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Recent
Stories
July
8, 2003
Linda
S. Heard
America's Kangaroo Justice
Saul Landau
The Intelligence Culture in the National Security Age
July
7, 2003
William
Blum
The Anti-Empire Report
Harvey
Wasserman
The Nuke with a Hole in Its Head
Ramzy
Baroud
Peace for All the Wrong Reasons
Simon
Jones
What Progressives Should Think About
Iran
Lesley
McCulloch
Fear, Pain and Shame in Aceh
Uri
Avnery
The Draw
Steve
Perry
Bush's Wars Web Log 7/3
July
4 / 6, 2003
Patrick
Cockburn
Dead on the Fourth of July
Frederick
Douglass
What is Freedom to a Slave?
Martha
Honey
Bush and Africa: Racism, Exploitation
and Neglect
Jeffrey
St. Clair
The Rat in the Grain: Amstutz and
the Looting of Iraqi Agriculture
Standard
Schaefer
Rule by Fed: Anyone But Greenspan in 2004
Lenni Brenner
Jefferson is for Today
Elaine
Cassel
Fucking Furious on the Fourth
Ben Tripp
How Free Are We?
Wayne
Madsen
A Sad Independence Day
John Stanton
Happy Birthday, America! 227 Years of War
Jim
Lobe
Bush's Surreal AIDS Appointment
John Blair
Return to Marble Hill: Indiana's Rusting Nuke
Lisa
Walsh Thomas
Heavy Reckoning at Qaim
David Vest
Wake Up and Smell the Dynamite
Adam
Engel
Queer as Grass
Poets'
Basement
Christian, Witherup, Albert & St. Clair
Website
of the Weekend
The Lipstick Librarian
July
3, 2003
Patrick
W. Gavin
The Meaning of Gettysburg
Thomas
W. Croft
There Was a Reason They Called It the Casino Economy
David
Lindorff
Outlawing Subversives: Hong Kong
and the US
John
Chuckman
Lessons from the American Revolution
Jackson
Thoreau
New Far-Right Scheme: Impeach Supreme Court Justices
Stan
Goff
"Bring 'Em On?": a Former
Special Forces Soldier Responds to Bush's Invitation for Iraqis
to Attack US Troops
Steve
Perry
Bush's Wars Web Log 7/3
July 2, 2003
Diane
Christian
Good Killing and Bad Killing
Richard
Falk
After Iraq, Does UN War Prevention Have a Future?
Mokhiber
/ Weissman
Bush Administration: Causing Repetitive Stress
Justin
Podur
Uribe's Onslaught Across Colombia
Reuven
Kaviner
Prosecuting Ben-Artzi, the Refusenik
Steve
Perry
Bush's Wars Web Log 7/2
July
1, 2003
Sasan
Fayamanesh
Weapon of Choice: Nukes, Israel and
Iran
Elaine
Cassel
Sex and the Supreme Moralizer: Scalia
and the Sodomy Cops
Susan
Block
A Love Supreme: Our Assholes Belong
to Ourselves
Bill
Glahn
RIAA Watch: No, No Bono
David Lindorff
Weapons in Search of a Name
Gary
Leupp
Occupation, Resistance and the Plight of the GIs
Steve
Perry
Bush's Wars Web Log 7/1
June
30, 2003
Karyn
Strickler
The Do-Nothings: an Exposé
of Progressive Politics in America
Col. Dan
Smith
The Occupation of Iraq: Descending into the Quagmire
Tim
Wise
Race and Destruction in Black and White
Neve Gordon
The Roadmap and the Wall
Chris
Floyd
The Revelation of St. George: "God Told Me to Strike Saddam"
Elaine
Cassel
Kentucky Woman
Uri
Avnery
Hope in Dark Times
Steve
Perry
Bush's Wars Web Log 6/30
Website
of the Day
Bush El Hombre
June
28 / 29, 2003
M.
Shahid Alam
Bernard Lewis: Scholarship or Sophistry?
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Meet Steven Griles: Big Oil's Inside
Man
Laura
Carlsen
Democracy's Future: From the Polls or the Populace?
Alan Maass
You Call These Democrats an Alternative?
C.Y.
Gopinath
Bush and Kindergarten
Noah Leavitt
Bush, the Death Penalty and International Law
Joanne
Mariner
Rehnquist Family Values
Ignacio
Chapela
Tenure, Censorship and Biotech at Berkeley
Bob
Scowcroft
Bush's Squeeze on Organic Farmers
Jon Brown
Tom Delay: "I am the Government"
Kam
Zarrabi
Keep Your Hands Off Iran, Please!
Ron Jacobs
Big Bill Broonzy's Conversation with the Blues
Julie
Hilden
Fear Factor: Art, Terror and the First Amendment
Adrien
Rain Burke
The Anarchists' Wedding Guide
Adam
Engel
US Troops Outta Times Square
Poets'
Basement
Witherup, Guthrie, Albert, Hamod
June
27, 2003
Jason
Leopold
CIA: Seven Months Prior to 9/11 Iraq
Posed No Threat to US
David
Vest
Supreme Silence: Bush's Bunker-Hunker
David
Lindorff
The Catch and Release of "Comical
Ali"
Ray McGovern
Cheney, Forgery and the CIA
Steve
Perry
Bush's Wars Web Log 6/26
Website
of the Day
John Kerry, Teresa Heinz & Ken Lay: The Politics of Hypocrisy
June
26, 2003
Sen.
Robert Byrd
The Road of Cover-Up is a Road to Ruin
Jason
Leopold
Wolfowitz Instructed the CIA to Investigate
Hans Blix
Paul
de Rooij
Ambient Death in Palestine
Chris Floyd
Mass Graves and Burned Meat in Bush's New Iraq
Elaine
Cassel
Wolfowitz as Lord High Executioner
CounterPunch
Wire
Musicians Unite Against Sweatshops
Sheldon
Hull
Squatting in Mansions
Ben Tripp
A Guide to Hating Almost Anyone
Uri
Avnery
The Best Show in Town
Steve
Perry
Bush's Wars Web Log 6/25
Website
of the Day
Ordinary Vistas:
The Photographs of Kurt Nimmo
June
25, 2003
Bruce
Jackson
Buffalo Cops Wage War on Pedal Pushers
Mickey
Z.
The New Dark Ages
David Lindorff
Indonesia's War on Journalists
Dan
Bacher
Butterflies and Farmworkers Confront USDA and Riot Cops
Adam Federman
"Success is Not the Issue Here"
Elaine
Cassel
"Ain't No Justice": Fed Judge Quits, Assails Sentencing
Guidelines
Bill Kauffman
My America vs. the Empire
Steve
Perry
Bush's Wars Web Log 6/25
Website
of the Day
You Are Being Watched:
Elevator Moods
June
24, 2003
Elaine
Cassel
Supreme Indemnity
Holocaust Denial at the High Court
Roya
Monajem
A Message from Tehran: Is It Worth
It to Risk One's Life?
John
Chuckman
The Real Clash of Civilizations
David Lindorff
WMD Damage Control at the Times
Steve
Perry
Bush's Wars Web Log 6/24
June
23, 2003
Marc
Pritzke
Washington Lied: an Interview with
Ray McGovern
Conn
Hallinan
The Consistency of Sharon
Wayne Madsen
Commercials, Disney & Amistad
Edward
Said
The Meaning of Rachel Corrie
Steve Perry
Bush's Wars Web Log 6/23
June
21 / 22, 2003
Alexander
Cockburn
My Life as a Rabbi
William
A. Cook
The Scourge of Hopelessness
Standard
Schaefer
The Wages of Terror: an Interview with R.T. Naylor
Ron Jacobs
US Prisons as Strategic Hamlets
Harry
Browne
The Pitstop Ploughshares
Lawrence
Magnuson
WMD: The Most Dangerous Game
Harold
Gould
Saddam and the WMD Mystery
David Krieger
10 Reasons to Abolish Nuclear Weapons
Avia
Pasternak
The Unholy Alliance in the Occupied Territories
CounterPunch
Summer Reading:
Our Favorite Novels
Todd Chretien
Return to Sender: Todd Gitlin, the Duke of Condescension
Maria
Tomchick
Danny Goldberg's Imaginary Kids
Adam Engel
The Fat Man in Little Boy
Poets'
Basement
Guthrie, Albert & Hamod
June 20, 2003
Walter
Brasch
Down on Our Knees
Robert
Meeropol
The Son of the Rosenbergs on His Parents Death and Bush's America
Russell
Mokhiber and Robert Weissman
Grannies and Baby Bells
Norman
Madarasz
Pierre Bourgault: the Life of a
Quebec Radical
Gary
Leupp
Bush on "Revisionist Historians"
Steve
Perry
Bush's Lies
Marathon: the Finale
Hot Stories
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Elaine
Cassel
Civil Liberties
Watch
Michel
Guerrin
Embedded Photographer Says: "I
Saw Marines Kill Civilians"
Uzma
Aslam Khan
The Unbearably Grim Aftermath of War:
What America Says Does Not Go
Paul de Rooij
Arrogant
Propaganda
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
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July
7, 2003
Imagine a Society
Without Secrets
The Intelligence
Culture in the National Security Age
By SAUL LANDAU
By late June 2003 the Sherlock Holmes unit of
the US Army had not encountered stockpiles of Iraqi weapons of
mass destruction that President Bush had assured us constituted
an imminent threat to our security.
So, the CIA began to take the heat. CIA
analysts didn't furnish the President with accurate evidence
on Iraq's alleged weapons, some critics opined. Others charged
that the Agency bowed to the President's whim and distorted intelligence
information. The President wanted to believe that
Saddam Hussein had accumulated threatening
piles of arms and that he soon planned to supply them to the
terrorists who hate us. And the White House asked them to furnish
the data -- whether or not it existed.
The Agency takes a beating again. CIA
Director George Tenet will not testify before some congressional
subcommittee that "the White House told us to distort the
intelligence so that Bush could justify the war he always intended
to wage against Iraq. And we CIA intelligence officials acted
obediently as usual. Isn't that our real function, to serve the
political wishes of the President in power?" Tenet will
take the heat.
Since its inception in 1948 the CIA's
ethical lapses produced by Cold War values and policies have
plagued the Agency. When will Iraqgate surface?
High-level officials have already begun
tossing around the blame ball like the proverbial hot potato.
Indeed, the June 17, 2003 BBC News reports
("Senator Queries WMD Claim") that Michigan Senator
Carl Levin, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Armed Services
Committee, says he has evidence that the CIA purposely withheld
key information from the UN's inspectors deployed in Iraq. There
would have been "greater public demand that the inspection
process continue," Levin continues, had the public known
that the CIA had failed to share its detailed information with
the UN inspectors.
"Did the CIA act in this way in
order not to undermine administration policy? Was there another
explanation for this?" Levin asked Instead of answering
these rhetorical questions, I recommend that Congress turn the
CIA into a branch of the Library of Congress. Instead of adding
to the seemingly endless string of congressional inquiries, followed
by reports with unheeded recommendations, just send CIA personnel
to that wonderful building on Capitol Hill.
As a super secret arm of national security
policy, the CIA has failed to abide by even its own rules. Repeatedly,
high CIA officials have sold vital secrets to enemies. In the
early 1990s, Aldrich Ames, a trusted Agency big shot with access
to the family jewels, admitted (after being caught) that he had
traded burning national secrets for cold cash.
How could the CIA have permitted such
lax security, Congress naively wondered, as if greed and treachery
only recently arose as characteristics of human behavior? They
focused on how and why the CIA let Aldrich Ames go undetected
for years while he conducted his lucrative transactions. But
the larger and most obvious questions didn't arise from the hearings:
Why should a republic possess so many vital secrets? If they
were so vital, how did our government survive after the Soviets
learned them? What's left to give away? And to whom?
We had suffered a similar shock in the
1980s. Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger worried publicly that
pre-Ames traitor spies inside US intelligence agencies had delivered
to the Soviets most of our national security secrets. Add Ames's
top-secret information to those documents pilfered throughout
the 1980s and there could hardly have been many top secrets our
former enemy didn't know.
However, possession of these secrets
didn't seem to help the Soviets. Indeed, no sooner did they obtain
our vital secrets than they collapsed. If Soviet Premiere Mikhail
Gorbachev's throwing in the towel and refusing to play Cold War
in the late 1980s resulted from his knowledge of these secrets,
then Ames had inadvertently helped end the Cold War. If so, maybe
Ames deserves a medal -- except that he betrayed our agents,
each of whom received a few hundred dollars a month to commit
treason against his own country.
The Soviets used vital secrets -- sources
and methods -- to discover and dispatch US agents, or Soviet
traitors. We did the same to discover agents inside our vital
secrets labyrinth. The Cold War was about fighting a mortal enemy.
Wait! The Soviets proved quite mortal -- may their corrupt Cold
War souls rest in peace.
But remember that Congress created the
CIA in the late 1940s for the exclusive purpose of centralizing
intelligence to more efficiently combat the Soviet threat, now
long gone. Maybe Congress should review the agency's charter
along with its recent intelligence blunders.
Such a reappraisal might show that the
CIA frequently failed to provide accurate intelligence. Instead,
it often provided the documents and rationale to justify policies
and agendas designed by a series of Presidents.
In the early and mid 1980s CIA Director
and ideologue uber alles William Casey directed the CIA to invalidate
a former Agency report, citing signs of Soviet weakness, and
to conclude instead that the USSR was stronger and more dangerous
then ever. Its expansionist posture, the agency informed the
president, demanded that the United States spend ever more money
on weapons and covert actions, alongside a propaganda war, to
counter the Soviet threat.
The initial report was true. The Soviet
apparatus had begun visibly to disintegrate. In the early 1980s,
an observant tourist could have testified to the breakdown of
production, discipline and morale throughout the Soviet Union.
The Soviet threat, however, had served
for four decades as a pretext for destabilizing elected governments
in Iran, Guatemala and Chile, among others and assassinating
people that Presidents didn't like, such as Trujillo in the Dominican
Republic (1961) and Lumumba in the Congo (1960)they never got
Fidel.
As a result of some of these "black"
operations, the CIA became linked to scandals like the 1970 murder
of Chilean Chief of Staff General Rene Schneider and the lurid
tales of drug and arms trafficking involved in the 1980s Iran-Contra
affair.
The importance of the encompassing Soviet
threat allowed the CIA to blithely alter the destiny of other
peoples as well as to feed LSD to its own human guinea pigs,
one of whom committed suicide. And they spied on Americans abroad
and at home.
I know because in 1983 under a Freedom
of Information Act request the CIA sent me copies of personal
letters I had sent to and received from friends living in the
Soviet Union and Cuba. I also received a lengthy personal portrait
of my family and me. Millions of Americans could have received
similar material from CIA files.
Imagine my surprise then in 1992, when
a CIA official telephoned the Institute for Policy Studies where
I had worked to request a briefing on ideas about the direction
the CIA should take in the future.
For thirty years, IPS had functioned
as a center of opposition to the Cold War. Its fellows opposed
the arms race, US interventions in other nations' affairs and
the very notion of covert action itself. Needles to say, IPS
did not approve of government agencies snooping into the lives
of U.S. citizens.
Some 25 CIA executives arrived, explaining
they had requested similar meetings with think tanks of other
political stripes as well. Where were politics and economics
going? Such a request from a CIA official during the Cold War
would have shortened his career.
Did these officials fear that the CIA
no longer had a raison d'etre? Did they understand that the Agency
belonged exclusively to the Cold War and that it therefore had
no legitimate charter in the post Soviet era? "We've always
spoken truth to power," one of our visitors said proudly,
referring to the openness the Agency had for opposition points
of view.
"But you've also spoken lies to
power," I added. "And for more than 40 years, the lies
have prevailed."
The discussion turned cold. I had insulted
them. But the analysts we met seemed like solid researchers who,
given a proper atmosphere, could sift and winnow facts and come
to reasonable and objective conclusions.
Maybe, my colleague suggested, the CIA
could acquire legitimacy if Congress folded it into the Library
of Congress, where in full view of other researchers, professionals
could gather data and inform our decision makers.
Think of the money and embarrassment
we'd save by ridding ourselves of the pesky covert and clandestine
operations! In the wake of the 9/11 intelligence failure and
then the Agency's acquiescence to -- or complicity with -- White
House bullying over the "imminent Iraq threat," the
CIA's intelligence mystique has evaporated -- again. It has proven
deficient precisely because it kept secret information that should
have been public. If we knew the classified information known
to a few CIA and FBI agents, we might have helped prevent the
9/11 deeds.
Why shouldn't we know? The terrorists
and a few intelligence agents knew. Had we known that the CIA
possessed no evidence of Iraqi WMDs, could Bush have convinced
the public on the need to go to war?
So, send the CIA to the Library of Congress
where its researchers can mingle with the citizens. Imagine a
society without hundreds of millions of secrets! Is this crazy?
Or just "revisionist" -- to quote the President.
Saul Landau's work also appears on www.rprogreso.com. He is a fellow of the Institute
for Policy Studies and teaches at Cal Poly Pomona University.
His films on Iraq and Cuba are distributed by Cinema Guild 800-723-5522.
He can be reached at: landau@counterpunch.org.
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