelligence on Iraq that, in effect, corroborates the British “Downing Street Memo” in accusing the Bush administration of rigging the evidence to justify the invasion.
The British memo recounted a July 23, 2002, meeting in which Richard Dearlove, chief of the British intelligence agency MI6, told Prime Minister Tony Blair about discussions in Washington with George W. Bush's top national security officials. “Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy,” Dearlove said, according to the minutes.
After the “Downing Street Memo” was revealed in Great Britain in 2005, Bush's spokesmen heatedly denied its claims and major U.S. news outlets dismissed its significance. But in the upcoming issue of Foreign Affairs magazine, Pillar offers a matching account. He wrote that the administration didn't just play games with the traditional notion that objective analysis should inform responsible policy, but “turned the entire model upside down.”
“The administration used intelligence not to inform decision-making, but to justify a decision already made,” Pillar wrote. “The Bush administration deviated from the professional standard not only in using policy to drive intelligence, but also in aggressively using intelligence to win public support for its decision to go to war. This meant selectively adducing data -- 'cherry-picking' -- rather than using the intelligence community's own analytic judgments.”
These two accounts -- which are further bolstered by first-hand statements from former counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke, former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill and Colin Powell's former chief of staff Lawrence Wilkerson -- reveal an administration long determined to invade Iraq and assembling reasons that would scare the American people into supporting an unprovoked war.
Yet, while the American public has a right to be furious about getting tricked into a war that has killed nearly 2,300 U.S. soldiers and tens of thousands of Iraqis, there are other concerns about why the U.S. intelligence community let itself be so manipulated, staying silent when a strong protest to Congress might have derailed Bush's scheme.
On Oct. 23, 2003, Consortiumnews.com addressed this longer-range question of why U.S. intelligence failed. That story, which is reprinted in an updated form below, shows that the politicization of intelligence has been a goal of neoconservative operatives for three decades. They have long understood the value of turning the principle of objective analysis on its head:
In Tom Clancy’s political thriller “Sum of All Fears,” the United States and Russia are being pushed to the brink of nuclear war by neo-Nazi terrorists who have detonated a nuclear explosion in Baltimore and want the Americans to blame the Russians.
CIA analysts have pieced together the real story but can’t get it to the president. “The president is basing his decisions on some really bad information,” analyst Jack Ryan (Ben Affleck) pleads to a U.S. general. “My orders are to get the right information to the people who make the decisions.”
Though a bit corny, Ryan’s dialogue captures the credo of professional intelligence analysts. Solid information, they believe, must be the foundation for sound decisions, especially when lives and the national security are at stake. The battle over that principle is the real back story to the dispute over Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction. It is a story of how the CIA’s vaunted analytical division has been corrupted – or “politicized” – by right-wing ideologues over the past quarter century.
Some key officials in George W. Bush’s administration – from former Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz to Vice President Dick Cheney – have long been part of this trend toward seeing intelligence as an ideological weapon, rather than a way to inform a full debate. Other figures in Bush’s circle of advisers, including his father, the former president and CIA director, have played perhaps even more central roles in this transformation. [More on this below. Also see Robert Parry's Secrecy & Privilege.]
For his part, the younger George Bush has shown little but disdain for any information that puts his policies or “gut” judgments in a negative light. In that sense, Bush’s thin skin toward contradiction can’t be separated from the White House campaign, beginning in July 2003, to discredit retired Ambassador Joseph Wilson for publicly debunking the Bush administration’s claim that Iraq had tried to buy yellowcake uranium from Niger. That retaliation included the exposure of Wilson’s wife as an undercover CIA officer.
Dating Back to Watergate
Though one cost of corrupting U.S. intelligence can now be counted in the growing U.S. death toll in Iraq, the origins of the current problem can be traced back to the mid-1970s, when conservatives were engaged in fierce rear-guard defenses after the twin debacles of the Vietnam War and Watergate. In 1974, after Republican President Richard Nixon was driven from office over the Watergate political-spying scandal, the Republicans suffered heavy losses in congressional races. The next year, the U.S. –backed government in South Vietnam fell.
At this crucial juncture, a group of influential conservatives coalesced around a strategy of accusing the CIA’s analytical division of growing soft on communism. These conservatives – led by the likes of Richard Pipes, Paul Nitze, William Van Cleave, Max Kampelman, Eugene Rostow, Elmo Zumwalt and Richard Allen – claimed that the CIA’s Soviet analysts were ignoring Moscow’s aggressive strategy for world domination. This political assault put in play one of the CIA’s founding principles – objective analysis.
Since its creation in 1947, the CIA had taken pride in maintaining an analytical division that stayed above the political fray. The CIA analysts – confident if not arrogant about their intellectual skills – prided themselves in bringing unwanted news to the president’s door. Those reports included an analysis of Soviet missile strength that contradicted John F. Kennedy’s “missile gap” rhetoric or the debunking of Lyndon Johnson’s assumptions about the effectiveness of bombing in Vietnam. While the CIA’s operational division got itself into trouble with risky schemes, the analytical division maintained a fairly good record of scholarship and objectivity.
But that tradition came under attack in 1976 when conservative outsiders demanded and were granted access to the CIA’s strategic intelligence on the Soviet Union. Their goal was to contest the analytical division’s assessments of Soviet capabilities and intentions. The conservatives saw the CIA’s tempered analysis of Soviet behavior as the underpinning of then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s strategy of détente, the gradual normalizing of relations with the Soviet Union. Détente was, in effect, a plan to negotiate an end to the Cold War or at least its most dangerous elements.
This CIA view of a tamer Soviet Union had enemies inside Gerald Ford’s administration. Hard-liners, such as William J. Casey, John Connally, Clare Booth Luce and Edward Teller, sat on the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. Another young hard-liner, Dick Cheney, was Ford’s chief of staff. Donald Rumsfeld was then – as he is today – the secretary of defense.
Team B
The concept of a conservative counter-analysis, which became known as “Team B,” had been opposed by the previous CIA director, William Colby, as in inappropriate intrusion into the integrity of the CIA’s analytical product. But the new CIA director, a politically ambitious George H.W. Bush, was ready to acquiesce to the right-wing pressure.
“Although his top analysts argued against such an undertaking, Bush checked with the White House, obtained an O.K., and by May 26 [1976] signed off on the experiment with the notation, ‘Let her fly!!,” wrote Anne Hessing Cahn after reviewing “Team B” documents that were released more than a decade ago. [See “Team B: The Trillion Dollar Experiment,” The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.]
The senior George Bush offered the rationale that Team B would simply be an intellectual challenge to the CIA’s official assessments. The elder Bush’s rationale, however, assumed that Team B didn’t have a pre-set agenda to fashion a worst-case scenario for launching a new and intensified Cold War. What was sometimes called Cold War II would demand hundreds of billions of dollars in taxpayers’ money for military projects, including big-ticket items like a missile-defense system. [One member of Team B, retired Lt. Gen. Daniel Graham, would become the father of Ronald Reagan “Star Wars” missile defense system.]
Not surprisingly, Team B did produce a worst-case scenario of Soviet power and intentions. Gaining credibility from its access to secret CIA data, Team B challenged the assessment of the CIA’s professional analysts who held a less alarmist view of Moscow’s capabilities and intentions. “The principal threat to our nation, to world peace and to the cause of human freedom is the Soviet drive for dominance based upon an unparalleled military buildup,” wrote three Team B members Pipes, Nitze and Van Cleave.
Team B also brought to prominence another young neo-conservative, Paul Wolfowitz. A quarter century later, Wolfowitz would pioneer the post-Cold War strategy of U.S. preemptive wars against countries deemed potential threats by using the same technique of filtering the available intelligence to build a worst-case scenario. In 2001, George W. Bush made Wolfowitz deputy secretary of defense under Rumsfeld.
Though Team B’s analysis of the Soviet Union as a rising power on the verge of overwhelming the United States is now recognized by intelligence professionals and many historians as a ludicrous fantasy, it helped shape the national security debate in the late 1970s. American conservatives and neo-conservatives wielded the analysis like a club to bludgeon more moderate Republicans and Democrats, who saw a declining Soviet Union desperate for arms control and other negotiations.
Reagan's Rise
Scary assessments of Soviet power and U.S. weakness also fueled Ronald Reagan’s campaign in 1980, and after his election, the Team B hard-liners had the keys to power. As Reagan and his vice presidential running mate, George H.W. Bush, prepared to take office, the hard-liners wrote Reagan’s transition team report, which suggested that the CIA analytical division was not simply obtuse in its supposed failure to perceive Soviet ascendancy, but treasonous.
“These failures are of such enormity,” the transition team report said, “that they cannot help but suggest to any objective observer that the agency itself is compromised to an unprecedented extent and that its paralysis is attributable to causes more sinister than incompetence.” [For details, see Mark Perry’s Eclipse.]
With Reagan in power, the Team B analysis of Soviet capabilities and intentions became the basis for a massive U.S. military buildup. It also was the justification for U.S. support of brutal right-wing governments in Central America and elsewhere.
Since Soviet power was supposedly on the rise and rapidly eclipsing the United States, it followed that even peasant uprisings against “death squad” regimes in El Salvador or Guatemala must be part of a larger Soviet strategy of world conquest, an assault on the “soft underbelly” of the U.S. southern border. Any analysis of these civil wars as primarily local conflicts arising from long-standing social grievances was dismissed as fuzzy thinking or worse.
In the first few months of the Reagan administration, the hard-liners’ animosity toward the CIA’s analytical division intensified as it resisted a series of accusations against the Soviet Union. The CIA analysts were obstacles to the administration’s campaign to depict Moscow as responsible for virtually all acts of international terrorism, including the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II in Rome in 1981.
With William Casey installed as CIA director and also serving in Reagan’s Cabinet, the assault on the analytical division moved into high gear. Casey put the analytical division under the control of his protégé, Robert Gates, who had made his name as an anti-Soviet hard-liner. Gates then installed a new bureaucracy within the DI, or Directorate of Intelligence, with his loyalists in key positions.
“The CIA’s objectivity on the Soviet Union ended abruptly in 1981, when Casey became the DCI [director of central intelligence] – and the first one to be a member of the president’s Cabinet. Gates became Casey’s deputy director for intelligence in 1982 and chaired the National Intelligence Council,” wrote former CIA senior analyst Melvyn Goodman. [See Foreign Policy magazine, summer 1997.]
Analysts Under Fire
Under Gates, CIA intelligence analysts found themselves the victims of bureaucratic pummeling. According to several former CIA analysts whom I interviewed, analysts faced job threats; some were berated or even had their analytical papers thrown in their faces; some were subjected to allegations of psychiatric unfitness.
The Gates leadership team proved itself responsive to White House demands, giving serious attention to right-wing press reports from around the world. The Reagan administration, for instance, wanted evidence to support right-wing media claims that pinned European terrorism on the Soviets. The CIA analysts, however, knew the charges were bogus partly because they were based on “black” or false propaganda that the CIA's operations division had been planting in the European media.
The attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II in 1981 was viewed as another opportunity to make propaganda points against what Reagan called the “evil empire.” Though the attack had been carried out by a neo-fascist extremist from Turkey, conservative U.S. writers and journalists began to promote allegations of a secret KGB role. In this case, CIA analysts knew the charges were false because of the CIA’s penetration of East Bloc intelligence services.
But responding to White House pressure in 1985, Gates closeted a special team to push through an administration-desired paper linking the KGB to the attack. Though the analysts opposed what they believed to be a dishonest intelligence report, they couldn’t stop the paper from leaving CIA and being circulated around Washington.
As the CIA’s traditions of analytical objectivity continued to erode in the 1980s, analysts who raised unwelcome questions in politically sensitive areas found their jobs on the line.
For instance, analysts were pressured to back off an assessment that Pakistan was violating nuclear proliferation safeguards with the goal of building an atomic bomb. At the time, Pakistan was assisting the Reagan administration’s covert operation in Afghanistan, which was considered a higher priority than stopping the spread of nuclear weapons. In Afghanistan, the CIA’s operations division and the Pakistani intelligence service were helping Islamic fundamentalists, including Osama bin Laden, battle Soviet troops.
One analyst involved in the Pakistan nuclear-bomb assessment told me that the CIA higher-ups applied almost the opposite standards that were used two decades later in alleging an Iraqi nuclear program. In the Pakistani case, the Reagan administration blocked warnings about a Pakistani bomb “until the last bolt was turned” while more recently on Iraq, speculative worst-case scenarios were applied, the analyst said.
One consequence of giving Pakistan a pass on proliferation was that Pakistan did succeed in developing nuclear weapons, which have contributed to an escalating arms race with India in South Asia. It also has created the potential for Islamic extremists to gain control of the Bomb by taking power in Pakistan.
Missing the Fall
The politicization of intelligence in the 1980s had other effects. Under pressure always to exaggerate the Soviet threat, analysts had no incentive to point out the truth, which was that the Soviet Union was a decaying, corrupt and inefficient regime tottering on the brink of collapse. To justify soaring military budgets and interventions in Third World conflicts, the Reagan administration wanted the Soviets always to be depicted as 10 feet tall.
Ironically, this systematic distortion of the CIA’s Soviet intelligence assessments turned out to be a political win-win for Reagan and his supporters.
Not only did Congress appropriate hundreds of billions of dollars for military projects favored by the conservatives, the U.S. news media largely gave Reagan the credit when the Soviet Union “suddenly” collapsed in 1991. The CIA did take some lumps for “missing” one of the most significant political events of the century, but Reagan’s success in “winning the Cold War” is now enshrined as conventional wisdom.
The accepted version of events goes this way: the Soviets were on the ascendance before Reagan took office, but thanks to Reagan’s strategic missile defense program and his support for right-wing insurgencies, such as arming contra rebels in Nicaragua and Islamic fundamentalists in Afghanistan, the Soviet Union fell apart.
A more realistic assessment would point out that the Soviets had been in decline for decades, largely from the devastation caused by World War II and the effective containment strategies followed by presidents from Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower to Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter. The rapid development of technology in the West and the lure of Western consumer goods accelerated this Soviet collapse.
But the U.S. news media never mounted a serious assessment of how the Cold War really was won. The conservative press corps naturally pressed its favored theme of Reagan turning the tide, while a complacent mainstream press offered little additional context.
'Politicization'
The plight of the CIA analysts in the 1980s also received little attention in Washington amid the triumphalism of the early 1990s. The story did surface briefly in 1991 during Gates’s confirmation hearings to become President George H.W. Bush’s CIA director. Then, a group of CIA analysts braved the administration’s wrath by protesting the “politicization of intelligence.”
Led by Soviet specialist Mel Goodman, the dissidents fingered Gates as the key “politicization” culprit. Their testimony added to doubts about Gates, who was under a cloud for his dubious testimony on the Iran-Contra scandal and allegations that he had played a role in another covert scheme to assist Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. But the elder George Bush lined up solid Republican backing and enough accommodating Democrats – particularly Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman David Boren – to push Gates through.
Boren’s key staff aide who limited the investigation of Gates was George Tenet, whose behind-the-scenes maneuvering on Gates’s behalf won the personal appreciation of the senior George Bush. Those political chits would serve Tenet well a decade later when the younger George Bush protected Tenet as his own CIA director, even after the intelligence failure of Sept. 11, 2001, and embarrassing revelations about faulty intelligence on Iraq’s WMD.
In the early 1990s. with the Cold War over, the need for objective intelligence also seemed less pressing. Political leaders apparently didn’t grasp the potential danger of allowing a corrupted U.S. intelligence process to remain in place. There was a brief window for action with Bill Clinton’s election in 1992, but the incoming Democrats lacked the political will to demand serious reform.
The “politicization” issue was put squarely before Clinton’s incoming national security team by former CIA analyst Peter Dickson, who wrote a two-page memo on Dec. 10, 1992, to Samuel “Sandy” Berger, a top Clinton national security aide. Dickson was an analyst who suffered retaliation after refusing to rewrite a 1983 assessment that noted Soviet restraint on nuclear proliferation. His CIA superiors didn’t want to give the Soviets any credit for demonstrating caution on the nuclear technology front. When Dickson stood by his evidence, he soon found himself facing accusations about his psychological fitness.
Dickson urged Clinton to appoint a new CIA director who understood “the deeper internal problems relating to the politicization of intelligence and the festering morale problem within the CIA.” In urging a housecleaning, Dickson wrote, “This problem of intellectual corruption will not disappear overnight, even with vigorous remedial action. However, the new CIA director will be wise if he realizes from the start the dangers in relying on advice of senior CIA office managers who during the past 12 years advanced and prospered in their careers precisely because they had no qualms about suppressing intelligence or slanting analysis to suit the interest of Casey and Gates.”
The appeals from Dickson and other CIA veterans were largely ignored by Clinton and his top aides, who were more interested in turning around the U.S. economy and enacting some modest social programs. Although Gates was removed as CIA director, Clinton appointed James Woolsey, a neo-conservative Democrat who had worked closely with the Reagan-Bush administrations. Under Woolsey and Clinton’s subsequent CIA directors, the Gates team sans Gates consolidated its bureaucratic power.
The old ideal of intelligence analysis free from political taint was never restored. Clinton’s final CIA director was George Tenet, who was kept on by George W. Bush in 2001. In violation of the CIA’s long-standing tradition of avoiding even the appearance of partisanship, Tenet happily presided over the ceremony that renamed the CIA’s Langley, Va., headquarters the George Bush Center for Intelligence, after George Bush senior.
The Iraq Debacle
Tenet also has proved himself a loyal bureaucrat to the second Bush administration. For instance, in February 2003 when Secretary of State Colin Powell addressed the United Nations Security Council about Iraq’s alleged WMD program, Tenet was prominently seated behind Powell, giving the CIA’s imprimatur to Powell’s assertions that turned out to be a mixture of unproved assertions, exaggerations and outright lies. At one point in his speech, Powell even altered the text of intercepted conversations between Iraqi officials to make their comments appear incriminating. [For details, see Consortiumnews.com’s "Bush's Alderaan."]
“If one goes back to that very long presentation [by Powell], point by point, one finds that this was not a very honest explanation,” said Greg Thielmann, a former senior official in the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, in an interview with PBS Frontline. “I have to conclude Secretary Powell was being a loyal secretary of state, a ‘good soldier’ as it were, building the administration’s case before the international community.” [For details, see Frontline’s “Truth, War and Consequences.”]
In the Foreign Affairs article, Pillar noted that Powell's U.N. speech also compromised the objectivity of the CIA on Iraq because “the intelligence community was pulled over the line into policy advocacy -- not so much by what it said as by its conspicuous role in the administration's public case for war. This was especially true when the intelligence community was made highly visible (with the director of central intelligence literally in the camera frame) in [Powell's] intelligence-laden presentation.”
Pillar added that the CIA also was compromised “in the fall of 2002, when, at the administration's behest, the intelligence community published a white paper on Iraq's WMD programs -- but without including any of the community's judgments about the likelihood of those weapons' being used.”
Though Tenet’s primary responsibility should have been to the integrity of the intelligence product, he was helping Powell and the White House present a largely bogus case before the U.N.
After the March 2003 invasion, as the case for Iraq’s possession of trigger-ready WMD fell apart, the Washington debate turned to who was at fault for the shoddy intelligence.
In testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee on June 25, 2003, Army Lt. Gen. John Abizaid offered a clue when he compared the accuracy of tactical intelligence in the Iraq war versus the faulty strategic intelligence.
“Intelligence was the most accurate that I have ever seen on the tactical level, probably the best I’ve ever seen on the operational level, and perplexingly incomplete on the strategic level with regard to weapons of mass destruction,” said Abizaid, who heads the U.S. Central Command, which is responsible for Iraq.
In other words, the intelligence handled by low-level personnel was excellent. It was the intelligence that went through senior levels of the Bush administration that failed.
The WMD issue really came down to two questions: Was the CIA’s intelligence analysis that bad or did the White House cherry-pick the intelligence that it wanted to march the country off to war? The answer appears to be that both points were true. A thoroughly politicized CIA slanted the intelligence in the direction that Bush wanted and the White House then trimmed off any caveats the CIA may have included.
The CIA’s internal complaint that it was just the victim of administration ideologues was undercut by its own analytical products, including a post-invasion report claiming that two captured Iraqi trailers were labs to produce chemical or biological weapons. That claim later collapsed as evidence emerged to show that the labs were for making hydrogen for artillery weather balloons. [For an early critique of this CIA report, see Consortiumnews.com’s "America's Matrix."]
Plus, while Tenet and other CIA officials noted that they objected to other bogus administration claims, such as the assertion that Iraq was seeking yellowcake uranium from Niger, those protests were mostly half-hearted and made behind closed doors. Bush was only forced to back off the yellowcake claim, which he cited in his 2003 State of the Union Address, after former Ambassador Wilson went public with evidence that the allegation was a fraud.
'Stovepipe'
Yet it's also true that the Bush administration didn't want to chance having its Iraqi WMD allegations vetted by any serious intelligence professionals. So, at the State Department, Pentagon and White House, senior political officials created their own channels for accessing raw or untested intelligence that was then used to buttress the charges.
In a New Yorker article about CIA analysts on the defensive, journalist Seymour Hersh described this “stovepiping” process of sending raw intelligence to the top. Intelligence agencies have historically objected to this technique because policy makers will tend to select unvetted information that serves their purposes and use it to discredit the more measured assessments of intelligence professionals.
“The analysts at the CIA were beaten down defending their assessments,” a former CIA official told Hersh. “And they blame Tenet for not protecting them. I’ve never seen a government like this.” [See Hersh’s “The Stovepipe,” The New Yorker, Oct. 27, 2003]
Pillar wrote that the battle between the intelligence analysts and the policymakers came to a head over the White House desire to assert that Saddam Hussein was connected to al-Qaeda, a claim that the intelligence analysts had rejected despite repetitious demands from Vice President Cheney's office that the CIA corroborate the supposed link.
“The administration's rejection of the intelligence community's judgments became especially clear with the formation of a special Pentagon unit, the Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group,” Pillar wrote. “The unit, which reported to Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith, was dedicated to finding every possible link between Saddam and al-Qaeda, and its briefing accused the intelligence community of faulty analysis for failing to see the supposed alliance.”
But the intelligence analysts weren’t the only ones coming under attack for pointing out evidence that didn’t conform to the Bush administration’s propaganda. From the start of its drive to invade Iraq, the administration treated going to war like a giant public relations game, with the goal of manufacturing consent or at least silencing any meaningful opposition.
Evidence that undermined Bush’s conclusions was minimized or discarded. People who revealed unwanted evidence were personally discredited or intimidated. When former Ambassador Wilson reported that he had been assigned by the CIA to investigate the Niger yellowcake claims and found them bogus, administration officials leaked the fact that Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, was an undercover CIA officer. The leak destroyed Plame's career and may have put at risk agents who worked with her.
'Slime and Defend'
Though Bush publicly denounced the leak, an unnamed Republican aide on Capitol Hill told the New York Times that the underlying White House strategy was to “slime and defend,” that is to “slime” Wilson and “defend” Bush. [NYT, Oct. 2, 2003]
The “slime and defend” strategy has been carried forward by conservative news outlets with the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s Washington Times attacking Wilson's motives, even as Wilson’s debunking of the Niger allegations has been borne out by other investigations.
“Joseph C. Wilson IV, the man accusing the White House of a vendetta against his wife, is an ex-diplomat turned Democratic partisan,” declared a front-page article in the Washington Times. “Mr. Wilson told the Washington Post he and his wife are already discussing who will play them in the movie.” [Washington Times, Oct. 2, 2003]
The Washington Times returned to its anti-Wilson campaign several days later. “As for Mr. Wilson himself, his hatred of Mr. Bush’s policies borders on the pathological,” wrote Washington Times columnist Donald Lambro on Oct. 6, 2003. “This is a far-left Democrat who has been relentlessly bashing the president’s Iraq war policies. … The mystery behind this dubious investigation is why this Bush-hater was chosen for so sensitive a mission.”
The Wall Street Journal also raised questions about Wilson’s motives. “Joe Wilson (Ms. Plame’s husband) has made no secret of his broad disagreement with Bush policy since outing himself with an op-ed,” the Journal wrote in a lead editorial on Oct. 3, 2003.
Strangely, these attacks on Wilson’s alleged bias (which he denies) continued even as Bush’s hand-picked Iraqi weapons inspector David Kay was confirming Wilson’s findings. In his report to the CIA and Congress, Kay acknowledged that no evidence has been found to support the stories about Iraq seeking African uranium.
“To date we have not uncovered evidence that Iraq undertook significant post-1998 steps to actually build nuclear weapons or produce fissile material,” Kay said.
The disconnect between fact and spin apparently has grown so complete among Bush’s allies that they can’t stop attacking Wilson’s findings as biased even when the facts he uncovered are being confirmed by one of Bush’s own investigators.
The clumsy attempt to discredit or punish Wilson eventually led to disclosures that Bush's chief political adviser Karl Rove and Cheney's chief of staff Lewis Libby took part in revealing Plame's identity to reporters. In 2005, Libby was indicted on charges of obstructing justice and lying to investigators about the leak. Rove apparently remains under investigation.
'Freedom Fries'
But the attacks on Wilson do not stand alone. In the drive to limit debate about Bush’s case for war, his allies ostracized virtually all major critics of the administration’s WMD claims, including the U.N.’s chief weapons inspector Hans Blix and former U.N. weapons inspector Scott Ritter.
Blacklisting campaigns also were mounted against celebrities, such as actor Sean Penn and the music group Dixie Chicks, for criticizing Bush’s rush to war. When France urged more time for U.N. weapons inspections, Bush’s supporters organized boycotts of French products, poured French wine in gutters and renamed “French fries” as “Freedom Fries.”
As with the Wilson case, Bush and his supporters didn't let the failure to find the alleged trigger-ready WMD stop their efforts to discredit these critics. Instead of apologies, for instance, Ritter continued to suffer from conservative smears about his patriotism.
In one particularly smarmy performance on June 12, 2003, Fox News anchor Bill O’Reilly teamed up with Rep. Mike Pence, R-Ind., to air suspicions that Ritter had been bribed by the Iraqis to help them cover up their illegal weapons. Neither O’Reilly nor Pence had any evidence that Ritter accepted a bribe, so they framed the segment as a demand that the FBI investigate Ritter with the purported goal of clearing him of any suspicion of treason.
The segment noted that a London newspaper reporter had found Iraqi documents showing that Ritter had been offered some gold as gifts for his family. “I turned down the gifts and reported it to the FBI when I came back,” Ritter said in an interview with Fox News.
Though Ritter’s statement stood uncontradicted, O’Reilly and Pence demanded that the FBI disclose what it knew about Ritter’s denial. “Now, we want to know whether that was true,” said O’Reilly about whether Ritter had reported the alleged bribe. “The FBI wouldn’t tell us.” O’Reilly then asked Pence what he had done to get the FBI to investigate Ritter.
“After that report in the British newspaper, many of us on Capitol Hill were very concerned,” Pence said. “Candidly, Bill, there’s no one who’s done more damage to the argument of the United States that Iraq was in possession of large stores of weapons of mass destruction leading up to Operation Iraqi Freedom other than Scott Ritter, and so the very suggestion that … there’s evidence of treasonous activity or even bribery, I believe, merits an investigation. I contacted the attorney general about that directly.”
Pence’s point was clear – that Ritter’s role as a skeptic about Bush’s WMD claims made him an appropriate target for a treason investigation. [Fox News’ “The O’Reilly Factor,” June 12, 2003]
Backward Filter
Time and again, Bush and his administration have replaced the principle that good intelligence makes for good policy with the near-opposite approach: you start with a conclusion and then distort all available information to sell the pre-ordained policy to a gullible, ill-informed or frightened public.
The WMD intelligence was pushed through a kind of backward filter. Instead of removing the imprecision that comes with raw intelligence, the Bush administration’s intelligence process shoved through the dross as long as it fit with Bush’s goal of bolstering political support for the war and removed the refined intelligence that undercut his desired actions.
Unlike the fictional president in Tom Clancy's “Sum of All Fears” – who was tricked into that “really bad information” – Bush and his team have actively sought out the bad information and assembled it as justification for going to war. This administration, which can sometimes act in a manner stranger-than-fiction, didn't just peer into the fog of war. It set up the fog machine.
Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq, can be ordered at secrecyandprivilege.com. It's also available at Amazon.com, as is his 1999 book, Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth.'"
Friday, February 10, 2006
White House misused Iraq intelligence: ex-official - Yahoo! News
White House misused Iraq intelligence: ex-official - Yahoo! News: "White House misused Iraq intelligence: ex-official By David Morgan
1 hour, 2 minutes ago
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A former CIA official who coordinated U.S. intelligence on the Middle East during the Iraq invasion accused the White House of misusing prewar intelligence to justify its case for war.
Paul Pillar, who was national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia from 2000 to 2005, also said the Senate intelligence committee and a presidential commission overlooked evidence that the Bush administration politicized the intelligence process to support White House policymakers.
"Official intelligence on Iraqi weapons programs was flawed but even with its flaws, it was not what led to the war," Pillar said in an article written for the March/April issue of Foreign Affairs and posted on the magazine's Web site on Friday.
"If the entire body of official intelligence analysis on Iraq had a policy implication, it was to avoid war -- or, if war was going to be launched, to prepare for a messy aftermath," he said.
Pillar was not immediately available for comment. A CIA spokesman said Pillar was expressing his own personal point of view and not the official views of the spy agency.
The CIA and other agencies that make up the U.S. intelligence community have been widely criticized for prewar Iraq intelligence including the claim that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, which was a main justification for the war. No such weapons have been found.
'CHERRY-PICKING' INTELLIGENCE
But Pillar, a widely respected intelligence analyst who spent 28 years at the CIA, said it has become clear since the 2003 invasion that the White House did not use official intelligence analysis in making even the most significant national security decisions.
Policymakers instead employed a "cherry-picking" approach that selected pieces of raw intelligence that seemed most favorable to its WMD claims and the charge of a relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda.
The White House ignored intelligence reports that said Iraq was not fertile ground for democracy and warned of a long, difficult turbulent post-invasion period that would require a Marshall Plan-type effort to restore the country's economy despite its abundant oil reserves.
Reports also predicted an occupying force would be a target of resentment and attacks including guerrilla warfare.
Pillar said the Bush administration politicized Iraq intelligence by repeatedly calling for more material that would contribute to its case for war, a tactic that he said skewed intelligence resources toward topics favoring the White House.
The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the WMD commission have both concluded in official reports that there was no evidence of White House political pressure.
"But the method of investigation used by the panels -- essentially, asking analysts whether their arms had been twisted -- would have caught only the crudest attempts at politicization," Pillar wrote."
1 hour, 2 minutes ago
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A former CIA official who coordinated U.S. intelligence on the Middle East during the Iraq invasion accused the White House of misusing prewar intelligence to justify its case for war.
Paul Pillar, who was national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia from 2000 to 2005, also said the Senate intelligence committee and a presidential commission overlooked evidence that the Bush administration politicized the intelligence process to support White House policymakers.
"Official intelligence on Iraqi weapons programs was flawed but even with its flaws, it was not what led to the war," Pillar said in an article written for the March/April issue of Foreign Affairs and posted on the magazine's Web site on Friday.
"If the entire body of official intelligence analysis on Iraq had a policy implication, it was to avoid war -- or, if war was going to be launched, to prepare for a messy aftermath," he said.
Pillar was not immediately available for comment. A CIA spokesman said Pillar was expressing his own personal point of view and not the official views of the spy agency.
The CIA and other agencies that make up the U.S. intelligence community have been widely criticized for prewar Iraq intelligence including the claim that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, which was a main justification for the war. No such weapons have been found.
'CHERRY-PICKING' INTELLIGENCE
But Pillar, a widely respected intelligence analyst who spent 28 years at the CIA, said it has become clear since the 2003 invasion that the White House did not use official intelligence analysis in making even the most significant national security decisions.
Policymakers instead employed a "cherry-picking" approach that selected pieces of raw intelligence that seemed most favorable to its WMD claims and the charge of a relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda.
The White House ignored intelligence reports that said Iraq was not fertile ground for democracy and warned of a long, difficult turbulent post-invasion period that would require a Marshall Plan-type effort to restore the country's economy despite its abundant oil reserves.
Reports also predicted an occupying force would be a target of resentment and attacks including guerrilla warfare.
Pillar said the Bush administration politicized Iraq intelligence by repeatedly calling for more material that would contribute to its case for war, a tactic that he said skewed intelligence resources toward topics favoring the White House.
The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the WMD commission have both concluded in official reports that there was no evidence of White House political pressure.
"But the method of investigation used by the panels -- essentially, asking analysts whether their arms had been twisted -- would have caught only the crudest attempts at politicization," Pillar wrote."
Libby: White House 'Superiors' OK'd Leaks - Yahoo! News
Libby: White House 'Superiors' OK'd Leaks - Yahoo! News: "Libby: White House 'Superiors' OK'd Leaks By TONI LOCY, Associated Press Writer
39 minutes ago
WASHINGTON - A former top aide to Vice President Dick Cheney told a federal grand jury that his superiors authorized him to give secret information to reporters as part of the Bush administration's defense of intelligence used to justify invading Iraq, according to court papers.
Special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald said in documents filed last month that he plans to introduce evidence that I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Cheney's former chief of staff, disclosed to reporters the contents of a classified National Intelligence Estimate in the summer of 2003.
The NIE is a report prepared by the head of the nation's intelligence operations for high-level government officials, up to and including the president. Portions of NIEs are sometimes declassified and made public. It is unclear whether that happened in this instance.
In a Jan. 23 letter to Libby's lawyers, Fitzgerald said Libby also testified before the grand jury that he caused at least one other government official to discuss an intelligence estimate with reporters in July 2003.
"We also note that it is our understanding that Mr. Libby testified that he was authorized to disclose information about the NIE to the press by his superiors," Fitzgerald wrote.
White House spokesman Scott McClellan refused to comment. "Our policy is that we are not going to discuss this when it's an ongoing legal proceeding," he said.
William Jeffress, Libby's lawyer, said, "There is no truth at all" to suggestions that Libby would try to shift blame to his superiors as a defense against the charges.
Libby, 55, was indicted late last year on charges that he lied to FBI agents and the grand jury about how he learned CIA operative Valerie Plame's identity and when he subsequently told reporters. He is not charged with leaking classified information from an intelligence estimate report.
Plame's identity was published in July 2003 by columnist Robert Novak after her husband, former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson, accused the administration of twisting intelligence about Iraq's efforts to buy uranium in Niger. The year before, the CIA had sent Wilson to Niger to determine the accuracy of the uranium reports.
Wilson's revelations cast doubt on President Bush's claim in his 2003 State of the Union address that Niger had sold uranium to Iraq to develop a nuclear weapon as one of the administration's key justifications for going to war in Iraq.
On Thursday, Sen. Edward Kennedy (news, bio, voting record), D-Mass., said Cheney should take responsibility if he authorized Libby to share classified information with reporters.
"These charges, if true, represent a new low in the already sordid case of partisan interests being placed above national security," Kennedy said. "The vice president's vindictiveness in defending the misguided war in Iraq is obvious. If he used classified information to defend it, he should be prepared to take full responsibility."
In the summer of 2003, White House officials — including Libby — were frustrated that the media were incorrectly reporting that Cheney had sent Wilson to Niger and had received a report of his findings in Africa before the war in Iraq had begun.
In an effort to counter those reports, Libby and other White House officials sought information from the CIA regarding Wilson and how his trip to Niger came about, according to court records.
Fitzgerald, in his letter to Libby's lawyers, said he plans to use Libby's grand jury testimony to support evidence pertaining to the White House aide's meeting with former New York Times reporter Judith Miller.
During the meeting with Miller on July 8, Libby also discussed Plame, Fitzgerald said. "Our anticipated basis for offering such evidence is that such facts are inextricably intertwined with the narrative of the events of spring 2003, as Libby's testimony itself makes plain," the prosecutor wrote.
Miller spent 85 days in jail for refusing to discuss her source."
39 minutes ago
WASHINGTON - A former top aide to Vice President Dick Cheney told a federal grand jury that his superiors authorized him to give secret information to reporters as part of the Bush administration's defense of intelligence used to justify invading Iraq, according to court papers.
Special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald said in documents filed last month that he plans to introduce evidence that I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Cheney's former chief of staff, disclosed to reporters the contents of a classified National Intelligence Estimate in the summer of 2003.
The NIE is a report prepared by the head of the nation's intelligence operations for high-level government officials, up to and including the president. Portions of NIEs are sometimes declassified and made public. It is unclear whether that happened in this instance.
In a Jan. 23 letter to Libby's lawyers, Fitzgerald said Libby also testified before the grand jury that he caused at least one other government official to discuss an intelligence estimate with reporters in July 2003.
"We also note that it is our understanding that Mr. Libby testified that he was authorized to disclose information about the NIE to the press by his superiors," Fitzgerald wrote.
White House spokesman Scott McClellan refused to comment. "Our policy is that we are not going to discuss this when it's an ongoing legal proceeding," he said.
William Jeffress, Libby's lawyer, said, "There is no truth at all" to suggestions that Libby would try to shift blame to his superiors as a defense against the charges.
Libby, 55, was indicted late last year on charges that he lied to FBI agents and the grand jury about how he learned CIA operative Valerie Plame's identity and when he subsequently told reporters. He is not charged with leaking classified information from an intelligence estimate report.
Plame's identity was published in July 2003 by columnist Robert Novak after her husband, former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson, accused the administration of twisting intelligence about Iraq's efforts to buy uranium in Niger. The year before, the CIA had sent Wilson to Niger to determine the accuracy of the uranium reports.
Wilson's revelations cast doubt on President Bush's claim in his 2003 State of the Union address that Niger had sold uranium to Iraq to develop a nuclear weapon as one of the administration's key justifications for going to war in Iraq.
On Thursday, Sen. Edward Kennedy (news, bio, voting record), D-Mass., said Cheney should take responsibility if he authorized Libby to share classified information with reporters.
"These charges, if true, represent a new low in the already sordid case of partisan interests being placed above national security," Kennedy said. "The vice president's vindictiveness in defending the misguided war in Iraq is obvious. If he used classified information to defend it, he should be prepared to take full responsibility."
In the summer of 2003, White House officials — including Libby — were frustrated that the media were incorrectly reporting that Cheney had sent Wilson to Niger and had received a report of his findings in Africa before the war in Iraq had begun.
In an effort to counter those reports, Libby and other White House officials sought information from the CIA regarding Wilson and how his trip to Niger came about, according to court records.
Fitzgerald, in his letter to Libby's lawyers, said he plans to use Libby's grand jury testimony to support evidence pertaining to the White House aide's meeting with former New York Times reporter Judith Miller.
During the meeting with Miller on July 8, Libby also discussed Plame, Fitzgerald said. "Our anticipated basis for offering such evidence is that such facts are inextricably intertwined with the narrative of the events of spring 2003, as Libby's testimony itself makes plain," the prosecutor wrote.
Miller spent 85 days in jail for refusing to discuss her source."
Thursday, February 09, 2006
Abramoff says he did indeed meet Bush - Politics - MSNBC.com
Abramoff says he did indeed meet Bush - Politics - MSNBC.com: "Abramoff says Bush met, even joked, with him
Statement follows White House claim that president does not know lobbyist
Updated: 8:34 p.m. ET Feb. 9, 2006
WASHINGTON - Jack Abramoff said in correspondence made public Thursday that President Bush met him “almost a dozen” times, disputing White House claims Bush did not know the former lobbyist at the center of a corruption scandal.
“The guy saw me in almost a dozen settings, and joked with me about a bunch of things, including details of my kids. Perhaps he has forgotten everything, who knows,” Abramoff wrote in an e-mail to Kim Eisler, national editor for the Washingtonian magazine.
Abramoff added that Bush also once invited him to his Texas ranch.
The messages were made public by the American Progress Action Fund, a liberal activist group. Eisler confirmed their accuracy to Reuters but said he did not intend them to become public.
“They reflect the feeling of frustration he has not just with Bush but with all these guys claiming they didn’t know him,” said Eisler, who knew Abramoff through a book he wrote about the Pequot Indian tribe.
Abramoff pleaded guilty to fraud charges in early January and is cooperating with prosecutors in a corruption probe that could implicate lawmakers and officials across Washington.
Alleged photos show the two together
Bush has said he never had a discussion with Abramoff and does not remember having his picture taken with him.
The White House has said Abramoff attended three Hanukkah receptions at the White House.
Eisler said he had seen five photographs of Abramoff with Bush, none taken at Hanukkah parties.
White House spokesman Scott McClellan said Thursday that the revelations did not prove Bush knew him well.
“I think as the president also indicated, he’s taken at least five photos with many people in this room at the annual holiday reception. And so I think you need to put this in context,” McClellan said.
Abramoff spokesman Andrew Blum declined to comment.
Abramoff raised more than $100,000 for Bush’s 2004 re-election campaign, a feat that won him an invitation to Bush’s ranch in August 2003, the National Journal reported at the time.
“I was invited during the 2004 campaign,” Abramoff told Eisler.
Turned down invitation to Bush’s ranch
Abramoff said he did not make the trip because as an Orthodox Jew he cannot travel on Saturdays.
In the wake of Abramoff’s indictment, the Bush-Cheney campaign said it would donate to charity $6,000 in contributions made by Abramoff or his clients, but not the money he helped raise.
The White House has acknowledged he participated in a few staff-level meetings at the White House.
Although the Abramoff scandal has mostly focused attention so far on prominent House Republicans, including former Majority Leader Tom DeLay of Texas, at least two Bush administration officials have been implicated.
David Safavian, a former White House budget official, has been charged with lying and obstructing investigations into his 2002 golf outing to Scotland with Abramoff.
Stephen Griles, the former No. 2 official at the Interior Department, has come under scrutiny after allegations he tried to block a casino at Abramoff’s request.
Copyright 2006 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved. Republication or redistribution of Reuters content is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Reuters."
Statement follows White House claim that president does not know lobbyist
Updated: 8:34 p.m. ET Feb. 9, 2006
WASHINGTON - Jack Abramoff said in correspondence made public Thursday that President Bush met him “almost a dozen” times, disputing White House claims Bush did not know the former lobbyist at the center of a corruption scandal.
“The guy saw me in almost a dozen settings, and joked with me about a bunch of things, including details of my kids. Perhaps he has forgotten everything, who knows,” Abramoff wrote in an e-mail to Kim Eisler, national editor for the Washingtonian magazine.
Abramoff added that Bush also once invited him to his Texas ranch.
The messages were made public by the American Progress Action Fund, a liberal activist group. Eisler confirmed their accuracy to Reuters but said he did not intend them to become public.
“They reflect the feeling of frustration he has not just with Bush but with all these guys claiming they didn’t know him,” said Eisler, who knew Abramoff through a book he wrote about the Pequot Indian tribe.
Abramoff pleaded guilty to fraud charges in early January and is cooperating with prosecutors in a corruption probe that could implicate lawmakers and officials across Washington.
Alleged photos show the two together
Bush has said he never had a discussion with Abramoff and does not remember having his picture taken with him.
The White House has said Abramoff attended three Hanukkah receptions at the White House.
Eisler said he had seen five photographs of Abramoff with Bush, none taken at Hanukkah parties.
White House spokesman Scott McClellan said Thursday that the revelations did not prove Bush knew him well.
“I think as the president also indicated, he’s taken at least five photos with many people in this room at the annual holiday reception. And so I think you need to put this in context,” McClellan said.
Abramoff spokesman Andrew Blum declined to comment.
Abramoff raised more than $100,000 for Bush’s 2004 re-election campaign, a feat that won him an invitation to Bush’s ranch in August 2003, the National Journal reported at the time.
“I was invited during the 2004 campaign,” Abramoff told Eisler.
Turned down invitation to Bush’s ranch
Abramoff said he did not make the trip because as an Orthodox Jew he cannot travel on Saturdays.
In the wake of Abramoff’s indictment, the Bush-Cheney campaign said it would donate to charity $6,000 in contributions made by Abramoff or his clients, but not the money he helped raise.
The White House has acknowledged he participated in a few staff-level meetings at the White House.
Although the Abramoff scandal has mostly focused attention so far on prominent House Republicans, including former Majority Leader Tom DeLay of Texas, at least two Bush administration officials have been implicated.
David Safavian, a former White House budget official, has been charged with lying and obstructing investigations into his 2002 golf outing to Scotland with Abramoff.
Stephen Griles, the former No. 2 official at the Interior Department, has come under scrutiny after allegations he tried to block a casino at Abramoff’s request.
Copyright 2006 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved. Republication or redistribution of Reuters content is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Reuters."
Forward: Israel Led the Charge to the Iraq War
THE HOUR: Knowing What We Don't Know: "Forward Forum
THE HOUR: Knowing What We Don't Know
By leonard fein
February 10, 2006
Here's a puzzle, a small piece of a much larger set of nagging issues that bubbles just beneath the surface of our ordinary lives: On December 23, 2005, Lawrence Kaplan, a senior editor of The New Republic, asserted in The Wall Street Journal that "Israeli officials were lukewarm about the war [in Iraq] from the outset, being far more concerned with the threat from Iran."
Yet now we have a book by James Risen, national security correspondent for The New York Times, titled "State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration," that argues the exact opposite.
In a section on the prewar jockeying in Washington, Risen describes the role of Paul Wolfowitz, then undersecretary of defense. Wolfowitz, he writes, found the CIA "insufficiently hawkish," believed it "an arrogant, rogue institution... unwilling to support administration policymakers." Specifically, Wolfowitz insisted on examining "the possibility that Saddam Hussein was behind the [September 11] attacks on the United States," a possibility that the CIA discounted.
Now comes the kicker: "Israeli intelligence played a hidden role in convincing Wolfowitz that he couldn't trust the CIA... Israeli intelligence officials frequently traveled to Washington to brief top American officials, but CIA analysts were often skeptical of Israeli intelligence reports, knowing that Mossad had very strong — even transparent — biases about the Arab world." Wolfowitz, who "had begun meeting personally with top Israeli intelligence officials," preferred the Mossad's analysis to the CIA's.
Now it cannot be that Israeli officials were at one and the same time "lukewarm about the war" yet busy shuttling back and forth to encourage Wolfowitz's evident eagerness for that same war. From all that we know regarding Wolfowitz and his ideological associates — Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Douglas Feith, Richard Perle and others — the Risen version seems to me the more plausible.
"Plausible" is the problem. We are these days awash in a surge in speculation, deep into a set of plausible yet inconclusive allegations and explanations, charges and counter-charges, in which the rumored role of Israel and of Israel's supporters is too close to the heart of the drama for comfort.
The leading current example, but scarcely the only one, is the approaching trial of Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman, late of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee but now accused of "unlawfully, knowingly and willfully" conspiring from about April 1999 until about August 27, 2004, to "communicate national defense information to persons not entitled to receive it." The source of the information was Larry Franklin, a Pentagon expert on Iran who has agreed to cooperate with the prosecution; the "persons" to whom the information was transmitted were officials at the Israeli embassy in Washington.
When the story first broke, it was widely believed that Rosen and Weissman were inadvertently caught up in an FBI investigation of Franklin. Now, however, it appears that the investigation was actually of Aipac; the language of the indictment suggests that Aipac was under investigation for more than five years.
That fact alone, one presumes, should have shocked the entire Jewish community; Aipac is its creature. And then you have the prospective implication, at trial, of a swath of top Pentagon officials — Wolfowitz, Feith and others — as well as the potential involvement of Lewis "Scooter" Libby from the office of the vice president, himself under indictment for his role in the Valerie Plame affair.
Many dots, and so far no solid information on whether or how they are connected. But the question necessarily arises: Do these diverse dots connect back to the American intervention in Iraq? After all, it is roughly the same cast of characters that insistently drummed up the case for that intervention.
And: Is current American policy toward Iran now being "played" the way that American policy toward Iraq was before the war? Obviously, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has called for Israel to be wiped off the map and who has repeatedly denied the reality of the Holocaust, is a despicable fellow. It seems entirely appropriate that the United States and its European allies are taking a tough line regarding Iran's nuclear ambitions.
But does not the case of Iraq teach us to beware those who would cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war? How much do we know — really know — about Iran? How much do we not know?
Do we, as Rumsfeld might put it, even know what it is we do not know? (It was Risen who broke the story on warrantless eavesdropping by the National Security Agency; until he did, we did not know what we did not know.)
More parochially, what are we to make of an ongoing FBI investigation of our community's leading pro-Israel lobby? Is this the old dual-loyalty canard raising its ugly head yet again? Was this Aipac recklessness induced by hubris, the result of an arrogance fed by Aipac's grand success in marshaling Congress on Israel's behalf?
And is Neal Sher, former executive director of Aipac, correct in his assertions in a recent letter addressed to the committee's board that the upshot of all this static is a chastened, even cowed Aipac, a timorous Aipac afraid to do battle where yesterday it was almost offensively bold?
It is no secret that there are more than a few people in Washington who are delighted to see Aipac getting what they regard as its comeuppance. Among them are even some members of Congress who have long resented Aipac's allegedly strong-arm tactics.
But such schadenfreude aside, where do those who care for Israel now go? And how and when can we disentangle America's consensual policy toward Israel from its controversial policies regarding Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia and other nations in the explosive Middle East?"
THE HOUR: Knowing What We Don't Know
By leonard fein
February 10, 2006
Here's a puzzle, a small piece of a much larger set of nagging issues that bubbles just beneath the surface of our ordinary lives: On December 23, 2005, Lawrence Kaplan, a senior editor of The New Republic, asserted in The Wall Street Journal that "Israeli officials were lukewarm about the war [in Iraq] from the outset, being far more concerned with the threat from Iran."
Yet now we have a book by James Risen, national security correspondent for The New York Times, titled "State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration," that argues the exact opposite.
In a section on the prewar jockeying in Washington, Risen describes the role of Paul Wolfowitz, then undersecretary of defense. Wolfowitz, he writes, found the CIA "insufficiently hawkish," believed it "an arrogant, rogue institution... unwilling to support administration policymakers." Specifically, Wolfowitz insisted on examining "the possibility that Saddam Hussein was behind the [September 11] attacks on the United States," a possibility that the CIA discounted.
Now comes the kicker: "Israeli intelligence played a hidden role in convincing Wolfowitz that he couldn't trust the CIA... Israeli intelligence officials frequently traveled to Washington to brief top American officials, but CIA analysts were often skeptical of Israeli intelligence reports, knowing that Mossad had very strong — even transparent — biases about the Arab world." Wolfowitz, who "had begun meeting personally with top Israeli intelligence officials," preferred the Mossad's analysis to the CIA's.
Now it cannot be that Israeli officials were at one and the same time "lukewarm about the war" yet busy shuttling back and forth to encourage Wolfowitz's evident eagerness for that same war. From all that we know regarding Wolfowitz and his ideological associates — Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Douglas Feith, Richard Perle and others — the Risen version seems to me the more plausible.
"Plausible" is the problem. We are these days awash in a surge in speculation, deep into a set of plausible yet inconclusive allegations and explanations, charges and counter-charges, in which the rumored role of Israel and of Israel's supporters is too close to the heart of the drama for comfort.
The leading current example, but scarcely the only one, is the approaching trial of Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman, late of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee but now accused of "unlawfully, knowingly and willfully" conspiring from about April 1999 until about August 27, 2004, to "communicate national defense information to persons not entitled to receive it." The source of the information was Larry Franklin, a Pentagon expert on Iran who has agreed to cooperate with the prosecution; the "persons" to whom the information was transmitted were officials at the Israeli embassy in Washington.
When the story first broke, it was widely believed that Rosen and Weissman were inadvertently caught up in an FBI investigation of Franklin. Now, however, it appears that the investigation was actually of Aipac; the language of the indictment suggests that Aipac was under investigation for more than five years.
That fact alone, one presumes, should have shocked the entire Jewish community; Aipac is its creature. And then you have the prospective implication, at trial, of a swath of top Pentagon officials — Wolfowitz, Feith and others — as well as the potential involvement of Lewis "Scooter" Libby from the office of the vice president, himself under indictment for his role in the Valerie Plame affair.
Many dots, and so far no solid information on whether or how they are connected. But the question necessarily arises: Do these diverse dots connect back to the American intervention in Iraq? After all, it is roughly the same cast of characters that insistently drummed up the case for that intervention.
And: Is current American policy toward Iran now being "played" the way that American policy toward Iraq was before the war? Obviously, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has called for Israel to be wiped off the map and who has repeatedly denied the reality of the Holocaust, is a despicable fellow. It seems entirely appropriate that the United States and its European allies are taking a tough line regarding Iran's nuclear ambitions.
But does not the case of Iraq teach us to beware those who would cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war? How much do we know — really know — about Iran? How much do we not know?
Do we, as Rumsfeld might put it, even know what it is we do not know? (It was Risen who broke the story on warrantless eavesdropping by the National Security Agency; until he did, we did not know what we did not know.)
More parochially, what are we to make of an ongoing FBI investigation of our community's leading pro-Israel lobby? Is this the old dual-loyalty canard raising its ugly head yet again? Was this Aipac recklessness induced by hubris, the result of an arrogance fed by Aipac's grand success in marshaling Congress on Israel's behalf?
And is Neal Sher, former executive director of Aipac, correct in his assertions in a recent letter addressed to the committee's board that the upshot of all this static is a chastened, even cowed Aipac, a timorous Aipac afraid to do battle where yesterday it was almost offensively bold?
It is no secret that there are more than a few people in Washington who are delighted to see Aipac getting what they regard as its comeuppance. Among them are even some members of Congress who have long resented Aipac's allegedly strong-arm tactics.
But such schadenfreude aside, where do those who care for Israel now go? And how and when can we disentangle America's consensual policy toward Israel from its controversial policies regarding Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia and other nations in the explosive Middle East?"
Friday, January 27, 2006
Gordon B. Hinckley so devestated by death of Skouson that he is hospitalized
Church: Mormon Leader, 95, in Hospital - Yahoo! News:
Gordon B. Hinckley thought to be guided by Cleon Skouson is devestated by the loss of the Prophet's Prophet. Speculation abounds that Hinckley may call for the end of the Chuch of Jesus of Laterday Saints.
"Church: Mormon Leader, 95, in Hospital Tue Jan 24, 7:18 PM ET
SALT LAKE CITY - Gordon B. Hinckley, the 95-year-old president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, was hospitalized Tuesday for what church officials described as a routine procedure.
Hinckley, president of the 12 million-member Mormon church since 1995, was at an undisclosed hospital Tuesday afternoon, church spokeswoman Kim Farah said.
No other details, including which hospital and the nature of the medical procedure, were immediately available.
Hinckley, a third-generation Mormon, has worked for the church for 70 years. He is its most-traveled president, and remains active in church affairs despite his age. In December, he attended a 200th anniversary celebration in Vermont marking the birth of church founder Joseph Smith.
Presidents of the Mormon church serve for life.
Mormonism is one of the world's fastest-growing religions. The church has doubled in size every 14 or 15 years since 1950.
The architect of the church's vast public relations network, Hinckley has long worked to burnish the faith's image as a world religion far removed from its peculiar and polygamous roots.
In 2004 President Bush awarded Hinckley the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor in the U.S., in a ceremony at the White House."
Gordon B. Hinckley thought to be guided by Cleon Skouson is devestated by the loss of the Prophet's Prophet. Speculation abounds that Hinckley may call for the end of the Chuch of Jesus of Laterday Saints.
"Church: Mormon Leader, 95, in Hospital Tue Jan 24, 7:18 PM ET
SALT LAKE CITY - Gordon B. Hinckley, the 95-year-old president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, was hospitalized Tuesday for what church officials described as a routine procedure.
Hinckley, president of the 12 million-member Mormon church since 1995, was at an undisclosed hospital Tuesday afternoon, church spokeswoman Kim Farah said.
No other details, including which hospital and the nature of the medical procedure, were immediately available.
Hinckley, a third-generation Mormon, has worked for the church for 70 years. He is its most-traveled president, and remains active in church affairs despite his age. In December, he attended a 200th anniversary celebration in Vermont marking the birth of church founder Joseph Smith.
Presidents of the Mormon church serve for life.
Mormonism is one of the world's fastest-growing religions. The church has doubled in size every 14 or 15 years since 1950.
The architect of the church's vast public relations network, Hinckley has long worked to burnish the faith's image as a world religion far removed from its peculiar and polygamous roots.
In 2004 President Bush awarded Hinckley the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor in the U.S., in a ceremony at the White House."
Hitting the Mark on Iran by Michael Rubin
"Hitting the Mark on Iran
by Michael Rubin
FrontPageMagazine.com
January 27, 2006
http://www.meforum.org/article/893
Ali Safavi's response is dishonest but useful as a study of Mujahedin-e Khalq (MKO) tactics.
Let there be no mistake: Masud Rajavi's Mujahedin-e Khalq is a terrorist group; Rajavi is as much a Monster of the Left as Yasir Arafat [1] or Robert Mugabe.
Mujahedin-e Khalq members trained with Arafat's Palestinian Liberation Organization and in Qadhafi's Libya. The groups terrorists have assassinated Americans, Iranian civilians, and bombed public buildings. Its members embraced Saddam Hussein and participated in the slaughter of Iraqi Kurdish civilians following their 1991 uprising against Saddam's dictatorial rule.
Safavi's endorsement of violence parallels the logic expressed by supporters of Islamic Jihad, Abu Sayyaf, and al-Qaeda. Comparisons betwen the Mujahedin-e Khalq and either American revolutionaries or French partisans ring hollow: The Mujahedin-e Khalq has no support among Iranians inside their own country. Citing the groups own publications to claim popularity as did Jalal Arani [2]is dishonest.
True, some Iranians did support the Mujahedin-e Khalq in 1972. Many Iranians, chafing under the Shah, accepted the rhetoric of demagogues like Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and groups like the Mujahedin-e Khalq. But Iranian public opinion has changed over the past 34 years. That Mr. Safavi has to return to 1972 to claim public support underlines the fallacies of his argument. Supporters who did not abandon the Mujahedin-e Khalq when it murdered civilians and planted bombs washed their hands of the group after Rajavi allied himself with Saddam Hussein. Many have since fled the Rajavi personality cult.
Mr. Safavi may want to dismiss Ervand Abrahamian's The Iranian Mojahedin.[3] It is a devastating and careful study of the Mujahedin-e Khalq. Abrahamian's books exploring torture in Iran, Khomeinis philosophy, and the history of the Mujahedin-e Khalq are well-reviewed and well-regarded by both left and right.[4] Reviewing a book of Abrahamian's essays, Daniel Pipes (neither a communist sympathizer nor a cheerleader for the Islamic Republic), wrote Abrahamian makes his case the old-fashioned way, through a close reading of texts and study of events.[5] Abrahamian's scholarship rests on archival research and documentary evidence. He is no Rashid Khalidi.[6] He did not cherry-pick his sources or remove context. Rather, he examined the opus of Rajavi's works and charted their development.
Mr. Safavi is likewise dishonest with his dismissal of Islamic Marxism, which was oft-discussed within Mujahedin-e Khalq circles and Iranian society.
Mr. Safavi poses a false choice: Theocracy or Mujahedin-e Khalq. Iranians want neither. They are sophisticated and vocal. They opine openly about various opposition groups, figures, and movements. They do not need to Mujahedin-e Khalq to channel their thoughts; they speak for themselves. They despise the Mujahedin. Safavi should not dismiss seventy million Iranians as agents of Tehran's intelligence ministry.
The only constituency that matters is Iranians residing inside Iran. Getting the signature of European parliamentarians and a few U.S. congressmen on petitions means little. Nor is the Mujahedin-e Khalq honest with its sponsorship. Few politicians make the mistake of signing their petitions twice. The U.S. government chronicles an ever expanding number of Mujahedin-e Khalq front organizations.[7] The group forms short-lived proxies to capitalize upon existing public support for issues ranging from calls for a constitutional referendum to earthquake relief.[8] But the Mujahedin-e Khalq's strategy of deception has undercut the Iranian peoples struggle for liberation by cynicism about and politicians detachment from legitimate opposition movements.
How pervasive is the groups dishonesty? In his letter to Frontpage Magazine, Safavi describes himself as a sociologist who has studied the activities of the Mujahedin-e Khalq for 34 years. Actually, Ali Safavi is a senior member of the National Council of Resistance of Iran, the Mujahedin-e Khalqs political wing.[9]
Most of Safavi's prose and notes are irrelevant to the argument and obscure or ignore points raised in Monsters of the Left: The Mujahedin al-Khalq. He seeks credibility by citing everything from the Pope to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Cults often use similar strategies. Often Safavi's notes refer to points tangential to the original arguments and, in some cases, even to points Mr. Safavi himself makes. Several look credible, but do not say what Mr. Safavi alleges.
Nor does Mr. Safavi gain credibility for the Mujahedin-e Khalq by cherry-picking statements. Mujahedin-e Khalq publications are infamous in Washington for using ellipses to alter the meanings analysis published elsewhere by policymakers. Citing statements replicated in recent Mujahedin-e Khalq publications brings as much credibility as quoting from Lyndon LaRouche's Executive Intelligence Review. Quality of sourcing always matters: Justin Raimondo is hardly a trustworthy authority.[10] David S. Cloud, having left the Wall Street Journal, has quickly become the New York Times' new Jason Blair.
That the Mujahedin-e Khalq helped expose Tehrans secret nuclear program does not give it a free pass to popular legitimacy. Previous and subsequent Mujahedin-e Khalq revelations proved false. So, too, are Mujahedin-e Khalq pronouncements that they had the support of the Bush administration. It is unfortunate that left-wing bloggers like Laura Rozen and Juan Cole advanced such statements. They substituted accuracy and sourcing with speculation and fabrication. Their statements helped the Mujahedin-e Khalq claim false legitimacy.
Mr. Safavi is right that the Islamic Republic is the antithesis of democracy. The nuclear threat is real. The problem is not political, but rather ideological.[11] Iranian leaders mean what they say. Neither European engagement nor flaccid diplomacy will work. It is an embarrassment that, as the Bush administration enters its sixth year, there remains no policy toward Iran. Bush's rhetoric means little when his administration is unwilling to act in support of the Iranian people. But solidarity with the Iranian people should mean what Solidarity meant to the Polish people. When the Reagan administration debated how to support Poland against the tyranny of the Soviet Empire, career diplomats and European officials counseled a do-nothing approach, for fear that real support for the dockyard workers in Gdansk would cause complicate diplomatic initiatives. President Ronald Reagan dismissed such concerns. So, too, should Bush.
But support for freedom in Iran means listening to the Iranian people. It means funding independent labor unions and unlicensed, truly independent civil society. So that the New York Times no longer accepts Iranian government statistics like voter turn-out at face value, the U.S. government should fund independent Iranian organizations to conduct true surveys. Iranian universities are full of honest sociologists, statisticians, and students who chafe under their governments rule and can participant. Nor, if the Bush administration is serious, should the Los Angeles-based Persian-language media want for funds.
The Mujahedin-e Khalq remains a terrorist group. That its target is not a friend of the U.S. government should be irrelevant. Under no circumstances, though, should Congressmen or Senators be duped into believing the rhetoric of a group like the Mujahedin-e Khalq who may see a cash cow, but whose ideology and actions are out-of-step with the freedom and liberty Iranians desire and deserve.
Notes:
[1] http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Printable.asp?ID=19590
[2] http://frontpagemagazine.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=21025
[3] New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992.
[4] See reviews, for example, in the Middle East Quarterly: http://www.meforum.org/article/114; and http://www.meforum.org/article/820
[5] Review of Abrahamian. Khomeinism: Essays on the Islamic Republic. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. http://www.meforum.org/article/820
[6] http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=18419
[7] http://www.treas.gov/offices/enforcement/ofac/actions/20030815.shtml; http://www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/ps/2003/23311.htm
[8] For example, see: MKO Organizes Gathering in Washington DC Convention Center. Radio Farda. January 24, 2004. http://www.radiofarda.com/transcripts/topstory/2004/01/20040124_1430_0344_0750_EN.asp
[9] Lisa Bryant. Iranian Resistance Group Seen as Leverage in Nuclear Dispute. Voice of America. January 23, 2006. http://www.voanews.com/english/2006-01-23-voa73.cfm
[10] http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=17310
[11] http://www.meforum.org/article/892"
by Michael Rubin
FrontPageMagazine.com
January 27, 2006
http://www.meforum.org/article/893
Ali Safavi's response is dishonest but useful as a study of Mujahedin-e Khalq (MKO) tactics.
Let there be no mistake: Masud Rajavi's Mujahedin-e Khalq is a terrorist group; Rajavi is as much a Monster of the Left as Yasir Arafat [1] or Robert Mugabe.
Mujahedin-e Khalq members trained with Arafat's Palestinian Liberation Organization and in Qadhafi's Libya. The groups terrorists have assassinated Americans, Iranian civilians, and bombed public buildings. Its members embraced Saddam Hussein and participated in the slaughter of Iraqi Kurdish civilians following their 1991 uprising against Saddam's dictatorial rule.
Safavi's endorsement of violence parallels the logic expressed by supporters of Islamic Jihad, Abu Sayyaf, and al-Qaeda. Comparisons betwen the Mujahedin-e Khalq and either American revolutionaries or French partisans ring hollow: The Mujahedin-e Khalq has no support among Iranians inside their own country. Citing the groups own publications to claim popularity as did Jalal Arani [2]is dishonest.
True, some Iranians did support the Mujahedin-e Khalq in 1972. Many Iranians, chafing under the Shah, accepted the rhetoric of demagogues like Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and groups like the Mujahedin-e Khalq. But Iranian public opinion has changed over the past 34 years. That Mr. Safavi has to return to 1972 to claim public support underlines the fallacies of his argument. Supporters who did not abandon the Mujahedin-e Khalq when it murdered civilians and planted bombs washed their hands of the group after Rajavi allied himself with Saddam Hussein. Many have since fled the Rajavi personality cult.
Mr. Safavi may want to dismiss Ervand Abrahamian's The Iranian Mojahedin.[3] It is a devastating and careful study of the Mujahedin-e Khalq. Abrahamian's books exploring torture in Iran, Khomeinis philosophy, and the history of the Mujahedin-e Khalq are well-reviewed and well-regarded by both left and right.[4] Reviewing a book of Abrahamian's essays, Daniel Pipes (neither a communist sympathizer nor a cheerleader for the Islamic Republic), wrote Abrahamian makes his case the old-fashioned way, through a close reading of texts and study of events.[5] Abrahamian's scholarship rests on archival research and documentary evidence. He is no Rashid Khalidi.[6] He did not cherry-pick his sources or remove context. Rather, he examined the opus of Rajavi's works and charted their development.
Mr. Safavi is likewise dishonest with his dismissal of Islamic Marxism, which was oft-discussed within Mujahedin-e Khalq circles and Iranian society.
Mr. Safavi poses a false choice: Theocracy or Mujahedin-e Khalq. Iranians want neither. They are sophisticated and vocal. They opine openly about various opposition groups, figures, and movements. They do not need to Mujahedin-e Khalq to channel their thoughts; they speak for themselves. They despise the Mujahedin. Safavi should not dismiss seventy million Iranians as agents of Tehran's intelligence ministry.
The only constituency that matters is Iranians residing inside Iran. Getting the signature of European parliamentarians and a few U.S. congressmen on petitions means little. Nor is the Mujahedin-e Khalq honest with its sponsorship. Few politicians make the mistake of signing their petitions twice. The U.S. government chronicles an ever expanding number of Mujahedin-e Khalq front organizations.[7] The group forms short-lived proxies to capitalize upon existing public support for issues ranging from calls for a constitutional referendum to earthquake relief.[8] But the Mujahedin-e Khalq's strategy of deception has undercut the Iranian peoples struggle for liberation by cynicism about and politicians detachment from legitimate opposition movements.
How pervasive is the groups dishonesty? In his letter to Frontpage Magazine, Safavi describes himself as a sociologist who has studied the activities of the Mujahedin-e Khalq for 34 years. Actually, Ali Safavi is a senior member of the National Council of Resistance of Iran, the Mujahedin-e Khalqs political wing.[9]
Most of Safavi's prose and notes are irrelevant to the argument and obscure or ignore points raised in Monsters of the Left: The Mujahedin al-Khalq. He seeks credibility by citing everything from the Pope to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Cults often use similar strategies. Often Safavi's notes refer to points tangential to the original arguments and, in some cases, even to points Mr. Safavi himself makes. Several look credible, but do not say what Mr. Safavi alleges.
Nor does Mr. Safavi gain credibility for the Mujahedin-e Khalq by cherry-picking statements. Mujahedin-e Khalq publications are infamous in Washington for using ellipses to alter the meanings analysis published elsewhere by policymakers. Citing statements replicated in recent Mujahedin-e Khalq publications brings as much credibility as quoting from Lyndon LaRouche's Executive Intelligence Review. Quality of sourcing always matters: Justin Raimondo is hardly a trustworthy authority.[10] David S. Cloud, having left the Wall Street Journal, has quickly become the New York Times' new Jason Blair.
That the Mujahedin-e Khalq helped expose Tehrans secret nuclear program does not give it a free pass to popular legitimacy. Previous and subsequent Mujahedin-e Khalq revelations proved false. So, too, are Mujahedin-e Khalq pronouncements that they had the support of the Bush administration. It is unfortunate that left-wing bloggers like Laura Rozen and Juan Cole advanced such statements. They substituted accuracy and sourcing with speculation and fabrication. Their statements helped the Mujahedin-e Khalq claim false legitimacy.
Mr. Safavi is right that the Islamic Republic is the antithesis of democracy. The nuclear threat is real. The problem is not political, but rather ideological.[11] Iranian leaders mean what they say. Neither European engagement nor flaccid diplomacy will work. It is an embarrassment that, as the Bush administration enters its sixth year, there remains no policy toward Iran. Bush's rhetoric means little when his administration is unwilling to act in support of the Iranian people. But solidarity with the Iranian people should mean what Solidarity meant to the Polish people. When the Reagan administration debated how to support Poland against the tyranny of the Soviet Empire, career diplomats and European officials counseled a do-nothing approach, for fear that real support for the dockyard workers in Gdansk would cause complicate diplomatic initiatives. President Ronald Reagan dismissed such concerns. So, too, should Bush.
But support for freedom in Iran means listening to the Iranian people. It means funding independent labor unions and unlicensed, truly independent civil society. So that the New York Times no longer accepts Iranian government statistics like voter turn-out at face value, the U.S. government should fund independent Iranian organizations to conduct true surveys. Iranian universities are full of honest sociologists, statisticians, and students who chafe under their governments rule and can participant. Nor, if the Bush administration is serious, should the Los Angeles-based Persian-language media want for funds.
The Mujahedin-e Khalq remains a terrorist group. That its target is not a friend of the U.S. government should be irrelevant. Under no circumstances, though, should Congressmen or Senators be duped into believing the rhetoric of a group like the Mujahedin-e Khalq who may see a cash cow, but whose ideology and actions are out-of-step with the freedom and liberty Iranians desire and deserve.
Notes:
[1] http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Printable.asp?ID=19590
[2] http://frontpagemagazine.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=21025
[3] New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992.
[4] See reviews, for example, in the Middle East Quarterly: http://www.meforum.org/article/114; and http://www.meforum.org/article/820
[5] Review of Abrahamian. Khomeinism: Essays on the Islamic Republic. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. http://www.meforum.org/article/820
[6] http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=18419
[7] http://www.treas.gov/offices/enforcement/ofac/actions/20030815.shtml; http://www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/ps/2003/23311.htm
[8] For example, see: MKO Organizes Gathering in Washington DC Convention Center. Radio Farda. January 24, 2004. http://www.radiofarda.com/transcripts/topstory/2004/01/20040124_1430_0344_0750_EN.asp
[9] Lisa Bryant. Iranian Resistance Group Seen as Leverage in Nuclear Dispute. Voice of America. January 23, 2006. http://www.voanews.com/english/2006-01-23-voa73.cfm
[10] http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=17310
[11] http://www.meforum.org/article/892"
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