Neo-Conned! Again

by D Liam O'Huallachain

  It is an important question. In my view, the need to protect the civil liberties of American citizens must trump other exigencies when rights embedded in the Constitution are at risk. The reorganization dictated by the latest reform legislation cannot be permitted to blur or erode constitutional protections. That would be too high a price to pay for hoped-for efficiencies of integration and scale. Rather, there is a continuing need for checks and balances and – especially in law enforcement – clear lines of demarcation within the executive branch as well as outside it. Unfortunately, the structure and functions of the oversight board created by the most recent intelligence legislation make a mockery of the 9/11 Commission's insistence that an independent body be established to prevent infringement on civil liberties. Sadly, the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board created by the new law has been gutted to such a degree that it has become little more than a powerless creature of the President.

  The concern over endangering civil liberties is fact-based. In discussing it we are not in the subjunctive mood. No one seemed to notice, but on June 16, 2004, when CIA director Porter Goss was chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, he actually introduced legislation that would have given the President new authority to direct the CIA to conduct law-enforcement operations inside the United States – including arresting American citizens. This legislation would have reversed the strict prohibition in the National Security Act of 1947 against such CIA activities in the U.S. Goss's initiative got swamped by other legislation in the wake of the 9/11 Commission report. More recently, Goss's answers to Senators' questions regarding CIA interrogation techniques and the use of torture have been disingenuous and, at times, transparently evasive. For the most part, Senators and Representatives have allowed themselves to be diddled by such evasive testimony. And with the U.S. media thoroughly domesticated, there is essentially no one to hold the administration accountable. The White House, the congressional intelligence committees, and the media simply tell us that we should await the results of another ongoing investigation on torture, this one led by CIA Inspector General John Helgerson!

  Second Wind for COINTELPRO?

  Some of us are old enough to remember operation COINTELPRO, in which the FBI, CIA, Army Intelligence, and other agencies cooperated closely in provocative and often unlawful actions targeting civil rights leaders like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., protesters against the Vietnam War, and a wide range of left-and right-wing groups. We thus have a reallife reminder of what can happen when lines of jurisdiction are blurred and super-patriots are given carte blanche to pursue U.S. citizens in time of war. History can repeat itself.

  A year and a half ago, FBI guidance to local police anticipating peace marches in Washington, D.C., and protest demonstrations in Miami blurred the line between legitimate protesters and “terrorists.” Local authorities and police were advised, for example, to watch for telltale behavior like raising money via the Internet, or going limp upon arrest. Such behavior, they were told, were signs that they might be dealing with “terrorists.”

  Let's be clear. There is in this country an already discernible trend toward the establishment of a national security state of the kind I closely observed during my career as an analyst of Soviet affairs. Our intelligence and security establishment has come to resemble more and more what the Russians called their all-powerful “organs of public safety,” which were – pure and simple – tools of the ruling party. If this trend continues here, it is entirely conceivable that civil liberties may come to be regarded as an artifact of the past. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales may even feel free to characterize laws protecting them as “obsolete” or “quaint” – adjectives he applied to provisions of the Geneva Conventions. Gonzales, you may recall, was the chief White House counsel who advised President Bush that he could disregard with impunity the Geneva Conventions' prohibitions, and also have a “reasonable” chance of avoiding subsequent prosecution under U.S. law, specifically the War Crimes Act (18 U.S.C. §2441) of 1996.

  The January 25, 2002, torture-is-not-only-okay-but-necessary memorandum from Gonzales to President Bush is just one of several signs that the President has been advised by his lawyers that – to put it simply – he is above the law. He has acted on that advice and there is plenty of disquieting evidence that he intends to continue doing so. If you have read down this far, you probably are among those who have succeeded in overcoming the common resistance to admitting that to yourself.

  And yet we keep hearing the glib denial, “It could not happen here.” Please tell your friends it has already begun to happen here. Tell them it is time for all of us to wake up and do something about it.

  In Sum

  Intelligence reform in a highly charged political atmosphere – laced with a pinch of hysteria – gathers a momentum of its own. The reform bill Congress passed late last year creates more problems than it solves, largely because the changes do not get to the heart of the main problem. Again, what is lacking is not a streamlined organizational chart, but integrity. Character counts.

  My own recommendations – for any who might be interested – include some simple organizational changes, but have mostly to do with integrity.1The leadership sets the tone, and one very important lesson leaping out of the performance of intelligence on Iraq is that greater care needs to be exercised in selecting intelligence community leaders. Next, the process of creating relevant, timely, apolitical National Intelligence Estimates needs to be improved and inoculated against politicization, with managers held accountable for their performance.

  Organizational changes. Imagery analysis should be returned, agendafree, to the CIA, after languishing in the Department of Defense for the past nine years, so that chicken coops can once again be distinguished from missile storage facilities, and imagery can again act as a check on information peddled by dubious émigré sources. Had professional imagery analysts been able to report their findings without fear of their ultimate master, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, the tenuousness of the evidence on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq could have been injected into the debate. (Remember? Rumsfeld said he knew where they were!)

  In addition, CIA must rebuild its independent media analysis capability. The Analysis Group of the agency's Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS) filled that role after Pearl Harbor for more than 50 years, and enjoyed wide respect in government and academe, before shortsighted senior CIA managers disbanded it a decade ago. Both the 9/11 Commission and the more recent presidential commission led by Judge Lawrence Silberman and former Senator Chuck Robb recommended new emphasis on media analysis, and the Silberman-Robb panel even proposed creating a separate “directorate” for that purpose. That is hardly necessary. All that is needed is (1) to acknowledge that it was a huge mistake to abolish FBIS's Analysis Group, and (2) to reconstitute it, staffing it with supervisors who are familiar with the tools of the exacting but fruitful discipline of media analysis. Such expertise could, for example, give the President and his advisers a better understanding of terrorism and what breeds it (beyond the “they hate our democracy” mantra).

  “You Will Know the Truth … ”

  Chiseled into the marble wall at the entrance to CIA Headquarters is: “You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” This was the ethos of the intelligence analysis directorate during most of the 27 years I spent there.

  The experience of the past four years suggests a visit might be in order to ensure that the inscription has not been sandblasted away. Many of us alumni are astonished that, of the hundreds of analysts who knew in 2002 and 2003 that Iraq posed no threat to the U.S., not one had the courage to blow the whistle and warn about what was about to happen. And even Paul O'Neil and Richard Clarke, who are to be commended for eventually speaking out, waited until it was too late to stop the administration from launching an unprovoked war.

  This is by no means a water-over-the-dam issue. If plans go forward for an attack on Iran, it may become necessary for those intelligence
professionals with the requisite courage to mount their own preemptive strike against the kind of corrupted intelligence that greased the skids for war on Iraq. That this would mean going to the press, preferably with documentation, is a sad commentary. But no alternatives with any promise are available. The normal channel for such redress, the inspector generals of the various agencies, is a sad joke. And the prospect for any appeal to the intelligence lapdog/watchdog intelligence committees of Congress is equally sad – and even more feckless.

  1. Report on the U.S. Intelligence Community's Prewar Intelligence Assessments on Iraq, July 7, 2004.

  2. Report of The Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction, March 31, 2005.

  1. The Senate Intelligence Committee's investigation into the Iraq intelligence debacle was supposed to look into the use/misuse of intelligence by administration officials in their public statements. Senator Roberts was successful in postponing that part of the inquiry until after the November 2004 election, in return for a promise to pursue it as “phase II” of the committee's investigation. In March 2005 Roberts dismissed the need for “phase II,” but when Democrats on the committee objected to his reneging, he expressed reluctant willingness to go forward. “Phase 2” was also supposed to look into the role of the Office of Special Plans. Time will tell. [Also vide supra, p. 271, note 2.—Ed.]

  1. Reported on by Robert Dreyfuss in the July 7, 2003, issue of The Nation and a July 17, 2003, piece in The Guardian by Julian Borger.

  2. “DoD's Role in Pre-War Iraq Intelligence: Setting the Record Straight,” remarks for the Center for Strategic and International Studies, May 3, 2004.

  1. See Seymour Hersh, “Selective Intelligence,” The New Yorker, May 12, 2003, online; Julian Borger, “The Spies Who Pushed for War,” The Guardian, July 17, 2003, online; Robert Dreyfuss and Jason Vest, “The Lie Factory,” Mother Jones, January/February, 2004, online; Report on the U.S. Intelligence Community's Prewar Intelligence Assessments on Iraq, July 7, 2004, pp. 361–636; and Senator Carl Levin, Report of an Inquiry into the Alternative Analysis of the Issue of an Iraq-al-Qaeda Relationship, October 21, 2004, passim.

  1. See “A Compromised Central Intelligence Agency: What Can Be Done” in Patriotism, Democracy, and Common Sense: Restoring America's Promise at Home and Abroad (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004).

  The only defensible war is a war of defense.

  —G. K. Chesterton, Autobiography, 1937

  THE PROFESSIONALS SPEAK III:

  WAR COLLEGE PROFESSORS APPLY THEIR EXPERTISE

  THE EDITORS' GLOSS: For a coherent, comprehensive, and persuasive dissection of the strategic viability of the “war on terror,” one need look no further than Dr. Record's incisive comments in the following interview. Were Dr. Record a French liberal, his perspective could easily be dismissed by ad hominem arguments accusing him of a deep-seated anti-Americanism, carefully sidestepping the fact that the substance of what he says would still be unimpeachable. The fact is, however, that Dr. Record is a respected professional in the U.S. military academic community, a professor at the Department of Strategy and International Security at the U.S. Air Force's Air War College in Montgomery, Ala., and a recipient of a doctorate from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. In other words, he's neither a lightweight nor a blowhard.

  His analysis of the mistake of mixing Iraq up with the Bush administration's “war on terror” cuts to the heart of the problem that Iraq poses for the U.S. at this very moment. As people increasingly discover that by removing Saddam – who is now starting to look like a master statesman in his governorship of a terribly divided and difficult country in the light of the evident incompetence of both Washington and its puppet regime in Baghdad – we have unleashed a whole slew of far more challenging and dangerous problems, the administration has to resort to ever more bloated rhetoric defending what is going on in Iraq in terms of 9/11. For a root analysis of what a disaster this was and remains, Dr. Record's analysis is unparalleled.

  CHAPTER

  19

  The “War on Terror”: Ingenious or Incoherent?

  ………

  An Interview with Prof. Jeffrey Record, Ph.D.

  PROFESSOR, ON MAY 1, 2003, President Bush announced, perhaps prematurely, the end to “major combat operations” from aboard the USS ABRAHAM LINCOLN. He also said that “the battle of Iraq is one victory in a war on terror that began on September the 11, 2001, and still goes on.” This statement is surprising, because many people – ourselves included – imagined Iraq to be something separate from the government's declared “war on terror.”

  JR: Strategically, Operation IRAQI FREEDOM was not part of the Global War on Terrorism, or “GWOT”; rather, it was a war-of-choice distraction from the war of necessity against al-Qaeda. Indeed, it will be much more than a distraction if the United States fails to establish order and competent governance in post-Saddam Iraq. Terrorism expert Jessica Stern, in August 2003, warned that the bombing of the UN headquarters in Baghdad was “the latest evidence that America has taken a country that was not a terrorist threat and turned it into one.” How ironic it would be that a war initiated in the name of the GWOT ended up creating “precisely the situation the administration has described as a breeding ground for terrorists: a state unable to control its borders or provide for its citizens' rudimentary needs.”1 Former CIA Director of Counterterrorism Operations and Analysis Vincent Cannistraro agrees: “There was no substantive intelligence information linking Saddam to international terrorism before the war. Now we've created the conditions that have made Iraq the place to come to attack Americans.”2

  Iraq and the “War on Terror”

  LID: So if there was initially no connection between terrorism and Iraq, then it wasn't necessarily a good idea to treat Iraq as if it were part of the GWOT – especially if we've now made it one by invading the country.

  JR: The conflation of al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein's Iraq as a single, undifferentiated terrorist threat was a strategic error of the first order because it ignored critical differences between the two in character, threat level, and susceptibility to U.S. deterrence and military action. The result has been an unnecessary preventive war of choice against a deterred Iraq that has created a new front in the Middle East for Islamic terrorism and diverted attention and resources away from securing the American homeland against further assault by an undeterrable al-Qaeda. The war against Iraq was not integral to the GWOT, but rather a detour from it. Moreover, Operation IRAQI FREEDOM saddled the U.S. armed forces, especially the U.S. Army, with costly and open-ended imperial policing and nation-building responsibilities outside the professional military's traditional mission portfolio. The major combat operational phase of the war against Iraq unexpectedly and seamlessly morphed into an ongoing insurgent phase for which most U.S. ground combat forces are not properly trained.

  LID: So you really think that the war in Iraq was an unnecessary expanding of the GWOT?

  JR: Yes. In conflating Saddam Hussein's Iraq and Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda, the administration unnecessarily expanded the GWOT by launching a preventive war against a state that was not at war with the United States and that posed no direct or imminent threat to the United States, at the expense of continued attention and effort to protect the United States from a terrorist organization with which the United States was at war.

  LID: You say “preventive” war: what do you mean by that, exactly?

  JR: According to the Defense Department's official definition of the term, Operation IRAQI FREEDOM was a preventive war, which traditionally has been indistinguishable from aggression, not a preemptive attack, which in contrast to preventive war has international legal sanction under strict conditions. Preemption is “an attack initiated on the basis of incontrovertible evidence that an enemy attack is imminent.” Preventive war is “a war initiated in the belief that military conflict, while not imminent, is inevitable, and that to dela
y would involve greater risk.”1

  LID: Now if the war in Iraq was really unnecessary, how is it that it became part of the administration's approach to dealing with terrorism?

  JR: Frankly, the goals of the GWOT also encompass regime change, forcible if necessary, in rogue states, and in the case of at least Iraq, the transformation of that country into a prosperous democracy as a precursor to the political transformation of the Middle East.

  LID: Forcible regime change? That seems a little disturbing, given not only George Washington's parting recommendation to the nascent America that she avoid “entangling alliances,” but also the sense most Americans have that we approach other nations in an equitable, “live and let live” kind of fashion.

  JR: Threatening or using force to topple foreign regimes is nothing new for the United States. During the 20th century, the United States promoted the overthrow of numerous regimes in Central America and the Caribbean, and occasionally in the Eastern Hemisphere (e.g., in Iran in 1953, South Vietnam in 1963, the Philippines in 1986).

  LID: Incredible. At any rate the GWOT is about a lot more than just dealing one-on-one with bin Laden?

  JR: Absolutely. Let me summarize it for you this way: the GWOT ledger of goals – war aims – thus far includes:

  (1) destroy the perpetrators of 9/11 – i.e., al-Qaeda;