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Recent
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June
2, 2003
Arundhati
Roy
Day of the Jackals
Norman
Madarasz
Behind the Neo-Con Curtain: Plato,
Leo Strauss and Allan Bloom
Alain
Frachon and Daniel Vernet
The Strategist and the Philosopher: Strauss and Wohlstetter
Anthony
Gancarski
Anti-Imperialism, Then & Now
Standard
Schaefer
Wasted at the Pentagon
Jason
Leopold
Rocky's Advice to the Dems
Guthrie
& Albert
HUAC 58 Years Letter
Steve
Perry
The Politics of Terror Alerts
May
31, 2003
Alexander
Cockburn
A Whiner Called Horowitz
Gary Leupp
The Frauds of War
Dave
Lindorff
Clinton, Bush, Lies and Impeachment
Tom Stephens
Does It Matter that the Bush Administration Lied?
Sasan
Fayazmanesh
Who Is Next?
Joanne
Mariner
Trivializing Terrorism
Wayne
Madsen
Ayatollah Rumseld's Busy Week
Larry Magnuson
Is a Television a Radio or a Billboard?
Elaine
Cassel
Wake Up, America!
Gila Svirsky
Waiting for the Lament to End
Susan
Davis
Kitchen Dreams
Chris Clarke
Barbra Streisand: Environmental Hypocrite
Chris
Floyd
Bush Locates Source of World Evil: God
Adam Engel
Gravity's End Zone
Poets'
Basement
Reiss, Guthrie, Orloski, Albert
May
30, 2003
Ben
Tripp
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Agenda
Neve
Gordon
The Bad Fence
Todd
Steiner
Endangered Ocean
Robert
Freeman
Bush's Tax Cuts: a Form of National Insanity
Sean
Carter
Utah Gets Fired Up for Executions
Daniel
Bacher
How Bush's War Violated International Laws
Tariq
Ali
Re-Colonizing Iraq
Steve
Perry
Bush Wars
Web Log
May
29, 2003
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Jason
Leopold
Despite Thin Intelligence Reports,
US Plans Overthrow of Iran Regime
Ron
Jacobs
Popular Uprising, Inc.
Michelle
Ciaccorra
Bush's Nuclear Policy: Do As I Say, Not As I Do
Yves Engler
The Economics of Health Care in
America: Pay More to Die Sooner
Kimberly
Blaker
Vouchers for Jesus
Harry
Browne
Stakeknife: Britain's Army Spy at
the Top of the IRA
Stew
Albert
Cops of the World
Steve Perry
Greens 04: In or Out?
May
28, 2003
David
Vest
DubyaCo.: It's Not So Funny Any More
Dave
Lindorff
My Grandfather's Medal
John
Stanton
America's Dying: Arts and Philosophy Hold the Key
Bernard
Weiner
A PNAC Primer
Robert
Jensen
Texas Dems Set a Standard for the Rest of the Party
Ahmad Faruqui
The Oil Business of Regime Change:
the CIA and Iran
Hammond
Guthrie
Disarming Conundrums
Steve Perry
What If There's No Such Thing as Al-Qaeda?
May
27, 2003
Kurt
Nimmo
Condoleezza Rice: Huckstress for Israeli
Myths
Anthony
Gancarski
Hillary: a Dem the NeoCons Could Love?
Patrick
Cockburn
Terror, Bush and Joseph Conrad
John Chuckman
an Interpretation of Bush's Character
Kathleen
Christison
What Sharon Wants, Sharon Gets
Jeffrey
Blankfort
AIPAC Hijacks the Roadmap
Steve
Perry
Trouble in the Hinterlands
May
26, 2003
Franklin
C. Spinney
Test Anxiety: Star Wars, Punctuated
Epistimology and the Triumph of Medievalism
Elaine
Cassel
Supreme Sacrifice
Sam
Hamod
When Trained Killers Return Home
Stew Albert
The Final Conflict
May
24 / 25, 2003
Gary
Leupp
The Philosopher Kings: Leo Strauss
and the Neo-Cons
Uri Avnery
The Hannibal Procedure
Diane
Christian
Who's the Real Enemy?
"Just Cause" or "Kill the Bastards"
Alexander
Cockburn
Derrida's Double Life
William
S. Lind
Is Saddam Really Out of the Game?
William
Cook
Road to Nowhere
David Krieger
Bush's War on the Poor: Economic Justice
Ilan
Pappe
Academic Freedom Under Assault in Israel
Wayne Madsen
American Idle
Noah
Leavitt
Slowing Sowing Justice in the Killing Fields
Walt Brasch
Americans are Liars
Lenni
Brenner
John Brown and Dutch Bill
Mickey
Z.
Hope, Crosby & Al Qaeda
Michael
Ortiz Hill
Grievous Harm Here and Abroad
Adam Engel
Towers of Babel
Poets'
Basement
Albert, Guthrie, Alam, Orloski
May
23, 2003
Standard
Schaefer
Lifting the Sanctions: Who Benefits?
Ron
Jacobs
Long Live People's Park!
Michael
Greger, MD
Return of Mad Cow: US Beef Supply
at Risk
Elaine
Cassel
Tigar to Ashcroft: "Secrecy is the Enemy of Democratic Govt."
Sam
Hamod
The Shi'a of Iraq
Christopher
Greeder
After the Layoffs (poem)
Steve
Perry
Bush's Wars Weblog 5/23
Hot Stories
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Elaine
Cassel
Civil Liberties
Watch
Michel
Guerrin
Embedded Photographer Says: "I
Saw Marines Kill Civilians"
Uzma
Aslam Khan
The Unbearably Grim Aftermath of War:
What America Says Does Not Go
Paul de Rooij
Arrogant
Propaganda
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
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June
5, 2003
Spilling the Beans
When Spooks
Speak Out
By GARY LEUPP
As I observed about a week ago, as stories about
the philosophical underpinnings of the neocons' activities began
appearing in the mainstream press, we may now be seeing "the
turning of the tide." As the days go by and "Coalition"
forces in Iraq fail to discover any weapons of mass destruction
that would validate the stated cause for the Iraq war, the sea
change surges. Mainstream journalists once on board the Iraq
attack, accepting it somehow as an extension of the "War
on Terror" against al-Qaeda, are now writing grimly that
we seem to have been misinformed by the administration. Newsweek,
Time and U.S. News & World Report all simultaneously
carry cover stories asking where are the terrifying WMDs?
Staring out at Joe Public from the drug-store check-out counter,
the headlines must be having some affect on public opinion; indeed,
CNN reports that one-third of Americans polled now think that
the administration misinformed (the polite term is "hyped")
them about Iraq's terror threat to themselves. That number might
grow, quickly. In Britain the journalism is more critical, and
the mass reaction more indignant (40% think themselves misled),
despite the wonted British reserve.
Meanwhile mainstream politicians are
finally waking up, or at least feeling it politically safe to
question the rationale for the war. (They are perhaps increasingly
inclined to do so as the taste of glorious victory sours in their
mouths. Iraqis, day after day, prove themselves rather hostile
to their "liberation;" it becomes apparent that the
occupation---if it is to realize the Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz objectives---will
require far more troops, last longer, and be more costly than
originally predicted.) Rep. Jane Harman of California, ranking
Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, says: "This
[story about WMDs threatening the U.S.] could conceivably be
the greatest intelligence hoax of all time." Sen. Bob Graham
of Florida, member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, states
the lack of evidence for WMDs might indicate "the manipulation
of that [Iraq] intelligence to keep the American people in the
dark." These committees both plan investigations. So does
the Armed Service Committee in the Senate, headed by Republican
Sen. John Warner. Ranking Republican senator Richard Lugar (Ind.),
who heads the Foreign Relations Committee, and Sen. Joseph Biden
(Del.), top Democrat on that committee, were both timidly critical
of the Iraq war, and in its aftermath unhappy with the apparent
disinformation that preceded it. Perhaps they will become more
outspoken, especially if they smell blood and political advantage.
So far the critics present their censure
mildly; they ask, "Was there an intelligence failure?"
(As though the fault lies in screw-ups in the intelligence community.)
Was the U.S. duped by opportunists in the Iraqi National Congress?
(Useful scapegoat; let's watch what happens with that one. You
have to ask how the most sophisticated intelligence-gathering
apparatus in the world could be so used by so discredited an
organization. Or for that matter, since we're on the subject,
so embarrassed by a posited, unnamed African diplomat who lied
to the U.S. about that Niger uranium-Saddam connection for personal
gain. The message will be: Look, people lied to us. Forces
of evil, lying to the good. We in our naïve
goodness believed them. But did we, the good, make this up? No
way! Ridiculous! How dare anyone suggest such a thing!)
In any case, should indignation lead
to serious investigation, and investigation to exposure of conscious
fraud, we could be talking impeachment. Two-thirds public approval
today, Nixonian disgrace tomorrow. Eventually, as Sen. Robert
Byrd told the Senate, "like it always does, the truth will
emerge. And when it does, this house of cards, built of deceit,
will fall."
The intelligence community itself might
well play a key role in that necessary fall. It seems that intelligence
operatives in the U.S. and Britain are outraged and insulted
by the lies surrounding the Iraq war. In a May 30 Reuters article,
Vince Cannistraro, former chief of CIA counterterrorist operations,
says he knows of CIA agents currently serving who complain that
"fraudulent"
evidence was used to justify the war on Iraq. A group of former
CIA analysts has written Bush denouncing "a
policy and intelligence fiasco of monumental proportions".
Patrick Lang, former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency,
which coordinates military intelligence, says the neocon cabal
in Washington "cherry-picked the intelligence stream"
in a bid to portray Iraq as an imminent threat, and that the
DIA was "exploited and abused and bypassed in the process
of making the case for war in Iraq based on the presence of WMD."
The U.S. News & World Report (a rather conservative
publication which has no reason to make this up) tells us that
the DIA issued a classified assessment of Iraq's chemical weapons
program last September, concluding "there is no reliable
information on whether Iraq is producing and stockpiling chemical
weapons." But almost immediately thereafter Secretary of
Defense Donald Rumsfeld told Congress that Saddam had "amassed
large, clandestine stockpiles of chemical weapons, including
VX, sarin, cyclosarin, and mustard gas."
I understand why some of the DIA guys
would be annoyed by the brazenness of such official dishonesty.
They went to all that trouble to find out the facts---and then
their bosses said the facts just weren't useable. "Go back
and do it again." Humiliating, to any self-respecting professional,
you'd think. And then they created that oddly-titled "Office
of Strategic Influence" (now Office of Special Plans) as
if to say to the CIA and DIA guys, "You're not good enough,
or brave enough, or special enough, because you're not dishonest
enough to produce disinformation at the macro level we require
in these heroic times." (Maybe you don't even love the smell
of napalm in the morning.)
The Boston Globe (June 5) quotes
a "US official long involved in intelligence" as stating
"Within the [intelligence] community there were people showing
their expertise and challenging a lot of this. Policymakers in
the Bush administration, to the extent they were weighing in,
were always on the side of 'You're not being aggressive enough.'"
The New York Times reports (June 4) that an "unusual
briefing" by Under Secretary of Defense for Policy (and
key neocon) Douglas J. Feith, held to refute allegations that
the Defense Department had "politicized intelligence"
"baffled or angered" "some defense officials
familiar with classified intelligence assessments on Iraq."
"One senior official, who said he was skeptical of Mr. Feith's
account, was too angry to answer immediately. Another official
said simply, 'There was a lot of doublespeak out there.'"
When you have senior Defense Department officials enraged over
official lying, you have a potential political problem, maybe
even the basis for regime change.
Similarly, the intelligence agencies
of the other major proponents of the war, Britain and Australia,
are upset. Members of Britain's MI6 have "strongly
contested" claims originating with the U.S. Defense
Department that there was any link between al-Qaeda and Iraq.
John Reid, the Leader of the Commons, blames such contestation
on "rogue elements in the intelligence community,"
and asks why their word "should be believed against the
word of the British Prime Minister." Such statements must
certainly boost the morale of the British intelligence community
as a whole. In Australia, analysts at the Office of National
Assessments thought "a decent chunk of the growing pile"
of intelligence information "looked
like rubbish."
U.S. News reports
that when Colin Powell was given disinformation about Iraq's
imagined WMDs last February, by Vice-President Cheney's chief
of staff, neocon "Scooter" Libby, and asked to present
it to the United Nations, he exploded. He tossed several pages
into the air, declaring, "I'm not reading this. This is
bullshit." It's being reported that both Colin Powell and
his British counterpart Jack Straw had "serious doubts"
about the rationale for the war, when they met and held discussions
in the Waldorf Hotel in New York in early February. "Powell
told Straw that he hoped the facts about Iraq's weapons of mass
destruction, when they came out, would not 'blow up in their
faces.'". Powell reportedly said in that meeting that
while he'd "moved in" to the Iraq war cause, he was
concerned with the consequences (as of course he well should
have been), knowing that Iraqis, like most people, wouldn't like
having their country invaded and devastated for no good honest
reason.
He might have added that Americans might
not in the long run support that invasion, especially when their
kids get shot every day as a result. As Sen. Byrd put it last
month: "When it comes to shedding American blood---when
it comes to wrecking havoc on civilians, on innocent men, women,
and children, callous dissembling is not acceptable. Nothing
is worth that kind of lie---not oil, not revenge, not reelection,
not somebody's grand pipedream of a democratic domino theory."
Some in the spook community evidently agree.
Powell and Straw bear some responsibility
for the crime of the war itself; they are deeply complicit, and
one would hope, burdened by guilty consciences. (Honest confession
can always alleviate those burdens.) Meanwhile, men and women
of integrity in the intelligence profession, who knew the war
was wrong and the product of "cooked" intelligence
foisted on the American people and the world, may be guilty of
the crime of silence, misguided by some notion of professional
discipline which should, in my opinion, not apply in these exceptional
circumstances. Those of you who have been quietly talking among
yourselves, or raging inside yourselves against the evident dishonesty:
please speak out now.
Spill the beans, or at least leak them.
Do something positive for the world. Everybody needs a job, so
I'm not suggesting resignation, necessarily. But you can help
turn the tide against the neocons' Straussian made-in-USA incipient
fascism. Years from now, your kids might speak proudly of you.
Gary Leupp
is an an associate professor, Department of History, Tufts University
and coordinator, Asian Studies Program.
He can be reached at: gleupp@tufts.edu
Today's
Features
Arundhati
Roy
Day of the Jackals
Norman
Madarasz
Behind the Neo-Con Curtain: Plato,
Leo Strauss and Allan Bloom
Alain
Frachon and Daniel Vernet
The Strategist and the Philosopher: Strauss and Wohlstetter
Anthony
Gancarski
Anti-Imperialism, Then & Now
Standard
Schaefer
Wasted at the Pentagon
Jason
Leopold
Rocky's Advice to the Dems
Guthrie
& Albert
HUAC 58 Years Letter
Steve
Perry
The Politics of Terror Alerts
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