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June 30, 2004
Open Thread
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Some interesting thoughts by George Packer in The New Yorker WARS AND IDEAS
titbits:
Only two serious, and competing, versions of the Iraq war’s meaning are left standing: one, that this is a war against tyranny and for democracy; the other, that this is a war of American domination
This is sometimes called American exceptionalism, and it’s another idea that the Iraq war should lay to rest.
The Administration has given idealism a bad name, and it will now take years to rescue Vaclav Havel from Paul Wolfowitz.
Posted by: Bernhard | Jun 30 2004 14:04 utc | 1
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. officials may move hundreds of prisoners from a base in Cuba to facilities within the United States after Supreme Court rulings that granted military detainees access to U.S. courts, the Los Angeles Times reported on Wednesday.
Posted by: route66 | Jun 30 2004 16:26 utc | 2
Just came by to say hello.
And Bernhard, since you asked for corrections, “todays” should read “today’s”.
Thanks for setting this up, Bernhard.
Very interesting tidbits, Bernhard & route66
Posted by: x | Jun 30 2004 17:40 utc | 3
This is just a test. Do not adjust your CRT:
It’s moi. Just checking out the site and I’ve bookmarked it. I hope some of the brilliant posters at Billmon’s find their way here. The recent column Billmon wrote about current and past right-wing ideology left me numb. I saved everything he wrote to reread a few times later. Anyway, not much to write about other than the weather here and it’s raining again today.
Posted by: Incognito | Jun 30 2004 17:49 utc | 4
I just posted this at atrios:
Anonymous no more?
NEW YORK
The active U.S. intelligence officer known only as “Anonymous,” who has gained world renown this month as author of an upcoming book called “Imperial Hubris,” is actually named Michael Scheuer, according to an article in the Boston Phoenix today by Jason Vest.
Speculation about his identity has run rampant since a June 23 article in The New York Times discussed the book and the background of the author. The book, “Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror,” asserts, among other things, that Osama bin Laden is not on the run and that the invasion of Iraq has not made the United States safer.
In that June 23 piece, the Times identified Anonymous as a 22-year CIA veteran who ran the Counterterrorist Center’s bin Laden station from 1996 to 1999, adding that a “senior intelligence official” held that revealing the man’s full name “could make him a target of Al Qaeda.” Anonymous has appeared in brief television interviews always in silhouette.
According to Vest, “Nearly a dozen intelligence-community sources, however, say Anonymous is Michael Scheuer — and that his forced anonymity is both unprecedented and telling in the context of CIA history and modern politics.”
http://tinyurl.com/34zuo
Posted by: route66 | Jun 30 2004 17:52 utc | 5
If you like the economical stuff or just some very eloquent writing take a look at todays Buttonwood Column titled “America: the world’s biggest hedge fund”.
His conclusion:
markets are again starting to realise that the only way in which this can be corrected in the long term is by a sharply lower dollar.
Buttonwood likes this, because:
His pony-mad younger daughter is enthralled by the idea of a holiday on a dude ranch.
Posted by: Bernhard | Jun 30 2004 18:04 utc | 6
@route66
very interesting – who ordered that guy to stay anonymous for what reason? It must have been obvious that the name would come up and the issue be in the news.
The original Boston Phoenix article is The secret history of Anonymous
The author of Imperial Hubris is unmasked and says he fears for his job at the CIA, not for his life at the hands of Al Qaeda
Anonymous does not, in fact, want to be anonymous at all
BTW The article doesn´t think he is just provoking
Anonymous is not squishy: both Hubris and Eyes seem sufficiently apocalyptic to warm the heart of someone as anti-Islamic and bloodthirsty as, say, Ann Coulter.
Posted by: Bernhard | Jun 30 2004 18:23 utc | 8
Ray McGovern had a piece out this week on Imperial Hubris where he hinted at annon’s identity. “…the last thing the Bush administration needed was publication of the challenging judgments of a CIA analyst who devoted 17 years to tracking al-Qaeda and other terrorists. That analyst (let’s call him Mike) wrote that..” which he evidently didn’t have much trouble finding out… “Asked yesterday to comment on these biting charges, National Security assistant Condoleezza Rice refused on grounds that she did not know who Anonymous is. Did she not think to ask the CIA? If I had no trouble finding out, certainly she should have none.”
Posted by: b real | Jun 30 2004 18:34 utc | 9
@Fran
welcome – works like Billmons site. To add a link in the comments type
<A HREF=”http://http://www.whatever.org/page.html“>visible link text</A>
where you replace http://www.whatever.org/page.html with the URL you want to link to and visible link text with the text you want to be seen as link.
I´ll set up an FAQ later
Posted by: Bernhard | Jun 30 2004 18:44 utc | 10
Just dropping in to say hi all.
This is nifty, Bernhard, thanks.
Posted by: four more wars | Jun 30 2004 18:52 utc | 11
IMPERIAL HYBRIS
The conclusion in my earlier post about the revealing of Anonymous “BTW The article doesn´t think he is just provoking” is wrong – I only did read the article when I posted. In the grey side bar next to the article Jason Vest cites the book and the interviews and explains:
Scheuer’s fits of bellicosity are best understood in context, so here’s a brief summation of the book. …
Indeed, Scheuer blasts most elite experts, whatever their political or philosophical persuasion, for “a process of interpreting the world so it makes sense to us, a process yielding a world in which few events seem alien because we Americanize their components.” Ultimately, “ignorance of their own and world history, failure to appreciate the power of faith, and disdain for the views and analyses of idiosyncratic American and non-Westerners” begets a particularly perilous imperialism.
In Scheuer’s view, because the American public seems either unwilling or unable to hold an honest debate about the wisdom of certain US policies, the insurgency will perpetuate and multiply.
his call for a purely militaristic approach is premised on the idea that current US policies won’t change. “It’s less about advocacy,” he said, “than provocation for debate.”
Unfortunatly, I am not optimistic that this debate, IF it takes place, will result in a different US policy.
Posted by: Bernhard | Jun 30 2004 20:18 utc | 13
Phew… It would have been truly frightening if a man of Scheuer’s intelligence had been on the dark side of the force. He was simply too good from the beginning to dismiss him as one of the loonies.
As to a different US policy: never underestimate our American friends. The system is after all made by people, so it can be undone by people. If only for some personal friends and a certain bunch of Americans I have come to like lately, I hope there will be a change.
Posted by: teuton | Jun 30 2004 20:45 utc | 14
Fed increases rate to 1.25%
NYT writes:
It said it considered “the upside and downside risks to the attainment of both sustainable growth and price stability for the next few quarters are roughly equal.”
Ouuch – glas-half-empty-read on this:
Chances for a downturn of sustainable growth is 50%
Chances for NOT having price stability is 50%
If the Fed comes up with such wordings they must be frightend. I wonder how long, after the spin that is sure to follow now, the markets will need to understand this.
It will be interesting to read fedwatcher Mr. Berry, who will have a comment on Bloomberg tomorrow. Usually he gets the interpretation right.
Posted by: Bernhard | Jun 30 2004 20:58 utc | 15
…from an interesting review of a new book by James Bamford
In recounting the failures of intelligence before 9/11, Bamford points to missed clues about the hijackers and the poisonous rivalry (not to mention fatal lack of communication) between the CIA and FBI. He also writes that a special unit of the CIA named Alec Station, which was set up in 1996 “with the sole mission of collecting intelligence” on bin Laden and “disrupting his network,” had an abysmal record. He adds: “It was George Tenet’s biggest secret. Not only was Al Qaeda never penetrated, neither the Counterterrorism Center nor Alec Station ever picked up a single piece of usable intelligence on bin Laden or his organization, the country’s greatest threat.”
.
Bamford observes that when Tenet declared war on terrorism – in the wake of the 1998 embassy bombings in Africa – it was so low-key that senior officials at the Pentagon and the FBI had not heard of it. And he points out that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who actually controls a large portion of America’s spy world, was “far more concerned with downsizing the Pentagon than reorganizing and reinvigorating the intelligence community” when he entered office.
.
In the end Bamford’s conclusions are alarming, if not unfamiliar ones: incompetence, timidity and a lack of readiness contributed to the failure to prevent the terrorist attacks of 9/11, and misinformation, ideology and poor intelligence led to the decision to go to war on Iraq.
.
The New York Times By James Bamford. Nonfiction. 420 pages. $26.95. Doubleday.
In the walk-up and wake of the Iraq war, it’s no secret that one of the most bitter battles in Washington has been between the CIA and the State Department on one side, and neoconservative hawks in the Pentagon and White house on the other. Intelligence and State Department officials have characterized the neocons as hawkish ideologues who entered office before 9/11 with an agenda to depose Saddam Hussein. They have accused the hard-liners of cherry-picking and hyping intelligence to sell the war.
.
The hawks have characterized the CIA as a bunch of risk-averse, bean-counting bureaucrats, hobbled by what Richard Perle has called “ideologically liberal assumptions.” They have accused the agency of continuing intelligence failures, from the overthrow of the shah’s government in Iran in 1979 to the terrorist attacks of 9/11.
.
As James Bamford, the author of two respected books on American intelligence, tells it, there is plenty of blame to go around. “A Pretext for War” draws a damning portrait of U.S. intelligence agencies as woefully ill equipped to deal with the threats of terrorism and a post-cold war world. It also draws a scathing picture of ideologues in the Bush administration, manipulating dubious evidence about links between Al Qaeda and Saddam and flawed information about weapons of mass destruction in the push toward war.
.
In addition Bamford suggests that the CIA caved in to pressure from hard-liners. He quotes a CIA case officer who says that in January 2003, one of the agency’s higher-ups called a meeting and said, “If Bush wants to go to war, it’s your job to give him a reason to do so.” And he writes that the CIA chief, George Tenet, said of the provocative intelligence about Iraq that Secretary of State Colin Powell presented to the United Nations in February 2003: “I’m standing behind it 100 percent,” even though much of that intelligence later turned out to be flawed, and Tenet stated in 2004 that his agency “never said there was an ‘imminent’ threat” from Saddam.
.
Much of the information and many of the theories in Bamford’s book will be familiar to readers from magazine and newspaper articles and other books. But he unearths new details about everything from the identity of one of the undisclosed locations used by Vice President Dick Cheney after 9/11 (Site R, a secret military command post on the Maryland-Pennsylvania border) to the failures of a special CIA unit charged with tracking bin Laden, and he connects the many dots, both old and new, to create a vivid, unsettling narrative.
.
Discursive in organization, the book provides selective context for the failure to prevent the attacks of 9/11 and Bush’s path to war. Bamford is highly persuasive in recounting how U.S. intelligence agencies lacked specialists in many key Middle Eastern languages and a sufficient number of analysts to grapple with an avalanche of cyber-age data, and shows how even though Americans like John Walker Lindh had been secretly joining Al Qaeda, operatives appear to have made little effort to penetrate terror organizations, preferring the decorous, low-risk tack of trying to recruit foreign embassy officials at cocktail parties.
.
Bamford does not address the broader question of how cold war paradigms shaped the thinking of such key Bush administration members as the national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, and Cheney. And unlike James Mann in “Rise of the Vulcans,” he does not delve into many of the larger factors shaping the hawks’ thinking – from their experiences in dealing with the Soviet Union to their appropriation of the Wilsonian idea of exporting democracy abroad.
.
What he does focus on is the role that Israel has played in shaping American policy. Bamford contends that “the blueprint for the new Bush policy” on the Middle East “had actually been drawn up five years earlier by three of his top national security advisers” (Richard Perle, Douglas Feith and David Wurmser) for the Israeli prime minister at the time, Benjamin Netanyahu (who rejected the plan), and that when they entered office in January 2001, all these hawks needed was “a pretext” for war against Iraq. Citing a report from the British newspaper The Guardian, Bamford adds that the Office of Special Plans, a Pentagon unit set up by Feith, “forged close ties to a parallel, ad hoc intelligence unit within Ariel Sharon’s office in Israel,” which “was designed to go around the country’s own intelligence organization, Mossad.”
.
In recounting the failures of intelligence before 9/11, Bamford points to missed clues about the hijackers and the poisonous rivalry (not to mention fatal lack of communication) between the CIA and FBI. He also writes that a special unit of the CIA named Alec Station, which was set up in 1996 “with the sole mission of collecting intelligence” on bin Laden and “disrupting his network,” had an abysmal record. He adds: “It was George Tenet’s biggest secret. Not only was Al Qaeda never penetrated, neither the Counterterrorism Center nor Alec Station ever picked up a single piece of usable intelligence on bin Laden or his organization, the country’s greatest threat.”
more
Posted by: route66 | Jun 30 2004 20:58 utc | 16
didn’t mean to post that much, my cut and paste finger failed me…my bad
Posted by: route66 | Jun 30 2004 21:00 utc | 17
@route66
so Scheuer was boss the of the Alec Station taskforce and Bamford says he didn´t get the job done. He also puts Blame on Tenet.
Now why did Tenet warn Bush so intensly on Al Qaida before 9/11? On what information could he do so if he was clueless?
Interesting fighting going on in the bowels of the secret business.
Posted by: Bernhard | Jun 30 2004 21:11 utc | 18
He was getting old and skinny and his hair was falling out, and he sat around our VFW Post, telling stories of his past. It was of a war that he had fought in, and the deeds that he had done. You see, in his adventures with his buddies, they were heroes everyone. And though sometimes to his best friends, his tales became a joke, but we young ones all listened, because we knew whereof he spoke. Now we’ll hear his tales no longer, for Cpl. Francis has passed away. And the world is a little poorer, for a Veteran died today.
In Memory of Cpl. Francis Ciminera – 1921-June 30, 2004, 7th AAF, MidPac, WW 2. He hated Bush.
This is a great place to hang out.
Posted by: sen. bob | Jun 30 2004 21:14 utc | 19
italics off, please.
(Over at Billmon’s there was an automatic setting for /i at the end of every post. You might consider doing same here.)
Posted by: x | Jun 30 2004 21:21 utc | 20
, all these hawks needed was “a pretext” for war against Iraq.
it seems obvious they knew the attack might be coming. i mean if you needed a pretext for war and one was coming rapped in a neat package wouldn’t you just go on vacation and wait? a small (only 3000) sacrafice. they used 9/11 after for their war, doesn’t seem like a stretch to think they used it before.
hi bernard. thanks
love the format
Posted by: annie | Jun 30 2004 23:36 utc | 25
ah, what a tangled web to unravel….a key question….to what extent were the Taliban reps involved in Cheney’s war counsil….er,,I mean, “energy meetings”…
And when we come to it
To the day of peacemaking
When we release our fingers
From fists of hostility
And allow the pure air to cool our palms
Posted by: route66 | Jun 30 2004 23:45 utc | 26
My copy of James Bamford’s “A Pretext for War” came in the mail yesterday. I’m about 3/4 through it.
I’ve been waiting for Anon to get outed. Laura Rozen flatly stated last week on her War and Piece blog that the outing was about to commence.
I’m impressed by Bamford’s scathing criticism of the intelligence services. They are worse than useless if they generate disinformation. He’s particularly harsh on the utter failure of Mike’s “Alec” section to produce any results in three years and hundreds of millions of dollars. The problem seems to be that instead of doing intelligence (i.e. information gathering) they were doing denial ops through mercenaries (trying to kill Bin Laden.) They accomplished neither.
So the debate inside the intelligence community is the utterly incompetent versus the corruptly dishonest.
DOD announces plans to immunize Korea based troops for smallpox and anthrax
http://tinyurl.com/3bmnk
Posted by: route66 | Jun 30 2004 23:54 utc | 28
Realclearpolitics.com says France is an enemy of America; time to drop Cheney on Paris:
FEELING THE AMOUR: Jaques Chirac is an enemy of America. It’s really that simple. He wants the policies of this country to fail in Afghanistan and Iraq. And to the extent we continue to follow these policies – promoting democracy in the Middle East, aggressively pursuing terrorists and dealing harshly with those who harbor or support them, lobbying for the expansion of NATO and the EU – Chirac will ALWAYS be opposed to them, no matter who is president.
It’s time for those on the left to put away the childish fantasy that John Kerry will alight in Paris shortly after his election, parlez with Chirac for a few hours and magically transform France back into a solid ally of the Untied States. It won’t happen.
Even worse, however, is the danger that we might well go along pretending it has happened while Chirac continues to agitate against us and obstruct our progress behind the scenes.
The only thing we can do is what we are and have been doing: work with Chirac when we can (which is almost never) and work around him when we can’t.
The Bush administration has made recent overtures to Chirac, but to no avail. It seems clear that the only thing that will change Chirac’s mind is a change in our position. In the end, that is what John Kerry will have to do as President if he wants to reconcile with France.
Perhaps what we should do instead is send Dick Cheney to the next meeting with Chirac and tell him what to do.
Posted by: Pat | Jun 30 2004 23:59 utc | 29
Meanwhile, the Guardian reports:
Mr Chirac was unapologetic about his repeated rows with the US. “We are friends and allies but we are not servants,” he told reporters before leaving for an EU summit in Brussels.
“When we don’t agree we don’t say so aggressively, but in a firm manner.”
The French president also resisted US pressure to deploy Nato units to boost security in Afghanistan.
Donald Rumsfeld, the US defence secretary, warned that opposition to deploying the Nato response force (NRF) could be circumvented by taking a decision in a forum which excludes France.
Posted by: Pat | Jul 1 2004 0:25 utc | 30
Isikoff and Hosenball are at it again, dissecting the “distortions” of F9/11.
http://tinyurl.com/22qf2
Posted by: pol | Jul 1 2004 1:02 utc | 31
Shako mako?
American politician makes bogus intelligence claim about Iraq
Wolfowitz makes ridiculous ‘retired terrorist at work’ allegations
Regime change? What regime change?
Iraq won’t exclude Ba’athists, envoy says
US soldier turns out not to be a hero after all
Captured U.S. Marine deserted in Iraq, New York Times reports
Someone forgot to tell someone that everything’s wonderful now
11 GIs wounded in attack on U.S. base in Iraq
It’s just success story after success story after success story, isn’t it?
Iraq’s basic services worse now than before war, GAO says
Business as usual
Violence goes on in ‘Sovereign Iraq’
Ooops!!!
UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) – More than 8 million small arms fell into private hands in Iraq when the U.S.-led invasion ousted Saddam Hussein creating a threat to regional stability for years to come, a new study said on Wednesday.
“What used to be a typically armed Middle East society has become one of the more heavily armed places in the world,” said researchers at the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva….
…Iraq’s central location meant the weapons would probably hemorrhage into neighboring countries as well, the report said.
“The consequences of the great Iraqi small arms abandonment may endanger stability in much of the Middle East for years to come,” it said. “In place of an exceptionally well armed state (under Saddam), the world now must deal with a heavily armed society.”
Another post-war planning oversight ensures that thousands of heavily armed terrorists will be able to threaten the USA for years and years to come
WASHINGTON (AFP) – Fledgling Iraqi security forces are “unready” to fight anti-government insurgents as their units remain inadequately trained, underequipped and suffer from a desertion rate sometimes exceeding 80 percent, a US congressional probe has found….
US probe finds Iraqi security forces plagued by mass desertions
Costing the Iraq war – Institute for Policy Studies and Foreign Policy in Focus – June 2004 .pdf file
Costs – fact sheet – June 2004 .pdf file
Irony is alive and well and living in Iraq – US troops ignore ‘Iraqi sovereignty’ to stop prisoner beatings
Looks like there’s not a lot of significant change to report after all. 🙁
As salam 3aleikom ya thirsty ones,
Shukran jaziilan to Annie for giving me directions, mabrouk to Berhard for your work and to all others who have helped create this news / debate oasis. May we all keep learning, insha’allah.
Allah ma3akom
Posted by: Helpful Spook | Jul 1 2004 3:13 utc | 34
Would you buy a used car from this guy?
Then…….
On Dec. 9, 2001. Cheney talking to NBC’s Tim Russert:
Cheney: “…Well, what we now have that’s developed since you and I last talked, Tim, of course, was that report that — it’s been pretty well confirmed that he did go to Prague and he did meet with a senior official of the Iraqi intelligence service in Czechoslovakia last April, several months before the attack. Now, what the purpose of that was, what transpired between them, we simply don’t know at this point, but that’s clearly an avenue that we want to pursue.”
…..and now….
June 17, 2004. Vice President Cheney talking to CNBC’s Gloria Borger:
Borger: “Well, let’s go to Mohamed Atta for a minute, because you mentioned him as well. You have said in the past that it was, quote, ‘pretty well confirmed…’ ”
Cheney: “No, I never said that.”
Borger: “Okay.”
Cheney: “Never said that.”
Borger: “I think that is . . . ”
Cheney: “Absolutely not. What I said was the Czech intelligence service reported after 9/11 that Atta had been in Prague on April 9th of 2001, where he allegedly met with an Iraqi intelligence official. We have never been able to confirm that nor have we been able to knock it down.”
Can’t somebody call this f*cker a little more loudly on his barefaced mendacity?
Posted by: Helpful Spook | Jul 1 2004 3:23 utc | 35
Don’t mention the war…
The Foreign Office has asked appeal court judges to refrain from ruling on the legality of the war in Iraq for fear of giving comfort to terrorists, endangering the lives of Britons in Iraq, and harming foreign relations…
British Foreign Office asks judges not to rule on Iraq war legality
Posted by: Helpful Spook | Jul 1 2004 4:39 utc | 36
Helpful Spook, so good to see you! Of course, I never thought you had gone missing during Billmon’s handover of sovereignty. Never said that!
Friede sei mit Dir.
Posted by: teuton | Jul 1 2004 7:43 utc | 38
bernhard
having great difficulty entering your site
my mac friezes
today it is difficult to wander threads
structure of page different aujourd’hui
still steel
Posted by: remembereringiap | Jul 1 2004 14:04 utc | 40
bernhard
having great difficulty entering your site
my mac friezes
today it is difficult to wander threads
structure of page different aujourd’hui
still steel
Posted by: remembereringiap | Jul 1 2004 14:05 utc | 41
sorry to display my oncompetence so brazenly
it works now berhard
still steel
Posted by: remembereringiap | Jul 1 2004 14:49 utc | 42
Hi all. Hope you are all well.
Am watching Michael Moore on Charlie Rose. It’s nice to listen to him, but I must admit that it is kind of annoying that he doesn’t really seem to register the neocons as a force that’s differentiated from Bush Sr. replayed.
I still haven’t seen the film, so I can’t really comment on the talk that he seems to leave out the neocon influence on the decision about going to war in Iraq.
Posted by: J | Jul 2 2004 6:53 utc | 43
PS by coincidence, I saw Bowling for Columbine on television today, and thought it was wonderful.
Posted by: J | Jul 2 2004 6:57 utc | 44