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Today's
Stories
December 1, 2003
Bill Christison
US
Foreign Policy and Intelligence: Monstrous Messes
November 29 / 30, 2003
Peter Linebaugh
On
the Anniversary of the Death of Wolfe Tone
Gary Leupp
Politicizing War on Fox News: a Tale of Two Memos
Saul Landau
Lying and Cheating:
Bush's New Political Math
Michael Adler
Inside a Miami Jail: One Activist's Narrative
Anthony Arnove
"They Put the Lie to Their Own Propaganda": an Interview
with John Pilger
Greg Weiher
Why Bush Needs Osama and Saddam
Stephen Banko, III
A Soldier's Dream
Forrest Hylton
Empire and Revolution in Bolivia
Toni Solo
The "Free Trade" History Eraser
Ben Terrall
Don't Think Twice: Bush Does Bali
Standard Schaefer
Unions
are the Answer to Supermarkets Woes
Richard Trainor
The Political Economy of Earthquakes: a Journey Across the Bay
Bridge
Mark Gaffney
US Congress Does Israel's Bidding, Again
Adam Engel
The System Really Works
Dave Lindorff
They, the Jury: How the System Rigs the Jury Pool
Susan Davis
Framing the Friedmans
Neve Gordon
Arundhati Roy's Complaint for Peace
Mitchel Cohen
Thomas Jefferson and Slavery
Ben Tripp
Capture Me, Daddy
Poets' Basement
Kearney, Albert, Guthrie and Smith
November 28, 2003
William S. Lind
Worse Than Crimes
David Vest
Turkey
Potemkin
Robert Jensen / Sam Husseini
New Bush Tape Raises Fears of Attacks
Wayne Madsen
Wag
the Turkey
Harold Gould
Suicide as WMD? Emile Durkheim Revisited
Gabriel Kolko
Vietnam
and Iraq: Has the US Learned Anything?
South Asia Tribune
The Story
of the Most Important Pakistan Army General in His Own Words
Website of the Day
Bush Draft
November 27, 2003
Mitchel Cohen
Why
I Hate Thanksgiving
Jack Wilson
An
Account of One Soldier's War
Stefan Wray
In the Shadows of the School of the Americas
Al Krebs
Food as Corporate WMD
Jim Scharplaz
Going Up Against Big Food: Weeding Out the Small Farmer
Neve Gordon
Gays
Under Occupation: Help Save the Life of Fuad Moussa
November 26, 2003
Paul de Rooij
Amnesty
International: the Case of a Rape Foretold
Bruce Jackson
Media
and War: Bringing It All Back Home
Stew Albert
Perle's
Confession: That's Entertainment
Alexander Cockburn
Miami and London: Cops in Two Cities
David Orr
Miami Heat
Tom Crumpacker
Anarchists
on the Beach
Mokhiber / Weissman
Militarization in Miami
Derek Seidman
Naming the System: an Interview with Michael Yates
Kathy Kelly
Hogtied
and Abused at Ft. Benning
Website of the Day
Iraq Procurement
November 25, 2003
Linda S. Heard
We,
the Besieged: Western Powers Redefine Democracy
Diane Christian
Hocus
Pocus in the White House: Of Warriors and Liberators
Mark Engler
Miami's
Trade Troubles
David Lindorff
Ashcroft's
Cointelpro
Website of the Day
Young McCarthyites of Texas
November 24, 2003
Jeremy Scahill
The
Miami Model
Elaine Cassel
Gulag
Americana: You Can't Come Home Again
Ron Jacobs
Iraq
Now: Oh Good, Then the War's Over?
Alexander Cockburn
Rupert Murdoch: Global Tyrant
November 14 / 23, 2003
Alexander Cockburn
Clintontime:
Was It Really a Golden Age?
Saul Landau
Words
of War
Noam Chomsky
Invasion
as Marketing Problem: Iraq War and Contempt for Democracy
Stan Goff
An Open Letter to GIs in Iraq: Hold on to Your Humanity
Jeffrey St. Clair
Bush Puts Out a Contract on the Spotted Owl
John Holt
Blue Light: Battle for the Sweetgrass Hills
Adam Engel
A DC Lefty in King George's Court: an Interview with Sam Smith
Joanne Mariner
In a Dark Hole: Moussaoui and the Hidden Detainees
Uri Avnery
The General as Pseudo-Dove: Ya'alon's 70 Virgins
M. Shahid Alam
Voiding the Palestinians: an Allegory
Juliana Fredman
Visions of Concrete
Norman Solomon
Media Clash in Brazil
Brian Cloughley
Is Anyone in the Bush Administration Telling the Truth?
William S. Lind
Post-Machine Gun Tactics
Patrick W. Gavin
Imagine
Dave Lindorff
Bush's
Brand of Leadership: Putting Himself First
Tom Crumpacker
Pandering to Anti-Castro Hardliners
Erik Fleming
Howard Dean's Folly
Rick Giombetti
Challenging the Witch Doctors of the New Imperialism: a Review
of Bush in Babylon
Jorge Mariscal
Las Adelitas, 2003: Mexican-American Women in Iraq
Chris Floyd
Logical Conclusions
Mickey Z.
Does William Safire Need Mental Help?
David Vest
Owed to the Confederate Dead
Ron Jacobs
Joe: the Sixties Most Unforgiving Film
Dave Zirin
Foreman and Carlos: a Tale of Two Survivors
Poets' Basement
Guthrie, Albert, Greeder, Ghalib and Alam
Congratulations
to CounterPuncher David Vest: Winner of 2 Muddy Awards for Best
Blues Pianist in the Pacific Northwest!
November 13, 2003
Jack McCarthy
Veterans
for Peace Booted from Vet Day Parade
Adam Keller
Report
on the Ben Artzi Verdict
Richard Forno
"Threat Matrix:" Homeland Security Goes Prime-Time
Vijay Prashad
Confronting
the Evangelical Imperialists
November 12, 2003
Elaine Cassel
The
Supremes and Guantanamo: a Glimmer of Hope?
Col. Dan Smith
Unsolicited
Advice: a Reply to Rumsfeld's Memo
Jonathan Cook
Facility
1391: Israel's Guantanamo
Robert Fisk
Osama Phones Home
Michael Schwartz
The Wal-Mart Distraction and the California Grocery Workers Strike
John Chuckman
Forty
Years of Lies
Doug Giebel
Jessica Lynch and Saving American Decency
Uri Avnery
Wanted: a Sharon of the Left
Website of the Day
Musicians Against Sweatshops
November 11, 2003
David Lindorff
Bush's
War on Veterans
Stan Goff
Honoring
Real Vets; Remembering Real War
Earnest McBride
"His
Feet Were on the Ground": Was Steve McNair's Cousin Lynched?
Derek Seidman
Imperialism
Begins at Home: an Interview with Stan Goff
David Krieger
Mr. President, You Can Run But You Can't Hide
Sen. Ernest Hollings
My Cambodian Moment on the Iraq War
Dan Bacher
The Invisible Man Resigns
Kam Zarrabi
Hypocrisy at the Top
John Eskow
Born on Veteran's Day
Website of the Day
Left Hook
November 10, 2003
Robert Fisk
Looney
Toons in Rummyworld: How We Denied Democracy to the Middle East
Elaine Cassel
Papa's Gotta Brand New Bag (of Tricks): Patriot Act Spawns Similar
Laws Across Globe
James Brooks
Israel's New War Machine Opens the Abyss
Thom Rutledge
The Lost Gospel of Rummy
Stew Albert
Call Him Al
Gary Leupp
"They
Were All Non-Starters": On the Thwarted Peace Proposals
November 8/9, 2003
Kathleen and Bill Christison
Zionism
as Racist Ideology
Gabriel Kolko
Intelligence
for What?
The Vietnam War Reconsidered
Saul Landau
The
Bride Wore Black: the Policy Nuptials of Boykin and Wolfowitz
Brian Cloughley
Speeding Up to Nowhere: Training the New Iraqi Police
William Blum
The Anti-Empire Report:
A Permanent Occupation?
David Lindorff
A New Kind of Dancing in Iraq: from Occupation to Guerrilla War
Elaine Cassel
Bush's War on Non-Citizens
Tim Wise
Persecuting the Truth: Claims of Christian Victimization Ring
Hollow
Toni Solo
Robert Zoellick and "Wise Blood"
Michael Donnelly
Will the Real Ron Wyden Please Stand Up?
Mark Hand
Building a Vanguard Movement: a Review of Stan Goff's Full Spectrum
Disorder
Norman Solomon
War, Social Justice, Media and Democracy
Norman Madarasz
American Neocons and the Jerusalem Post
Adam Engel
Raising JonBenet
Dave Zirin
An Interview with George Foreman
Poets' Basement
Guthrie, Albert and Greeder
November 7, 2003
Nelson Valdes
Latin
America in Crisis and Cuba's Self-Reliance
David Vest
Surely
It Can't Get Any Worse?
Chris Floyd
An Inspector
Calls: The Kay Report as War Crime Indictment
William S. Lind
Indicators:
Where This War is Headed
Elaine Cassel
FBI to Cryptome: "We Are Watching You"
Maria Tomchick
When Public Transit Gets Privatized
Uri Avnery
Israeli
Roulette
November 6, 2003
Ron Jacobs
With
a Peace Like This...
Conn Hallinan
Rumsfeld's
New Model Army
Maher Arar
This
is What They Did to Me
Elaine Cassel
A Bad
Day for Civil Liberties: the Case of Maher Arar
Neve Gordon
Captives
Behind Sharon's Wall
Ralph Nader and Lee Drutman
An Open Letter to John Ashcroft on Corporate Crime
November 5, 2003
Jeffrey St. Clair
Just
a Match Away:
Fire Sale in So Cal
Dave Lindorff
A Draft in the Forecast?
Robert Jensen
How I Ended Up on the Professor Watch List
Joanne Mariner
Prisons as Mental Institutions
Patrick Cockburn
Saddam Not Organizing Iraqi Resistance
Simon Helweg-Larsen
Centaurs
from Dusk to Dawn: Remilitarization and the Guatemalan Elections
Josh Frank
Silencing "the Reagans"
Website of the Day
Everything You Wanted to Know About Howard Dean But Were Afraid
to Ask
November 4, 2003
Robert Fisk
Smearing
Said and Ashrawi: When Did "Arab" Become a Dirty Word?
Ray McGovern
Chinook Down: It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Vietnam
Woodruff / Wypijewski
Debating
the New Unity Partnership
Karyn Strickler
When
Opponents of Abortion Dream
Norman Solomon
The
Steady Theft of Our Time
Tariq Ali
Resistance
and Independence in Iraq
November 3, 2003
Patrick Cockburn
The
Bloodiest Day Yet for Americans in Iraq: Report from Fallujah
Dave Lindorff
Philly's
Buggy Election
Janine Pommy Vega
Sarajevo Hands 2003
Bernie Dwyer
An
Interview with Chomsky on Cuba
November 1 / 2,
2003
Saul Landau
Cui
Bono? The Cuba Embargo as Rip Off
Noam Chomsky
Empire of the Men of Best Quality
Bruce Jackson
Midge Decter and the Taxi Driver
Brian Cloughley
"Mow the Whole Place Down"
John Stanton
The Pentagon's Love Affair with Land Mines
William S. Lind
Bush's Bizarre Korean Gambit
Ben Tripp
The Brown Paste on Bush's Shoes
Christopher Brauchli
Divine Hatred
Dave Zirin
An Interview with John Carlos
Agustin Velloso
Oil in Equatorial Guinea: Where Trickle Down Doesn't Trickle
Josh Frank
Howard Dean and Affirmative Action
Ron Jacobs
Standing Up to El Diablo: the 1981 Blockade of Diablo Canyon
Strickler / Hermach
Liar, Liar Forests on Fire
David Vest
Jimmy T99 Nelson, a Blues Legend and the Songs that Made Him
Famous
Adam Engel
America, What It Is
Dr. Susan Block
Christy Canyon, a Life in Porn
Poets' Basement
Greeder, Albert & Guthrie
October 31, 2003
Lee Ballinger
Making
a Dollar Out of 15 Cents: The Sweatshops of Sean "P. Diddy"
Combs
Wayne Madsen
The
GOP's Racist Trifecta
Michael Donnelly
Settling for Peanuts: Democrats Trick the Greens, Treat Big Timber
Patrick Cockburn
Baghdad
Diary: Iraqis are Naming Their New Babies "Saddam"
Elaine Cassel
Coming
to a State Near You: The Matrix (Interstate Snoops, Not the Movie)
Linda Heard
An Arab View of Masonry
October 30, 2003
Forrest Hylton
Popular
Insurrection and National Revolution in Bolivia
Eric Ruder
"We Have to Speak Out!": Marching with the Military
Families
Dave Lindorff
Big
Lies and Little Lies: The Meaning of "Mission Accomplished"
Philip Adams
"Everyone is Running Scared": Denigrating Critics of
Israel
Sean Donahue
Howard Dean: a Hawk in a Dove's Cloak
Robert Jensen
Big Houses & Global Justice: A Moral Level of Consumption?
Alexander Cockburn
Paul
Krugman: Part of the Problem
October 29, 2003
Chris Floyd
Thieves
Like Us: Cheney's Backdoor to Halliburton
Robert Fisk
Iraq Guerrillas Adopt a New Strategy: Copy the Americans
Rick Giombetti
Let
Them Eat Prozac: an Interview with David Healy
The Intelligence Squad
Dark
Forces? The Military Steps Up Recruiting of Blacks
Elaine Cassel
Prosecutors
as Therapists, Phantoms as Terrorists
Marie Trigona
Argentina's War on the Unemployed Workers Movement
Gary Leupp
Every
Day, One KIA: On the Iraq War Casualty Figures
October 28, 2003
Rich Gibson
The
Politics of an Inferno: Notes on Hellfire 2003
Uri Avnery
Incident
in Gaza
Diane Christian
Wishing
Death
Robert Fisk
Eyewitness
in Iraq: "They're Getting Better"
Toni Solo
Authentic Americans and John Negroponte
Jason Leopold
Halliburton in Iran
Shrireen Parsons
When T-shirts are Verboten
Chris White
9/11
in Context: a Marine Veteran's Perspective
October 27,
2003
William A. Cook
Ministers
of War: Criminals of the Cloth
David Lindorff
The
Times, Dupes and the Pulitzer
Elaine Cassel
Antonin
Scalia's Contemptus Mundi
Robert Fisk
Occupational Schizophrenia
John Chuckman
Banging Your Head into Walls
Seth Sandronsky
Snoops R Us
Bill Kauffman
George
Bush, the Anti-Family President
October 25 / 26,
2003
Robert Pollin
The
US Economy: Another Path is Possible
Jeffrey St. Clair
Outsourcing US Guided Missile Technology to China
James Bunn
Plotting
Pre-emptive Strikes
Saul Landau
Should Limbaugh Do Time?
Ted Honderich
Palestinian Terrorism, Morality & Germany
Thomas Nagy
Saving the Army of Peace
Christopher Brauchli
Between Bush and a Lobotomy: Killing Endangered Species for Profit
Laura Carlsen
Latin America's Archives of Terror
Diane Christian
Evil Acts & Evil Actors
Muqtedar Khan
Lessons from the Imperial Adventure in Iraq
John Feffer
The Tug of War on the Korea Peninsula
Brian Cloughley
Iraq War Memories are Made of Lies
Benjamin Dangl
and Kathryn Ledebur
An Uneasy Peace in Bolivia
Karyn Strickler
Down
with Big Brother's Spying Eyes
Noah Leavitt
Legal Globalization
John Stanton
Hitler's Ghost Haunts America
Mickey Z.
War of the Words
Adam Engel
Tractatus Ridiculous
Poets' Basement
Curtis, Subiet and Albert
Website of the Weekend
Project Last Stand
October 24, 2003
Kurt Nimmo
Ashcroft's
War on Greenpeace
Lenni Brenner
The Demographics of American Jews
Jeffrey St. Clair
Rockets,
Napalm, Torpedoes and Lies: the Attack on the USS Liberty Revisited
Sarah Weir
Cover-up of the Israeli Attack on the US Liberty
David Krieger
WMD Found in DC: Bush is the Button
Mohammed Hakki
It's Palestine, Stupid!: Americans and the Middle East
Harry Browne
Northern
Ireland: the Agreement that Wasn't
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Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Subcomandante Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
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Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
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Impeach
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Click Here
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|
December
1, 2003
US Foreign Policy:
a Monstrous Mess
US
Intelligence Policy: Also a Monstrous Mess
By BILL CHRISTISON
former
CIA analyst
I want to tell you right at the start what my
strongest belief is about the present U.S. position in the world.
It's this. The United States of America is today in a monstrous
mess with its current foreign policies.
Now, to repeat, I believe this, but I
don't think most other Americans do. In fact, I think it's fair
to say that a majority of people in the United States still,
even after the events of the last few months, would not agree
with me that the United States needs to change its foreign policies
in major ways. Maybe some of you here will not agree with me.
But give me a chance and hear me out, and then, during the question-and-answer
period, we should be able to get a good discussion going.
Before we go any further, I want to make
a couple of comments on a matter that directly affects the CIA,
where I used to work. I'm talking about one of the recent "hot-button"
issues in Washington, the nasty and small minded effort, carried
out quite obviously by as yet unnamed individuals in the White
House, to gain revenge on an ex-U.S. Ambassador, Joseph Wilson,
by ruining the career of his wife, Valerie Plame, who has been
a CIA case-officer under non-official cover. I have two entirely
different comments I want to make on this.
One is that the intent of the White House
here, quite clearly it seems to me, is to warn other people in
Washington's foreign affairs bureaucracy not to get out of line
or they'll run into serious trouble. In other words, the intent
is to squelch legitimate criticism and opposition. All I can
say is, I hope our legal system works well enough to prevent
those who damaged these two people from getting off scot-free.
What the perpetrators did was reprehensible, and I hope there
are no legal loopholes that allow them to get off.
The other comment I want to make on this
case, though, is to me much more important. This case creates
a new side-issue. AND IT IS A SIDE-ISSUE, a side-issue that creates
a great danger of distracting us from what is really important
to the nation, that is, bringing about major changes in U.S.
foreign policies. Look at what's already happening. All of the
Democratic candidates for president have leapt on this issue
because it's a great one and an easy one to pound the Republicans
with. They don't have to talk about the harder questions of actually
doing something to change U.S. policies, and so most of them
don't. It's kind of like an issue involving sex; you can make
a Roman circus out of it and distract people from the things
that ought to be more important. We should not let that happen.
To repeat, what I think we ought to do is to hold all politicians'
feet to the fire, and make them pursue policies that turn us
away from the goal of global domination, and cut back our ridiculously
high levels of military expenditures, and, just incidentally
of course, also cut back our equally ridiculous level of expenditures
today on intelligence and covert actions. So watch out for Roman
Circuses, and don't be distracted.
While we're on the subject of the CIA,
let's stay with it a little longer. The CIA was established over
half a century ago, after World War II, to coordinate the entire
U.S. intelligence community. This intelligence community today
includes over a dozen different agencies and, contrary to general
perception, the CIA does not actually control any of the others.
Over all these years, this multiplicity of agencies has led to
inefficiencies, duplication, waste, and internal rivalries. Everyone
should remember that the CIA was created for the express purpose
of preventing a second Pearl Harbor from ever happening. Half
a century later, on September 11, 2001 another Pearl Harbor did
occur, and it occurred first and foremost because of an inexcusable
failure to exchange information within the intelligence community.
As far as I can see, there is even today
no "smoking gun" that would point to dereliction of
duty personally by President George W. Bush with respect to September
11, although it is possible that evidence will appear in the
future to change this judgment. But the evidence that has emerged
over the past two years makes it clear that the U.S. government
as a whole suffered a massive intelligence failure. If the CIA
report delivered to the President on August 6, 2001, had been
supplemented, either then or at any later time before September
11, with other information that was available at the time to
the FBI, the president would have had a more direct responsibility.
The evidence available today is that the CIA did not receive
that additional information until after September 11, and that
no one else reported it to the president before the horrendous
acts of that date took place. So the massive failure, as far
as we can tell at this point, was within the intelligence community
itself. I want to emphasize that I'm talking here only about
September 11, not about intelligence concerning the war against
Iraq, or weapons of mass destruction or the presence or absence
of ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda.
Let's stay for the moment with September
11 and with this intelligence failure. What happened on that
day exemplifies, better than anything else I can think of, the
dilemma that underlies practically every question you can come
up with about how the U.S. intelligence establishment should
be organized and managed. The dilemma is this. If the United
States really wants an intelligence apparatus of maximum efficiency,
it would require a CIA, or some new organization with a different
name, that would be truly "central" and have real control
over all the components. The danger, and the other horn of the
dilemma, is that the resulting organization could be a monster,
a bull in a china shop, a body too powerful to accept in what
is supposed to be a democracy.
My own belief is that while the country
clearly needs an effective intelligence service, there should
be a lot more public discussion of how big and how "centralized"
it should actually be. My own vote would be against creating
a CIA organized largely as it is now, but with much greater power
so that it could truly dominate and control the rest of the intelligence
community. I also believe that the big increases in the amounts
of money that seem to be going to the CIA and other intelligence
agencies (reportedly rising from some $29 to $30 billion to over
$35 billion annually) are not necessary.
Rather than spending time arguing over
how much money should be spent on intelligence, however, there
are far more important changes, in my view, that should be made
in the CIA and the intelligence community. The most serious problem
facing this "community" today is that the individual
agencies far too frequently provide biased analyses that either
reflect the preferred policies of the agencies themselves or
cater to the policy desires of the White House. It's difficult
for the intelligence components of the Defense Department, for
example, to present analyses of foreign military capabilities
that might undercut the desires of Defense budgeteers for more
money. To one degree or another, similar difficulties face analysts
in the intelligence components of the State Department, the FBI,
the Energy Department and elsewhere.
The CIA's analytical components, which
sometimes pride themselves on having the only intelligence analysts
without policy axes to grind, cannot in truth lay claim to any
greater objectivity. They can be influenced by their own director,
a political appointee, and by White House officials who want
analytical backing for both overt policies and covert actions
they desire to pursue. You should add to these pressures the
turf rivalries and differing agency cultures that at their best
and with no malice can make exchanging information imperfect,
and at their worst can result in one or another agency deliberately
refusing to pass information on to the CIA or another agency,
often under the guise that the information is "too sensitive"
to pass on.
The CIA itself, not being part of one
of the government's major established departments (State, Defense,
etc.), flourishes or fades depending on its relations, and especially
the relationship of its director, with the incumbent president,
vice-president, and national security advisor. Very important
in this regard is the fact that the CIA has two major parts:
a covert collection and covert action unit, and an analytical
unit. Of the two, most recent presidents have regarded the covert
collection and action part of the agency as the more important.
It is the part of the CIA that allows an action-oriented president
(and what president wants to be identified in any other way?)
to do things, to take actions, all supposedly in secret. That
tends to make many directors of central intelligence reluctant
to present to the president reports and studies from the analytical
unit, if those studies implicitly or explicitly criticize the
president's policy preferences or the CIA director's own covert
action recommendations in support of the president's policies.
There have been exceptions; a few CIA directors have been very
strong in presenting analyses to the president that they knew
would not be well received, but I do not think that the present
director, George Tenet, has been one of those exceptions. The
almost inevitable internal conflict between the two separate
jobs that all Directors of Central Intelligence must carry out,
however, has probably had some effect on every one of them over
the last half-century.
Now, how should this be changed, assuming
one had the power to do so? I'd like to see new legislation that
would completely split the analytical part of the CIA from the
covert operational, or spooky, part. Even without control over
the other intelligence agencies, the present CIA with its two
parts is in some ways too powerful, and therefore too dangerous
to have in a democracy, in my opinion. In other ways, the director
of the CIA, whoever he may be, is too often conflicted; that
is, as I've just tried to explain, he is too much in conflict
with himself over the two separate parts of his job, and it's
almost impossible for him to do both parts equally well. In my
view, the operational part of the agency should become a separate
organization with a new name and be run directly out of the White
House. At the same time, every covert operation should by law
require the written approval of the president, designated committee
chairmen of the Congress, and the chief justice of the Supreme
Court. All three branches of the government should be represented
here. Generally, no covert intelligence operations abroad should
be carried out by any other intelligence agencies.
The analytical part of what is now the
CIA should, under this proposal of mine, become another separate
agency, and could either keep the present name, CIA, or not.
It doesn't matter. But the new head of this agency would be the
head only of this analytical body. A key and critical change
here should be that under new legislation the head of this analytical
body should be appointed for a 10-year term. This would give
a new director of this agency a higher degree of independence
than the present and previous directors of the CIA have had,
and make him or her less a part of any given administration.
Senior officers of this new agency should be assigned to every
other intelligence agency, and should by statute have access
to every substantive piece of paper produced by the other agency.
Other intelligence agencies should have
the right to produce and disseminate any intelligence analyses
they wished, but the new government-wide analytical intelligence
agency, with access to all sources, would produce any reports
it wished, on its own initiative, and it would also be responsible
for answering any and all requests for analyses from the White
House, the Congress, and the chief justice of the Supreme Court.
The new agency should have absolutely no operational or covert
action responsibilities, and having no such responsibilities,
it should not pose an unacceptable danger to our form of government.
(The head of the FBI, by the way, is already appointed for a
ten-year term, and the danger that arose under J. Edgar Hoover
of an FBI director becoming too powerful , at least in the eyes
of many of us, came about at least in part because the FBI director
does have significant operational and action responsibilities,
including, in conjunction with the Justice Department, the power
of arresting people or harassing them through the FBI's investigative
powers. The head of a new, exclusively analytical CIA, or a renamed
agency, would have no such operational powers.)
My belief is that such independence is
the most important thing now lacking in the analytical components
of the intelligence community. Obviously I no longer have any
access to, or detailed information about, the hundreds of specific
things that the present CIA director tells the president and
other top leaders of the government. But I have read very carefully
the unclassified parts of the George Tenet's briefings over the
past couple of years to committees of the Congress. As far as
I can see, he has rarely said anything that President Bush would
not have liked to hear. In a world as complex as the one we live
in today, I find that somewhat alarming.
Now, let's get back to the mess that
I think the U.S. government has made of its foreign policies.
Right now, there are two key issues on which U.S. foreign policies
need to change, in my view. Number one is the need, even today,
to continue opposing this wretched invasion and occupation of
Iraq by the Bush administration. And number two is the need to
support an "evenhanded" approach to the Israel-Palestine
conflict.
On this latter issue, the Bush administration
is not evenhanded at all; it is almost entirely supportive of
present Israeli policies. And no recent administration, whether
Republican or Democratic, has been truly evenhanded either. On
the Democratic side in the coming election, Dennis Kucinich has
explicitly favored evenhandedness, occasionally at least, and
Howard Dean recently also did so. Dean, however, immediately
met a buzz-saw of opposition from Joseph Lieberman and John Kerry,
and has already backed away from his earlier statement. None
of them wants to be charged with anti-Semitism, although all
they would be doing by supporting evenhandedness would be criticizing
some of the policies of the U.S. government and the government
of Israel, and that is not anti-Semitism under any legitimate
definition of that word.
This issue is so important in the Arab
and Muslim worlds and also elsewhere that, in my opinion, any
hopes for peace and a lasting reduction of wars and terrorism
will be utterly impossible to realize unless the U.S. adopts,
for the first time in decades, a policy of true evenhandedness
toward Israel and Palestine. To repeat, lasting peace in the
Middle East and a reduction of terrorism cannot happen, in my
opinion, unless a resolution of the Palestinian issue can be
reached that offers as much justice to the Palestinians as to
the Israelis.
On the question of Iraq, now that the
so-called coalition of the U.S. and Great Britain is actually
occupying that country, we should support a real and immediate
transfer of power from the U.S. to the United Nations. This,
I strongly believe, is the only U.S. policy that makes sense.
The U.S. should give up both its drive for global domination
and its drive to advance Israel's hegemony in the entire Middle
East through military action. The invasion of Iraq was the first
step in this drive, and it is time for the U.S., right now, to
accept the defeat of even this first step. The alternative seems
to me to be perpetual guerrilla wars of attrition against the
U.S. in the Middle East and the entire Muslim world, more killings
and deaths on all sides, more terrorism against the U.S. and
whatever allies it has left, and an altogether unstable world
in coming decades. The massive military power of the U.S. simply
does not give us the weapons to prevent such eventualities.
But the transferring of real power in
Iraq from the U.S. to the United Nations is only a first step--an
absolutely necessary first step toward many other changes in
U.S. foreign policies, all of which should lead to greater cooperation
with the rest of the world and away from unilateralism. It should
be a first step toward a negotiated abolition of all weapons
of mass destruction, not just Iraq's, or North Korea's, or Iran's.
It should be a step away from the absurd ideas of global domination
held by the Bush administration even though the U.S. contains
only five percent of the world's population, as well as a step
away from preemptive wars, and away from a further massive expansion
of U.S. military forces, including nuclear forces, beyond all
real need. And, it should be a step away from sacrificing the
domestic needs of our society and our people to the aggressive
foreign policies that Bush seems intent on continuing. And one
more point: I hope it would be a first step toward ridding this
country of what is really the root cause of most of what is wrong
with the U.S. government, the stranglehold that big money from
the corporate and military-industrial establishment has over
our increasingly corrupt political system.
Let's move to the issue of Iraq and weapons
of mass destruction. I don't propose to spend much time on how
the U.S. has failed so far to find any weapons of mass destruction,
because that's all over the newspapers. The real answer, I think,
is that the U.N. weapons' inspection program worked, and the
Bush administration's lies and scare tactics now look pretty
silly. France and Germany, and at that time Russia, were essentially
right in their judgment that we should allow the inspections
to continue, and that there was no imminent danger to cause the
U.S. to invade Iraq. The U.S. is paying for that misjudgment
now, in its inability to persuade other countries to support
us in the occupation of Iraq. But again, you can hear or read
all about this on the television and the radio and in the newspapers
every day.
I want to talk more about the global
problem of proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, which
is going to be very important to us in years to come. U.S. propaganda
mouths nice words about preventing the further proliferation
of such weapons, while U.S. policies actually encourage a further
proliferation. The fact is that today the relative ease with
which weapons of mass destruction can spread to new areas of
the world makes all nations much more vulnerable to events that
can severely damage their own national security, and the security
and stablility of the entire globe.
Technology as well as U.S. policy has
played a role here. With respect to nuclear weapons, for example,
for the past almost 60 years it has gradually become a little
easier each year to acquire a nuclear weapon and some type of
delivery system. Now, after all these years, it's appreciably
easier for a number of nations to obtain a nuclear weapon than
it was 20 or 30 years ago. North Korea is a good example. But
I think in general the same thing applies to other nations, and
to other weapons of mass destruction and delivery systems. In
another decade or two, it will be even easier than it is now
to acquire such weapons.
Let's talk about North Korea for a minute
or so. The North Korean case has made it clearer than ever that
in a world of nation-states, the only world we'll have for some
time to come, small countries are increasingly able to obtain
nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction. One small country,
Israel, got nuclear weapons in the 1960s, but its ties with an
acquiescent United States made it a special case. North Korea
has now become the second small country to acquire nuclear weapons.
The Bush administration is, in my view,
seriously in error if it believes that it can ever so dominate
the rest of the world militarily that it can suppress all future
nuclear and other threats against itself from weapons of mass
destruction. The best rational judgment one can make today, I
think, is that the opportunity for global domination is already
lost to this and any future administration of the United States.
Not only the threats but also the actuality of further nuclear
and other weapons-of-mass-destruction proliferation will almost
certainly increase in the next few years. This is in some measure
because of the increasing ease with which nuclear weapons technology
seems to be spreading around the world. But the vastly different
approaches by the U.S. toward Iraq on the one hand and North
Korea on the other just make more rapid proliferation even more
likely.
Largely because North Korea already has
a few nuclear weapons, the U.S. has been deterred from the kind
of aggressive action it has employed against non-nuclear Iraq,
and has been forced to rely on diplomacy. And that's a good thing.
But the point here is that at a minimum, nuclear weapons alone
will probably make it possible for North Korea to stand up to
the U.S. for a longer period than most of us up to now would
have thought possible. This will automatically make other nations
of the world, and probably some sub-national groups too, see
even greater value in having their own nuclear weapons, and other
weapons of mass destruction as well. Jonathan Schell, one of
the most astute analysts in the United States on weapons of mass
destruction, emphasized this in a recent major speech on U.S.
foreign policy, when he pointed out that the lesson to other
nations was, "Get nuclear weapons and get them fast."
U.S. policies for the past half century
do indeed deserve most of the blame for this. Except as a propaganda
tool, every U.S. administration since Harry Truman's has in practice
made the spread of nuclear weapons, the major type of weapons
of mass destruction, a less important issue than the short-term
perceived needs of U.S. national security. No administration
has ever been willing even to discuss giving up the United States'
own nuclear weapons. In these same years, however, most U.S.
leaders and practically every American foreign policy or intelligence
"expert" who ever worked on the nuclear-proliferation
issue understood that, given this cast-in-concrete U.S. policy,
preventing the further spread of such weapons among either friends
or foes over the long run was impossible. The result is that
over the past half-century, the U.S. has badly botched, and been
completely hypocritical about, its alleged policy of opposing
nuclear proliferation. The administrations of Presidents Kennedy
and Johnson, who made the most noise against proliferation, are
regarded by the Arab and Muslim worlds as the most hypocritical
of all, because these two administrations acquiesced in Israel's
acquisition of nuclear weapons during the 1960s.
Most U.S. policymakers, past and present,
seem not to understand how profoundly mistrusted we are because
of our lenient attitude toward Israel's nuclear capability. Many
other nations will never accept a status quo that perpetuates
Israeli possession of nuclear weapons and at the same time prevents
them from ever acquiring such weapons. They will always be suspicious
that the U.S. really opposes nuclear proliferation only for its
enemies, while acting too often as a hidden enabler of proliferation
for its friends. Add to this that the U.S., in the persons of
George W. Bush, Richard Cheney, and Colin Powell, earlier this
year was caught out in presenting distorted and false intelligence
information about Iraq's alleged nuclear weapons program. It's
hard to see how any other nations can have much confidence in
what the U.S. says with respect to weapons of mass destruction
in the future.
I personally also have a problem with
waging a preemptive war over this issue, that is, a war that
we ourselves start, againstIraqor any other nation that we believe
is trying to acquire nuclear or other weapons of mass destruction.
As part of its official military doctrine,
the U.S. government publicly declared just last year, in September
2002, that it would be perfectly proper to launch a preemptive
war against any such nation. This is aU.S.policy change of extreme
importance. In the more than 58 years since the age of nuclear
weapons began, the U.S. has deliberately decided, time after
time,notto launch wars against any nations for simply acquiring,
rather thanusing, the most important type of weapons of mass
destruction, nuclear weapons. Ever since shortly after World
War II, we have rejected launching wars against theSoviet Union,China,England,France,Israel,India,
andPakistan, all of whom have acquired nuclear weapons.If theU.S.is
really concerned about the further spread of such weapons, we
should understand that other nations--not justIraq- will over
the long run never go along withU.S.desires until theU.S.,Israel,
and other nuclear powers themselves show a real willingness to
negotiate seriously on creating an entire nuclear-weapons-free
world.And this is precisely, in my opinion, what theU.S.should
do.
A few more comments are necessary here.
Wars inevitably kill innocent people, often in large numbers.
That's an obvious cliche, but it is true. Even if Congress gave
the CIA and the rest of the U.S. intelligence community unlimited
resources and reorganized the complete intelligence apparatus
of the country so that it became infinitely more efficient that
it's ever been, one thing is crystal clear, and I want to emphasize
this: IT IS BEYOND BELIEF THAT THE U.S. COULD EVER COUNT ON HAVING
INTELLIGENCE GOOD ENOUGH TO MAKE LAUNCHING A PREEMPTIVE WAR MORALLY
ACCEPTABLE. There is almost always an element of guesswork with
respect to a potential enemy's intentions, and those intentions
can change instantly--and at the last moment.
This question of intentions is vital.
It is not enough, despite the Bush administration's arguments
to the contrary, to know that some possible enemy possesses and
has thecapabilityto use weapons of mass destruction. You need
to know--and know for sure--theintentionsof that possible enemy
as well. Even if you have a 90-percent degree of confidence in
your judgment of what another country, or a sub-national group,
truly intends to do, initiating a preemptive war and killing
innocent people is still a prohibitively immoral action. You
should also understand that even your 90-percent degree of confidence
is nothing but a guess. Any way you slice it, you are killing
people on the basis of a guess. And to believe that any nation's
intelligence services can ever provide a 100 percent degree of
confidence is just one more form of arrogance.
To wrap all this up, the U.S. does not
have a consistent or meaningful policy on preventing the further
spread of weapons of mass destruction, and most senior U.S. officials
know full well that we will never devote a top priority to preventing
that further spread unless and until the U.S. becomes willing
to negotiate seriously on giving up its own such weapons and
to induce its closest allies to do likewise.
Another issue that needs to be mentioned
in connection with U.S. policies in the Middle East today is
the problem of religious fundamentalism. U.S. propaganda these
days occasionally still mouths nice words about most Muslims
being good people, not dominated by fundamentalist ideology.
But at the same time, U.S. policies seem to be strengthening
fundamentalism around the entire world.
To me, all fundamentalism is dangerous.
Islamic fundamentalism will surely be one of the factors encouraging
more terrorism against the U.S., Great Britain, and Israel in
the wake of the Iraq war. Judaic fundamentalism encourages terrorism
by the settlers in the West Bank and Gaza, as well as state terrorism
by the Israeli military. And Christian fundamentalism here in
this country will encourage the Bush administration to extend
full support to Israel's continued occupation and colonization
of the West Bank and Gaza.
The Christian fundamentalists in the
U.S. will also provide strong support for the Bush administration's
plans for more regime changes throughout the Middle East, by
military force if necessary, to create a new colonialism in the
region dominated by some type of partnership between the U.S.
and Israel.
Over the past couple of years under the
Bush administration, and especially now that the Iraq war has
become a full-blown occupation and guerrilla war, these trends
have become well established in U.S. foreign policy. I believe
that they are extremely dangerous because they may lead to a
new world war, a Judeo-Christian World War against Islam. I think
we should do everything we can to prevent such a war.
Now, we cannot turn off religious fundamentalism
anywhere with just a wave of our hand. And I would submit that
it is both a terribly wrong policy and an immoral policy to try
to turn it off by military action and killing people in one part
of the world, the Islamic world, while encouraging Judaic fundamentalism
to flourish in the Palestinian occupied territories, and encouraging
Christian fundamentalism to grow stronger in the U.S. Yet that
is precisely what U.S. foreign policies today are doing.
Rather than anyone's using military action
and warfare to control religious fundamentalism, it would be
far better to create the kinds of conditions around the world
that would help the moderate forces in each of the three religions
to control their own fundamentalists. I think the moderate elements
in all of these religions are probably more numerous than the
fundamentalists, but they are less well organized and less driven
to achieve their aims and agenda.
The main point I want to make here is
that there is really no other moral and civilized way to deal
with the global problem of fundamentalism than to allow, and
to encourage by peaceful means and exclusively peaceful means,
the three major religions and their unique cultures to deal with
their own problems of extremists in their own way. This is not
a perfect world, but one thing I am very sure of is that the
use of military action, especially by outsiders, to solve these
deeply embedded religious problems, will make this world an entirely
imperfect and unstable place to live in for years, and possibly
decades, to come.
Now I'd like to go back to Iraq and its
tie-in with the United Nations. George Bush's own father, President
Bush the First, wrote something worth remembering in a book that
he and his National Security Adviser, Brent Scowcroft, published
in 1998:
"Trying to eliminate Saddam, extending
the ground war into an occupation of Iraq, would have violated
our guideline about not changing objectives in midstream, engaging
in 'mission creep,' and would have incurred incalculable human
and political costs. Apprehending him was probably impossible.
We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule
Iraq. The coalition would instantly have collapsed, the Arabs
deserting it in anger and other allies pulling out as well. Under
those circumstances, there was no viable 'exit strategy' we could
see, violating another of our principles.
"Furthermore, we had been self-consciously
trying to set a pattern for handling aggression in the post-Cold
War world. Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding
the United Nations' mandate, would have destroyed the precedent
of international response to aggression that we hoped to establish.
Had we gone the invasion route, the United States could conceivably
still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land. It would
have been a dramatically different--and perhaps barren--outcome."
[Again, this was written by Bush the First in a 1998 book entitled
A World Transformed, page 489.]
In my remarks so far, I've suggested
that any U.S. strategy for an exit from Iraq ought to rely more
heavily on the United Nations in the future than the U.S. has
done in the past. If we are going to rely more on the U.N., we
ought to make it a better U.N. In fact, I believe that all of
us interested in the future of the world ought to be working
right now toward changing the United Nations, which is now close
to 60 years old, into something that will meet the needs of the
21st Century more effectively than the present U.N. organization.
The least of the U.N.'s problems is that Japan and Germany, defeated
powers at the end of World War II, are now nations that we all
need to recognize as major powers on this globe. There are also
other powerful nations that either did not exist as independent
states or are now much stronger than they were in 1945, India,
Pakistan and Brazil being among them.
The easy answer, of simply making all
or some of these nations permanent members of the U.N. Security
Council with the veto power, however, is not enough; in fact,
that may be the wrong answer. Many argue that it would be better
to abolish the veto and work instead toward introducing some
sort of democratically elected international parliament that
would cross national borders. Others, of course, oppose the entire
concept of making the U.N. more democratic, or reducing in any
way the sovereignty of national states. Quite a few people in
the U.S. would probably oppose any United Nations organization
that was not thoroughly subservient to the U.S. There ought to
be a major debate on all this, and I personally think that it
should be a high priority of all of us who consider ourselves
to be internationalists, and who support the concept of a stronger
United Nations, to participate actively in such a debate.
Given the inevitability of more rather
than less economic globalization around the world, we should
not automatically reject the notion of at least the early stages
of some kind of world government coming to us in the fairly near
future. World government may be just as inevitable as more globalization.
The real questions are the extent to which such a government
will be democratic, and the extent to which it will instead be
dictatorial, as such bodies as the WTO and NAFTA are today. (The
WTO is, by the way, what some might define as already an early
stage of world government in the economic area.) Again, if we
truly want a reasonable exit strategy from Iraq, one that will
encourage more peace and stability around the world in the next
few decades rather than more terrorism and warfare, we should
rely on the U.N. far more in the future than we have in the past.
The only point I want to make here is that in doing that, we
also probably should encourage major changes in the U.N. that
will make it a stronger organization. This, in turn, would require
additional major changes in U.S. foreign policies. I certainly
don't know all the answers here. What I do know is that the people
of this country need to engage in a major debate on the question
of how much national sovereignty our own country should be willing
to give up.
One final comment is necessary here.
These days, theU.S.government decides unilaterally who are terrorists
and who are not in black-and-white terms utterly lacking in the
grays that might arise from knowledge, wisdom, or simple caution
and doubt. Palestinians are always among the black terrorists;
Israeli settlers and soldiers are invariably among the white
good guys--enemies of terrorism, never terrorists themselves.
Iraqi Baathists are also among the black guys these days, as
are Chechen rebels. American and Russian soldiers? Never. Chris
Hedges, the New York Times correspondent who is the author of
a powerful recent book titled, War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning,
put it like this is a speech he gave earlier this year: "We
are part of a dubious troika, in the war against terror, with
Vladimir Putin and Ariel Sharon, two leaders who do not shrink
in Palestine or Chechnya from carrying out acts of gratuitous
and senseless violence. We have become the company we keep."
It's my strong belief that everyone in
the United States, and perhaps in the entire world, will have
to pay one day not only for the company the U.S. government now
keeps, but also for the policies this administration is carrying
out in the selfish pursuit of global domination. It would be
much better, in my view, if theU.S.government did the smart thing
and changed these policies, right now. An American friend of
ours, who has lived for years in the Middle East and is an expert
on the area, recently wrote to us and really caught our attention.
He said this: "For many people living outside the United
States, it is incomprehensible that most Americans would actually
take pride in bombing into submission pitifully weak countries
like Afghanistan and Iraq, the moral equivalent of a teenager
beating up a three-year-old. In their eyes, such behavior should
be cause for shame and embarrassment, not for pride."
Who, do you suppose, will be the next
three-year-old? I'd guess it'll be Syria. Or will it be Iran?
Or will we be caught by the surprise of a revolution in Saudi
Arabia, in which case the U.S. might feel it must occupy the
oil fields of northern Saudi Arabia by military force--in order
to keep the oil flowing?
The distaste and hatred of U.S. foreign
policies that are rising daily around the world from such thoughts
as these should not be minimized.
Bill Christison
joined the CIA in 1950, and served on the analysis side of the
Agency for 28 years. From the early 1970s he served as National
Intelligence Officer (principal adviser to the Director of Central
Intelligence on certain areas) for, at various times, Southeast
Asia, South Asia and Africa. Before he retired in 1979 he was
Director of the CIA's Office of Regional and Political Analysis,
a 250-person unit.
Bill and his wife Kathleen are also contributors
to CounterPunch's hot new book: The
Politics of Anti-Semitism.
The Christison's can be reached at: christison@counterpunch.org
Weekend
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Anthony Arnove
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Why Bush Needs Osama and Saddam
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Empire and Revolution in Bolivia
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The "Free Trade" History Eraser
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Mark Gaffney
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The System Really Works
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They, the Jury: How the System Rigs the Jury Pool
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Mitchel Cohen
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