Cockburn
/ St. Clair's Scorching New History of a Decade of War
Now Available!
Today's
Stories
June
8, 2004
Dave
Lindorff
The March on Rumsfeld's House: Is
the US Anti-War Movement Running Out of Steam?
Phillip
Cryan
Torture, Bombings & the Press in
Colombia
Mark
Zepezauer
Getting Reagan Wrong
Mickey
Z.
Reagan, Radicals and Repetitive Reactions
John
L. Hess
Reagan and Bush in Normandy
Alex
Dawoody
Reagan and Saddam: the Unholy Alliance
Christopher
Fons
Reagan in a Word: Mean
Niranjan
Ramakrishnan
Some Tenets are More Important Than Others
Ahmed
Bouzid
Nothing New Under the Israeli Sun
Michael
Leon
Bush the Narcissist
Jeffrey
St. Clair
The Nature of Ronald Reagan: Will
the Earth Accept His Corpse?
June
7, 2004
Jason
Leopold
New Enron Docs Show Lay and Skilling
Knew of California Trading Schemes
Patrick
Cockburn
The Baghdad Bombings: the Pattern
of Attacks is Changing
Dennis
Hans
From Afghanistan to El Salvador: Reagan's
Dark Global Legacy
Tracy
McLellan
Nader at the National Press Club:
a Glimpse at a Different Kind of Politics
Bill
Blum
The Myth of the Gipper: Reagan Didn't
End the Cold War
Ben
Tripp
What I Owe Reagan: the Brylcreemed
Bullshitter
Susan
Davis
Reagan, In a Nutshell
Phil
Gasper
Reagan: Goodbye and Good Riddance
Website
of the Day
A Child's ABCs of Terrorism
June
5 / 6, 2004
C.
Douglas Lummis
Toward a Universal Declaration of
Human Wrongs
Saul
Landau
Five Cubans in Prison, Victims of Bush's Obsession
Dave
Lindorff
John Walker Lindh, Revisited
Brian
Cloughley
Apologies, Please, From Those Who Got It Wrong
Rich
Gibson
The Grenada 17: the Last Prisoners of the Cold War are Black
Elaine
Cassel
A Sorry FBI
Cathrin
Schütz
On the Ruins of Yugoslavia
Ben
Tripp
Call Me, Mr. Cassandra
Kurt
Nimmo
The Madness of King George
Ron
Jacobs
They Ain't Goin' Nowhere (Unless We Make It So)
Laura
Flanders
The Lynne Cheney Show?
Lenni
Brenner
Renaissance Noir: Caravaggio at the Met
Abigail
Jones
Whatever Happened to Lori Berenson, President Toledo's Trophy
Prisoner?
Mark
Latham
Nothing Bush Said Has Changed Our Hopes
Gerry
Adams
I Was Photographed While Tortured, Too
Toni
Solo
Venezuela 2004, Nicaragua's Contra War Reprised
Derek
Seidman
Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old
M.
Junaid Alam
Torture is Just the Symptom
Matt
Siegfried
An American Way of War
Dave
Zirin
The Politics of Charles Barkley
Poets'
Basement
Albert, Krieger, St. Clair
Website
of the Weekend
Overnight Sensations
June
4, 2004
Chris
Floyd
Masked and Anonymous: Inside America's
Animal House
Cornwell
/ Penketh
Exit Tenet: the Fall of a Fall Guy
Wayne
Madsen
Apprehension & Frustation: Neo-Cons on the Brink
Greg
Moses
Agitating for Workers' Rights in Iraq
Yitzak
Laor
Before Rafah
Ghali
Hassan
Ambassador to Death Squads: Who is Negroponte?
Jane
Stillwater
God, the Rapture and Vera Casey
CounterPunch
Wire
D-Day Reconsidered: Was It Really Worth the Carnage?
John
Borowski
Woo-Wooism v. Meteorites: Why the Dems Are No Match for Bush
Mike
Griffin
Caterpillar's Assault on the UAW
Alexander Cockburn
Has Bush Gone Over the Edge?
Website
of the Day
Aquae Urbis Romae:
Water and Empire
June
3, 2004
Ron
Jacobs
Iran's Nuclear Dilemma
Dr.
Susan Block
America in tha Hood
Michael
Donnelly
The Bully and the Brahmin
John
Chuckman
Insanity in America: US Ranks Number
One in the Deranged
Christopher
Brauchli
The Return of Cardinal Law: Rome
on $12,000 a Month
Samia
Nassar Melki
Caravaggio in Iraq
Mike
Whitney
Subverting Justice: Pre-Trial Ruminations in the Padilla Case
Diane
Rejman
Memorial Day Isn't Just About the Dead
Scott
Morris
"WMDs" in Cuba
Paul
de Rooij
Palestinian Misery in Perspective
June
2, 2004
Brian
Cloughley
The Liars are Winning
Ray
McGovern
How Far Would They Go? Beware "Credible
Intelligence"
Josh
Frank
The Anybody But Bush Offensive
Mike
Whitney
The Afghanistan Failure: Bush's Warlord Patriots
Jackie
Corr
Iraq and Ireland: Three Tales from Butte, Montana
Robert
Jensen
The US Lost the Iraq War...and It's a Good Thing, Too
Alexander
Cockburn
"Bye, Bye Boonville!"
June
1, 2004
Gary
Leupp
Instant Karma: Bush's Sins Catch Up
with Him
William
A. Cook
Manufacturers of Fear and Loathing in
Rafah
Dave
Lindorff
Will the Times Clean House?
Kevin
Zeese
Inside the Kerry / Nader Meeting: Did
the Kerry Campaign Lie About What Was Discussed?
Jacob
Levich
Coming Soon: Return of the Draft,
a Bipartisan Production
Kathy
Kelly
Voices in the Wilderness v. the US
Government
Website
of the Day
Remind Us
May
29 / 31, 2004
Lee
Ballinger / Dave Marsh
The Origins of Memorial Day
Janine
Pommy Vega
Memo for Memorial Day
Mike
Ferner
On Their Way to Abu Ghraib
Alfred
W. McCoy
The Cruel Shadow: the Long History of CIA Torture Research
Douglas
Valentine
An Open Letter to the NYT: Questions, Questions, Questions
Chris
White
First to Fight Culture: a Former Marine on the Marine Motto
Bruce
Anderson
The Awful Injustice to Tai Abreu
David
Vest
Get Ready for Kerry's War: the 100 Year Quagmire
Saul
Landau
Torture: the Logical Outcome of Bush's War for Democracy?
Kurt
Nimmo
Abu Hamza al-Mazri, Made in the USA
Elaine
Cassel
The Secrets of Surveillance: Ashcroft, Snoops, and Gag Orders
Will
Potter
The New War on "Terror": Protest the Torture of Chimps;
Get Arrested as a "Terrorist"
Ben
Tripp
They Fiddled While Nero Got the Matches
Dr.
Susan Block
Save Abu Ghraib!
Kia
Kojouri
Nukes, the US, Israel and Iran: an
Interview with Sasan Fayazmanesh
Mickey
Z
D-Day: 60 Years is Enough!
Jon
Brown
Correcting the Correction at the Times
Patrick
B. Barr
Pre-emptive War Insurance
Stephen
Gowans
Bad Apples in a Bad Barrel
Tom
Gorman
Gore on Bush in Iraq: the Approach May be Exotic, But It's Hardly
New
Dave
Zirin
Fighting for Boxers' Rights: an Interview with Eddie Mustafa
Muhammad
Gregory
Weiher
Bush to Arabs: "Go Get Yourself Some Democracy"
Erik
Cummings
Jung Meets Bush
Poets'
Basement
Davies, Ford, Kearney, McLellan and Albert
May
28, 2004
Rafael
Rodriguez Cruz
Curtain of Silence on the Cuban 5
Greg
Moses
Bush's Misleading Speech on Abu Ghraib
Dave
Lindorff
Dissing Independent Contractors:
Those Who Do the Dirty Work
Norman
Solomon
Leaping for Lies at the Times
Rep.
Bill Delahunt
Bush's Cruel New Rules on Cuba
Paul
McGeough
Chalabi Baba and the 40 Thieves
Niranjan
Ramakrishnan
India and Nehru: 40 Years After
Alexander
Cockburn
NYTs: "Maybe We Did Screw Up...a
Little"
May
27, 2004
Amy
Goodman / David Goodman
Fatal Errors: the Lies of Our Times
Douglas
Valentine
Ragging the Dogs of War at the
NYTs
John
L. Hess
The Times Confesses...Kind Of
Stew
Albert
Dellinger, the Wrestling Pacifist
Dave
Dellinger
a 1993 Interview
Christopher
Brauchli
Tax Breaks for Scions...to Hell with Poor Kids
Rampton
/ Stauber
Banana Republicans: Pumping Irony
May
26, 2004
Ron
Jacobs
Goodbye, David Dellinger: He Was a
Friend of Ours
Robert
Fisk
The Things Bush Didn't Say in His Speech
Zeynep
Toufe
New Draft UN Resolution Permits Perpetual Occupation
Conn
Hallinan
Bush and Sharon: the Oil Connection
Tom
Stephens
2 + 2 is On My Mind: More Morons
and War Crimes
Derek
Medley
Protesting Gov. Bigot
CounterPunch
Wire
FBI Abducts Artist; Seizes Art
Andrew
Cockburn
The Trail to Tehran
May
25, 2004
Joe
Bageant
The Covert Kingdom: On Earth as It
is in Texas
Col.
Dan Smith
A Question of Human Dignity
Gary
Handschumacher
Visiting Lori Berenson: Time to Bring Her Home
Toni
Solo
A Developing War in the Andes
Marc
Estrin
September Song: Disturbing Questions
About 9/11
Stephen
Banko, III
A Vietnam Vet on "Supporting the
Troops"
Website
of the Day
The Wizard of Whimsy
May
24, 2004
Ron
Jacobs
Dan Senor is Safe!
Kurt
Nimmo
Dirty Tricks & TortureGate: the
Missing Taguba Pages
Sam
Hamod
Gen. Zinni: "Wrong War, Wrong
Place, Wrong Time"
Mike
Whitney
The Wedding was a Bomb
Stan
Goff
Open Season on MAMs
Image
of the Day
A Photo from Abu Ghraib We Didn't See on the Front Page of the
NYTs
May
22 / 23, 2004
Paul
de Rooij
Colin Powell, a Political Obituary
Jeffrey
St. Clair
When War is Swell: Bush and the Carlyle Group
Elizabeth
Weill-Greenberg
Her Son Was Told He Wouldn't See Combat; Now He's Dead: an Interview
with Sue Niederer
Brian
Cloughley
America is Committing War Crimes in Iraq
Saul
Landau
Democracy in Latin America: Great for Investors; Not So Good
for People
Brandy
Baker
Feminists Stand By Their Man: Abortion, Judges and Kerry
Randall
Robinson
Bushwhacked in the Caribbean
Uri
Avnery
The Rape of Rafah
Ben
Tripp
Assume the Worst
Bruce
Anderson
News from Ecotopia: the Truth About the Wine Business
Josh
Ruebner
Why I Burned My Israeli Military Papers
Peter
Wolson, Ph. D.
Exhibitionistic Revenge at Abu Ghraib
Chloe
Cockburn
In Defense of "Troy": What Hector Could Teach Rummy
Linda
Burnham
Sexual Domination in Uniform: an American Value
Adrien
Rain Burke
War of the Necrophiliacs: Spc. Sabrina Harman and Her Corpse
David
Krieger
Charting a New Course for US Nuclear Policy
Ron
Jacobs
Turnaround
Poets'
Basement
Ford, Albert & LaMorticella
May 21, 2004
Ray
Close
The Canards of the Apologists
Christopher
Brauchli
"The Object of Torture is Torture"
Amira
Hass
Darkness at Noon
Jack
McCarthy
Camilo Mejia: Can the Son of a Sandinista Get a Fair Trial from
the US Army?
Bill
Kauffman
Nader v. Bush
Omar
Barghouti
No More Tears for America
Ghali
Hassan
Moral Failure of the "Free World" in Gaza
Christopher
Reed
How the CIA Taught the Portuguese to
Torture
Website
of the Day
Eric Idle on the Bush Administration: Fuck You, So Very Much
May
20, 2004
Andrew
Cockburn
The Truth About Chalabi
Kathy
Kelly
A Visit from the FBI
Niranjan
Ramakrishnan
Brown and Bored of Education in India
Tom
Stephens & John Philo
The War Crimes of Bush, Cheney & Co.
Sam
Bahour / Michael Dahan
Genocide by Public Policy
Robert
Ovetz
Ending the Race for the Last Turtle
Billy
Wilson
The Most Important Thing I Learned at School This Year
Website
of the Day
Rafah Today
Hot Stories
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
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click
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|
June
9, 2004
Kerry
Proposes More Big, Bad Intelligence
Why
the CIA will Always be a Costly Flop
By
JOHN CHUCKMAN
The resignation of both the director
and an important deputy director of any large organization is
noteworthy, but when that organization is the CIA we have an
event of global interest.
Several official, and likely-embarrassing,
reports concerning CIA activities--including one dealing with
the Agency's generous estimates of Iraq's non-existent weapons--are
expected to appear soon. The timing of the resignations may well
reflect these coming reports.
You might think the men who
resigned, Director George Tenet and Deputy Director for Operations
James Parvitt, should have been fired long ago. Never mind the
nonexistent weapons in Iraq or phony invoices for uranium, the
Agency's failure around the events leading to 9/11 was stunning,
but the intelligence business is one of the few where job performance
is almost unconnected with keeping your job.
There are many examples, but
the incredibly bizarre career of James Angleton, CIA's Chief
of Counterintelligence during the 1960s and into the 1970s, is
perhaps the most striking. The activities of Angleton, a man
certainly suffering from paranoid delusions, came close to destroying
the Agency in the 1960s, but his career didn't end until William
Colby became Director and forced Angleton to resign in 1974.
Even then, he was kept on as a consultant, in the typical generosity
of an organization with unlimited funds and afraid of revelations
by an extremely angry, sick old man.
The disconnect between performance
and job in Big Intelligence exists for many reasons, but four
key ones are the fear of discrediting or embarrassing the Agency
at a time of difficulty, the organizational difficulty of holding
particular individuals responsible for bad intelligence, the
chummy, old-boy atmosphere that invariably pervades such a vast
and privileged bureaucracy, and unavoidably-political nature
of all work by Big Intelligence.
These points have been demonstrated
many times. The CIA does not appear to have paid a price for
its monstrous failings before and after President Kennedy's assassination
(which included no anticipation of an event intimately related
to its activities in Cuba and, afterward, acts like Angleton's
destroying important evidence), nor does it appear to have paid
for decades of wildly-inaccurate assessments of the Soviet Union's
capacities. Since raw intelligence from many sources is digested
and filtered through an elaborate bureaucracy, the second point
is virtually axiomatic for Big Intelligence. Kim Philby's amazing
career with Britain's SIS may be the greatest-ever example of
the third point.
John Kerry's reaction to the
resignations provides a perfect example of the political trash
dumped time and again at the Agency's doorstep, "We must
reshape our intelligence community for the 21st century and create
a new position of 'director of national intelligence' with real
control of all intelligence personnel and budget." What
do you do with a cheap, gas-bag slogan like that?
I guess Kerry missed the fact
that his suggestion closely fits the job description given the
Director when President Truman created the CIA half a century
ago. Kerry also seems unaware that the CIA has been reshaped
and adjusted time after time in its brief history--after the
nightmare revelations of the Church Committee, after James Angleton's
reign of terror in counterintelligence, and after Reagan's election--to
little meaningful or lasting effect. It remains the world's largest
bureaucracy for the production of costly flops.
The ancient Greeks gave us
many timeless legends and warnings, but the myth of Cassandra,
who received both the gift of telling the truth and the curse
of not being believed, fixes for all time a fundamental relationship
in human affairs.
Governments always feel an
irresistible impulse to obtain intelligence. You might call it
the God Impulse, wanting to know everything that's going to affect
you, yet governments are condemned by their nature not to want
to hear truth on many subjects. That applies just as much to
democracies as dictatorships. Government policies are shaped
by attitudes, preconceptions, and wishes. When these confront
disagreeable facts, the preconceptions generally prevail.
There is also an inherent conflict
between the idea of an agency charged with providing facts and
the needs of a government which more often than not involve actively
hiding or manipulating facts for political goals.
But Big Intelligence is not
exactly comparable to Cassandra. It has not been blessed with
always knowing the truth, so that after spending frightful amounts
of money, it often works feverishly to hide its ignorance and
protect its image of godlike knowledge. The cloak of secrecy
is used to protect Big Intelligence from embarrassment as much
as it is used to protect genuine information.
Big Intelligence shares the
same preconceptions as the politicians it serves. After all,
its leaders are appointed from a pool of people friendly to a
government's intentions. You do not get people like Ralph Nader
appointed to high posts in the CIA. No, you get people like Daddy
Bush, always.
If you want a whiff of the
unavoidably bureaucratic and political nature of Big Intelligence,
go find some of the op-ed pieces written by Robert M. Gates who
served as Director from 1991 to 1993. The good old New York Times
often published his puff pieces. Gates was a career CIA bureaucrat,
I believe the only one ever given the top job. His pieces, bromides
expressed in oily institutional prose, are not worth reading
except for the sense they convey of a decades-long career of
throbbingly-dull, inconclusive reports.
Later, John M. Deutch, an extraordinarily
arrogant, plodding academic served as Director. He should have
faced trial for taking top-grade secret material home and storing
it on a personal computer later shown to have accessed many pornographic
Internet sites. Some national security.
On the other end of the scale
of Directors, there was a violence-prone thug like William Casey,
1981 to 1987, a throwback to the days of "Wild" Bill
Donavon who ran the OSS, World War II forerunner of the CIA.
Casey was a good chum of the late Great Communicator and relished
the dirty-tricks part of Big Intelligence. He utterly failed
in the CIA's great tasks, from understanding revolutionary developments
then occurring in the Soviet Union to knowing enough about the
Middle East to prevent Reagan's disastrous, embarrassing landing
and blowing-up of Marines in Lebanon.
Intelligence agencies do succeed
at certain kinds of tasks, but they are not necessarily tasks
sensible people want done in a free society. The KGB was very
effective at keeping the population of Soviet Union watched and
intimidated. The FBI in the United States was pretty effective
at the same task. Many members of the American government, in
both legislative and executive branches, for decades lived in
dread of revelations from the special files Director Hoover kept
on them. As a part of its defensive arsenal against Hoover, officials
at the CIA--the Agency and the FBI fought like wild dogs over
every scrap of bone--are reported to have kept salacious items
like a Peeping Tom photograph of Mr. Hoover having oral sex with
his assistant Clyde Tolson.
The CIA has at times been successful
at overthrowing, or contributing to the overthrow of, governments
America doesn't like, even when they were elected, although it
often fails here, too, the most notable example being its years
of costly, stupid effort to overthrow Castro. The Agency also
pays selected politicians, leaders, and parties all over the
world both to assist them and compromise them should it become
necessary later to apply pressure. The new Prime Minister of
Iraq's so-called independent government is one of these CIA creatures.
Many of the CIA's most costly
operations appear successful when viewed superficially. Its operation
in Afghanistan during the 1980s, where it spent billions to help
drive out the Soviets, is a good example. Eventually, the Soviets
left and were embarrassed by their failure, but if you examine
the operation over a longer time-horizon, you see that it was
in fact a catastrophic failure.
The truth is, so long as the
Soviets held sway in Afghanistan, no one had to worry about terror
or instability from the region. The CIA's "success"
gave birth to those very things. With no strategic foresight,
the CIA was not greatly concerned about such matters--instead,
it was concerned with staging a set of gigantic, deadly frat-boy
pranks to embarrass and damage the Soviets. The horrible excesses
of the Taleban (the British spelling for those ready to e-mail
a correction) owe much to the CIA's "success." The
Soviets, for all their flaws, always promoted secular government
and practices such as women being educated as professionals,
and they did this in Afghanistan. Their efforts were swept away
by the terrible governments the CIA's "success" gave
the country.
Not only was the Soviet Union
already beginning to unravel during those years--again, momentous
developments of which the CIA as an institution remained ignorant--but
the training, money, arms, and incitement the CIA contributed
to Afghan rebels virtually created the groups associated with
9/11. The CIA's practice of bringing shadowy characters back
and forth by the hundreds to the United States on visas American
embassies were forced to issue without examination unquestionably
helps explain how nineteen suicide-bombers entered the country
on legitimate visas. The shoulder-held anti-aircraft missiles
the CIA supplied wild mountain men to shoot down Soviet helicopters
found their way later to various places for attacks on civilian
airliners. How's that for a return on your tax dollar?
Most Americans have little
idea how much money is wasted on Big Intelligence. The budgets
are, of course, top secret, but, before 9/11, it was a common
estimate that the CIA went through $30 billion a year. Of course,
the U.S. also maintains an even more-secret, technical outfit
called the NSA, various branches of military intelligence (pardon
the oxymoron), intelligence sections in the State Department,
the FBI (now spreading its tentacles around the globe with offices
being established abroad--oh, wouldn't J. Edgar be happy! He
and Clyde might have done weekends in London or Paris), and other
lesser-known agencies. After 9/11, we can be sure that the dinner
plates of all these agencies were so heaped with extra ladles
of gravy, they slopped trails on their way back to the table.
For what America wastes on
Big Intelligence, every beat-up classroom in the nation could
be re-equipped or replaced over a few years. Were that ever to
happen, the world might be blessed by a generation of Americans
whose international behavior displayed a notable increase in
genuine, effective intelligence.
Weekend
Edition Features for June 5 / 6, 2004
C.
Douglas Lummis
Toward a Universal Declaration of
Human Wrongs
Saul
Landau
Five Cubans in Prison, Victims of Bush's Obsession
Dave
Lindorff
John Walker Lindh, Revisited
Brian
Cloughley
Apologies, Please, From Those Who Got It Wrong
Rich
Gibson
The Grenada 17: the Last Prisoners of the Cold War are Black
Elaine
Cassel
A Sorry FBI
Cathrin
Schütz
On the Ruins of Yugoslavia
Ben
Tripp
Call Me, Mr. Cassandra
Kurt
Nimmo
The Madness of King George
Ron
Jacobs
They Ain't Goin' Nowhere (Unless We Make It So)
Laura
Flanders
The Lynne Cheney Show?
Lenni
Brenner
Renaissance Noir: Caravaggio at the Met
Abigail
Jones
Whatever Happened to Lori Berenson, President Toledo's Trophy
Prisoner?
Mark
Latham
Nothing Bush Said Has Changed Our Hopes
Gerry
Adams
I Was Photographed While Tortured, Too
Toni
Solo
Venezuela 2004, Nicaragua's Contra War Reprised
Derek
Seidman
Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old
M.
Junaid Alam
Torture is Just the Symptom
Matt
Siegfried
An American Way of War
Dave
Zirin
The Politics of Charles Barkley
Poets'
Basement
Albert, Krieger, St. Clair
Website
of the Weekend
Overnight Sensations
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