“It was not the Fuehrer's aggression against Austria-which Beck had supported-but the rolling of General von Fritsch's head after the Gestapo frame-up which seems to have cleared his mind. Swept of its cobwebs it began to perceive that Hitler's policy of deliberately risking war with Britain, France and Russia against the advice of the top generals would, if carried out, be the ruin of Germany.

Beck had got wind of Hitler's meeting with Keitel on April 21 in which the Wehrmacht was instructed to hasten plans for attacking Czechoslovakia, and on May 5 he wrote out the first of a series of memoranda for General von Brauchitsch, the new Commander in Chief of the Army, strenuously opposing any such action.17 They are brilliant papers, blunt as to unpleasant facts and full of solid reasoning and logic. Although Beck overestimated the strength of will of Britain and France, the political shrewdness of their leaders and the power of the French Army, and in the end proved wrong on the outcome of the Czech problem, his long-range predictions turned out, so far as Germany was concerned, to be deadly accurate.

Beck was convinced, he wrote in his May 5 memorandum, that a German attack on Czechoslovakia would provoke a European war in which Britain, France and Russia would oppose Germany and in which the United States would be the arsenal of the Western democracies. Germany simply could not win such a war. Its lack of raw materials alone made victory impossible. In fact, he contended, Germany's "military economic situation is worse than it was in 1917-18," when the collapse of the Kaiser's armies began.

On May 28, Beck was among the generals convoked to the Reich Chancellery after the "May crisis" to hear Hitler storm that he intended to wipe Czechoslovakia off the map the coming autumn. He took careful notes of the Fuehrer's harangue and two days later, on the very day that Hitler was signing the new directive for "Green," which fixed the date for the attack as October 1, penned another and sharper memorandum to Brauchitsch criticizing Hitler's program point by point. To make sure that his cautious Commander in Chief fully understood it, Beck read it to him personally. At the end he emphasized to the unhappy and somewhat shallow Brauchitsch that there was a crisis in the "top military hierarchy" which had already led to anarchy and that if it was not mastered the fate of the Army, indeed of Germany, would be "black." A few days later, on June 3, Beck got off another memorandum to Brauchitsch in which he declared that the new directive for "Green" was "militarily unsound" and that the Army General Staff rejected it.(Rise and Fall of The Third Reich, Simon and Schuster 1960, William L. Shirer, pp. 366-367)”

"Ordinarily the resignation of a chief of the Army General Staff in the midst of a crisis, and especially of one so highly respected as was General Beck, would have caused a storm in military circles and even given rise to repercussions abroad. But here again Hitler showed his craftiness. Though he accepted Beck's resignation at once, and with great relief, he forbade any mention of it in the press or even in the official government and military gazettes and ordered the retired General and his fellow officers to keep it to themselves. It would not do to let the British and French governments get wind of dissension at the top of the German Army at this critical juncture and it is possible that Paris and London did not hear of the matter until the end of October, when it was officially announced in Berlin. Had they heard, one could speculate, history might have taken a different turning; the appeasement of the Fuehrer might not have been carried so far. Beck himself, out of a sense of patriotism and loyalty to the Army, made no effort to bring the news of his quitting to the public's attention. He was disillusioned, though, that not a single general officer among those who had agreed with him and backed him in his opposition to war felt called upon to follow his example and resign. (Rise and Fall of The Third Reich, Simon and Schuster 1960, William L. Shirer, pp. 371)”

Why Iraq Was a Mistake
A military insider sounds off against the war and the "zealots" who pushed it
By LIEUT. GENERAL GREG NEWBOLD (RET.)
Nation

With the encouragement of some still in positions of military leadership, I offer a challenge to those still in uniform: a leader's responsibility is to give voice to those who can't--or don't have the opportunity to--speak. Enlisted members of the armed forces swear their oath to those appointed over them; an officer swears an oath not to a person but to the Constitution. The distinction is important.

...What we are living with now is the consequences of successive policy failures. Some of the missteps include: the distortion of intelligence in the buildup to the war, McNamara-like micromanagement that kept our forces from having enough resources to do the job, the failure to retain and reconstitute the Iraqi military in time to help quell civil disorder, the initial denial that an insurgency was the heart of the opposition to occupation, alienation of allies who could have helped in a more robust way to rebuild Iraq, and the continuing failure of the other agencies of our government to commit assets to the same degree as the Defense Department. My sincere view is that the commitment of our forces to this fight was done with a casualness and swagger that are the special province of those who have never had to execute these missions--or bury the results.

Flaws in our civilians are one thing; the failure of the Pentagon's military leaders is quite another. Those are men who know the hard consequences of war but, with few exceptions, acted timidly when their voices urgently needed to be heard. When they knew the plan was flawed, saw intelligence distorted to justify a rationale for war, or witnessed arrogant micromanagement that at times crippled the military's effectiveness, many leaders who wore the uniform chose inaction. A few of the most senior officers actually supported the logic for war. Others were simply intimidated, while still others must have believed that the principle of obedience does not allow for respectful dissent. The consequence of the military's quiescence was that a fundamentally flawed plan was executed for an invented war, while pursuing the real enemy, al-Qaeda, became a secondary effort.

...There have been exceptions, albeit uncommon, to the rule of silence among military leaders. Former Army Chief of Staff General Shinseki, when challenged to offer his professional opinion during prewar congressional testimony, suggested that more troops might be needed for the invasion's aftermath. The Secretary and Deputy Secretary of Defense castigated him in public and marginalized him in his remaining months in his post. Army General John Abizaid, head of Central Command, has been forceful in his views with appointed officials on strategy and micromanagement of the fight in Iraq--often with success. Marine Commandant General Mike Hagee steadfastly challenged plans to underfund, understaff and underequip his service as the Corps has struggled to sustain its fighting capability.

To be sure, the Bush Administration and senior military officials are not alone in their culpability. Members of Congress--from both parties--defaulted in fulfilling their constitutional responsibility for oversight. Many in the media saw the warning signs and heard cautionary tales before the invasion from wise observers like former Central Command chiefs Joe Hoar and Tony Zinni but gave insufficient weight to their views.

The Slander That Launched Don Rumsfeld's Career
Written by Chris Floyd
Chris Floyd.com
Tuesday, 11 April 2006

An anecdote from James Carroll's magnificent new book, House of War (which I'll be reviewing here soon) provides a brief but penetrating glimpse at the gutter politics and moral nullity that have marked the entire career of the Pentagon warlord -- and the rest of his cohorts in the Bush gang.

In 1963, John F. Kennedy nominated Paul H. Nitze as Secretary of the Navy. This was actually a demotion for Nitze, who, as Carroll notes, had been at the very heart of American power for almost 20 years by then. He was in fact one of the godfathers of the Cold War, a Wall Street blue-blood turned high-level bureaucrat who served several presidents but was always driven by the same vision: projecting American dominance to the four corners of the earth, using an ever-expanding nuclear arsenal as the tip of the spear. For Nitze, thoroughly marinated in the "paranoid school" of U.S. political thought, no Pentagon budget was ever too big, no policy was ever too aggressive (including first-strike nuclear attacks), no restriction on American liberty was ever sufficient to stave off the demonic, all-powerful "evil empire" of the Soviet Union, which threatened, at every moment, to destroy America and its "way of life."

Nitze was the author of NSC-68, the document that more than any other engineered the militarization of American society and constituted the re-founding of the country as a "National Security State," controlled by the military-industrial complex and driven by a nightmare vision of exaggerated threats, craven fear, secrecy and deception, bellicosity and brinkmanship. This vision has waxed and waned in intensity at various times over the years, but it has never been displaced as the central dynamic of American power. The demonic, all-powerful enemy has now morphed from the Soviet Union to Islamic extremism, but the paranoid rhetoric and "Pentagon uber alles" philosophy of the Cold War has been seamlessly transferred whole cloth to the supposedly transformed "post-9/11 age."

And in the Bush administration, this nightmare Nitzean philosophy has reached its apotheosis in the war-making, liberty-gutting dictatorship of the Commander-in-Chief that George W. Bush proclaims more openly every day. Thus Nitze is one of the Founding Fathers of the new Bushist State, and Rumsfeld is one of his most dutiful sons.

All the more ironic then, that Rumsfeld began his career with a vicious smear of Nitze during his confirmation hearings for the Navy nomination. Rumsfeld was then a rookie Congressman from Illinois looking to make a name for himself. Nitze, who had been one of Kennedy's top advisors, had fallen out of favor with the young president. During two flashpoints that brought the world to the very brink of nuclear war -- in Berlin and Cuba -- Nitze had urged Kennedy to take military action, including nuclear first strikes if necessary. He derided the "morality questions" involved in taking the world to nuclear war, and accused Robert Kennedy (and indirectly the president) of "appeasement" for seeking peaceful solutions. For some reason, Nitze thought all this would win him a much longed-for nomination as Deputy Secretary of Defense -- the same position held much later by Paul Wolfowitz. But Kennedy had other ideas. Nitze was too powerful, too well-connected to jettison outright -- as Carroll's book makes clear, by this time the presidency had become in large part a prisoner of the Pentagon -- so he was palmed off with the Navy job.

And here he came into the crosshairs of young Don Rumsfeld. Any confirmation hearing is a good opportunity for the political opposition to score points off the sitting administration, but what could a hard-right, rampant Cold Warrior like Rumsfeld find to say against one of the chief architects of America's bristling, ever-expanding nuclear arsenal and its policies of aggressive "rollback" that even then beginning to ensnare the United States in the bloody quagmire of Vietnam? Here was a man after Rumsfeld's own cold heart. But the budding Bushist knew just what to do in such a situation: you lie. You come up with the most ludicrous, unsupported, impossible lie that you can think of -- then you launch it in the most public way possible. Yes, it's the old "Big Lie" gambit, consciously perfected by Josef Goebbels in Nazi Germany and now the chief mode of political discourse used by the Bush Administration. And although George W. himself was just a prep school cheerleader at the time, Rumsfeld was already honing the skills he would need to serve the master to come.

Rumsfeld accused Nitze -- of all people -- of being a pinko wimp who supported nuclear disarmament in the face of the implacable Soviet foe. What was the basis of this outrageous charge, which made about as much sense as calling Gandhi a war profiteer? It seems that years before, Nitze had attended a meeting of the National Council of Churches. At this conference, some people had spoken in favor of disarmament; others opposed it. In fact, the keynote speaker at the event was John Foster Dulles, then Secretary of State and one of the most aggressive and military-minded figures ever to hold power at the State Department (until the arrival of Condi Rice). It was, in other words, a very Establishment affair, where the great and good gather to pontificate and eat prime rib; "hardly a gathering of pinkos," Carroll notes. Nitze himself had a copious public record of speaking out against disarmament.

But none of these facts stopped Rumsfeld from publicly slandering Nitze at the hearings as a disarmer, a betrayer of national security, the kind of weakling who would cut and run in the face of the enemy. For Rumsfeld, the merest, fleeting association with any organization that so much as entertained the notion of pursuing peace over domination was enough to taint a nominee. Other Republicans followed the firebrand stripling's Big Lie and pounded Nitze -- one of the greatest champions of war, even genocidal nuclear war, in American history -- as a peacenik unworthy to head the Navy. Nitze survived the assault and won the confirmation vote, barely; but as Carroll writes, "the wound of the insult would never heal." As for Rumsfeld, his particular brand of ideological nastiness was noted -- and approved -- by powerful factions in the Republican Party, and when Richard Nixon brought the party back to power five years later, he found room for the hawkish hatchet man in the White House. Rumsfeld was a made man; he would remain entrenched in the bowels of the military-industrial, and often at the center of government, from that time until today.

And every step of the way, his career has been marked by mendacity, duplicity, smirking chatter and deadly ideological blindness -- for example, in the White House, he was a champion of the infamous "Team B" group that insisted that all of the CIA's intelligence about the Soviet Union's declining economy, its military weakness and its genuine desire to reach a new, peaceful accommodation to the West while reforming its own system was all false; Rumsfeld and his cohorts insisted -- on the basis of false evidence, manipulated evidence and no evidence at all -- that the "evil empire" was developing a whole range of new super-weapons that would be able to destroy the United States at a moment's notice. The fact that the CIA, the NSA, the DIA and the whole phalanx of America's intelligence services couldn't find any evidence for these weapons of mass destruction only proved how devious the Russians were in cloaking them. This group of "outside advisers" was formed by then-CIA Director George H.W. Bush; when he and goofy front-man Ronald Reagan took office in 1981, Rumsfeld and the B-teamers were able to "stovepipe" their twisted non-intelligence directly to the White House, which used it to justify gargantuan increases in military budgets and missile systems.

The Big Lie -- first deployed against his ideological soul-mate, Paul Nitze -- has served Rumsfeld well throughout his long career. And now he may cap this long and dirty record with the greatest irony of all: making Nitze's dream come true by launching nuclear weapons in an unprovoked first strike against a demonized Enemy -- Iran.

Scoop for Sioux Falls Paper: Newt Gingrich Wants U.S. Out of Iraq
By E&P Staff
Published: April 11, 2006 10:55 AM ET

NEW YORK The Argus-Leader of Sioux-Falls, S.D. was on the scene Monday to report that Newt Gingrich, the former Republican Speaker of the House, had told students and faculty at the University of South Dakota that the United States should pull out of Iraq and leave only a small force there, just as it did post-war in Korea and Germany.

"It was an enormous mistake for us to try to occupy that country after June of 2003," Gingrich said during an informal question-and-answer session at the school, according to the newspaper. "We have to pull back, and we have to recognize it...."

New Military Offensive Against Rumsfeld by Jim Lobe

The latest demand for Rumsfeld's resignation came Wednesday when Maj. Gen. John Batiste, who commanded the First Infantry Division in Iraq, called for a "fresh start in the Pentagon."

"We need a leader who understands teamwork, a leader who knows to build teams, a leader that does it without intimidation," Batiste told a CNN interviewer.

...ret. Army Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton, who had been in charge of training the Iraqi military during the first year of the occupation, argued that Rumsfeld "has shown himself incompetent strategically, operationally, and tactically" and "has put the Pentagon at the mercy of his Cold Warrior's view of the world and his unrealistic confidence in technology to replace manpower."

The Revolt Against Rumsfeld
By Fred Kaplan
truthout.org
12 April 2006

The officer corps is getting restless.

It's an odd thought, but a military coup in this country right now would probably have a moderating influence. Not that an actual coup is pending; still less is one desirable. But we are witnessing the rumblings of an officers' revolt, and things could get ugly if it were to take hold and roar.

The revolt is a reluctant one, aimed specifically at the personage of Donald Rumsfeld and the way he is conducting the war in Iraq.

It is startling to hear, in private conversations, how widely and deeply the U.S. officer corps despises this secretary of defense. The joke in some Pentagon circles is that if Rumsfeld were meeting with the service chiefs and commanders and a group of terrorists barged into the room and kidnapped him, not a single general would lift a finger to help him.

Some of the most respected retired generals are publicly criticizing Rumsfeld and his policies in a manner that's nearly unprecedented in the United States, where civilian control of the military is accepted as a hallowed principle. Gen. Anthony Zinni, a Marine with a long record of command positions (his last was as head of U.S. Central Command, which runs military operations in the Persian Gulf and South Asia), called last month for Rumsfeld's resignation. Army Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton, who ran the program to train the Iraqi military, followed with a New York Times op-ed piece lambasting Rumsfeld as "incompetent strategically, operationally and tactically," and a man who "has put the Pentagon at the mercy of his ego, his Cold Warrior's view of the world, and his unrealistic confidence in technology to replace manpower."

But the most eye-popping instance appears in this week's Time magazine, where retired Lt. Gen. Greg Newbold, the former operations director for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, not only slams the secretary and what he calls "the unnecessary war" but also urges active-duty officers who share his views to speak up. Newbold resigned his position in late 2002 - quite a gesture, since he was widely regarded as a candidate for the next Marine Corps commandant. His fellow officers knew he resigned over the coming war in Iraq. The public and the president did not. He writes in Time:

I now regret that I did not more openly challenge those who were determined to invade a country whose actions were peripheral to the real threat - al-Qaeda. … [T]he Pentagon's military leaders … with few exceptions, acted timidly when their voices urgently needed to be heard. When they knew the plan was flawed, saw intelligence distorted to justify a rationale for war, or witnessed arrogant micromanagement that at times crippled the military's effectiveness, many leaders who wore the uniform chose inaction. … It is time for senior military leaders to discard caution in expressing their views and ensure that the President hears them clearly. And that we won't be fooled again.

Newbold isn't urging active-duty senior officers to go public, just to speak out directly to the president (whose handlers famously filter the bad news from official reports before they hit the Oval Office). Still, in a climate where the secretary of defense hammers three-star generals for daring to suggest that our troops in Iraq are fighting "insurgents" and not just "terrorists," Newbold's invocation reads like a revolutionary manifesto. Generals of the Pentagon, unite! You have nothing to lose but your stars!

If Rumsfeld is in less danger than these calls for his head might suggest, it's in part because not many generals want to lose those stars - and quite a lot of colonels would like to earn some. (Remember: Zinni, Eaton, and Newbold are retired generals; they have no more promotions to risk.)

The patron saint, but also the object lesson, of the many officers who are mulling their options - whether to heed Newbold's rallying cry or keep their heads down and shoes polished - is Gen. Eric Shinseki, the former Army chief of staff who spoke truth to power and got slammed for his troubles. Shortly before the invasion, Shinseki told the Senate armed services committee that "a few hundred thousand" troops would be needed to impose order after the war was over. Paul Wolfowitz, then deputy secretary of defense, upbraided him in public the next day; Rumsfeld named Shinseki's successor a year in advance of his scheduled retirement, thus undercutting his authority for the rest of his term. In his Times op-ed, Gen. Eaton wrote of Shinseki's punishment, "The rest of the senior brass got the message, and nobody has complained since."

Zinni, Eaton, and Newbold are explicitly trying to supplant the lesson of Shinseki with an earlier lesson - one that was propagated throughout the U.S. armed forces in the late 1990s but laid aside once the war in Iraq got under way. It came from a book called Dereliction of Duty, by H.R. McMaster, then an Army major, now a colonel. Based on extensive research into declassified files, the book concluded that during the 1960s, the Joint Chiefs of Staff betrayed their constitutional duties by failing to provide their honest military judgment to President Lyndon B. Johnson and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara as they plunged into the quagmire of Vietnam. When McMaster's book was published in 1997, during the Clinton administration, Gen. Hugh Shelton, then the JCS chairman, ordered all his service chiefs and commanders to read it and follow its lessons to the letter - to express disagreements to their superiors, even at the risk of getting yelled at. William Cohen, Clinton's secretary of defense, echoed the sentiment. Ever since, Dereliction of Duty has been a must-read for all senior officers.

At a small, on-the-record press lunch last week with Gen. Zinni (who was promoting his new book, The Battle for Peace), I asked him what would have happened had even two other active-duty generals appeared before Congress - or resigned and called a press conference - to support Shinseki's testimony. Gen. Zinni said he thought President Bush would have had a harder time rallying political support for the invasion. I also asked him why, in the three years since the war's start, not a single active-duty general has mustered the courage (or recklessness, disloyalty, call it what you will) to follow Shinseki's example - or, to put it another way, to follow the lesson in Dereliction of Duty.

Gen. Zinni referred to another book, a favorite of officers for nearly four decades now - Anton Myrer's 1968 novel, Once an Eagle. It's about two Army officers, friends from childhood, and their rise through the ranks: Sam Damon, a straight-arrow field commander, and Courtney Massengale, a scheming Pentagon careerist. Gen. Zinni said the two characters are widely seen in his profession as symbols for the two types of military officer - and the two paths of military promotion. He stopped short of saying so explicitly, but he suggested that the Pentagon's upper ranks contain too many Courtney Massengales and not enough Sam Damons.

He acknowledged other reasons many generals have declined to follow Shinseki, et al. into dissent. Some have no problem with the war or the way it has been conducted. Many others take very seriously the principle of civilian control; they firmly believe it is not their place to disagree with the president and his duly appointed secretary of defense - certainly not to do so in public, especially while the nation is at war. As a matter of principle, we should be glad that they feel this way. There are plenty of lessons from books, movies, and history that support this view as well: Seven Days in May (a charismatic general mounts a coup to keep the president from signing a nuclear-test-ban treaty with the Soviets), Dr. Strangelove (a loony general launches a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union without presidential authority), and the true-life tale of Gen. Douglas MacArthur (heroic commander of Korean War troops publicly advocates going beyond the 38th parallel and invading Communist China, forcing President Harry Truman to recall him).

MacArthur's legacy in particular has kept even the boldest generals deeply reluctant to criticize civilian leaders over the decades. Rumsfeld's arrogance, his "casualness and swagger" as Gen. Newbold put it - which have caused so many strategic blunders, so much death and disaster - have started to tip some officers over the edge. They may prove a good influence in the short run. But if Rumsfeld resists their encroachments and fights back, the whole hierarchy of command could implode as officers feel compelled not merely to stay silent but to choose one side or the other. And if the rebel officers win, they might find they like the taste of bureaucratic victory - and feel less constrained to renew the internecine combat when other, less momentous disputes arise in the future.

Both paths are cluttered with drear and danger. Does President Bush know this is going on? If he does, he would do the nation - and the Constitution - a big favor if he launched a different sort of pre-emptive attack and got rid of Rumsfeld now.

1984, Chapter 17, George Orwell.

It need hardly be said that the subtlest practitioners of doublethink are those who invented doublethink and know that it is a vast system of mental cheating. In our society, those who have the best knowledge of what is happening are also those who are furthest from seeing the world as it is. In general, the greater the understanding, the greater the delusion; the more intelligent, the less sane. One clear illustration of this is the fact that war hysteria increases in intensity as one rises in the social scale. Those whose attitude towards the war is most nearly rational are the subject peoples of the disputed territories.

...It is in the ranks of the Party, and above all of the Inner Party, that the true war enthusiasm is found. World-conquest is believed in most firmly by those who know it to be impossible. This peculiar linking-together of opposites -- knowledge with ignorance, cynicism with fanaticism -- is one of the chief distinguishing marks of Oceanic society.

...It systematically undermines the solidarity of the family, and it calls its leader by a name which is a direct appeal to the sentiment of family loyalty. Even the names of the four Ministries by which we are governed exhibit a sort of impudence in their deliberate reversal of the facts. The Ministry of Peace concerns itself with war, the Ministry of Truth with lies, the Ministry of Love with torture and the Ministry of Plenty with starvation. These contradictions are not accidental, nor do they result from ordinary hypocrisy; they are deliberate exercises in doublethink. For it is only by reconciling contradictions that power can be retained indefinitely. In no other way could the ancient cycle be broken. If human equality is to be for ever averted -- if the High, as we have called them, are to keep their places permanently -- then the prevailing mental condition must be controlled insanity.

MSNBC
‘Micromanaged the generals’The spreading challenge to the Pentagon’s civilian leadership included criticism from some recently retired senior officers directly involved in the Iraq war and its planning.

“I really believe that we need a new secretary of defense because Secretary Rumsfeld carries way too much baggage with him,” retired Maj. Gen. Charles Swannack, who led the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division in Iraq, told CNN on Thursday.

“Specifically, I feel he has micromanaged the generals who are leading our forces,” he said.

Retired Army Maj. Gen. John Riggs told National Public Radio on Thursday that Rumsfeld had helped create an atmosphere of “arrogance” among the Pentagon’s top civilian leadership.

“They only need the military advice when it satisfies their agenda. I think that’s a mistake, and that’s why I think he should resign,” Riggs said.

Retired Marine Lt. Gen. Gregory Newbold and Army Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton have also spoken out against Rumsfeld.

Christopher H. Sheppard: 'A Marine captain comes home — disillusioned'
April 14, 2006
Christopher H. Sheppard, The Seattle Times
Smirkingchimp

Three years ago, I was a Marine Corps captain on the Iraqi/Kuwaiti border, participating in the invasion of Iraq. Awestruck, I heard our howitzers thunder and watched artillery rockets rise into the night sky and streak toward Iraq — their light bathing the desert moonscape like giant arc welders.

As I watched the Iraq war begin, I completely trusted the Bush administration. I thought we were going to prove all of the left-wing antiwar protesters and dissenters wrong. I thought we were going to make America safer. Regrettably, I acknowledge that it was I who was wrong.

I believed the Bush administration when it said Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. I believed its assertion that Iraq was trying to buy yellowcake uranium from Africa and refine it into weapons-grade uranium for a nuclear bomb. I believed its claim Iraq had vast quantities of biological and chemical agents. After years of thorough inspections, all of these claims have been disproved.

I believed the administration when it claimed there was overwhelming evidence Iraq was in cahoots with al-Qaida. In January 2004, then-Secretary of State Colin Powell admitted that there was no concrete evidence linking Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida.

I believed the administration when it grandly proclaimed we were going to bring a stable, Western-style liberal democracy to Iraq, complete with religious tolerance and the rule of law. We never had enough troops in Iraq to restore civil order and the rule of law. The Iraqi elections have produced a ruling majority of Shiite fundamentalists and marginalized the seething Sunni minority. Iraq dangerously teeters on the brink of civil war. We have emboldened Iran and destabilized the entire Middle East.

I believed the administration when it claimed the war could be done quickly and cheaply. It said the war would cost only between $50 billion and $60 billion. It said that Iraqi oil revenue would fund the country's reconstruction. I believed President Bush when he landed on the USS Lincoln and said "major combat operations have ended."

The war has cost the American taxpayers $250 billion and counting. The vast majority — 94 percent — of the more than 2,300 United States service members killed in Iraq have occurred since Bush's "Top Gun" proclamation. The cost in men and materiel has been far beyond what we were led to believe.

I volunteered to go back to Iraq for the fall and winter of 2004-2005. I went back out of frustration and guilt; frustration from watching Iraq unravel on the news and guilt that I wasn't there trying to stop it. Many fine Marines from my reserve battalion felt the same and volunteered to go back. I buried my mounting suspicions and mustered enough trust and faith in my civilian leadership to go back.

I returned disillusioned by what I saw. I participated in the second battle of Fallujah in November 2004. We crushed the insurgents in the city, but we only ended up scattering them throughout the province. The dumb ones stayed and died. The smart ones left town before the battle, to garner more recruits and fight another day. We were simply the little Dutch boy with our finger in the dike. In retrospect, we never had enough troops to firmly control the region; we had just enough to maintain a tenuous equilibrium.

I now know I wrongfully placed my faith and trust in a presidential administration hopelessly mired in incompetence, hubris and a lack of accountability. It planned a war based on false intelligence and unrealistic assumptions. It has strategically surrendered the condition of victory in Iraq to people who do not share our vision, values or interests. The Bush administration has proven successful at only one thing in Iraq — painting us into a corner with no feasible exit.

I will never trust any of them again.

Christopher H. Sheppard is a former Marine captain who served two tours of duty in Iraq as a combat engineer. He currently is finishing his master's degree in mass communication and lives in Marysville.

Copyright © 2006 The Seattle Times Company

'On the possibility of a military coup in the United States of America'
April 14, 2006
Anwaar Hussain, Fountainhead
Smirkingchimp

About the possibilities of a military coup in the United States, historian Andrew Jonas said this;
"Coup d'etat in the United States would be too fantastic to contemplate, not only because few would actually entertain the idea, but also because the bulk of the people are strongly attached to the prevailing political system and would rise in defense of a political leader even though they might not like him. The environment most hospitable to coups d'etat is one in which political apathy prevails as the dominant style."
The question to ask is whether 'political apathy' now 'prevails as the dominant style' in the United States of today or not?

With the unending 'war on terror' resulting in a heavy tampering of the American Constitution by the current US Administration, and the consequent granting of virtually limitless powers to the President of United States for the duration of the unending war, a real 'Constitutional Conundrum' has been created.

Ironically, this self-granting of limitless powers in turn has now manifested itself in an inverse power vacuum being created at the decision making level that is now becoming more and more visible with each passing day. Despite the fact that American nation seems to understand more than any other nation that the armed forces exist to support and defend government, not to be the government, yet faced with an intractable national problem on the one hand, and having an efficient and capable military on the other, it is all too enticing to start viewing the military as a gainful solution or as the 'ultimate saviors' a la certain banana republics where the military does indeed call the shots.

The seeds of the outrage are all there. The war-ravaged economy is in the dumps, American casualties in Iraq are mounting with Iraq itself now in the throes of a civil war, corruption in high places is rampant, the environment is in trouble, the delicate subject of 'immigration' has been given a needless prod resulting in massive protests and political scandals are exploding on almost daily basis in Washington. In addition to all this, despite a national and international uproar, the current American leadership seems to be inching inexorably towards yet another war.

Americans becoming frustrated with democracy and disheartened with the apparent inability of their elected government to solve the nation's confounding impasses, thus, is a natural response. Unable to effect a change themselves, they may now be looking for someone or something that could produce workable solutions. Despite its misuse by the civilian leadership, the one institution of government in which the Americans continue to retain faith is their military.

Ever since Washington's warnings about the dangers of large military establishments in his farewell address, Americans have generally viewed their armed forces with a careful mix of awe and respect. For over two centuries that admiration was rewarded, and most Americans have come to consider the very idea of a military coup outrageous. To be sure, there always were eccentric conspiracy theorists that saw the Pentagon's hand in the assassination of President Kennedy, President Nixon's downfall, and similar events yet not very many Americans would think that a military coup d'etat in America of today is a tangible possibility.

That fact may be slowly, but surely, changing. According to a very recent Guardian report, for example, the US government is increasingly faced with a intensifying split between its civilian and military leadership over the war on Iraq after a fourth retired general called for the defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, to stand down. This latest was retired Major General Charles Swannack, who led the 82nd Airborne Division in Iraq. The other three were Lieutenant General Gregory Newbold, the former director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Major General Paul Eaton, who oversaw the training of Iraqi troops until 2004 and retired Marine General Anthony Zinni, the former head of US Central Command.

The unparalleled ferocity of the attacks and repeated calls for serving officers to go public with their dissent was starting to cause concern among military analysts. "If this opens up so we have more and more officers speaking up and blaming Rumsfeld and blaming senior civilians, then it is possibly heading towards a fairly dangerous civilian-military crisis," opined Andrew Bacevich, a military historian at Boston University.

Richard Gabriel fittingly observed in his book 'To Serve with Honor' that, "When one discusses dissent, loyalty, and the limits of military obligations, the central problem is that the military represents a threat to civil order not because it will usurp authority, but because it does not speak out on critical policy decisions. The soldier fails to live up to his oath to serve the country if he does not speak out when he sees his civilian or military superiors executing policies he feels to be wrong." While Gabriel was right when he described military leadership's responsibilities vis-a-vis the civilian leadership, he may have been off the mark when he dismissed the military's potential to threaten civil order.

Efforts to carve a role for the military in America's civilian affairs can be traced to as far back as the Carter administration. According to two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Knut Royce in a July 1983 series in the San Francisco Examiner, a presidential directive had been drafted by a few Carter administration personnel in 1979 "to allow the military to take control of the government for 90 days in the event of an emergency." A requirement on page one of the directive said, "Keeping the government functioning after a nuclear war is a secret, costly project that detractors claim jeopardizes US traditions and saves a privileged few." There was a heated debate, Royce noted, within the Carter administration as to just what constituted an "emergency."

Then again during the Iran-Contra affair it came to light that a few high officials of the US government were planning a possible military/civilian coup. Miami Herald on July 5, 1987 ran the story. The article, by Alfonzo Chardy, revealed Oliver North's involvement in plans for the Federal Emergency Management Agency to take over federal, state and local functions during an ill-defined national emergency.

With the unending 'war on terror' continuing endlessly, the incessant chant of 'enemies all around' and the inevitable militarization of the American society, the armed forces have now penetrated many vital aspects of American society. There is now an entire generation of young Americans who have grown up comfortable with the sight of military personnel patrolling their streets and interacting with them on their campuses. Military uniforms now draw no stares. Furthermore, with the ever increasing importance attached to agencies like Homeland Security and FEMA, the military is now ideally positioned in thousands of communities to support the supposed coup.

Given these unparalleled times, there are increasing indications that Americans traditional and strong resistance to any military interference into civilian affairs may be waning. The time may not be very far when they start re-thinking the appeal and need of that resistance. Indeed, many may already be comparing the military's principled competence with the shenanigans and uselessness of their elected officials, and finding the former more capable.

American public's unease too is now increasing in a direct proportion to the top military brass's voicing of its opinion. The terms 'impeachment', 'censuring', 'removal from power' etc. have now become a common lexicon not just in the fringe media. Never before has the threat of disorder occasioned by an increasingly isolated Chief Executive so precipitated with each passing day. Needless to say that the inept civilian leadership, on all sides of the American political spectrum, direly necessitates a strong headship in these troubled times.

With the current US administration getting the lowest ever job approval ratings from American public; the country now suffers from a deep pessimism about politicians and government after years of false promises and outright lies. Ruling politicians and their proposals seem rotten and repetitive. With surfacing of reports of vote rigging in the last elections, the American voters now seem to have also given up hope of finding answers through the ballot. Even a cursory glance at the alternative media shows that an increasing number of Americans have come to view the chief function of their government as inventing a security threat and then turning the job over to the military. If that be the case, some may argue, why not remove the corrupt middlemen and entrust the task directly to the military.

The "environment of apathy" Janos characterized as a forerunner to a coup seems to have arrived in America.

America, ladies and gentlemen, has entered a dangerous phase.

Copyrights : Anwaar Hussain

Permission to Speak Freely, Sir
By Stephen Pizzo,
Alternet.com
April 14, 2006.

Those who have never served in the military don't understand how extraordinary it is for career military officers to say the things they're saying.

I am sorry that high school and college kids no longer have to face a couple of years of mandatory military service. That may be a strange thing to say for a guy who protested the draft back in the '60s. Maybe it's the inevitable aging process. Or maybe it's the perspective you get from the higher altitude of experience.

What got me thinking about this were the extraordinary statements being made by recently retired U.S. generals. Those who have never served in the military don't understand how extraordinary it is for career military officers to say the things these guys are saying about their former civilian superiors.

I hit Marine Corps bootcamp on July 7, 1965, a wimpy kid from suburbia. The first thing we were told was that we were the lowest forms of life on earth -- and that meant lower than civilians. I was to learn as time went on that this was not just drill instructor blather. It was a genuine, deeply ingrained belief that permeated the highest ranks of the military for civilian control. We were repeatedly told that the lowest civilian we met on the street outranked the highest grade military officer. And that was not show. They believed it, not just as a principle, but a sacred trust.

Those who never served will likely see that as corny, empty rhetoric, window dressing, quaint -- at best. But those who did serve know of what I speak. We get it. That's one reason I bemoan that two generations of kids have since been spared a stint in uniform. It changed my life in ways I now understand and appreciate in ways I could not back then.

This is not a column about reinstituting the draft. I just want to make the case that you pay close and respectful attention to the recent statements by retired top Pentagon brass. Because never in my life did I ever expect to hear these kinds of things coming out of the mouths of such men. Never. Here's a sampler:


"[Donald Rumsfeld] has proved himself incompetent strategically, operationally and tactically. Mr. Rumsfeld must step down."
--General Paul Eaton, who oversaw training of Iraqi army troops, 2003-2004


"I really believe that we need a new secretary of defense because Secretary Rumsfeld carries way too much baggage with him. Specifically, I feel he has micromanaged the generals who are leading our forces there."
--retired Maj. Gen. Charles Swannack, former commander of the 82nd Airborne Division.


"I think we need a fresh start … We need leadership up there (the Pentagon) that respects the military as they expect the military to respect them."
--Maj. Gen. John Batiste, commander 1st Infantry Division in Iraq, 2004-2005


We won't get fooled again … Rumsfeld and many others unwilling to fundamentally change their approach should be replaced."
--Marines Lt. Gen. Gregory Newbold, director of operations of Joint Chiefs of Staff, 2000-2002


"The problem is that we've wasted three years … absolutely, Rumsfeld should resign."
--Marines Gen. Anthony Zinni, former chief of U.S. Central Command


"A lot of them [other generals] are hugely frustrated. Rumsfeld gave the impression that military advice was neither required nor desired" in the planning for the Iraq war.
--Lt. Gen. Wallace Gregson, former commander of Marines forces in the Pacific Theater


"Everyone pretty much thinks Rumsfeld and the bunch around him should be cleared out. [Rumsfeld and his advisers have] made fools of themselves, and totally underestimated what would be needed for a sustained conflict."
--Army Maj. Gen. John Riggs

The administration is trying to counter these devastating statements by noting that none of the generals voiced such reservations during the lead-up to the war. And, because so many Americans now lack any direct experience with the military, the tactic may just work. After all, it's easy to dismiss these retired generals just that easily. "So, where were your qualms when we really need them, general?"

I know the answer to that question -- and it's not the answer the Bushies want you to get.

When an officer has a particularly sticky problem with the actions or orders of a superior officer, s/he can "request permission to speak freely, sir."

Well, that was tried, by Army Gen. Eric Shinseki, who was promptly and unceremoniously "shit-canned." (Another term my fellow vets may find familiar.)

The Pentagon's civilian leaders sent a clear message to the rest of the Pentagon brass: "Do what we want, or we'll find a junior officer who will."

With the "permission to speak freely" option off the table, the brass was left only with their prime directive: Civilians rule.

So, their silence leading up to war was not cowardice or careerism, as some have suggested. It was instead the manifestation of that deeply ingrained principle that civilians not only outrank them, but that the most dangerous thing that can happen in a democracy is for the military to start preempting civilian leadership.

We can quibble over that notion, of course. We can wave around the Nuremberg principle that "just following orders" is no defense for wrongdoing. I agree. But let me tell you, my experience in the military left me with a deep respect for the way the American military views its place in our democracy. They really do believe civilians rule. I would have it no other way. And neither should you.

Which is why we old vets understand better than most how gut-wrenching it must have been for these recently retired officers to go public. I am certain it was not the way they wanted to end their lifetimes of service to their country. Because, as far as these men are concerned, under normal circumstances, such behavior smacks of treason.

Retired two-star Maj. Gen. John Batiste, who commanded the Big Red One (the Army's 1st Infantry Division) in Iraq until November, said Rumsfeld must go for ignoring and intimidating career officers. "You know, it speaks volumes that guys like me are speaking out from retirement about the leadership climate in the Department of Defense. (Full Story)

So, no one should take their statements lightly. This is serious business … especially at the very moment these same civilian leaders are grunting eagerly over satellite images of Iran.

Stephen Pizzo is the author of numerous books, including "Inside Job: The Looting of America's Savings and Loans," which was nominated for a Pulitzer.

The CIA “Wehrmacht”
By Ken Silverstein.
Harpers.org
April 19, 2006

With the war in Iraq an utter debacle and public opinion turned against the White House, anger within the armed forces towards Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and the Administration is growing, and the Pentagon is fighting back (see “Pentagon Memo Aims to Counter Rumsfeld Critics” in the April 16 New York Times). But what's been little noted thus far is what looks to be a similar revolt brewing at the CIA. An ex-senior agency officer who keeps in contact with his former peers told me that there is a “a big swing” in anti-Bush sentiment at Langley. “I've been stunned by what I'm hearing,” he said. “There are people who fear that indictments and subpoenas could be coming down, and they don't want to get caught up in it.”

This former senior officer said there “seems to be a quiet conspiracy by rational people” at the agency to avoid involvement in some of the particularly nasty tactics being employed by the administration, especially “renditions”—the practice whereby the CIA sends terrorist suspects abroad to be questioned in Egypt, Syria, Uzbekistan, and other nations where the regimes are not squeamish about torturing detainees. My source, hardly a softie on the topic of terrorism, said of the split at the CIA: “There's an SS group within the agency that's willing to do anything and there's a Wehrmacht group that is saying, 'I'm not gonna touch this stuff'.”

Scott Horton, a human rights activist who has become a principal spokesman for the New York City Bar Association in evaluating the Bush Administration's tactics, said that he's also hearing stories of growing dissent at the CIA. “When the shit hits the fan,” he explained, “the administration scapegoats lower-level people. It doesn't do a lot in terms of inspiring confidence.”

The expanding revolt against Rumsfeld is nothing new. I received a note way back on June 22, 2004 from a source at the Naval War College that put the situation in sharp perspective:

From my vantage point...cracks definitely have developed in the Administration's relationship with the Armed Forces. Most recently, several active duty senior commanders who spoke on the record at the “Current Strategy Forum” that ended here last week were critical to a point that walked a fine constitutional line of disloyalty to the political leadership. It was clear that many of the officers in the audience agreed with them and admired them for telling it like it is...[W]hat I think is going on here is serious concern among officers to protect the integrity of the institution. After unquestionably following policy, as we would expect, the increasing strains on the military plus the devolution in Iraq seem to have retrieved a collective wisdom from the shadow of Vietnam.
Other signs of serious military anger toward the administration were apparent by the spring of 2004 when a group of very senior officers from the Judge Advocate General's Corps, the legal arm of the U.S. armed forces, were so upset about the administration's loosening of rules against torture that they complained in private to Horton, who was then a committee chair at the New York City Bar Association. Horton and the Bar subsequently prepared a groundbreaking report on U.S. interrogation tactics, “Human Rights Standards Applicable to the United States' Interrogation of Detainees,” which challenged the Pentagon's actions. Horton and the Bar also were involved in publishing the “torture memoranda” and used them to disprove Rumsfeld's claims that the abuses at Abu Ghraib resulted from a few low-ranking “bad apples” (to use the administration's phrase).

Today's “Wehrmacht” officers at the CIA are right to be worried about subpoenas: a legal analysis prepared by a senior FBI attorney in 2002 deemed that renditions to countries that torture detainees were illegal. The attorney concluded that such actions were designed to circumvent American laws against torture and that anyone even discussing such a plan could be found criminally liable. If the political winds shift, some “bad apples” in the CIA could find themselves indicted for torture.

8th General Calls For Rumsfeld’s Resignation
Fox News is reporting an eighth general has called for Rumsfeld’s resignation. Ret. Marine General Paul Van Riper said he constantly talks with many active duty and retired senior officers who share his feelings that Secretary Rumsfeld has not fought the Iraq war competently. He told Fox that Rumsfeld has run the Pentagon through intimidation and that a change in leadership is needed.

Excerpt:
If this leader is not capable of doing it, now going in excess of five years, has not demonstrated he is, then perhaps it is time to find a new one. If I was the president, I would have relieved him three years ago.

Crisis building in White House over Iraq war
The Star.com
Apr. 25, 2006
RICHARD GWYN

A week ago, it was the generals. Now it's the colonels and majors and captains. Moreover, these officers are in uniform and have none of the security from retribution of the generals who had all already retired.

In a front-page story Sunday, The New York Times described an "extraordinary debate" now going on among younger American officers "in military academies, in the armed services staff colleges, and even in command posts and mess halls in Iraq."

This debate is about the war in Iraq, about the tactics and prospects of the American forces there, and, most particularly, about Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, already the target of stinging criticism by a half dozen recently-retired senior generals, most of whom had served in Iraq.

The names of these junior officers have all been withheld by the Times. If ever identified, they would be court-martialed. So readers have to take it on faith that the paper has described their opinions accurately.

But it's hard to doubt that the report is close to the truth. To heighten its credibility, by no means all of its findings are predictable.

Thus, while the younger officers overwhelmingly fault Rumsfeld, they are less critical of President George W. Bush.

Several thought their own generals were as much to blame as Rumsfeld, for having gone along silently with his bad planning.

The sense of malaise, though, is widespread.

Time and again these officers questioned the "strategic and political mistakes" that left the American troops unprepared to deal with the kind of insurgency that is now tearing apart Iraq. Nor could any see any way out. One Special Forces major pointed out that the Americans couldn't now pull out: "We have to restore it (security in Iraq) ... otherwise we'll just return later, which is even more terrible."

In terms of political reality, Rumsfeld isn't going anywhere. Bush has just declared his complete confidence in him.

To make that circumstance even more politically real, Bush can't now afford to let Rumsfeld go: Without Rumsfeld around, Bush himself would become the target for all the criticism.

It's also a political reality, though, that the criticism of a defence secretary by his own officers is without precedent.

The military occupies an iconic role in American public life. It's widely admired and is seen as a protector of the nation in a way that is rarely equalled internationally.

The effect of this criticism of Rumsfeld will therefore be to multiply the credibility of all those criticizing the war itself. The latest of these is former national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, who has called for a withdrawal of American troops, arguing that the costs of staying will be even higher than the undoubted costs of quitting.

The key political question is how all this will play out in November's mid-term Congressional elections. The issue here is whether the Democrats can capitalize on Bush's plummeting popularity and win back control of at least the House of Representatives.

If this happens — an uncertain prospect given that the Democrats still lack a coherent policy on Iraq, or indeed on anything much — Bush's room to manoeuvre on foreign policy will be severely constricted.

More significant, a Republican defeat in the November elections will ensure that the next presidential election, in 2008, will become a single-issue election about Iraq.

It will be won by whichever of the Republican and Democrat nominees can convince voters that their way will get the U.S. out of Iraq with a minimum loss of blood and face.

Bush needs Rumsfeld to protect himself. The Democrats need Rumsfeld to attack Bush. Politically, it can still go either way. But a crisis is building that's going to force a decision, about the U.S. and Iraq, one way or another.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Richard Gwyn's column appears Tuesdays and Fridays. gwynR@sympatico.ca.

ISSUES & IDEAS
Silencing The Squeaky Wheels
By Shane Harris, National Journal
© National Journal Group Inc.
Thursday, April 27, 2006

The CIA has imposed new and tighter restrictions on the books, articles, and opinion pieces published by former employees who are still contractors with the intelligence agency. According to several former CIA officials affected by the new policy, the rules are intended to suppress criticism of the Bush administration and of the CIA. The officials say the restrictions amount to an unprecedented political "appropriateness" test at odds with earlier CIA policies on outside publishing.

The move is a significant departure from the CIA's longtime practice of allowing ex-employees to take critical or contrary positions in public, particularly when they are contractors paid to advise the CIA on important topics and to publish their assessments.

All current and former CIA employees have long been required to submit manuscripts for books, opinion pieces, and even speeches to the agency's Publications Review Board, which ensures that the works don't reveal classified information or intelligence sources and methods. The board has not generally factored political opinions into its decision-making, former CIA officials say. But in recent years, former employees have written memoirs and opinion pieces challenging the CIA and the Bush administration, particularly for its use of prewar intelligence to justify the war in Iraq. The board did not find that any of those pieces revealed secrets, a fact that makes the CIA's new review standards troubling, former officials and intelligence-community analysts said.

Many of those experts believe that public criticism provides an important source of alternative analysis -- something the CIA needs to understand terrorism, global disease, and other emerging threats. But the White House and CIA Director Porter Goss view spies-turned-authors as political liabilities who embarrass an already battered administration, former officials said. The CIA is now aggressively investigating -- using polygraphs in some cases -- employees who are suspected of leaking classified information to journalists, and last week the agency said it fired a senior official, Mary O. McCarthy, reportedly for having unauthorized contact with the news media.

The former CIA officials carefully distinguished leaks of classified information, which they acknowledged can endanger national security, from articles or speeches that challenge policy yet reveal no secrets. But several said that Goss's vigorous pursuit of leakers is philosophically connected to his desire to keep embarrassing comments by former CIA insiders out of the public domain.

"I think the [publications] that are causing the most kickback now are things that look like they're critical of the administration," said one former official who has written about intelligence policies and techniques. "The [career] agency people feel like they are regarded by the White House as the enemy." They "feel like Goss's real job is to decimate the place," said the former official, who, like others contacted for this story, asked for anonymity to avoid reprisal from the CIA.

Full-time agency employees are discouraged from expressing their political opinions, lest they taint the agency as partisan. But contractors traditionally have been free to speak their minds. The new review policy "reflects [Goss's] concern, and his personality, which seems to have minimal tolerance for dissent," said Steven Aftergood, an authority on government secrecy policies with the Federation of American Scientists.

The publications review process "was designed to assure agency personnel that their First Amendment rights would be protected as long as they did not compromise security," Aftergood said. "That relatively enlightened position has now been abandoned."

The CIA acknowledged for the first time last week that the Publications Review Board subjects former officials under contract to a two-part test. "First, material submitted for publication cannot contain classified information," CIA spokesman Paul Gimigliano wrote in an e-mail. "Second, it cannot impair the individual's ability to do his or her job or the CIA's ability to conduct its mission as a nonpartisan, nonpolicy agency of the executive branch."

That new criterion is at odds with the agency's earlier rules. According to a July 2005 unclassified regulation, signed by Goss, "The [Publications Review Board] will review material ... solely to determine whether it contains any classified information. Permission to publish will not be denied solely because the material may be embarrassing to or critical of the agency."

Former officials who have been contacted by the CIA or made aware of the policy warned that it could backfire. "If this is the direction in which it's going ... the agency would be shooting itself in the foot," said one former official who was involved in contracting with outside experts to solicit reviews of draft intelligence assessments. "At a time when the agency is being criticized at least as much as it ever has for 'groupthink,' unchallenged assumptions, and not practicing alternative analysis rigorously, this is one of the last changes it ought to be making."

The former official predicted, "Those contractors who tend to express opposing viewpoints would be among the first to terminate their contracts." If they bolt, the agency's efforts will have been for naught: The CIA will have lost them, and they'll publish their writings anyway, because the new policy review doesn't apply to former employees who don't have CIA contracts, the former official explained.

Another former official under contract, who has written critically about intelligence analysis, said the policy would encourage people to share their views with journalists anonymously. "I know they did it to scare people," the former official said. "The problem is, they're not dealing with fools here.... In my case, they took someone who is reasonably familiar with [the CIA] and made it so that anytime I can torpedo them, I will."

Authors describe the former publications review process as fair, if sometimes tedious. "There was a real sense it was done on the up-and-up," said a former CIA official who is a proponent of ex-employees' writing about their expertise.

Another former employee agreed. "When I went through the process ... I certainly didn't feel like the political standpoint of my book made a difference in how the [review board] evaluated it," said Lindsay Moran, who wrote about her brief career as a CIA operative in "Blowing My Cover: My Life as a CIA Spy." Moran's book skewered agency managers as incompetent and made some officials nervous because it described aspects of training, but the Publications Review Board approved it without incident.

"It's just ridiculous that the biggest threat to the CIA seems to be the grumblings of former employees," Moran said. Aftergood concurred, saying, "It's bizarre that the CIA is in such a weakened state that it feels the need to suppress criticism."

The CIA apparently put the new rules into practice early this year. The former officials contacted for this story agreed that Goss implemented the restrictions partly to send a message about policies under his immediate predecessor, George Tenet.

"It's very clearly the result of Tenet's approving both my books," said Michael Scheuer, the former head of the CIA unit that tracked Osama bin Laden, and the author of two books on Al Qaeda and the war on terrorism. Scheuer published both books under the pseudonym "Anonymous" while he was still a CIA employee. The second book, "Imperial Hubris," sparked controversy because it was seen as a rebuke of the war in Iraq as an effective means of fighting terror. The book is more properly viewed as a critique of intelligence leadership, Scheuer said, but he acknowledged that it is mostly cited for its relatively few mentions of Bush and the war.

Scheuer, who retired from the CIA in November 2004 and has no contracts with the agency, said he faced no opposition to publishing his books. "The agency never asked me, for either book, not to publish it." But he said that if he tried to publish the books as an agency employee today, he would be denied permission. Moran worried that it may even become more difficult for former employees who, like her, don't have contracts, to publish if the CIA's new policies stand. "I got my book cleared in a unique window of opportunity that's disappearing," she said.

"It doesn't have to be that way," Aftergood contended. "One can envision an agency that is so self-confident and so willing to rethink its own positions that it actually welcomes criticism. But that's not the agency we have today."

U.S. losing war on terror, experts say
By Bob Deans
COX NEWS SERVICE
Jun. 29, 2006

WASHINGTON - The United States is losing its fight against terrorism and the Iraq war is the biggest reason why, more than eight of 10 American terrorism and national security experts concluded in a poll released yesterday.

One participant, a former CIA official who described himself as a conservative Republican, said the war in Iraq has provided global terrorist groups with a recruiting bonanza, a valuable training ground and a strategic beachhead at the crossroads of the oil-rich Persian Gulf and Turkey.

"The war in Iraq broke our back in the war on terror," said the former official, Michael Scheuer, author of Imperial Hubris, a popular book highly critical of the Bush administration's anti-terrorism efforts. "It has made everything more difficult and the threat more existential."

Scheuer is one of more than 100 national security and terrorism analysts surveyed by Foreign Policy magazine and the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning think tank.

Asked whether the United States is "winning the war on terror," 84 percent said no and 13 percent answered yes. Asked whether the war in Iraq is helping or hurting the global anti-terrorism campaign, 87 percent said hurting. Eighty-six percent said the world is becoming "more dangerous for the United States and the American people."

FAMILY DEMANDS THE TRUTH
New inquiry may expose events that led to Pat Tillman's death Robert Collier, Chronicle Staff Writer
September 25, 2005
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c...MNGD7ETMNM1.DTL

The battle between a grieving family and the U.S. military justice system is on display in thousands of pages of documents strewn across Mary Tillman’s dining room table in suburban San Jose.

As she pores through testimony from three previous Army investigations into the killing of her son, former football star Pat Tillman, by his fellow Army Rangers last year in Afghanistan, she hopes that a new inquiry launched in August by the Pentagon’s inspector general finally will answer the family’s questions:

Were witnesses allowed to change their testimony on key details, as alleged by one investigator? Why did internal documents on the case, such as the initial casualty report, include false information? When did top Pentagon officials know that Tillman’s death was caused by friendly fire, and why did they delay for five weeks before informing his family?

“There have been so many discrepancies so far that it’s hard to know what to believe,” Mary Tillman said. “There are too many murky details.” The files the family received from the Army in March are heavily censored, with nearly every page containing blacked-out sections; most names have been deleted. (Names for this story were provided by sources close to the investigation.) At least one volume was withheld altogether from the family, and even an Army press release given to the media has deletions. On her copies, Mary Tillman has added competing marks and scrawls — countless color-coded tabs and angry notes such as “Contradiction!” “Wrong!” and “????”

A Chronicle review of more than 2,000 pages of testimony, as well as interviews with Pat Tillman’s family members and soldiers who served with him, found contradictions, inaccuracies and what appears to be the military’s attempt at self-protection.

For example, the documents contain testimony of the first investigating officer alleging that Army officials allowed witnesses to change key details in their sworn statements so his finding that certain soldiers committed “gross negligence” could be softened.

Interviews also show a side of Pat Tillman not widely known — a fiercely independent thinker who enlisted, fought and died in service to his country yet was critical of President Bush and opposed the war in Iraq, where he served a tour of duty. He was an avid reader whose interests ranged from history books on World War II and Winston Churchill to works of leftist Noam Chomsky, a favorite author.

Unlike Cindy Sheehan — who has protested against President Bush because of the death of her son Casey in combat in Baghdad — Mary Tillman, 49, who teaches in a San Jose public junior high school, and her ex-husband, Patrick Tillman, 50, a San Jose lawyer, have avoided association with the anti-war movement. Their main public allies are Sen. John McCain, RAriz., and Rep. Mike Honda, D-San Jose, who have lobbied on their behalf. Yet the case has high stakes because of Pat Tillman’s status as an all-American hero.

A football star at Leland High School in San Jose and at Arizona State University, Tillman was chosen Pac-10 defensive player of the year in 1997 and selected by the Arizona Cardinals in the NFL draft the following spring.

He earned a bachelor’s degree in marketing from Arizona State and graduated summa cum laude in 3 1/2 years with a 3.84 grade point average. Ever the student, Tillman not only memorized the playbook by the time he reported for the Cardinals’ rookie camp but pointed out errors in it. He then worked on a master’s degree in history while playing professional football.

His 224 tackles in a single season (2000) are a team record, and because of team loyalty he rejected a five year, $9 million offer from the St. Louis Rams for a one-year, $512,000 contract to stay with Arizona the next year.

Moved in part by the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Tillman decided to give up his career, saying he wanted to fight al Qaeda and help find Osama bin Laden. He spurned the Cardinals’ offer of a three year, $3.6 million contract extension and joined the Army in June 2002 along with his brother Kevin, who was playing minor-league baseball for the Cleveland Indians organization.

Pat Tillman’s enlistment grabbed the attention of the nation — and the highest levels of the Bush administration. A personal letter from Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, thanking him for serving his country, now resides in a storage box, put away by Pat’s widow, Marie.

Instead of going to Afghanistan, as the brothers expected, their Ranger battalion was sent to participate in the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003. The Tillmans saw combat several times on their way to Baghdad. In early 2004, they finally were assigned to Afghanistan.

Although the Rangers are an elite combat group, the investigative documents reveal that the conduct of the Tillmans’ detachment — A Company, 2nd Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment — appeared to be anything but expert as it advanced through a remote canyon in eastern Afghanistan on April 22, 2004, on a mission to search for Taliban and al Qaeda fighters in a village called Manah.

According to the files, when one of the humvees became disabled, thus stalling the mission, commanding officers split Tillman’s platoon in two so one half could move on and the other could arrange transport for the disabled vehicle. Platoon leader Lt. David Uthlaut protested the move as dangerous, but he was overruled. The first group was ordered out in the late afternoon, with Pat Tillman in the forward unit. Kevin’s unit followed 15 to 20 minutes later, hauling the humvee on an Afghan-owned flatbed truck. Both groups temporarily lost radio and visual contact with each other in the deep canyon, and the second group came under attack from suspected Taliban fighters on the surrounding ridges.

Pat Tillman, according to testimony, climbed a hill with another soldier and an Afghan militiaman, intending to attack the enemy. He offered to remove his 28-pound body armor so he could move more quickly, but was ordered not to. Meanwhile, the lead vehicle in the platoon’s second group arrived near Tillman’s position about 65 meters away and mistook the group as enemy. The Afghan stood and fired above the second group at the suspected enemy on the opposite ridge. Although the driver of the second group’s lead vehicle, according to his testimony, recognized Tillman’s group as “friendlies” and tried to signal others in his vehicle not to shoot, they directed fire toward the Afghan and began shooting wildly, without first identifying their target, and also shot at a village on the ridgeline.

The Afghan was killed. According to testimony, Tillman, who along with others on the hill waved his arms and yelled “cease fire,” set off a smoke grenade to identify his group as fellow soldiers. There was a momentary lull in the firing, and he and the soldier next to him, thinking themselves safe, relaxed, stood up and started talking. But the shooting resumed. Tillman was hit in the wrist with shrapnel and in his body armor with numerous bullets.

The soldier next to him testified: “I could hear the pain in his voice as he called out, ‘Cease fire, friendlies, I am Pat f—ing Tillman, dammit.” He said this over and over until he stopped,” having been hit by three bullets in the forehead, killing him.

The soldier continued, “I then looked over at my side to see a river of blood coming down from where he was … I saw his head was gone.” Two other Rangers elsewhere on the mountainside were injured by shrapnel.

Kevin was unaware that his brother had been killed until nearly an hour later when he asked if anyone had seen Pat and a fellow soldier told him.

Tillman’s death came at a sensitive time for the Bush administration — just a week before the Army’s abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib in Iraq became public and sparked a huge scandal. The Pentagon immediately announced that Tillman had died heroically in combat with the enemy, and President Bush hailed him as “an inspiration on and off the football field, as with all who made the ultimate sacrifice in the war on terror.”

His killing was widely reported by the media, including conservative commentators such as Ann Coulter, who called him “an American original — virtuous, pure and masculine like only an American male can be.” His May 3, 2004, memorial in San Jose drew 3,500 people and was nationally televised.

Not until five weeks later, as Tillman’s battalion was returning home, did officials inform the public and the Tillman family that he had been killed by his fellow soldiers.

According to testimony, the first investigation was initiated less than 24 hours after Tillman’s death by an officer in the same Ranger battalion. His report, delivered May 4, 2004, determined that soldiers involved in the incident had committed “gross negligence” and should be appropriately disciplined. The officer became a key witness in the subsequent investigation. For reasons that are not clear, the officer’s investigation was taken over by a higher ranking commander. That officer’s findings, delivered the next month, called for less severe discipline.

The parents, protesting that many questions were left unanswered, found a sympathetic ear in McCain, who Mary Tillman later said was greatly admired by her son. Tillman was well known in Arizona because of his success there as a college and pro football player. McCain began to press the Pentagon on the family’s behalf, and a third probe finally was authorized. Its report was delivered in January.

The military is saying little publicly about the Tillman case. Most Army personnel who were involved in the Tillman incident or the investigations declined to comment publicly when contacted by The Chronicle. The inspector general’s press office also declined to comment, saying only that the new probe is openended.

Over the coming weeks, Pentagon investigators are scheduled to carry out new interviews with many of the soldiers, officers and others involved in the incident. As they carry out their reassessment, potentially controversial points include:

-- Conflicting testimony. In his Nov. 14, 2004, interrogation, the first investigator expressed frustration with “watching some of these guys getting off, what I thought … was a lesser of a punishment than what they should’ve received. And I will tell you, over a period of time … the stories have changed. They have changed to, I think, help some individuals.”

The investigator testified that after he submitted his report on May 3, higher-ranking officers permitted soldiers to change key details of their testimony in order to prevent any individual from being singled out for punishment.

“They had the entire chain of command (inaudible) that were involved, the [deleted], all sticking up for [deleted] … And the reason the [deleted] called me in … because the [deleted] … changed their story in how things occurred and the timing and the distance in an attempt to stick up for their counterpart, implied, insinuated that the report wasn’t as accurate as I submitted it …” the first investigator testified.

In another section of his testimony, he said witnesses changed details regarding “the distance, the time, the location and the positioning” in Tillman’s killing.

Another disputed detail was whether the soldiers were firing while speeding down the canyon or whether they stopped, got out and continued shooting. In testimony in the third investigation, the soldiers said they did not stop. However, the medical examiner’s report said Tillman was killed by three bullets closely spaced in his forehead — a pattern that would have been unlikely if the shooter were moving fast. Spc. Russell Baer, a soldier pinned down by gunfire on the hillside near Tillman, said in an interview with The Chronicle that at least two soldiers had gotten out of the humvee to fire uphill. One other soldier confirmed this account to a Tillman family member.

One soldier dismissed by the Rangers for his actions in the incident submitted a statement in the third investigation that suggests the probe was incomplete: “The investigation does not truly set to rest the events of the evening of 22 April 2004. There is critical information not included or misinterpreted in it that could shed some light on who is really at fault for this,” he wrote.

-- Commanders’ accountability. According to the documents and interviews, Capt. William Saunders, to whom platoon leader Uthlaut had protested splitting his troops, was allowed to change his testimony over a crucial detail — whether he had reported Uthlaut’s dissent to a higher ranking commander. In initial questioning, Saunders said he had done so, but when that apparently was contradicted by that commander’s testimony, Saunders was threatened with perjury charges. He was given immunity and allowed to change his prior testimony.

The regiment’s commander, Lt. Col. Jeffrey Bailey, was promoted to colonel two months after the incident, and Saunders, who a source said received a reprimand, later was given authority to determine the punishment of those below him. He gave administrative reprimands to six soldiers, including Uthlaut, who had been seriously wounded in the face by shrapnel in the incident. Uthlaut — who was first captain of his senior class at West Point, the academy’s highest honor — was dismissed from the Rangers and re-entered the regular Army.

“It seems grossly inappropriate that Saunders would determine punishment for the others when he shares responsibility for the debacle,” Mary Tillman said.

Baer told The Chronicle that commanding officers were to blame for the friendly fire because they split the platoon and ordered it to leave a secure location in favor of a region known as a Taliban stronghold.

“It was dumb to send us out during daylight,” said Baer, who was honorably discharged from the Rangers earlier this year and lives in the East Bay.

“It’s a well-known military doctrine that privates first learn going through basic training — if you are in enemy territory and you are stopped for a prolonged period of time, the best thing to do is to wait until nightfall. Why they thought that moving us out in broad daylight from our position, dragging a busted humvee slowly through a known hotspot after we had been stranded there all day was a good idea will forever elude me. Who made that decision? Bailey? Saunders? That’s what I want to know.”

-- Inaccurate information. While the military code gives clear guidance for informing family members upon a soldier’s death when cases are suspected of being a result of friendly fire, that procedure was not followed in the Tillman case. After Tillman’s death, the Army gave conflicting and incorrect descriptions of the events.

On April 22, the family was told that Tillman was hit with enemy fire getting out of a vehicle and died an hour later at a field hospital.

Although there was ample testimony that Tillman died immediately, an Army report — dated April 22, 2004, from the field hospital in Salerno, Afghanistan, where his body was taken — suggested otherwise. While it stated that he had no blood pressure or pulse “on arrival,” it stated that cardio pulmonary resuscitation had been conducted and that he was transferred to the intensive care unit for further CPR.

On April 23, all top Ranger commanders were told of the suspected fratricide. That same day, an Army press release said he was killed “when his patrol vehicle came under attack.”

On April 29, four days before Tillman’s memorial, Gen. John Abizaid, chief of U.S. Central Command, and other top commanders were told of the fratricide. It is not known if Abizaid reported the news to Washington. Mary Tillman believes that with her son’s high profile, and the fact that Rumsfeld sent him a personal letter, the word quickly reached the defense secretary. “If Pat was on Rumsfeld’s radar, it’s pretty likely that he would have been informed right away after he was killed,” she said. White House, Pentagon and Army spokesmen all said they had no information on when Bush or Rumsfeld were informed.

On April 30, the Army awarded Tillman a Silver Star medal for bravery, saying that “through the firing Tillman’s voice was heard issuing fire commands to take the fight to the enemy on the dominating high ground.”

On May 2, the acting Army Secretary Les Brownlee was told of the fratricide.

On May 7, the Army’s official casualty report stated incorrectly that Tillman was killed by “enemy forces” and “died in a medical treatment facility.”

On May 28, the Army finally admitted to Tillman’s family that he had been killed by friendly fire.

“The administration clearly was using this case for its own political reasons,” said the father, Patrick Tillman. “This cover-up started within minutes of Pat’s death, and it started at high levels. This is not something that (lower-ranking) people in the field do,” he said.

The files show that many of the soldiers questioned in the inquiry said it was common knowledge that the incident involved friendly fire.

A soldier who on April 23 burned Tillman’s bullet riddled body armor — which would have been evidence in a friendly-fire investigation — testified that he did so because there was no doubt it was friendly fire that killed Tillman. Two days later, Tillman’s uniform and vest also were burned because they were soaked in blood and considered a biohazard. Tillman’s uniform also was burned.

The officer who led the first investigation testified that when he was given responsibility for the probe the morning after Tillman’s death, he was informed that the cause was “potential fratricide.’’

After they received the friendly-fire notification May 28, the Tillmans began a public campaign seeking more information. But it was only when the Tillmans began angrily accusing the Pentagon of a coverup, in June 2005, that the Army apologized for the delay, issuing a statement blaming “procedural misjudgments and mistakes.”

-- Legal liability. In testimony on Nov. 14, the officer who conducted the first investigation said that he thought some Rangers could have been charged with “criminal intent,” and that some Rangers committed “gross negligence.” The legal difference between the two terms is roughly similar to the distinction between murder and involuntary manslaughter.

The Tillmans demand that all avenues of inquiry remain open.

“I want to know what kind of criminal intent there was,” Mary Tillman said. “There’s so much in the reports that is (deleted) that it’s hard to tell what we’re not seeing.”

In Congress, pressure is building for a full public disclosure of what happened. “I am committed to continuing my work with the Tillman family to ensure that their concerns are being addressed,” said Rep. Honda. He added that he expects the investigation to do the following: “1) provide all factual evidence about the events of April 22, 2004; 2) identify the command decisions that contributed to Pat Tillman’s death; 3) explain why the Army took so long to reveal fratricide as the cause of Pat Tillman’s death; and 4) offer all necessary recommendations for improved procedures relating to such incidents.”

Patrick Tillman drily called the new Army probe “the latest, greatest investigation.” He added, “In Washington, I don’t think any of them want it investigated. They (politicians and Army officials) just don’t want to see it ended with them, landing on their desk so they get blamed for the cover-up.” The January 2005 investigation concluded that there was no coverup.

Throughout the controversy, the Tillman family has been reluctant to cause a media stir. Mary noted that Pat shunned publicity, refusing all public comment when he enlisted and asking the Army to reject all media requests for interviews while he was in service. Pat’s widow, Marie, and his brother Kevin have not become publicly involved in the case, and they declined to comment for this article.

Yet other Tillman family members are less reluctant to show Tillman’s unique character, which was more complex than the public image of a gung-ho patriotic warrior. He started keeping a journal at 16 and continued the practice on the battlefield, writing in it regularly. (His journal was lost immediately after his death.) Mary Tillman said a friend of Pat’s even arranged a private meeting with Chomsky, the antiwar author, to take place after his return from Afghanistan — a meeting prevented by his death. She said that although he supported the Afghan war, believing it justified by the Sept. 11 attacks, “Pat was very critical of the whole Iraq war.”

Baer, who served with Tillman for more than a year in Iraq and Afghanistan, told one anecdote that took place during the March 2003 invasion as the Rangers moved up through southern Iraq.

“I can see it like a movie screen,” Baer said. “We were outside of (a city in southern Iraq) watching as bombs were dropping on the town. We were at an old air base, me, Kevin and Pat, we weren’t in the fight right then. We were talking. And Pat said, ‘You know, this war is so f— illegal.’ And we all said, ‘Yeah.’ That’s who he was. He totally was against Bush.”

Another soldier in the platoon, who asked not to be identified, said Pat urged him to vote for Bush’s Democratic opponent in the 2004 election, Sen. John Kerry.

Senior Chief Petty Officer Stephen White — a Navy SEAL who served with Pat and Kevin for four months in Iraq and was the only military member to speak at Tillman’s memorial — said Pat “wasn’t very fired up about being in Iraq” and instead wanted to go fight al Qaeda in Afghanistan. He said both Pat and Kevin (who has a degree in philosophy) “were amazingly well-read individuals … very firm in some of their beliefs, their political and religious or not so religious beliefs.”

Baer recalled that Tillman encouraged him in his ambitions as an amateur poet. “I would read him my poems, and we would talk about them,” Baer said. “He helped me grow as an individual.”

Tillman subscribed to the Economist magazine, and a fellow soldier said Tillman created a makeshift base library of classic novels so his platoon mates would have literature to read in their down time. He even brought gourmet coffee to brew for his platoon in the field in Afghanistan.

Baer said Tillman was popular among his fellow soldiers and had no enemies. “The guys who killed Pat were his biggest fans,” he said. “They were really wrecked afterward.” He called Tillman “this amazing positive force who really brought our whole platoon together.

He had this great energy. Everybody loved him.” His former comrades and family recall Tillman as a born leader yet remarkably humble. White, the Navy SEAL, recalls one day when “some 19-year-old Ranger came and ordered him to cut an acre of grass.

And Pat just did it, he cut that grass, he didn’t complain. He could have taken millions of dollars playing football, but instead he was just taking orders like that.”

Mary Tillman says that’s how Pat would have wanted to be remembered, as an individual, not as a stock figure or political prop. But she also believes “Pat was a real hero, not what they used him as.”

For the moment, all that is left are the memories and the thick binders spread across Mary Tillman’s dining room table in San Jose. As she waits for the Pentagon investigators to finish their new probe, she wonders whether they will ask the hard questions. Like other family members, “I just want accountability,” she said. “I want answers.”
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
‘IT’S HARD TO KNOW WHAT TO BELIEVE’
That’s the lament of Mary Tillman, above, a teacher of special education in a San Jose public school. She has long pressed the Army to reopen its investigation into the friendly-fire killing of her son, Pat Tillman, in a canyon in Afghanistan on April 22, . The persistence of Mary Tillman and her former husband, Patrick Tillman, was rewarded when the Pentagon’s inspector general opened a new inquiry in August, the fourth such probe. Mary Tillman says she hopes questions created by discrepancies in past testimony will finally be answered.
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STORY CHANGES OVER TIME
An officer in Pat Tillman's Ranger battalion who directed the first investigation into the soldier's death served as a witness on Nov. 14, 2004, in the third investigation, which was led by Brig. Gen. Gary Jones. The first investigator complained that the officers in charge of the second investigation had allowed Rangers involved in the shooting to change their testimony.

THREAT OF PERJURY CHARGES
An excerpt from a March 3, 2005, memorandum by

Brig. Gen. Gary Jones describes how Capt. William Saunders, the commander of Pat Tillman's Ranger company, was threatened with perjury charges. Jones' memo said Saunders made false claims that he had informed his superiors that platoon commander Lt. David Uthlaut had protested orders given to him leading up to the incident. Despite this threat, Saunders was allowed to change his testimony and was granted immunity.

Delta Force Founder Eric Haney has fighting words for Bush By David Kronke, TV Critic
03/26/2006

'Unit's' military expert has fighting words for Bush
By David Kronke, TV Critic

Eric Haney, a retired command sergeant major of the U.S. Army, was a founding member of Delta Force, the military's elite covert counter-terrorist unit. He culled his experiences for "Inside Delta Force" (Delta; $14), a memoir rich with harrowing stories, though in an interview, Haney declines with a shrug to estimate the number of times he was almost killed. (Perhaps the most high-profile incident that almost claimed his life was the 1980 failed rescue of the hostages in Iran.) Today, he's doing nothing nearly as dangerous: He serves as an executive producer and technical adviser for "The Unit," CBS' new hit drama based on his book, developed by playwright David Mamet. Even up against "American Idol," "The Unit" shows muscle, drawing 18 million viewers in its first two airings.
Since he has devoted his life to protecting his country in some of the world's most dangerous hot spots, you might assume Haney is sympathetic to the Bush administration's current plight in Iraq (the laudatory cover blurb on his book comes from none other than Fox's News' Bill O'Reilly). But he's also someone with close ties to the Pentagon, so he's privy to information denied the rest of us.

We recently spoke to Haney, an amiable, soft-spoken Southern gentleman, on the set of "The Unit."

Q: What's your assessment of the war in Iraq?

A: Utter debacle. But it had to be from the very first. The reasons were wrong. The reasons of this administration for taking this nation to war were not what they stated. (Army Gen.) Tommy Franks was brow-beaten and ... pursued warfare that he knew strategically was wrong in the long term. That's why he retired immediately afterward. His own staff could tell him what was going to happen afterward.

We have fomented civil war in Iraq. We have probably fomented internecine war in the Muslim world between the Shias and the Sunnis, and I think Bush may well have started the third world war, all for their own personal policies.

Q: What is the cost to our country?

A: For the first thing, our credibility is utterly zero. So we destroyed whatever credibility we had. ... And I say "we," because the American public went along with this. They voted for a second Bush administration out of fear, so fear is what they're going to have from now on.

Our military is completely consumed, so were there a real threat - thankfully, there is no real threat to the U.S. in the world, but were there one, we couldn't confront it. Right now, that may not be a bad thing, because that keeps Bush from trying something with Iran or with Venezuela.

The harm that has been done is irreparable. There are more that 2,000 American kids that have been killed. Tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis have been killled in which no one in the U.S. really cares about those people, do they? I never hear anybody lament that fact. It has been a horror, and this administration has worked overtime to divert the American public's attention from it. Their lies are coming home to roost now, and it's gonna fall apart. But somebody's gonna have to clear up the aftermath and the harm that it's done just to what America stands for. It may be two or three generations in repairing.

Q: What do you make of the torture debate? Cheney ...

A: (Interrupting) That's Cheney's pursuit. The only reason anyone tortures is because they like to do it. It's about vengeance, it's about revenge, or it's about cover-up. You don't gain intelligence that way. Everyone in the world knows that. It's worse than small-minded, and look what it does.

I've argued this on Bill O'Reilly and other Fox News shows. I ask, who would you want to pay to be a torturer? Do you want someone that the American public pays to torture? He's an employee of yours. It's worse than ridiculous. It's criminal; it's utterly criminal. This administration has been masters of diverting attention away from real issues and debating the silly. Debating what constitutes torture: Mistreatment of helpless people in your power is torture, period. And (I'm saying this as) a man who has been involved in the most pointed of our activities. I know it, and all of my mates know it. You don't do it. It's an act of cowardice. I hear apologists for torture say, "Well, they do it to us." Which is a ludicrous argument. ... The Saddam Husseins of the world are not our teachers. Christ almighty, we wrote a Constitution saying what's legal and what we believed in. Now we're going to throw it away.

Q: As someone who repeatedly put your life on the line, did some of the most hair-raising things to protect your country, and to see your country behave this way, that must be ...

A: It's pretty galling. But ultimately I believe in the good and the decency of the American people, and they're starting to see what's happening and the lies that have been told. We're seeing this current house of cards start to flutter away. The American people come around. They always do.

On Thursday, 20 July (last week), former National Security Advisor and one of America's top strategic thinkers, Zbigniew Brzezinksi, spoke at a public policy dinner salon that my colleagues and I at the New Amerca Foundation organized.

Brzezinski's presentation and responses to questions were riveting. He framed the stakes of what was evolving in the Middle East as well as the basic motivations of all the players in ways that many policy intellectuals and senior foreign policy writers had not considered.

I am posting Zbigniew Brzezinski's comments here. The Q&A was not fully on the record, so I will be working to digest the best material from the Q&A to protect the identities of those posing questions or making comments -- and will post that material at a later time. But I wanted to get Zbigniew Brzezinski's opening remarks on line now.

Some of the notable points made by Brzezinski were:

1. America's "policy in the Middle East is the basic test of America's capacity to exercise global leadership." This is similar to "what transpired during the Cold War when the ultimate test of America's capacity to act as a defender of the free world was its ability to conduct a meaningful policy in Europe."
If America does not do well in its Middle East challenge, the U.S. will lose its capacity to lead.

2. Neither the United States nor Israel "has the capacity to impose a unilateral solution" to Israel's problems in the Middle East. "There may be people who deceive themselves of that. We call them neo-cons in this country and there are other equivalents in Israel as well."

3. Israel and its neighbors alone "can never resolve their conflict peacefully, no matter how much they try, now matter how sincere they may be." When one party is sincere, the other's intentions are not synchronous.

4. Brzezinski stated: "I hate to say this but I will say it. I think what the Israelis are doing today for example in Lebanon is in effect, in effect -- maybe not in intent -- the killing of hostages. The killing of hostages."

"Because when you kill 300 people, 400 people, who have nothing to do with the provocations Hezbollah staged, but you do it in effect deliberately by being indifferent to the scale of collateral damage, you're killing hostages in the hope of intimidating those that you want to intimidate. And more likely than not you will not intimidate them. You'll simply outrage them and make them into permanent enemies with the number of such enemies increasing."

5. "The solution can only come if there is a serious international involvement that supports the moderates from both sides, however numerous or non-numerous they are, but also creates the situation in which it becomes of greater interest to both parties to accommodate than to resist because both of the incentives and the capacity of the external intervention to impose costs. That means a deliberate peace effort led by the United States, which then doubtless would be supported by the international community, which defines openly in a semi-binding fashion how the United States and the international community envisages the outlines of the accommodation."

6. It's becoming increasingly difficult to separate the Israeli-Palestinian, problem, the Iraq problem and Iran from each other.

7. "The Iraq problem, look what Prime Minister al-Maliki said today -- it's an indication of things to come. The notion that we're going to get a pliant, democratic, stable, pro-American, Israel-loving Iraq is a myth which is rapidly eroding and which is now being contradicted by political realities."

8. "And that leads me then to the proposition beforehand, namely that we have now, we're not only committed to what I said earlier, regarding the Israeli-Palestinian process, but more deliberately by terminating our involvement in Iraq. And I have put forth a four-point program which [I am sure] I have discussed in one of the rare occasions within the last year administration has talked to me, some top level people in the administration. They listened to this:

That we start talking to the Iraqis of the day of our disengagement., We say to them we want to set it jointly, but in the process, indicate to them that we will not leave precipitously. I asked Khalilzad what would be his definition of precipitous and he said four months and I said I agree. Are you saying to the Iraqis, we intend to disengage by some period? We need to."

9. "As far as Iran is concerned--and with this I'll end--thanks to Iraq, I think we have made an offer to the Iranians that is reasonable. I do not know that Iranians have the smarts to respond favorably or at least not negatively. I sort of lean to the idea that they'll probably respond not negatively but not positively and try to stall out the process. But that is not so bad provided they do not reject it.

Because while the Iranian nuclear problem is serious, and while the Iranians are marginally involved in Lebanon and to a greater extent in Syria, the fact of the matter is that the challenge they pose to us, while serious, is not imminent. And because it isn't imminent, it gives us time to deal with it. And sometimes in international politics, the better part of wisdom is to defer dangers rather than try to eliminate them altogether instantly, because the later produces intense counter-reactions that are destructive. We have time to deal with Iran, provided the process is launched, dealing with the nuclear energy problem, which can then be extended to involve also security talks about the region.

In the final analysis, Iran is a serious country, it's not Iraq. It's going to be there. It's going to be a player. And in the longer historical term, it has all of the preconditions for a constructive internal evolution if you measure it by rates of literacy, access to higher education, the role of women in society, a sense of tradition and status which is real.

I'm convinced that the mullahs are part of the past in Iran, not its future. But that process can change in Iran, not in a confrontation but through engagement. I think if we pursue these policies, we can perhaps avert the dangers that we face but if we do not, I fear that the region will explode, and for that matter, Israel will be in the long run in great jeopardy."

Armitage Fears Bombing Campaign Will ‘End Up Empowering Hezbollah'
thinkprogress.org
July 27, 2006

Richard Armitage dramatically broke ranks with his neoconservative allies yesterday, saying in a radio interview that he feared it was impossible to eliminate Hezbollah through airstrikes, and that by attempting to do so, "you're going to end up empowering Hezbollah, and perhaps introducing an element into the body politic in Lebanon that will take some great period of time to recover from." Armitage also criticized the Bush administration for refusing to talk directly to Syria.

According to a database search, no major media outlets have yet printed Armitage's remarks. Listen:

Armitage was Assistant Secretary of Defense under President Reagan when the U.S. Embassy in Lebanon was bombed in 1983, and served as second-in-command at the State Department under President George W. Bush. In 1998, he signed the Project for a New American Century letter to President Clinton urging regime change in Iraq.

The Bush administration has thus far "giving a tacit blessing" to the escalating Mideast violence. During crisis talks in Rome yesterday, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice bucked the "entreaties of nearly all of her European and Arab counterparts" to push for a ceasefire.

Full transcript:

NPR: You were an assistant secretary of defense back in 1982, when a peacekeeping force was sent into Lebanon, a multinational force stationed there but ultimately forced to withdraw. Talk to us about that, and what we might draw from that.

ARMITAGE: It was a very troubled time, actually, and sooner rather than later we became involved — or were seen as taking sides — in someone else's civil war. And ultimately we lost 241 Naval and Marine personnel.

NPR: In the bombing of the...

ARMITAGE: Yes, in the October 83 bombing.

NPR: Are there parallels between that peacekeeping force and now?

ARMITAGE: Well, I remember with stunning clarity one of our Israeli interlocutors sitting in my office, telling me that, "Don't worry about this peace in Galilee operation. We understand our neighbors very well. We understand them better than anyone. We know all the dynamics of the situation in Lebanon." And that turned out not quite to be the case.

I suspect that people in government now are also hearing that from Israel. Don't get me wrong — if I thought that this air campaign would work, and would eliminate Nasrullah and the leadership of Hezbollah, I think it would all be fine. But I fear that you can't do this from the sky, and that you're going to end up empowering Hezbollah, and perhaps introducing an element into the body politic in Lebanon that will take some great period of time to recover from.

NPR: An element into the body politic that as yet we do not know?

ARMITAGE: I think we do not know. And we're not, as far as I'm concerned, using all the levers that we have, such as having the Secretary of State talk to the Syrians. I think they want to get involved. I think they want to become more central to a solution, and you might as well give them the opportunity. If they step up to it, fine. If they don't, we&#