|
Cheney’s ‘War Czar’ Raid Attempt
What a weird idea:
The White House wants to appoint a high-powered czar to oversee the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan with authority to issue directions to the Pentagon, the State Department and other agencies, …
Coordination between the various departments and agencies is THE job of the national security adviser. Hadley, currently in that position, has no formal authority to "issue directions" to State and DoD, but Bush could easily delegate this to Hadley.
So there must be something else behind the idea. What and who would be affected by such a new position?
[T]he new czar would report directly to Bush and to Hadley and would have the title of assistant to the president, just as Hadley and the other highest-ranking White House officials have, the sources said. The new czar would also have "tasking authority," or the power to issue directions, over other agencies, they said.
Gates and Rice would have someone installed between the President and themselves. Hadley, Rice’s former deputy, would be shifted to the side. All three would have less influence and less direct access to the President should such a position be installed.
All three have shown a tiny bit of independence from the hard neocon line coming out of the AEI and Cheney’s office. Cheney is certainly not happy with Gates opinion on Guantanamo and he has sabotaged Rice several times on Middle East issues by direct contacts with Bandar in Saudi Arabia and Olmert in Israel. So could this be an attempt to rein these Secretaries in and to bring the policy under Cheney’s influence?
Who cooked this up?
The idea of someone overseeing the wars has been promoted to the White House by several outside advisers. "It would be definitely a good idea," said Frederick W. Kagan, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. "Hope they do it, and hope they do it soon. And I hope they pick the right guy. It’s a real problem that we don’t have a single individual back here who is really capable of coordinating the effort."
The neocons are pushing for a new central position/person that can overrule Gates and Rice. With the right person in that position, it would be a complete takeover of Middle East and war policies.
But there would certainly be an outcry if the job would go to someone like Richard Perle or some other true believer. So they looked for someone in uniform and offered the job to three retired four-star Generals.
But that is a crazy idea too. A retired four-star, without Senate confirmation, to "issue directions" to the Secretary of Defense? The Washington foreign policy establishment, with some nudging by Rice and Gates, would certainly have barked at that scheme.
Those Generals asked, all to some degree administration insiders, smelled the rat and have turned down the job offer.
Besides [General] Sheehan, sources said, the White House or intermediaries have sounded out retired Army Gen. Jack Keane and retired Air Force Gen. Joseph W. Ralston, who also said they are not interested.
No one wants to get between the lines where there is nothing waiting but pain.
"The very fundamental issue is, they don’t know where the hell they’re going," said retired Marine Gen. John J. "Jack" Sheehan, a former top NATO commander who was among those rejecting the job. Sheehan said he believes that Vice President Cheney and his hawkish allies remain more powerful within the administration than pragmatists looking for a way out of Iraq. "So rather than go over there, develop an ulcer and eventually leave, I said, ‘No, thanks,’ " he said.
For now Cheney’s raid attempt on foreign policy has failed for lack of willing personnal. But don’t expect him to give up on this.
Most people think the TSOG [Tsarist Occupation Government] began its infestation of America with George Bush Sr., when he appointed a Tsar to discombobulate our previously democratic form of government; but Bush had a long C.I.A. career behind him and the C.I.A. had a long, long Tsarist history before they came out in the open with a public and blatant Tsar, a functionary not endowed or permitted by any clause in our Constitution.
Actually, the TSOG began replacing representative democracy in the U.S. way back in 1945, when Gen. Rheinhard Gehlen, Hitler’s Chief of Soviet Intelligence, surrendered to the U.S. Army, after first prudently burying several truckloads of “inside information” about the Soviet Union at a secret location.
Gehlen was not only a master spy but a wizard negotiator. Within a week, he was out of his Nazi uniform and into a U.S. Army General’s uniform; the U.S. intelligence services, in return, got the info about the Soviets, including access to Gehlen’s agents in the Soviet government — a group of Mystical Tsarists who had infiltrated both the Red Army and the KGB.
You see, their leader and Gehlen’s major “asset,” General Andrei Vlassov, had a fervent belief, not just in common or garden Tsarism, but especially in the “mystical Tsarism” espoused in the later half of the 19th Century by the anti-Semitic novelist Dostoyevsky and even more by Konstantin Pobedonostsev, an advisor to two Tsars [Alexander III and Nicholas II].
Pobedonostsev, popularly called “The Grand Inquisitor” because of the vast platoons of spies, snoops, agents provocateur and informers he unleashed upon the Russian people , combined theological obsessions with reactionary politics, always an explosive and nefarious mixture.
“Mystical Tsarism” deserves a whole book in itself. especially since it now rules our own country; but we must be brief here. This holy religion, or superstition — as you will –has two major tenets: (1) The Tsar is guided by God and can do no wrong (2) Reason is “cold” and inhuman, faith is “warm” and human; therefore we should ignore reason and guide ourselves by faith in the Tsar, our “Little Father.” I don’t think any of Pobedonostsev’s crew actually believed in the Tooth Fairy, though.
Besides, Roman Catholics of the old school have similar attitudes, but merely prefer a Pope to do their thinking for them instead of a Tsar, and most of us consider them sane, but just “weird.”
Gen. Gehlen and Gen. Vlassov formed what became the Gehlenapparat, the CIA’s main source of info on Soviet affairs; Gehlen became the fulcrum of the CIA’s “Soviet penetration” sector, working under James Jesus Angleton, Chief of Counter-Intelligence, breeder of prize orchids, lover of the arts, and a devout Catholic.
Since the U.S. government based its foreign policies on CIA reports, and the CIA based its Soviet reports on Gehlen and some other former Nazis, plus a crew of Mystical Tsarists, as filtered and interpreted by a Papist intellectual, the U.S. government’s ideas and actions became increasingly “weird, ” bizarre and frightening, in the view of the rest of the world. The results are very sad and very funny. In a nutshell, most of the world thinks we’ve gone batshit crazy. “Tsarists and Nazis and spooks, oh my!”
Although James Jesus Angleton was Gehlen’s alleged supervisor, data indicates that the Gehlenapparat engaged in many activities, including kidnapping, extortion, murder etc. about which Angleton either did not know or devoutly did not want to know.
But James J. Angleton was a pathological case of some sort himself; he often hid his middle name because it revealed his half-Hispanic genes. An exceptionally intelligent and sensitive student of modern literature while at Yale, Angleton adored Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, I.A. Richards, e e cummings and other SuperStars of Modernism; he met most of them personally. They collectively influenced Angleton’s fascination with multiple perspectives, labyrinthine ambiguity and the eternal uncertainty of all inferences and “interpretations.” These modernist tendencies, which also appeared in science and philosophy at the same time, blossomed into obsessions and, perhaps, raging madness when Angleton systematically applied them to the spy-game. After all, modernism really begins with Wilde’s “The Reality of Masks” and Yeats’s hermetic mystique the world we know emerging from interactions of Mask, Anti-Mask, Self, and Anti-Self: which may or may not fit all of us or all the world but certainly fits the world of spooks and snoops that Angleton created.
Another CIA officer, Edward Petty, described Angleton as “a lone wolf” and “a strange bird”; every other source I have found bluntly calls him “paranoid.” He suspected everybody else in the CIA, and in “our” government generally, of being KGB moles, and operated with so much modernist ambiguity and hidden trapdoors that, in Petty’s words, “nobody really knows” what he was doing most of the time. In short, he became as esoteric as the poets he admired, and remade the C.I.A. and, increasingly, our whole nation into a theatre of impenetrable mystery.
A.J. Weberman, a leading Kennedy assassination buff, thinks Angleton personally organized the JFK hit, an idea also strongly hinted at by Norman Mailer’s documentary novel, Harlot’s Ghost, in which Angleton appears as “Hugh Montague.” [Angleton’s father was named Hugh; Angleton’s code name was “Mother,” and Montague’s is “Harlot.”Work on that, ye seekers of multiple meaning. ]
If James Jesus really arranged the JFK assassination, he had probably decided that Kennedy was the top Soviet mole of all.
Why not? Angleton had Tsarist agents in all sorts of nooks of the Soviet system, and he knew the KGB was smart enough and tireless enough to reciprocate by planting their own Masks and Anti-Masks in his own backyard, or maybe under his bed at night. According to Edward Jay Epstein, J.J.A.s endless search for Soviet moles nearly destroyed the C.I.A. itself. Certainly, everybody in “the Company” learned to distrust everybody else.
Imagine a U.S. Caine with not one Queeg as captain, but a whole crew of Queegs, each worrying about what the others might be plotting. Angleton created that ship of shape-shifters in the C.I.A. and then by osmosis it spread through the government, evolving into the TSOG.
In short, the government cannot trust us, because it can never know with absolute certainty what mischief we may hatch; and every sentence we speak into a bugged phone may have as many possible meanings as Eliot’s “The rose and the fire are one.”
In William F. Buckley Jr.’s docu-novel Spytime: The Undoing of James Jesus Angleton occurs a scene that epiphanizes the TSOG’s looped and relooped logic. Angleton and an associate discuss 17 or 37 possible interpretations of a bit of information [or disinformation] passed on by a possible Soviet defector [who might be a Soviet mole.] At the end of the discussion, J.J.A. points out one more “reading” that the associate hadn’t considered: namely, that Angleton himself might be the top Soviet mole of all. You can’t learn more about ambiguity and irony in a seminar on the poetry of Empson.
In the same vein, after the death by drowning of “Montague”[Angleton] in Harlot’s Ghost, the CIA systematically investigates such alternative scenarios as: he’s not dead, and another water-rotted corpse has been foisted on them; the Soviets did it and have him full of truth serums already; he went over to the Soviets willingly; he was working for the Reds all along.
“Trust No One,” the motto of X Files, seems the only safe rule in the world Angleton created.
T.S.O.G.
The Creature That Ate the Constitution
by Robert Anton Wilson
more ?
Posted by: Uncle $cam | Apr 11 2007 19:46 utc | 18
|
