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Should the Left Cheer the Dollar's Drop? How to make the bankers scream: Robert Pollin, world's best obituarist of Clintonomics, explains it all for you. Do police states make people feel safer? Vicente Navarro on Franco's Spain, Cockburn on Ireland in the Fifties under the Catholic Hierarchy, Alevtina Rea on growing up in Brezhnev-time. Capitalism's true utopia? St Clair on the Pentagon's no-bid arms contracts. How's the press doing in Iraq? Patrick Cockburn tells all to Omar Waraich. Get the answers you're looking for in the latest subscriber-only edition of CounterPunch... CounterPunch Online is read by millions of viewers each month! But remember, we are funded solely by the subscribers to the print edition of CounterPunch. Please support this website by buying a subscription to our newsletter, which contains fresh material you won't find anywhere else, or by making a donation for the online edition. Remember contributions are tax-deductible. Click here to make a donation. If you find our site useful please: Subscribe Now! or write CounterPunch, PO BOX 228, Petrolia, CA 95558 |
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Other Lands Have Dreams: From Baghdad to Pekin Prison by KATHY KELLY  Today's Stories May 23, 2005 Esther
Sassaman / Thomas Nagy May 21 / 22, 2005 David
H. Price Gabriel
García Márquez Oren
Ben-Dor Gary
Leupp Laith
al-Saud Elaine
Cassel Greg
Moses Fred
Gardner Dave
Lindorff Alan
Maass William
Blum Tom
Crumpacker Niranjan
Ramakrishnan Doug
Giebel Evelyn
J. Pringle Carolyn
Baker Chris
Floyd Frederick
B. Hudson Ben
Tripp Poets'
Basement
May 20, 2005 Dave
Lindorff Kevin
Zeese Paul
de Rooij Christopher
Brauchli Mark
Engler Joshua
Frank Robert
Jensen Jeffery
R. Webber
May 19, 2005 Bill
Forman Stan
Goff Neve
Gordon Michael
Dickinson Karyn
Strickler Andrew
Freedman Paul
Craig Roberts
May 18, 2005 Jean
Bricmont Laura
Carlsen Mike
Whitney Joshua
Frank George
Galloway Manuel
Garcia, Jr. Dwight
D. Eisenhower Dave
Lindorff
May 17, 2005 Mickey
Z. Petuuche
Gilbert Paul
Craig Roberts Ramzy
Baroud Robert
Jensen / Pat Youngblood Stan
Cox Dave
Zirin Diana
Barahona Website
of the Day
May 16, 2005 Michael
Gillespie Jason
Leopold Jesse
Muldoon Norman
Solomon Robert
Cray Patrick
Cockburn Website
of the Day
May 14 / 15, 2005 Alexander
Cockburn Saul
Landau Gary
Leupp JoAnn
Wypijewski Ben
Tripp Brian
J. Foley Tom
Barry Mitchell
Verter Mike
Ferner Dan
Smith Mark
Scaramella Don
Fitz Diane
Farsetta Michael
Dickinson Ron
Jacobs Fred
Gardner Farrah
Hassen Douglas
Valentine Poets'
Basement Website
of the Weekend
May 13, 2005 Tom
Stephens Patrick
Cockburn Mike
Whitney Chris
Floyd Jenna
Orkin Dave
Lindorff Joshua
Frank Website
of the Day
May 12, 2005 Paul
Craig Roberts Uri
Avnery Greg
Moses Carolyn
Baker Pat
Williams William
S. Lind Jack
Random Gary
Leupp
May 11, 2005 Patrick
Cockburn Kevin
Zeese Christopher
Brauchli Zalman
Amit Robert
Shull Mike
Whitney Dr.
Teresa Whitehurst Norman
Solomon
May 10, 2005 Richard
Drayton Dave
Zirin Jackie
Corr Dave
Lindorff Michael
Donnelly Reza
Fiyouzat Scott
Parkin Stephen
Babcock Alan
Farago Michael
Neumann Website
of the Day
May 9, 2005 Louis
Proyect Robert
Fisk Kevin
Zeese Joshua
Frank Sasha
Kramer Andrew
Wimmer Jeffrey
Webber Jeffrey
St. Clair
May 7 / 8, 2005 Alexander
Cockburn Gary
Leupp Saul
Landau Joe
DeRaymond Daniela
Ponce Heather
Williams Gregory
Elich Anis
Memon John
Chuckman Mike
Whitney Ron
Jacobs Colin
Kalmbacher Lance
Selfa Fred
Gardner Ben
Tripp Mickey
Z. Richard
Joseph Dr.
Susan Block Poets'
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May 6, 2005 Patrick
Cockburn Erin
Yoshioka Sam
Husseini Dave
Lindorff Kevin
Zeese Joshua
Frank Dan
Bacher P.
Sainath
May 5, 2005 Carles
Mutaner Carl
G. Estabrook Farrah
Hassen Kevin
Zeese Michael
Leonardi Bennett
Ramberg Ray
McGovern Norman
Solomon Nicole
Colson Brian
Concannon, Jr.
May 4, 2005 Colin
Kalmbacher John
Walsh Greg
Moses Ali
Khan Chris
Floyd Linda
S. Heard Dave
Zirin William
S. Lind Gary
Leupp Website
of the Day
May 3, 2005 Dave
Lindorff Brian
Cloughley Ira
Kurzban Seth
Sandronsky Gilad
Atzmon Michael
Donnelly Alex
Sanchez Peter
Linebaugh
May 2, 2005 Ron
Jacobs Stan
Goff Karyn
Strickler Joshua
Frank Kevin
Zeese Vicente
Navarro
April 30 / May 1, 2005 Alexander
Cockburn Gabriel
Kolko Jennifer
Loewenstein Lee
Sustar Saul
Landau T.W.
Croft Nikolas
Kozloff William
Blum Dave
Lindorff Joshua
Frank Doug
Giebel Steven
Erlanger Fred
Gardner Mike
Whitney Kurt
Nimmo Joe
DeRaymond Michael
Dickinson Mickey
Z. Justin
Taylor Poets
Basement Website
of the Weekend
Hot Stories Alexander Cockburn Subcomandante
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May 23, 2005 An Interview with James BamfordInventing a Pretext for WarBy KEVIN B. ZEESE For more than two decades James Bamford has been a noted investigative journalist focusing on intelligence gathering in the United States. He exposed the ultra secret National Security Agency two decades ago in The Puzzle Palace and Body of Secrets, both award winning best sellers. He has testified as an expert witness on intelligence issues before committees of both the Senate and House of Representatives as well as the European Parliament in Brussels and the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. His most recent book is A Pretext for War : 9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse of America's Intelligence Agencies? examines intelligence gathering related to the Iraq War and 9/11. In addition to writing, he spent most of the decade of the 1990s as the Washington Investigative Producer for the ABC News program World News Tonight with Peter Jennings. Zeese: Tell me about your
current book A Pretext for War : 9/11, Iraq, and
the Abuse of America's Intelligence Agencies? Wurmser then authored a paper
in January 2001 arguing that the U.S. and Israel jointly launch
a pre-emptive war throughout the Middle East and North Africa
to establish U.S.-Israeli dominance. The U.S. and Israel should
"strike fatally, not merely disarm, the centers of radicalism
in the region the About the same time, on January 30, 2001, President Bush held his first National Security Council meeting and, according to former Bush Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, discussed only two topics: becoming closer to Israel's Ariel Sharon and locating targets to attack in Iraq. As Wurmser had suggested, following the 9/11 attacks the Bush administration immediately began using the crisis as an opportunity to launch their long planned war against Iraq. At 2:40 p.m. on September 11, as the Pentagon was still burning, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld dictated notes indicating his intention to blame Saddam Hussein, even though there was no evidence of any such link and all the intelligence pointed exclusively to bin Laden and al Qaeda. "Hit S.H. at same time," he wrote. "Sweep" him up, whether "related" to 9/11 or "not." Next, Wurmser was put in charge of a secret unit in Feith's office with the cover name Policy Counter-terrorism Evaluation Group. Its function was to gather and feed less-than-credible intelligence -- intelligence discounted by the CIA, such as the supposed Niger uranium deal -- to the White House and Vice President Cheney's office. Wurmser is now Cheney's top Middle East advisor. Finally, Pretext closely examines the numerous lies and deceptions presented to the Congress, the American public and the world in order to justify the war in Iraq. Zeese: A recent memo of meeting minutes was released in Great Britain saying the Bush administration was "fixing the intelligence" so that the Iraq War could be justified. And, when I look back at intelligence reports I see lots of indications that there were doubts about WMD, Iraq as a threat to the U.S. and surrounding countries that were downplayed or ignored. Was intelligence manipulated to get the Congress and public to support the war in Iraq? What kind of pressure, if any, was put on U.S. intelligence agencies to come up with a basis for the war? Bamford: Intelligence was manipulated, mangled, ignored, and analysts were harassed and bullied to present the false picture that Iraq was an imminent threat to the U.S. In talking with intelligence analysts and case officers, in the months leading up to the war none believed that Iraq posed a threat to the U.S. The most basic evidence was the fact that Iraq had never begun work on a long-range missile system (unlike Iran and North Korea), something that can be easily seen by imaging satellites space with a resolution down to the centimeter. And no country has ever built a warhead without simultaneously building a delivery system. One CIA analyst from the Iraq Non-Proliferation section told me that his boss once called his office together (about fifty people) and said, "You know what if Bush wants to go to war, it's your job to give him a reason to do so." The former analyst added, "And I said, 'All right, it's time, it's time to go . . . And I just remember saying, 'This is something that the American public, if they ever knew, they would be outraged." Congress was also lied to. Because Iraq had no long-range missiles, they were told in secret session that Iraq was planning to launch a series of unmanned drones loaded with chemical and biological agents against the East Coast of the U.S. Many members of Congress voted for the resolution exclusively because of that warning. It later turned out that not only did Iraq not have such warheads, the few drones they had were rudimentary, short range, and there was no way to launch them from sea off the East Coast in the first place. There were many such falsehoods. Zeese: After 9/11 there were many changes in law to fight the war on terrorism. The Patriot Act is the most notable. Congress is in the process of expanding and making permanent the Patriot Act. What are your thought on the balance being struck between civil liberties and the war on terrorism? Bamford: In the same way the Bush administration used the 9/11 attacks as a pretext to launch its disastrous war against Iraq, they are now exploiting the threat of terrorism to push for harsh assaults on constitutional liberties. And they are succeeding to a remarkable degree, largely because of the non-stop drumbeat of fear and paranoia generated over the issue and the steady, numbing regularity of their attacks on civil liberties. The Senate Intelligence Committee is now debating such provisions as whether to reauthorize the FBI to conduct secret, warrantless searches of library, bookstore and videoshop records to see what you are reading or watching; granting the FBI the right to subpoena information about you without the need of obtaining court approval; classified procedures giving the FBI broad new warrantless authority to secretly record the origins and destinations of letters in your mailbox. This last provision even alarmed some senior U.S. Postal Service officials. "This is a major step," Zoe Strickland, the chief privacy officer for the Postal Service, told the New York Times. "From a privacy perspective, you want to make sure that the right balance is struck between protecting people's mail and aiding law enforcement, and this legislation could impact that balance negatively . . . I worry quite a bit about the balance being struck here, and we're quite mystified as to how this got put in the legislation." Resorting to the politics of fear is not new. In 1947, President Harry Truman was seeking advise on how to convince Congress to pass an aid bill for Greece and Turkey to help them defeat the communist insurgency. "Mr. President," volunteered Sen. Arthur Vandenberg, "the only way you are ever going to get this is to make a speech and scare the hell out of the country." And James Madison once warned, "If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy." Zeese: There are a lot of people discussing whether the U.S. government was aware of the 9/11 attack before it happened, some even argue that some in the U.S. government were involved or informed of the attack. What are your thoughts on this? Bamford: I disagree. The problem was the opposite: the U.S. didn't have a clue before the attack. I also found no evidence that the U.S. government was involved in the attack. Zeese: What has been the reaction to A Pretext for War, in particular by Members of Congress? Bamford: Pretext was very well received by reviewers, the public and members of Congress. Time gave it a two-page spread and called it, "Probably the best one-volume companion to the harrowing events in the war on terrorism since 1996." The New York Times top reviewer, Michiko Kakutani, also gave Pretext an excellent review, calling it "Highly persuasive . . . a damning portrait of the country's intelligence agencies," adding, "Bamford unearths new details . . . to create a vivid, unsettling narrative." And the Washington Post gave Pretext the cover of the book review and called it "Highly readable and well-researched . . . Bamford does a superb job tying together threads of the Sept. 11 intelligence failures and their ongoing aftermath, using original research, the public record and a light, fast-paced writing touch." Pretext was also very well received by Congress. In an unusual move, a number of Republican and Democratic members of Congress hosted me at several private, members-only events to outline how the Bush administration deceived Congress and the public in the lead-up to the war in Iraq. This included both a dinner and an address in the Capitol Building. Zeese: You've been writing about intelligence matters for two decades beginning with The Puzzle Palace. What is your evaluation of how intelligence has evolved over the years and in particular about recent changes in law and policy regarding how intelligence is gathered, shared and directed? Bamford: Over the years, the principal problem with the intelligence community is that 85% of it is primarily under the control of the Secretary of Defense, not the Director of Central Intelligence. This includes the National Security Agency, the National Geospacial-Intelligence Agency, the National Reconnaissance Office and the Defense Intelligence Agency the major collection agencies. Under the Bush administration, Donald Rumsfeld has exercised control over the intelligence community to extreme and dangerous lengths. For the first time, Congress authorized him to appoint his own powerful intelligence czar an undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence. Then, to bypass the intelligence coming from the CIA much of which was indicating that Iraq was not a threat he established a special secret office to come up with its own intelligence on Iraq, much of which turned out to be fraudulent. These included bogus reports from Ahmed Chalabi, a person whom the CIA had wisely refused to have anything to do with a decade ago. The creation of the Director of National Intelligence was supposed to help correct this problem. But the lines of responsibility were never really changed and unless Negroponte and Hayden quickly begin asserting their authority backed up by Congress and the White House it is likely the real power will remain, and expand, within the office of Secretary of Defense. This could lead to the continued politization of intelligence. Another major issue is human intelligence. Traditionally, human spies have been virtually useless. During the Cold War, from 1985 to 1993, the U.S. had about a dozen Soviet agents passing information to the CIA. The problem was, they had all been compromised by both Aldrich Ames of the CIA and Robert Hanssen of the FBI. Thus, whatever we were getting from them was worse than useless because it was likely disinformation from the KGB. Today, because al Qaeda is so decentralized around the world and operates in air-tight cells, even if someone was able to penetrate the organization they would only learn what a single cell might be doing. Technical intelligence is equally problematic in a "war on terrorism." NSA was originally designed to eavesdrop on a large stationary country that constantly communicated mostly in the clear over dedicated government lines. Today the problem is the opposite it is like trying to find a single call in a giant electronic haystack. The terrorists move from country to country, communicate at a minimum, use disposable phones, calling cards, payphones, the Internet and other hard to trace equipment. During the 1990s the NSA the country's largest and most expensive intelligence agency downsized by one third. At the same time, there was an enormous increase in new modes and volume of communication, from cell phones to e-mail to high-speed data transfers. Also, instead of easy to capture dedicated government communications channels, the terrorists use the world-wide communications grid so locating individual calls has become extremely difficult. Additionally, there are new legal problems with 21st Century communications. An e-mail sent from Madrid to Paris during the busy morning hours may be automatically routed via New York where communications are quiet. Thus different laws now apply because the call is no longer foreign but domestic (or international), at least for a millisecond. Languages are still another major problem. During the Cold War, there were many colleges pumping out Russian and Slavic area studies and language majors. But now there are virtually no colleges teaching such key dialects as Urdu, Pashtu, Dari and many others among the more than 6,500 languages in the world. And NSA has little language capability for future conflicts in many parts of the world. If al Qaeda moves into the political vacuum in Congo, for example, there are maybe one or two people at most who speak Lingala. Gen. Mike Hayden, director of NSA until he was recently named deputy DNI, attempted to modernize NSA during his tenure there but he was only partly successful. Imagery is also a problem. It was designed to focus on stationary missile silos, not humans running from mountain to mountain or country to country. The NRO/NGA are still a long way away from developing systems that can hover over a single spot for an extended period of time, or have a resolution that can pick out individual faces. Then there is the problem of
the CIA's new license to kill anytime and anywhere overseas without
oversight. They are now using missile-armed drones to do assassinations
in Pakistan, Yemen, Afghanistan and other places in total secrecy,
often without notice even to the host countries. And these problems
just scratch the surface in the intelligence community. Bamford: It would seem logical that if Bill Clinton could be subject to impeachment for an alleged deception over a minor consensual sexual affair, George W. Bush should be subject to the same treatment for launching a deadly and seemingly endless war based on lies, distortions and deceptions. If that doesn't qualify as a "high crime" I don't think anything does. The key problem is massive public apathy and extremely poor press coverage. I think the only way to prevent such wars in the future would be to make every citizen an equal shareholder in the war not just the families of the 140,000 troops currently in Iraq. This would require legislation mandating a draft upon the deployment of a certain number of troops to a combat environment. Also legislation forbidding deficit spending for a war should be enacted. The cost of a war would have to be paid as a surcharge on all taxpayers in the year the fighting takes place. In this way, nearly every citizen would have both a personal and financial stake in a war. If such were the case today we would not be in this situation and if we were, there would certainly be calls for impeachment. Kevin Zeese is Director of Democracy Rising. You
can comment on this column on his blogspot at http://www.DemocracyRising.US.
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