Category: Hawkwatch

The short article in which former CIA analyst Philip Giraldi wrote about Cheney/Pentagon contingency plans touse tactical nukes against Iran is now up on the American Conservative website. I’d written about this piece here Tuesday, but didn’t have a link.
(It turns out it has an August 1 dateline.)
The other two items in Giraldi’s piece there are interesting, too.
In the first, he writes that a CIA internal review of the agency’s performance pre-9/11 is “harshly critical” of Tenet, his former Director of Operations James Pavitt, and the head of the Counterterrorist Center then, Cofer Black. Giraldi adds,

The report, completed by CIA Inspector General John Helgerson, is especially acerbic regarding the failure of the agency to stop two of the 9/11 hijackers, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, as they entered the United States. Black did not share information on the two men with the FBI agents assigned to the Counterterrorist Center at the CIA and also turned down a request for a formal memorandum to be sent to FBI Headquarters. The report will be finalized and given to Congress after those criticized in it add their own comments. Pavitt… has publicly accepted full responsibility for the agency

Attention all enthusiastic participants in, and perpetuators of, the discourse of “terror”– your one-time leader Donald Rumsfeld has now abandoned you! Writing in the NYT today, Eric Schmitt and Thom Shanker note the following:

In recent speeches and news conferences, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and the nation’s senior military officer have spoken of “a global struggle against violent extremism” rather than “the global war on terror,” which had been the catchphrase of choice. Administration officials say that phrase may have outlived its usefulness, because it focused attention solely, and incorrectly, on the military campaign.

Well, it only took these guys about 46 months to recognize their mistake… And meantime, they’ve used the misleadingly constructed concept of the “Global War on Terror” to jerk Americans and others into two major wars and scores of smaller military commitments around the world.
So for those like to be “up-to-date” with the latest conceptual tools coming out of that bastion of intellectual enlightenment, the Pentagon (major irony alert there, folks)… What, you will be asking, is the new discourse of choice?
… And the winner is…
The discourse of “civilization”, as presented by Rumsfeld last Friday, when he addressed an audience at the US Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland. According to that NYT report, at that event,

Mr. Rumsfeld described America’s efforts as it “wages the global struggle against the enemies of freedom, the enemies of civilization.”

The use of the discourse of “civilization” to mask the true content of strategies of global domination is, sadly, as old as globe-girdling colonialism itself. The British used it in Tasmania as they exterminated the indigenous peoples there… The Germans used it in South West Africa as they did likewise… The Spanish used it in Central America as they…
And now, Donald Rumsfeld.
You might think that an administration that has brought us the kinds of abuses that continue in detention centers and military prisons from Guantanamo to Bagram to Baghdad might be ashamed to even mention the word “civilization”??
But no. These guys apparently lack any capacity for either shame or self-awareness. A sad day for “civilization”, I would say.

Douglas Feith, a longtime pro-Likud mole inside successive US administrations and one of the small coterie of neocons near the top of the Rumsfeld Pentagon who worked tirelessly to push the US into invading Iraq… is now admitting some doubts about aspects of the planning and conduct of the war???
This, after 1,758 members of the US military and scores of thousands of Iraqis have lost their lives, and millions more have had their lives irreparably blighted, because of the invasion…
Feith, who will soon be leaving his position as Under-Secretary of Defense of Policy, had this to say about the invasion of Iraq, according to that article by WaPo reporter Ann Scott Tyson:

“I am not asserting to you that I know that the answer is, we did it right. What I am saying is it’s an extremely complex judgment to know whether the course that we chose with its pros and cons was more sensible.”
… He said mistaken actions and policies in Iraq resulted in frequent “course corrections,” pointing to two that he considered significant.

He identified these “mistaken actions and policies” as:

(1) not giving military training to enough Iraqi exiles before the invasion was launched (for which he appeared to blame the generals of U.S. Centcom), and
(2) the reluctance among some U.S. officials to transfer power early on to an Iraqi government and dismantle the U.S. occupation authority, the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), headed by Ambassador L. Paul Bremer.

Oh, how very handy to be able to blame the generals and the now-ousted Paul Bremer… Rather than, for example, the extremely immoral decision to launch the invasion at all– let alone, to launch it almost completely unilaterally, and according to Rumsfeld’s stealth-induced and extremely rushed timetable…
Tyson apparently asked Feith explicitly about the question of the troop levels at the time of entering Iraq. She got this response:

On troop levels in Iraq, Feith said U.S. military commanders — not the Pentagon — determined the flow of and number of forces into the country. “I don’t believe there was a single case where the commander asked for forces and didn’t get them . . . the commander controlled the forces in the theater,” he said.
Senior U.S. Army officers dispute this view, saying the Pentagon cut off the planned influx of nine division-equivalents into Iraq in the war’s initial phase.

I wonder whether she got around to asking him the really big question: From the vantage point of today, do you still think that the decision to launch the war against Iraq was the right one?
I think I can guess Feith’s answer. (“Yes.”) But I wish we had his response to that question on the record.
So, shortly this extremely ideological, racist, and militarist man will be leaving the upper echelons of the US government payroll and returning to the private sector. Maybe he’ll go back to the same law firm he was a partner in before, along with the Israeli settler and lawyer Marc Zell? I’m sure they could organize some nice land-sale deals for good clients in the occupied West Bank.
(Oh, make that good Jewish clients, since those are the only people allowed to undertake real-estate projects under the present “Jews-only” land-grab system in the West Bank.)
But what about Iraq meanwhile? Tyson’s article ends with this about Feith:

He declined to comment on a possible timetable for a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq.

Oh, don’t you love all those chickenhawks who just love to extol the military lifestyle– but not for their own offspring?
Latest one to join the club is Tom Friedman, writing this in today’s New York Times:

Maybe it is too late, but before we give up on Iraq, why not actually try to do it right? Double the American boots on the ground and redouble the diplomatic effort…

What a sorry ignoramus, for crying out loud!
Where on earth does he think the US military is going to find the additional 140,000-plus-plus troops it would take to achieve this? The army can’t even plan on sustaining the present level of deployment for more than the next couple of months.
Has he even heard about the recruitment crisis?
Maybe he’ll set the ball rolling to remedy that by frogmarching his own two lovely daughters down to the nearest recruiting office. (There’s another wellknown chickenhawk who could follow that example, too.)
H’mm. Come to think of it, they’ve extended the upper age-limit for active service to the extent that Tom himself could also sign up. Three members of the Friedman family– great!
Now, about the next 139,997 new recruits…
Actually, I’m kinda disappointed. I have disagreed with just about everything my old bud’ Tom has written on Iraq in the past four years. But usually he at least makes logical, well-informed arguments.
But this one?

Jim Hoagland, MSM’s war-drum-beater-in-chief in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq (on behalf of his trusted pal, A. Chalabi) seems to be running scared… He’s writing in the WaPo today about a “dangerous” transition point having been reached.
Oh my! What danger might that be, Jim?
Here’s what he wrote:

That dangerous transition point could be glimpsed in this month’s Post-ABC News survey, when 52 percent of those polled said that the war in Iraq was not contributing to American security and 49 percent said they disapproved of President Bush’s handling of the global war on terrorism.
Polls are snapshots that change quickly, as White House aides quickly pointed out. But this one reflects my own anecdotal sense of a shift that I have been hearing about from politicians and activists in the nation’s capital and elsewhere over the past six weeks. This survey should be treated by the White House as a serious warning.

Here’s more of his diagnosis of this “danger”:

It is not just the surge of violence in both conflicts in the past month that is shaking support for Bush. It is also the growing concern of middle-of-the-road Americans that they cannot trust the information they are being given by the administration — and particularly by the Pentagon — about the conduct and progress of these wars…
The failure to discover weapons of mass destruction in Iraq has forced the administration to emphasize the moral reasons that underlie the case for regime change, a cause I argued for through four successive administrations. But it is American morality — not Saddam Hussein’s demonstrated lack thereof — that is becoming a defining issue now, however unfair that may seem.

So is he calling for greater morality and accountability for all participants in US political life? That might seem logical don’t you think?
Nah. If our Jimbo were to do that, he might have to face up to to the nefarious role he himself played in having beaten the drums for this war.
He might feel he ought to apologise, at the very least, to the families of the nearly 1,700 US service members killed in Iraq to date– as well as to all Iraqis for the devastation that the war he helped to bring about has visited on their country.
If he were Japanese, then considering the gravity of the suffering he has materially helped to cause in the world, he might consider falling on his sword in repentance.
No, Jim, I’m not recommending harakiri. Some kind of reparative action would be far more useful for the world. (Contact me if you want suggestions. I have plenty.)
But starting out with a full mea culpa, and a clear apology, and a resignation from the extremely high-paid and respected position you occupy in the WaPo could be a good place to start.

You have to know a President is losing political capital rapidly when he finds himself at a public press conference– as Bush did yesterday— having to answer a question about whether he has been losing political capital.
The loss of political capital was alleged in this article in yesterday’s WaPo, by Peter Baker and Jim VandeHei. They wrote:

Two days after winning reelection last fall, President Bush declared that he had earned plenty of “political capital, and now I intend to spend it.” Six months later, according to Republicans and Democrats alike, his bank account has been significantly drained.
In the past week alone, the Republican-led House defied his veto threat and passed legislation promoting stem cell research; Senate Democrats blocked confirmation, at least temporarily, of his choice for U.N. ambassador; and a rump group of GOP senators abandoned the president in his battle to win floor votes for all of his judicial nominees.
With his approval ratings in public opinion polls at the lowest level of his presidency, Bush has been stymied so far in his campaign to restructure Social Security. On the international front, violence has surged again in Iraq in recent weeks, dispelling much of the optimism generated by the purple-stained-finger elections back in January, while allies such as Egypt and Uzbekistan have complicated his campaign to spread democracy…

In Tuesday’s press conference, Bush demonstrated how deeply he is “out of it” by responding to a question on Iraq with a disquisition on the Taliban. (?)
He also responded to a question about Amnesty International’s claim that the administration has established a “new gulag” around the world by dismissing it as “absurd.”
It took Dana Milbank, in today’s WaPo to add in this significant detail:

“It’s just an absurd allegation,” he said with a chuckle.

Somehow, that “chuckle” really, really upset me.
Does Bush totally lack the ability to see that, whether you challenge the reports of torture and ill-treatment so carefully compiled by Amnesty and other rights groups or not, these issues are ones of deadly seriousness?
Especially for the leader of a world power that claims to be bringing democracy and “freedom” to all the peoples of the world?
Milbank’s piece– which is titled “Spelling nuance with a W”– doesn’t appear to be up on the WaPo’s website yet.
His thesis there is that the blustery, black-and-white worldview W displayed during his first term in office has been replaced by something more closely approaching nuance.
Bill and I agreed, after reading the article, that ‘evasion” would be a better term for it…

The way the White House wants us to ‘think’ about things, they want to blame Newsweek for all the anti-US riots that occurred in Muslim countries last week– and you might think they want to blame Newsweek and the rest of the media for having invented the whole set of allegations about US torture of (mainly) Muslims, in the first place.
Newsweek editor Mark Whitaker seems to have gone into hiding. He should have stood his ground! Though the (un-named) military source who had attributed the claim about the Korans-in-toilets to a certain internal report later– under pressure– retracted that and said he wasn’t sure the claim was in that report after all, there are plenty of other reports from other sources of this having occurred in Gitmo.
Like the ones cited in this Human Rights Watch report.
Moreover, so far as I know neither Whitaker nor anyone on his staff ever tortured anybody– and far less did they ever put in place a whole globe-circling system of torture.
The American Civil Liberties Unon and the New York-based group Human Rights First have both done really groundbreaking work on the US torture issue over the past couple of years.
The ACLU has been doggedly filing “Freedom of Information” (FOIA) requests, to try to get various organs of the US government to do their democratic duty and release to US citizens reports that were written using the citizens’ very own tax dollars. So far it has pried 35,000 government documents into the open, some heavily edited, but many extremely damaging to the Bushies and their acolytes.
The ACLU’s latest report on the torture issue is here.
It includes this quote from ACLU staff attorney Jameel Jaffer:

“The government’s own documents describe literally hundreds of instances in which prisoners have been abused by U.S. military and intelligence personnel… In light of what the documents show, it is simply astounding that senior military and civilian officials still have not been held accountable.”

I like Human Rights First’s take on this issue of command responsibility. This is a page they have titled, “One year later [i.e. after the revelations of Abu Ghraib]: Where are they now?”
Learn all about these people:

Don Rumsfeld– still Secdef…
Alberto Gonzales– promoted to Attorney-General with the full “consent” of the U.S. Senate…
Barbara Fast– now in charge of the Army’s main interrorgation training facility …
Ricardo Sanchez– head of the Army’s V Corps in Europe… etc etc.

Seeing all these high-ups shrugging off any taint from the torture and abuse that have been happening– and that, indeed, continue to happen in various parts of the US gulag around the world–is really enough to make you feel sorry for Private Lynndie England and even, just a little bit, for her immediate abuser Charles Graner.
Actually, it’s worse than that the high-ups managed to “shrug off any taint”. It looks from their resumes as if establishing and implementing the torture system was a good, career-building move for just about everyone above the rank of Colonel. (Except Janis Karpinski.)

Jim Hoagland of the WaPo, who was one of the main, most influential, and most insistent voices in the commentatoriat who goaded a (never-reluctant) Bush administration into the truly disastrous war adventure in Iraq, nowadays seems to be having some second thoughts… Or is he?
He has this truly extraordinary piece in today’s WaPo, which shows, well, if not a distinct change of heart on the virtues of the invasion of Iraq, then at least some lofty (and very muddled-looking) self-distancing from it.
Look, I know the move. As an op-ed writer, you have to meet deadlines; and sometimes an issue is so much in the news that you feel you have to write about that issue. But either you can’t figure out exactly what to say; or else, what you want to say runs so much at odds with what you’ve said before that you have to do an awkward-looking bit of segueing to get into it.
That’s definitely how this extraordinary piece reads. It starts thus:

President Bush and Vice President Cheney fight an inexorable tide that pushes their goal of restoring presidential and national power farther away even as they accelerate their efforts to reach it.
They swim against a tide of the global fragmentation of power in all its forms — economic, political and military. More nations today possess the ability to make and sell inexpensive, good-quality shirt buttons than ever before. The same is true for costly but workable nuclear weapons.
Located at the opposite ends of any spectrum of importance, the spread of consumer goods and of history’s deadliest weapons underlines the need to update our notions of power, whether we are ordinary shoppers or strategists working in the White House
Thirty years ago Americans fantasized (in horror or delight) about U.S. troops occupying oil fields in the Middle East to guarantee low-cost energy. Today U.S. troops fight in Iraq — but China and India determine the record levels of world oil prices more than the White House does. The galloping consumption and fierce competition for supplies and future contracts by the two Asian giants make supply and demand dance on a knife’s edge….

Looks like he’s heading for a big critique of the administration’s militaristic power-grabbing?
But he ends up with this extremely clunky (and unoriginal) ending:

What our leaders have to fear is fear itself. Fear will inhibit the vision and judgment needed to adjust and rebalance power on a global and equitable basis.

What the heck that is meant to mean, I have no idea.
I think the WaPo should just retire this tired old guy, pronto. And perhaps along the way some of us can go back over some of Hoagy’s past war-mongering columns and start laying some symbolic coffins of those thousands of Iraqis and Americans who have died because of the war he so successfully mongered right at his front doorstep.
That’s what Abraham Lincoln did to the secessionist General Robert E. Lee whose actions were responsible for scores of thousands of deaths back in the mid-19th centruy…. Nowadays, what used to be Lee’s front meadows– right up to the front door his house– is called Arlington National Cemetery.
So how about it, Jim? Cleveland Park US-Iraqi Cemetery…

In Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Uzbekistan– indeed, just about everywhere they lay its hands– the Bush administration is showing us that it seems to understand only one faulty “logic”: the logic of a dehumanized military.
Have you read the kinds of reporting that the US mainstream media have been providing about Iraq recently? Long gone are all the slick little reports about anything to do with rebuilding civilian livelihoods in the country. Long past (now) is reporting about the “democratic process” in Iraq– most of which has turned into an impotent quagmire. No, now, the reporting– and more importanyly, the focus of the US officials who dominate it– is almost completely about technical military matters.
Like this piece by Brad Graham in today’s WaPo. It’s all about how rapidly the US military can train a replacement Iraqi army.
Yes, I guess an independent Iraq will want to have some kind of a military (though in an ideal “Europeanized” world, maybe not.) But people who want to counter the current insurgencies in Iraq would do far better to focus on providing decent civilian livelihoods for the great mass of Iraqis rather than on honing– in a terribly uncertain political situation– the military skills of as many tens of thousands of them as it can.
Then there’s this about the adminsitration’s policy toward the atrocity-perpetrating government of Uzbekistan (also from the WaPo):

The U.S. government has sometimes spoken to Uzbekistan with more than one voice. Last summer, then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell refused to certify that Uzbekistan had improved its human rights record, cutting off $18 million for military training. Weeks later, Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, visited Tashkent and criticized that decision as “very shortsighted”; he announced that the United States would be giving $21 million for bioterrorism defense. And the State Department later restored $7 million of the suspended aid, arguing that it was for priorities such as health care and nuclear security.
The result, according to critics, is that Uzbek officials shrug off U.S. complaints about repression. “They don’t take the State Department seriously,” said Tom Malinowski of Human Rights Watch. “They think the Pentagon and CIA will protect them. So the Uzbeks are not inclined to listen to American diplomats when they get lectured on democracy.”
The U.S. anti-terrorism program has conducted 41 training exercises for Uzbek soldiers since 1999, most of them since 2001, and also trained 807 civilian police and security officers over that period. “The focus is on engagement, to develop a professional officer corps for the Uzbek military, and improving counterterrorism and border capabilities,” said Navy Lt. Cmdr. Joe Carpenter, a Pentagon spokesman.

There is, I guess, a certain mindset that believes that military technology can resolve human problems. In normal countries that mindset may bemore or less limited to people in the professional military hierarchy– though goodness knows, military people are often the ones who understand the real human costs of war better than their civilian counterparts.
But in a “normal” democratic country, the professional military come under the command of the elected political leadership, which places the military dimesnion of things within a broader human context of diplomacy, national interest, etc etc.
What is scary about the Bush administration is how far it has departed from this norm– since the civilian leadership itself, in the form of Rumsfeld and Cheney, has the mindset of a bunch of little boys excitedly playing with war-toys on the kitchen floor.
Except that these aren’t “toys” they’re playing with, and it ain’t the kitchen floor. It’s our whole world– or at least as much of it as they can lay their hands on… And everywhere they go, the direct and indirect fallout from their “games” is that thousands– or scores of thousands– of people die, and millions more have their lives and livlihoods wrecked…

Before last year’s election, things were getting so bad in Iraq that the Bush administration was forced to commission two additional studies of “what went wrong?” The higher-level of these studies was the one the Prez commissioned “personally”– the one headed by former Virginia Senator Chuck Robb and legal eagle Larry Silberman.
That one looked into “why the US intel agencies had gotten it so wrong on so many of the ‘claims’ the administration had made about Saddam Hussein’s WMDs, etc, in the lead-up to the war. ” (Wrong question. It wasn’t mainly the work of the intel agencies that was faulty– though certainly, numerous mistakes were made. But it was overwhelmingly the fault of the political leaders who created a clear climate in which the intel chiefs were encouraged to bring in completely skewed intelligence… But the commission wasn’t “allowe” to look into that.)
The other, lower-level and more technical report was one produced by the quasi-nongovernmental Rand Corporation, which looked into the failures of planning for the post-war period in Iraq.
I’ve quickly skimmed the news reports about the Robb-Silberman report, and I think that today’s NYT editorial got it pretty right in its scathing critique of the report this morning:

The president’s commission on intelligence gathering could have saved the country a lot of time, and considerable paper, by not publishing its report yesterday and just e-mailing everyone the Web addresses for the searching studies already done by the 9/11 commission and the Senate Intelligence Committee. After more than a year’s dithering, the panel produced some 600 pages of conventional wisdom about the intelligence failures before the war with Iraq, along with a big dose of political spin that pleased the White House but provided little enlightenment for the public.
We were not optimistic when President Bush was pressured into creating this panel in February 2004. Though bipartisan, its membership lacked stature or independence, and Mr. Bush failed to give the commission a sweeping mandate that would go beyond rehashing the distressing but well-known shortcomings of the intelligence agencies. Still, it seemed worth waiting until after the election for the results because it was hard to imagine that the panel would not ask the vital questions.
Sadly, there is nothing about the central issue – how the Bush administration handled the intelligence reports on Iraq’s weapons programs and presented them to the public to win support for the invasion of Iraq. All we get is an excuse: the panel was “not authorized” to look at this question, so it didn’t bother. The report says the panel “interviewed a host of current and former policy makers” about the intelligence on Iraq, but did not “review how policy makers subsequently used that information.” (We can just see it – an investigator holding up his hand and declaiming: “Stop right there, Mr. Secretary! We’re not authorized to know what you did.”)
Just compare this job with the work of the 9/11 commission, whose chairman, Thomas Kean, battled the White House over access to documents, fearlessly expanded the inquiry and insisted that policy makers testify in public – and not just about the shortcomings of their subordinates.
The report is right in saying that American claims about Saddam Hussein’s weapons programs were “dead wrong” because the intelligence was old or from highly dubious sources, and because the analysis was driven by a predetermined conclusion that Mr. Hussein was a threat. But we knew that.
The panel said timidly that “it is hard to deny the conclusion that intelligence analysts worked in an environment that did not encourage skepticism about the conventional wisdom.” But it utterly ignored the way President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his team, and Condoleezza Rice, as national security adviser, created that environment by deciding what the facts were and saying so, repeatedly.
It does not say that these powerful people knew or should have known that there was no new intelligence on Iraq, and that as the intelligence reports were sanitized for the public, the caveats were stripped out. Instead, it loyally maintains the fiction that Mr. Bush was just given bum information by incompetent intelligence agents.
The way the administration hyped the intelligence on Iraq is not just a matter of intellectual curiosity. It is vital that the public know the answers because Americans are now being asked to accept a new set of claims about nuclear programs in Iran and North Korea. A full airing of this issue could help John Negroponte, after his expected confirmation as national intelligence director, ensure that the missteps and misrepresentations are not repeated as the nation grapples with real threats from those and other countries, not imagined threats from Iraq.
As it stands, the report has mainly negative value. It reminds us that the Senate Intelligence Committee has yet to complete and publish its investigation of the handling of the Iraq intelligence. And it shows us what the 9/11 panel’s report might have looked like if Mr. Bush had succeeded in making Henry Kissinger chairman.

Well said. In general, I think the NYT has been doing a great job with its Iraq-related editorials recently.
Of course, with the Republicans having increased their hold on the Senate in the November elections, I don’t think we should hold our breaths waiting for the Senate Intel Committee’s report to come out with a fearless exposé of the intel-handling issue, either.