Author: Helena

This afternoon, the leader of the democrats in the US Senate, Sen. Harry Reid of Nevada abruptly activated something called “Rule 21” which forced the Senate to go into a closed session to discuss a Democratic demand that the Intelligence Committee complete a long-delayed investigation into the intel that underlay the invasion of Iraq.
The “unilateral” way in which Reid did this marked a sharp break from the kowtowing “collegiality” that has marked the Democratic senators’ relations with their GOP (Republican) counterparts until now. Senate Majority (i.e. Republican) Leader Bill Frist yelped that the Dems were “hijacking the Senate”.
Reid’s move was, however, quite legal. Senate employees cleared nearly all the non-Senators out of the chamber, dimmed the lights (why?), made sure electronic devices were turned off, and secured the entrances so the senators could have their “closed-door” deliberation. It lasted a couple of hours; and according to this AP report by the end of that time the Republicans had ” agreed … to a bipartisan review of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s investigation into prewar intelligence.”
At issue was the second phase of an investigation into the pre-war intel that the Intelligence Committeee started work on last year. The AP report said, “A six-member task force — three members from each party — was appointed to review the Intelligence Committee’s work and report to their respective leaders by Nov. 14.” But apparently the Dems were afraid the work was being delayed.
Just before he invoked Rule 21, Reid stated,

The Libby indictment provides a window into what this is really all about, how this administration manufactured and manipulated intelligence in order to sell the war in Iraq and attempted to destroy those who dared to challenge its actions.

Fighting words! Some analysts– most notably Mark Schmitt at TPM Cafe— almost immediately identified Reid’s moment of feistiness as a “tipping point” or “power shift”. He wrote:

there is often a moment when the effective majority switches, when the minority takes control of the agenda well before an election. It happened in 1994 when Gingrich forced the Crime Bill back to conference. It happened in 1996 when Kennedy forced the Senate to take up the minimum wage increase. After those events, the majority never quite had control of the agenda again.
I think the same thing just happened today when Harry Reid took the Senate into closed session to force a discussion of the delayed Intelligence Committee report on misuse of intelligence.
Bill Frist’s ability to run the institution now lies completely in ruins.

Not so fast there. It will take a lot more evidence than Reid’s single action of today to persuade me this is so. (And over at his own blog, Schmitt admits that, “I”ve never been a very good political prognosticator.”)
Yes, it would be great to think that the Democrats in the Senate could suddenly develop spines. But we’d need to see a lot more real protest, and a clear and principled anti-Bush movement developing in the country, before we could be confident of that. The party system in this country is so very different from that in most of the other countries I’m familiar with… Here, the social fragmentation and wide geographic dispersal of the citizenry means that parties don’t really have a forceful, continuing, and coherent political existence apart from being machines for winning elections. So the fact that the Senate Democratic leader has suddenly taken one semi-forceful action certainly doesn’t mean that tomorrow every Democrat in the country will take up the cause of “Show us where the lies were!” in a coordinated manner.
And then, of course, there’s the whole sad question of– even if we do find out all the details of who told which lie to whom, who fabricated which lie for whom, in the run-up to the war– well… So what?? What do the Democrats plan to do about it??? John Kerry’s little bleat last week about hoping to pull “20,000” US troops out of Iraq by Christmas really didn’t seem convincing or forceful, at all.
Well, maybe I’m too cynical. Maybe there is something new stirring in the Democratic Party…
Here in Virginia, and in a lot of other states, there will be some fairly interesting elections happening next Tuesday. Here we’re going to have elections for many state-level offices including the Governor, Lieutenant Governor (a separate race), Attorney General, and many state legislators. In Virginia, governors can only serve one four-year term each. Our present Governor, Mark Warner, is an android-looking political centrist who governed fairly effectively as a Democrat while having to deal with both houses of the state legislature here being strongly dominated by Republicans. Now, the present Lieut. Governor, Tim Kaine– also a Democrat– is running to replace him. The last polls I saw showed Kaine ahead of his GOP challenger by a hair.
Well, all politics is local; and in the case of some of these state-level races very local indeed. But I suppose that next week’s elections might give us one general impression of how much fight the Democrats have in them in various parts of the country… And of course, the other big issue at the national level right now is the latest Supreme Court nominee. But I’m too tired to write anything cogent here about that.

The NYT has a very significant article today, in which reporter Scott Shane reveals that,

The National Security Agency has kept secret since 2001 a finding by an agency historian that during the Tonkin Gulf episode, which helped precipitate the Vietnam War, N.S.A. officers deliberately distorted critical intelligence to cover up their mistakes, two people familiar with the historian’s work say.
The historian’s conclusion is the first serious accusation that communications intercepted by the N.S.A., the secretive eavesdropping and code-breaking agency, were falsified so that they made it look as if North Vietnam had attacked American destroyers on Aug. 4, 1964, two days after a previous clash. President Lyndon B. Johnson cited the supposed attack to persuade Congress to authorize broad military action in Vietnam, but most historians have concluded in recent years that there was no second attack.
The N.S.A. historian, Robert J. Hanyok, found a pattern of translation mistakes that went uncorrected, altered intercept times and selective citation of intelligence that persuaded him that midlevel agency officers had deliberately skewed the evidence.

Mr. Hanyok concluded that they had done it not out of any political motive but to cover up earlier errors, and that top N.S.A. and defense officials and Johnson neither knew about nor condoned the deception.
Mr. Hanyok’s findings were published nearly five years ago in a classified in-house journal, and starting in 2002 he and other government historians argued that it should be made public. But their effort was rebuffed by higher-level agency policymakers, who by the next year were fearful that it might prompt uncomfortable comparisons with the flawed intelligence used to justify the war in Iraq, according to an intelligence official familiar with some internal discussions of the matter.
Matthew M. Aid, an independent historian who has discussed Mr. Hanyok’s Tonkin Gulf research with current and former N.S.A. and C.I.A. officials who have read it, said he had decided to speak publicly about the findings because he believed they should have been released long ago.
“This material is relevant to debates we as Americans are having about the war in Iraq and intelligence reform,” said Mr. Aid… “To keep it classified simply because it might embarrass the agency is wrong.”

(Shane wrote that Aid’s description of Hanyok’s findings was confirmed by the intelligence official he had already referred to, ” who spoke on condition of anonymity.”)
As a citizen here in the US, I demand to see Robert Hanyok’s study. Both it and all the intelligence reports that it analyzed were completely funded by US taxpayers. And as Matthew Aid argues, in light of the controversy about the current administration’s deliberate misuse of so-called “intelligence information” in its (successful) attempt to build the case for starting a war against Iraq, we citizens and taxpayers need to be as clear as we can be about exactly how our government’s various “intelligence” organs work, and in particular how they can be misused and abused in such circumstances.
It seems, however, that what Hanyok has written about in his still-unpublished study is something significantly different from what the participants in the more recent “yellow cake”, “aluminimum tubes”, and “Muhammad Atta” disinformation conspiracies were doing…
Shane writes that his two sources (Aid and the anonymous intel official) both said that,

Mr. Hanyok believed the initial misinterpretation of North Vietnamese intercepts was probably an honest mistake. But after months of detective work in N.S.A.’s archives, he concluded that midlevel agency officials discovered the error almost immediately but covered it up and doctored documents so that they appeared to provide evidence of an attack.

Actually, this account does not tell us anything about the motivation of those involved in the cover-up (as opposed to that of the people who made the original, apparently “honest”, mistake.) The main motivations of the cover-uppers could have been professional pride– as in, not wanting their particular analysis unit to have been caught making what looks like a fairly elementary mistake in translation– or they might well have been more heinous. Evidently, we need to see the whole timeline, and those original documents, in order to make a judgment on that.
Regardless of their motivations, the cover-uppers certainly helped catapult the US Congress into passing the Gulf of Tonkin resolution. (Wikipedia has a fairly good description of the whole episode here. However, their intro there still says of the false intel information that, “According to the Pentagon Papers and various researchers, the attacks were virtually fabricated by President Lyndon B. Johnson’s administration.” We need to see Hanyok’s work to get more clarity on whether it was a “fabrication” or the cover-up of an– originally perhaps honest– mistake.)
NYT reporter Shane writes that, “Many historians believe that even without the Tonkin Gulf episode, Johnson might have found a reason to escalate military action against North Vietnam.” But he quotes then-Defense Secretary Robert McNamara as telling him in an interview last week that:

“I think it’s wrong to believe that Johnson wanted war… But we thought we had evidence that North Vietnam was escalating.”
Mr. McNamara, 89, said he had never been told that the intelligence might have been altered to shore up the scant evidence of a North Vietnamese attack.
“That really is surprising to me,” said Mr. McNamara, who Mr. Hanyok found had unknowingly used the altered intercepts in 1964 and 1968 in testimony before Congress. “I think they ought to make all the material public, period.”

So Bob McNamara comes across as, in some ways, the Colin Powell of his day.
Regarding the present-day “cover-up”– or perhaps more accurately, official suppression– of the truth behind the Gulf of Tonkin allegations, Shane quotes his anonymous intel official (who may well be Hanyok himself?) as saying that:

N.S.A. historians began pushing for public release in 2002, after Mr. Hanyok included his Tonkin Gulf findings in a 400-page, in-house history of the agency and Vietnam called “Spartans in Darkness.” Though superiors initially expressed support for releasing it, the idea lost momentum as Iraq intelligence was being called into question, the official said.
Mr. Aid said he had heard from other intelligence officials the same explanation for the delay in releasing the report, though neither he nor the intelligence official knew how high up in the agency the issue was discussed. A spokesman for Gen. Michael V. Hayden, who was the agency’s. director until last summer and is now the principal deputy director of national intelligence, referred questions to Mr. Weber, the N.S.A. spokesman, who said he had no further information.

Right. “No further information.”
So back in 1964, someone, or some “midlevel” ones, at the NSA engaged knowingly in a cover-up about the truth of an alleged North Vietnamese “escalation” in the Gulf of Tonkin, and 55,000 US servicemen and some 1.5 million Vietnamese died as a result. In 2002-2003, some highly placed individuals in the Bush administration engaged apparently knowingly in a cover-up about the “truth” of the Niger yellow-cake (and possibly other WMD- and terrorism-related) allegations about Saddam’s Iraq… So far, the casualty toll is 2,000 US service-members, some 30,000-80,000 Iraqis, and quite possibly the existence of the state of Iraq and the stability of the Gulf region for several decades to come…
Yes, you can see why some high-ups in today’s NSA wouldn’t necessarily want the truth about 1964 to come out now. But if we want to cling to the notion that our country is a democracy, the whole truth must be told– about both of these very troubled periods.